HOW do you make amends without admitting you’re wrong? How do you offer millions of your customers a solution to a problem you say hardly matters? Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs gave it a good shot at a press conference Friday (http://bit.ly/jobs_antennagate) aimed at addressing user complaints that gripping the new iPhone 4 in a certain way would dramatically reduce signal strength.
THE recent kerfuffle over the iPhone 4 “death grip” highlights how a simple problem can be blown out of proportion, not only by media hype but by a woefully inadequate response, in this case, from Apple.
THE MagSafe charger for my MacBook died last week. It had given me some warning. Every so often, the power indicator on the magnetic connector would refuse to light up, and I would have to jiggle the cable to just the right position to get it working again. Finally, it had become so unreliable that I decided I had to buy a new one. After all, it’s hardly good form to start a three-hour lecture by fumbling with the cord of your power adapter for 10 minutes, hoping the charge light will come on while your battery is draining.
LIKE it or not, the technology world is ruled by hype, and the epicenter of hype these days is Apple. Everywhere you look, it’s the iPhone this, or the iPhone that. There are applications for anything and everything, and we’re supposed to drool over them while we visit the Apple App Store and eagerly surrender our hard-earned money to the technology world’s equivalent of the Soup Nazi. Well, I’m not buying. I’ve seen the iPhone and it’s a cool, shiny device, but I don’t need it. How many people can say that?
NOBODY I’ve shown the Verzio Skii to can believe that this slim, dual-SIM touch-screen phone costs less than P5,000. Visually, everything about the Skii from Verzio of Singapore—black piano finish, the brush metal back cover, chrome trim and one-centimeter profile—speaks of an expensive phone. That Verzio has managed to pack so many features into an attractive candy-bar phone that sells for only P4,990 is no mean feat.
Some writers suggest that dedicated e-book readers are on the way out, since Apple’s iPhone and other smart phones can do the same job, I disagree. For most serious book readers, the tiny screen just doesn’t cut it. The real challenge to Kindle and other dedicated e-book readers will come, not from mobile phones, but from small and inexpensive netbooks.
Jaunty Jackalope Netbook Remix on an Acer Aspire One
IT was a long slog rather than a jaunt. This weekend, I installed the beta version of Ubuntu 9.04—otherwise known as Jaunty Jackalope--on an Acer Aspire One netbook with 1 gigabyte of RAM and an 8GB solid state drive. Since I had been satisfied with how Version 8.04 ran on the same model, I was eager to see how the latest release would play. To keep things interesting, I decided to install the Netbook Remix edition, which is specifically tailored to run on small format laptops. Unfortunately, the process took longer than it did the last time, and it was dawn by the time I figured out how to get the Aspire One’s built-in Wi-Fi card to work.
ACER’s Aspire One is a solid netbook, but it can be much more. In the last two weeks, I’ve been using it as a full notebook, running office applications, editing digital photos, surfing the Web and watching videos on a robust, full-featured system. The remarkable thing is, I’m doing it on a such a small, lightweight computer (less than a kilo) that has only 8 gigabytes (GB) of storage and 1GB of memory. The key to unlocking the Aspire One’s power was to replace the Linpus Lite Linux operating system that comes installed with the netbook with Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron).
IT’S difficult to write about the Aspire One from Acer without gushing. Out of the box, this mini-notebook is the perfect traveling companion for anyone who simply needs to surf the Web, send e-mail and perform typical office tasks such as typing up documents, working on spreadsheets or giving a presentation. Its compact size—6.7”x9.8” and less than an inch thick—and weight—less than a kilo—make the Aspire One extremely easy to bring along anywhere. The netbook is slightly longer than the pioneering Asus Eee PC, but Acer has put that extra space to good use by building in a larger keyboard that most touch typists will appreciate (about 85 percent of a full-sized one) and a glossy black frame around the LCD screen that makes it look brighter.
First shot of Dell’s mini-notebook, courtesy of Gizmodo
In the next month or two, it should be interesting to watch as Dell, the world’s third largest computer company, rolls out its “Dell E” series of mini-notebooks. The company has not announced the new line, but the new netbook has been making waves on the Internet ever since Gizmodo bumped into Michael Dell at the All Things Digital conference in May and took pictures of his shiny new notebook that sported a fire-engine red high-gloss finish. Since then, more intriguing details have surfaced.
The Asus Eee PC on top of a 13-inch MacBook.
WHAT’S the best-selling notebook computer on Amazon.com? If you guessed the new MacBook Air, guess again. Five of the 10 best-selling notebooks, including the top three models this weekend do not run Windows or Mac OS X. In fact, they are different models of the same diminutive notebook the Asus Eee PC—that runs on Linux. The significance of this development is easy to miss, particularly if you have your head buried in the Windows or Mac OS X world. (The other five models on Amazon’s list over the weekend were versions of the MacBook; there were no Windows machines in the top 10.) For the first time, a Linux-based consumer product is making waves, not just among geeks but among buyers.
Every once in awhile, it’s nice to be able to check e-mail or read the news online without having to stop by an Internet café or whipping out your notebook. It would be great, too, not to have to pay through the nose for such access. Happily, with the right mobile phone and service provider, these are not such outlandish wishes.
Digital Life is a blog that features a technology column by the same name that appears every Tuesday in Manila Standard Today, a national daily from the Philippines. This blog gives readers easy access to the column, which started in November 2002. Copyright 2009 Chin Wong.
Made the switch to Linux? Tell me about it here and get your own penguin! Click here for a high-resolution image.
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