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Nilay Patel:

HP just reported its Q4 2011 financial results, and although the company managed an overall profit, the real news is in the webOS numbers: HP spent a big chunk of $3.3 billion this year killing the webOS group and absorbing Palm’s falling value. Considering the $1.2 billion HP spent on Palm in the first place, and it’s clear that HP’s blown through at least a couple billion in its failed webOS experiment — an experiment that’s still awaiting a final resolution from new CEO Meg Whitman, who’s promised employees a decision on their fates sometime within the next few weeks.

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CaptureNotes [Sponsor]

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CaptureNotes 2 is more than just a note-taking app for the iPad. It lets you record audio while you type.

While there might be other apps that let you take notes and record, CaptureNotes 2 brings an entirely new feature to the experience: Flags.

Flags are intelligent bookmarks, allowing you to place specific marks in time during a recording to follow up on in later review. For example, if you were using CaptureNotes in a class, you could mark things like test questions, text references, follow-up requests, or even make your own custom flag set. In a meeting at work, you could mark action items to follow up on.

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Marco, on the Kindle Fire

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Ouch:

I expected the Kindle Fire to be good for books, great for magazines and newspapers, great for video, and good for apps and games.

In practice, it’s none of these. Granted, I’ve only spent two days with it, so I can’t share any long-term impressions. But I’m honestly unlikely to have any, because this isn’t a device that makes me want to use it more. And that’s fatal.

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What’s on my Home Screen

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IMG 0402

Row 1

The top row is pretty close to stock. Messages, Calendar and Photos are all in their default positions. Camera+ took over for the system’s camera app a long time ago. I like the filters and sharing options, but most importantly, it is faster than iOS’ app, at least on my 4.

Row 2

  • Music is pretty self-explanatory. I’ve got iTunes Match turned on.
  • Instacast is fantastic. Syncing with iTunes to update podcasts seems super old-fashioned after using this app. I listen to a bunch of shows while driving around, and this app is a game-changer.
  • PlainText is a universal Dropbox text editor. I gave up Simplenote earlier this year to simplify my setup, and PlainText made that possible. (On the desktop, I access my Dropbox-based files via nvALT.
  • I’m somewhat of a weather nerd. I love radars, dew points and storm warnings. After lots of testing, I settled on My-Cast as my iPhone weather app of choice.

Rows 3

  • My life is inside OmniFocus. I’m not even kidding.
  • While it is $3 more than the free, first-party Twitter client, Tweetbot is worth the money. It’s got really smart push notification, a great design and a healthy dose of personality. I wish they guys would make an iPad version.
  • Reeder is the Google Reader client not only for the iPhone, but the iPad and Mac, too. It’s not without good reason — Reeder is fast, ties into sharing services and has a great icon.
  • While I use Instapaper more on my iPad than on my phone, it might be my favorite iOS app. I send tons of stuff to the service, and I love having it ready to read if I have a moment.

Row 4

I keep this row empty. It makes my phone less overwhelming to look at, and it gives me a nice place to slide over to the others screens.

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