The Wall Street Journal’s Brett Arends bought a Nook Color, rooted it, and is calling it a tablet:
Be aware that you perform this software hack entirely at your own risk. Barnes & Noble says it invalidates your warranty. The process ran smoothly for me, but when I read the Internet chat rooms, I found at least a few people had had problems. If it goes wrong, you’re on your own.
Check out what the user ratings for the official Twitter client have done after the Dickbar release:
Nameless Electronista Staff Member:
The iPad 2 has triggered a minor panic among PC and tablet makers, including a possible HP change in strategy for the future TouchPad, insiders said late Monday. A number of notebook designers, including Acer, ASUS, and HP, have reportedly looked at adding tablet features into what were going to be conventional designs. Digitimes cited the example of a 10-inch Eee Pad’s USB keyboard as an example of what sort of changes might take place.
Although the Xoom has a lot to offer, the product feels very incomplete. A surprising number of promised hardware and software features are not functional at launch and will have to be enabled in future updates. The Xoom’s quality is also diminished by some of the early technical issues and limitations that we encountered in Honeycomb. Google’s nascent tablet software has a ton of potential, but it also has some feature gaps and rough edges that reflect its lack of maturity.
There are two things I remind myself of daily in regards to social media. The first is that this technology exists to create true community. It’s not a game, or a toy, or a matter to be taken lightly. When you begin interacting online, you are dipping your foot into a very special place, where true friendships can grow and impressions can be made that affect future employment or reputation with potential customers. The Internet isn’t a disposable spoon to be used when convenient and thrown away without regard. Real relationships are formed, and actual people exist behind the lovely twitter avatars we see each day. Real people. With feelings and dreams and issues and needs.
Seth Godin, on a rough experience at the Genius Bar:
Every employee means well. Every employee is overwhelmed by incoming traffic, most from people who have already had their promises broken. Every employee has discovered that it’s easier to make a promise and pass it along than it is to either tell the truth or keep the promise.
The cascade starts with the product. When your brand makes promises it can’t keep, your overworked staff bears the brunt.
The fact that the iPad only lets me see one app at a time often does not help me focus. Instead, it forces me to switch between apps constantly, thus preventing me from focusing on my task. Every time I have to deal with the iPad’s task switching, I’m interrupted.
For some tasks, letting applications take up the whole screen is useful. Applications like Garage Band or Writer make good use of the screen. But a lot of the time, allowing more than one app to occupy the screen can actually help people focus, because human tasks are often not as simple as computer tasks, and may require people to be able to see more than just a single application.
This brave new Apple is fast, agile and and above all, cool. Well, to be fair they’ve almost always been cool, but there’s something different this time. This isn’t like the iPod or the iPhone (or even the iMac for that matter.) The iPad marks a shift in the company. Before 2010 they had the luxury of waltzing into an existing market, picking a product, reinventing it and saying, “look how much better we made this.” With iPad, all that changed. Now that they’re creating markets Apple is finally forcing the competition to ask, “how are we going to keep up?” This is perhaps the first time a successful Apple product is in the lead and a generation beyond the also-rans. And they’re scaring the pants off of the competition.
10 years ago a browser was born.
Its name was Internet Explorer 6. Now that we’re in 2011, in an era of modern web standards, it’s time to say goodbye.
This website is dedicated to watching Internet Explorer 6 usage drop to less than 1% worldwide, so more websites can choose to drop support for Internet Explorer 6, saving hours of work for web developers.
Currently, worldwide usage of IE 6 is at 12 percent, with 34.5 percent of China’s web traffic being generated with the browser.
What Simperium will eventually offer is an easy-to-use platform for building apps that sync. I’m happy to announce that I’m now an advisor to and a (very minor) investor in Simperium. I haven’t worked on sync systems, but I am hoping that I can provide some insight to the Simperium team on building a developer platform and scaling out their backend systems.
If you’re a Simplenote user, expect the app to get better and better. If you’re developing an app that needs to sync, Simperium is building a platform you’ll want to use. If you rely on apps that sync, you’ll be using Simperium-powered tools before you know it. Fred, Mike, and their team are up to great things, and I feel privileged to be able to support them as best I can as they take their company to the next level.