I just heard a fascinating monologue on NPR's "This American Life" about the manufacturing plants in China where devices from Apple, Dell, and hundreds of other consumer electronic companies come from. Has anyone else had a chance to listen to it? Any thoughts or reflections on the experiences of the narrator, an avowed Apple fanboy himself?
Just moments ago at an all-hands meeting, HP CEO Meg Whitman announced that the company will be open-sourcing webOS. Not just the Enyo app development framework — the actual underlying operating system! http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press/2011/111209xa.html No hardware partners to announce right now, but this means any interested smartphone or tablet manufacturer can pick up webOS and run with it. I think this is a bold move and a great outcome; it would have been a real shame if they killed...
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It looks like the rumors are true! Meg Whitman will be named the new CEO of HP. The New York Times wrote a piece yesterday [1], "As speculation swirled Wednesday that Meg Whitman might be brought in to save the troubled Hewlett-Packard, the tech world rendered a verdict: You have got to be kidding." Meanwhile, at The Atlantic, Alexis Madrigal takes a stand, and argues that she is potentially one of the more successful CEOs in tech [2]. No matter what though, everyone seems to be of the consensus...
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The Wall Street Journal posts an interesting piece on how one would kill HP in a year. ---- Fire well-performing CEO Mark Hurd over expense-report irregularities and a juicy sexual-harassment claim that you admit has no merit. Fire four board members, as publicly as possible. Foment a mass exodus of key executives who actually know how to run the giant computer company. ---- It starts out pretty saucy and then details all their stumbles over the past year. It's not a pretty sight. Ouch! To be...
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I was thinking about the many consequences of the HP Touchpad meltdown we all just witnessed, and I am thinking the biggest consequence may be one that doesn't end up affecting HP at all. That consequence is to scare consumers away from taking a chance on any but the two established options for tablets, Apple and Google, and thereby establishing them as an immovable duopoly for the next three to five years. Some may point out that the problem with the TouchPad in the first place was a lack of...
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This is kind of amusing (and sad, from a hardware standpoint) -- it looks like engineers at HP / Palm created a special build of webOS and were able to run it on the iPad 2. Despite the TouchPad having similarly spec'd hardware, webOS apparently ran "twice as fast" on the iPad 2. The Next Web reports that, "the hardware reportedly stopped the team from innovating beyond certain points because it was slow and imposed constraints, which was highlighted when webOS was loaded on to Apple’s iPad...
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I'm one of those early adopters of the original Pre on Sprint. I put up with the crappy hardware (all three replacements of them), the slow laggy software, the lack of updates, the lack of apps, the reneging of getting webOS 2.0 and finally the promise that we'll get something special in return for our "loyalty". Well, today Palm (HP) announced that we can qualify for a $50 mail-in-rebate for just the $599 32GB TouchPad (not the $499 16GB version). I know people will say that this is better than...
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Doesn't it seem dangerous for Microsoft to pursue an HTML5 strategy for Windows 8 Apps? First, I'll assume that they will run only in IE10, which will probably be backward compatible to Win7, eliminating a compelling reason to upgrade to Win8 in the first place. just run IE10 fullscreen. Second, if Windows developers begin to shift away from traditional Windows-native applications toward HTML5, doesn't that empower Chrome OS, iOS, Android, and even webOS at the same time (in fact, this whole...
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impression of the device. HP seems to have tightened up the build quality quite a bit (the slider mechanism feels tighter than on my Pre 2, the buttons are metal and are not loose in the device's housing, and the keyboard is much more tactile) and ensured that webOS scales nicely to a screen of this size. I don't buy Rubinstein's notion that this device will cater primarily to a market of people who own a TouchPad and want an extremely small smartphone--the screen is smaller than...
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Firstly: I currently use a Blackberry 9650, which I love. I'd also love the Blackberry Bridge functionality from the PlayBook. But how functional would the PlayBook be if I bought a phone that isn't a Blackberry? Secondly: I'm not sure I'd buy into the TouchPad and WebOS (again) with it's developer support dwindling quickly. Is the app situation on WebOS as bad as it was last year? Third question: Is Honeycomb a viable option for tablets? I know the Xoom is basically...
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All of the phone OS seem to be doing something better than their competitors and with the first WebOS3 device set to come out soon it just adds onto the already competitive market. And just as the OS keep getting better we're now starting to see some handset manufactures push the hardware limits. This thought came into my mind because I'm planning to pick up a new phone in the next month and after my experience with Android I'm on the fence with if I want to go back to them.
What I mean to say is, are there average parts in computers already fast enough to suit most users so that you're more inclined to pay a premium for a "better" computer as opposed to the computer with the most RAM or the fastest clock speed? I'm going to take the (current) MacBook Air for example. It's most definitely not the fastest computer out there and won't be fast enough for the vast majority of computer enthusiasts. At the same time, most aspects of the...
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(to get the most "bang for the buck") Which parts will they try to rip you off on / should you try to purchase and install yourself? From my experience, it seems to be more important to upgrade the parts you cannot change later on. (For example, you can purchase more memory later on or get a new hard drive but not a higher resolution display.)
RIM announced that they'll be selling the PlayBook starting at $499 (available mid April), and Samsung will begin selling their 10.1 inch tablet starting at $499 as well (available in June). It looks like we finally have a game folks! And this can only mean good things for us. Color me excited! Starting prices for tablets: Apple iPad 2: $499 RIM PlayBook: $499 Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1: $499 Motorola Xoom: $599 HP TouchPad: ??? (Note: I know there's varying specs between each of these...
We had a number of awesome companies come out and show off their latest gear. For some, this was their first gdgt live event and the response was fantastic. Did you get a chance to play with any gear? If so, what did you check out and what were your impressions? Full list of companies that attended: Platinum: HP, Incipio, Motorola, Rovi Gold: BlackBerry, Logitech, Samsung Mobile, Sonos, TiVo, Western Digital, Windows Phone Silver: 3M Touch Systems, 3M Pocket Projectors, Bitbop, BodyMedia,...
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This is a long read. Feel free to respond to the title question without reading. My wife and I got an HP Photosmart C4795 something or the other that was on sale at Best Buy 2 years ago. It's the one with the gold/bronze trim and it uses HP 60 ink. It has been a headache from week 1 but, we hesitate to get something else in the same price range to be disappointed again. We are both in grad school, and need to print out papers, journal articles, scan articles, and copy forms. I liked that the HP...
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Hey guys. Need a favor. I'd like to upgrade from my trusty Dell Inspiron 1427 laptop. Let me know any suggestions you have for a Midrange laptop (13-15 inches / 4Gb Memory/ 320 to 500Gb HDD/ midrange graphics card) and if it has an option for a backlit keyboard..
I'm looking for a laptop. But here's what I'm looking for: These are a must: NFC DLNA Bluetooth at least 1 USB 3.0 port but must have at least 2 usb ports An HDMI port (In and out if possible touch screen (possibly a convertible laptop) and a camera (for video chat. i don't plan on sing this for photography. it looks stupid) Can't be over 14 in in width, High-Res Display. Optical drive not necessary. looking for a thin laptop. Core i5 or i7 cpu, max out ram at 8 GB (can't sit pretty t 4 gb or ram) 1 gb...
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I'm in the market for a new laptop after three years. Now I'm the kinda guy who doesn't mind spending a couple hundred dollars more right now to get something that seems like overkill at the present, so long as it keeps me chugging along at a decent pace for two or three years. Basically, I don't like to throw down money for a new gadget every year. This brings me to my question: Are there any decent touchscreen laptops available these days? I ask because it's patently obvious that that's the...
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I've been loving me test drive of windows 8. it's smoother than windows 7. But... All the features that make it really worth having are for a touch screen. I'm currently rocking a Toshiba satellite with a single core Celeron cpu. its a 15" in netbook. I love touch screens but i hate tablets. I'm looking for a convertible laptop. something like a Lenovo X220 or a dell latitude xt2 or a HP touchsmart tx2. But not as heavy as these 3. i like these because they have the power i want but unlike the...
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I'm not looking for anything too special. But cheap would be nice. I wouldn't say I need a huge hard drive, as I don't hold much on it, and the one I currently have is like 100GB and it has served me fine. I would like to stick with Windows 7.. The only little thing I might want would be a somewhat decent video card, as from time to time I still get random urges to play games.
Just wondering if a significant market injection like this, along with potentially licensing WebOS to other hardware developers, could be exactly what HP needs.
This article by Jean-Louis Gassée (http://www.mondaynote.com/2011/08/21/hp-what-leo-... is probably the best article on the current happenings at HP. The idea that Jean-Louis throws out about Microsoft buying the Personal Systems Group that HP intends to spinoff sounds pretty good if MSFT can build a vertically integrated device & software company similar to Apple. With Nokia as a solid mobile phone partner and a thriving gaming platform in XBox, Microsoft...
So I don't know if this has been asked yet, but here it goes. I wasn't able to get a touchpad this weekend, either from online retailers or local stores. I noticed that newegg had them in stock for full price. Let's say that I buy one from there, will I be able to get a price match eventually? I was thinking of doing that. And if don't get the price match, I can send it back and get a full refund. Is it worth it? I have nothing to lose, I think.
With TouchPads hitting $99 tomorrow, I am tempted to buy two of them and two cases, surgically attach them together, and create the greatest ever FrankenProduct that is the epitome of DOA - the HP Palm TouchPad Foleo!
It's sad news in the tech world today as HP kills of their tablet and smartphone development. Is this truly the end of webOS? A common meme I've seen over the past year or so with regard to webOS is that "it has a lot of potential." This is something numerous users, critics, colleagues, and even myself have said. It seemed to have a lot of legitimately great ideas, but suffered from extremely poor execution and marketing. It raises an interesting question though. Did webOS *really* ever have a...
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HP's is going to discontinue development of tablets and smartphones, but it sounds like they might be willing to sell webOS to someone else. The only problem is, apart from the value in the patents (which HP might conceivably hold onto anyway), why would anyone buy it at this point? If it were cheap enough I could sort of see HTC buying it just as a hedge against Google and Microsoft, but at this point it feels like the market (and developers) have spoken, and that no matter how good webOS is or...
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