July, 2009
Windows 7 on MacBook Pro: Nice, but still has poor battery life
Posted on July 31, 2009 |
Windows 7 rates my unibody 15-inch MacBook Pro at 5.3, which is very high for a laptop.
(Credit: Dong Ngo/CNET)I have had Windows 7 Ultimate RTM (release to manufacturer) for a few days. This is, of course, a legitimate copy, not the leaked copy that you can download from the Internet. That's the good news.
The bad news is I have had to test it, which has been lot of work. We tested the new operating system against Windows Vista SP2 and Windows XP SP3. Overall, Windows 7 offers a much more pleasant experience than Windows Vista. Everything works more smoothly. The new OS takes less time to launch applications, and it's nice just to browse around its functions and features. It's also very pretty. However, it is slower than Windows XP, except for the boot and shutdown times, where XP has always been a drag.
...iSuppli: Handset Shipments Return to Growth
Posted on July 31, 2009 |
Nokia, Samsung, LG and Motorola have a reason to rejoice: Sales of handsets are starting to pick up. Global shipments of cell phones rose 4.7% in the second quarter, ending nine month of sales declines, according to consultant iSuppli.
“The moderate increase indicates the worldwide mobile handset market is bottoming out and now is returning to growth,” according to analyst Tina Teng, who authored the report. “Much of the growth was generated by two emerging regions: the Middle East and Latin America. Furthermore, several aggressive promotional campaigns boosted sales in North America, with regional shipments rising by 8% during the period.”
Now, the future looks bright. Shipments should rise 6%, to 280.9 million handsets, in the third quarter, and by another 8.3% in the fourth quarter, which is seasonally strongest. Despite the quarterly growth, shipments for the full year are still expected to contract by 9.9%, to 1.1 billion units, down from 1.23 billion in 2008.
Handset shipments declined by 0.3% in the third quarter of 2008, by 2.6% in the fourth quarter of last year and by 16.4% in the first quarter of 2009. By the first quarter of 2009, shipments had fallen by 58.8 million units compared to before the economic downturn began in the second quarter of 2008.
That said, not everyone agrees that the handset industry has seen its worst days yet. As my colleague Andy Reinhardt points out in his post, researcher Strategy Analytics believes that cell-phone sales actually declined in the second quarter.
Microsoft acknowledges Windows 7 activation leak
Posted on July 31, 2009 |
(Credit: Dong Ngo/CNET)Alex Kochis, Microsoft's director of Genuine Windows, posted a blog late Thursday addressing the "leak of a special product key" of Windows 7 RTM (release to manufacturers). This confirmed the rumor on Tuesday that an ISO file of Windows 7 RTM sent to Lenovo that ...
Originally posted at News - Microsoft
CrunchPad tablet allegedly revealed: Apple tablet killer or overhyped Netbook?
Posted on July 31, 2009 |
(Credit: The Straits Times)We started seeing prototype photos of the CrunchPad back in April. Back then we described it as, "a mobile computing device as envisioned by TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington...The project's goal was to design and build a thin, light touch-screen PC without a physical keyboard ...
Goodbye BlackBerry; Hello iPhone
Posted on July 31, 2009 |
Guest blogging today is George Colony, CEO of Forrester Research, who for 30 years has been advising CEOs on the impact of technology on business. He also blogs at The Counterintuitive CEO:
If you're the typical CEO, you are carrying a BlackBerry. But not for long. Once the iPhone is able, in a corporate setting, to replicate all aspects of Outlook (email, calendar, notes, and tasks) with high security, the iPhone floodgates will open and you will have a new device. Here's why:
1) User interface. Despite the annoyance of the glass keyboard, the iPhone interface is faster, more intuitive, more flexible, and more versatile. You can do more, with more content, less instruction, and faster speed.
2) Applications. iPhone has a massive head start in the battle for applications. It's possible that your company already has an iPhone application in the market -- servicing your customers. Don't you wish you could see it? And there may already be applications available that will make your job easier -- I predict that corporate dashboards for CEOs will be a small but influential segment of the iPhone apps portfolio. In some markets, it's changing how customers connect to companies -- here's an example around mobile banking. The application revolution has begun -- and it's not on BlackBerry.
3) iPhone will soon be available from more cell services providers -- starting first in Europe. Once the device breaks out of its AT&T cage, the multiplier effect will kick in -- and the flood waters will rise fast.
Now there's a big "if" in all of this. Apple has been hostile to large corporate environments for years. Steve Jobs has famously called your CIO an "orifice" as in, "...we've never been good at going through the orifices to get to end users." Every time the company tries to leave the consumer and go enterprise, it goes from being cool to being incompetent. The company hates to take direction from anyone -- especially from large company CIOs.
But Apple may have to bend its corporate culture to grab the enterprise iPhone business -- the opportunity of moving iPhones into large companies will be too big and too lucrative to ignore. Once your company supports full Outlook replication to iPhones, many of your employees will dump their BlackBerries -- and your CIO will begin looking at how she can build some game-changing corporate applications for the Apple device.
After many years of watching tech revolutions unfold, I know that winners control two factors: 1) they effect a quantum jump in man/machine interface, and 2) they win massive applications support. Check and check with the iPhone. If Apple consents to change its strategy, an iPhone will be coming your way.
