books

Post-mortem on Road Trip 2008 gadgets

TAMPA, Fla.--And so it ends.

After driving through nine Southern states and crossing innumerable borders, Road Trip 2008 has come to an end.

What began in Orlando, Fla., ended 4,593 miles later here in Tampa. Along the way, the trip has taken me to a Space Shuttle landing, to the Corvette factory, to watch the Blue Angels practice at their home base, to being banned from Graceland, and much, much more.

Through it all I carried with me thousands of dollars worth of tech gear, aiming to road test it all. The list of gadgets included some of … Read more

Going thin on Road Trip 2008 with the MacBook Air

SAN FRANCISCO--After working on an Apple MacBook Air for the last month while on Road Trip 2008, it was a real shock when I returned home and picked up my regular work MacBook Pro for the first time.

Compared to the Air, which I'd really gotten used to as I drove around the South, the Pro was really heavy. Shockingly so. And thinking back over the countless hours I spent with the Air in my backpack on my back as I visited endless places, I'm eternally grateful for all that weight I didn't have to carry.

And … Read more

Okay, okay, I'll get an iPhone 3G!

My very first meaningful blog post here (after an introduction), from June 23, 2007, was titled "Why I'm not getting an iPhone".

Let me review my reasons at the time:

The original iPhone couldn't really do any more for me than my Palm Treo 650. The iPhone couldn't be used to connect my laptop to the Internet. No voice-memo support. No 3G networking. Not enough storage capacity. No native apps from third-party developers. No high-res screen.

Okay, what's changed?

Well, the iPhone 3G still… Read more

DailyCandy and the blogs-to-books trend

NEW YORK--Tuesday night was the first time I'd been to a digital-media-related event at a bookstore, unless you count the time that Google threw a conference at the New York Public Library.

It was the launch party for girly e-newsletter DailyCandy's new book, The DailyCandy Lexicon: Words That Don't Exist But Should, at the McNally Robinson bookstore-cafe in Manhattan's SoHo neighborhood. Refreshments consisted of rum cocktails and, not surprisingly, candy.

Sample entry in the book: "textual frustration: a late-night text exchange that fails to result in old-fashioned lip-locking." DailyCandy staffers told me that about … Read more

My MacBook Air dies while Google Docs is offline

I've been a proponent of the Cloud and hosted applications for quite some time but today I am dramatically feeling the effects of having zero control over my infrastructure and the inability to get anything when a Cloud provider has issues.

My MacBook Air is clearly in it's death-throes just six months after purchase and today Google Docs was down for over an hour. I basically have no way to do any real work at this point as I can't use most of my applications and can't get to my documents on Google. I'm a … Read more

Battle of the breeze: MSI Wind vs. MacBook Air

Remember back in the day when we went nuts and compared a Samsung Q1 Ultra to an Apple Newton? We've been eating the crazy pills again. Today, we woke up and decided we'd do another mental comparison--the MSI Wind versus the similarly gusty MacBook Air.

Despite the price disparity, they're both laptops, they're both ultraportable, they both have keyboards and screens, and they're both so gorgeous they cause random strangers to accost you in the street, demanding to know where you got them from. So which is best? The great silver hope from Apple, or … Read more

Apple MacBook: Change is in the Air

The Apple MacBook Air has been a ground-breaking first-generation product (in my opinion). So, what will Apple do to top it when an update comes later this year? There are some telling indicators already. This is what I expect--and hope for--as a user.

First, a disclaimer. I am not an Apple fanatic. The MacBook Air is the first Apple product I have ever used for more than a few days. For well over a decade, I have been wedded to Wintel (Windows-Intel) laptops.

Before I dive into upcoming features, I should also mention that I have been extremely pleased with … Read more

Looking back, looking ahead: The week in laptops

Ah, summer. Summer means long sunny days, vacations at the beach, and--if you're in the United States--the Independence Day holiday. Which is why this weekly wrap-up is coming a day early: tomorrow my colleagues and I will be busy eating grilled meat and watching fireworks, all in the name of patriotism.

Because it spans the middle months of the calendar, summer can also be a time of reflection. We took the opportunity this week to look back on all that's happened so far this year and came up with a list of notable notebooks from the first half of 2008. … Read more

Apple cuts price of flash-drive MacBook Air

Updated 2 p.m. PDT Monday to clarify that Apple has cut the price of a MacBook Air with a solid-state hard drive and faster processor by $500 total.

Apple has quietly reduced the price of the flash-memory version of the MacBook Air.

Appleinsider tipped us to the new price, which can be found at the online Apple Store. Before today, you would have paid a $999 premium if you wanted a MacBook Air with a solid-state hard drive, but Apple has reduced that premium to $599. It's also now cheaper to upgrade the processor from 1.6GHz to … Read more