It’s really not good. My hands aren’t that big (I can type faster than you could ever dream on a BlackBerry, iPhone or E71) and my thumb literally takes up 3 or 4 keys on the keyboard. There’s less space in between each key than say, a BlackBerry Curve 8300 keyboard, and the texture takes some time to get used to. It’s a rubberized coating kind of like the Centro and Treo Pro, and while the keys are a bit harder (better), the coating could possibly get irritating as usage increases. It’s really such an important area that couldn’t afford to be messed with and we’ll admit it… we’re a little let down. You’re going after the big guns here, and this is kind of disappointing.
Category: General Tech
Behold, The Titanium
The Titanium PowerBook was the first notebook from Apple to feature the G4 processor.
At 1-inch thick, sporting a 15-inch widescreen display and wrapped in metal, the notebook caught everyone by surprise. The design is proving timeless. The Unibody MacBook and MacBook Pros are built like the Titanium - a thin plate on the bottom with all the insides built into the top case. Not to mention the black keyboard being back in style.
Jason Snell on Twitterrific 2.0
Looks like it may give Tweetie a run for its money.
‘Not His Superpower’
Perhaps the best thing I’ve read on the Jobs/Woz relationship, written by John Siracusa:
By all accounts, Steve Jobs is no engineer. He was never a programming maven like Bill, nor was he a hardware wiz like Woz. On his own, Jobs could not create much of anything. But that’s not his superpower.
Though a good critic can influence the community of creators, in the end, he does not create anything himself. But take that critic and put him in charge of the creators. Make him, let’s say, the founder, CEO, and spiritual leader of several thousand of the most talented engineers and artists in the computer industry. What might happen then?
Apple’s Media Pad/Tablet Ideas (c. 1987)
The video is set in 2011.
Retro Goodness Over on Flickr
May 4 - 8 is ’Roid Week 2009. My contributions will be collected here.
Damn It, Rob Enderle
The man’s “blogging” is just an extension of his work for the big companies that have hired him as a consultant.
So I was shocked when I actually agreed with him about something:
The company has Al Gore on its board and could lead in efforts to prevent global warming, but there is no effort to take Apple to solar power on record – or any other global warming program that I can find – and when it comes to green products, Apple had to be dragged kicking and screaming to make changes. Granted, that was mostly Greenpeace using Apple as a lightning rod, but Apple should have been leading there.
Revolutionaries Get Overtaken
With so much now at stake, some experts suggest the iPhone will soon become the most important technology Apple’s empire has produced, even, potentially, eclipsing the computer business that revolutionised our lives in the 1980s. There are an estimated 1bn personal computers in use worldwide, but that many mobile phones are sold every year and for many people their first experience of computing will be through a mobile phone.
On Unneeded Nerdgasms
Today, the Apple Store apparently when offline for a bit. TUAW:
Apple Store down on a Sunday? Well, that’s unusual. Price drops? New gear? Regular maintenance? We’ll know soon enough.
The Boy Genius Report also reported it. Honestly, I’m surprised the bigger blogs like Engadget and Gizmodo didn’t post something as well. The Internet gets all crazy when Apple pulls their online store down. Nothing new, of course, but this comes to mind:
Still No 10.5.7 Update
Mac Rumors, on the most recent developer build of the next update to Leopard:
As with numerous previous developer builds, the inability to install Safari 4 Beta remains the only documented issue. Development on OS X 10.5.7 has been presumed to be wrapping up for several weeks now, but Apple appears to still be finding a few bugs that require their continued attention. The last developer release, Build 9J56, was seeded in the middle of last week.
Old Illustrator Video Brings Back The 80s’ Design Awesomeness
[via blogs.adobe.com]
More than 400 Milliseconds
Gizmodo has some info on how Windows 7 ought to be faster in ways that are, well, noticeable:
Microsoft obviously focused a lot on the user experience in Windows 7, so a lot of work went into improving desktop responsiveness—smoothing out the little snags or hangs up that made people feel like Vista was too slow. Which is apparently a hard thing to do, since a million different things can cause slowdown. But the most frequent cause of hangups is a bottleneck caused by one graphics device interface application—an app that taps your graphics card—waiting on another GDI app that’s being all slow and crappy.