Showing posts with label features. Show all posts
Showing posts with label features. Show all posts

Saturday, April 23, 2011

Ten years of BlackBerry 10


The year is 1999. Bill Clinton is the President of the United States, gas is 94 cents a gallon, Bondi Blue iMacs are a staple in dorm rooms across the country, and Microsoft is trying to bring the desktop Windows experience to the pocket, pushing its Palm-size PC concept (after Palm had quashed the original "Palm PC" branding) on a world still feeling jilted by the failures of the Apple Newton. 3Com subsidiary Palm and its heavyweight licensee Handspring have figured out something interesting about the still-nascent PDA market, though: people like simplicity. If an electronic organizer does what it says it's going to do, keeps your information in sync with your PC, runs for forever and a day on a single set of batteries, and does it all with a minimum of fuss, people will buy. It's an exciting, challenging, and rapidly-changing era in the mobile business.

Friday, April 15, 2011

Western Digital's My Book Studio Edition II

It's a great time to be in the market for mass storage for your Mac. Hardware manufacturers keep coming out with new solutions that either provide more speed (like SSDs) or greater capacity, and the prices keep coming down.
Western Digital is now shipping the My Book Studio Edition II, a two-drive enclosure filled with 6 TB (that's right, six terabytes) of RAID 0 storage and a quad-interface (FW800 / FW400 /eSata / USB2.0) for only US$549.99. That price is quite amazing, since the competing LaCie 4 Quadra array sells for almost $400 more. The My Book Studio Edition II takes advantage of WD's 3 TB Caviar Green drives, two of which are nestled into an enclosure. The product comes with a power adapter usable in the US, Canada and most European countries, FireWire 800 and USB cables, a FireWire 800/400 cable and a CD containing a user manual and a selection of software.
The My Book Studio Edition II drive comes pre-formatted for Mac OS X and can be reformatted for use with Windows 7. While the array comes set up as a 6 TB RAID 0 stripe set, it's possible to use it as a mirrored pair (RAID 1) of 3 TB drives. For those who are looking for redundant storage, the RAID 1 solution makes a lot of sense. If it's raw storage capacity that you want, RAID 0 is the way you'll want to go -- just be sure to buy a second array for backup purposes.
To see how the My Book Studio Edition II array stood up during our tests, turn to the next page.

Tuesday, April 12, 2011

iChair for iPad 2 looking for a | little Kickstarter love



In the last year, just about every iPad case or stand has made it to my office for a review. While I don't always write them up, I often show the products on TUAW TV Live. It doesn't matter what I'm showing; there's always someone for whom the product is perfect, and a lot of people liked the case that I'm writing about here. For people who want the protection of a case and the convenience of the stand, the iChair (no, not thehelmsman's chair from Norway) is one of the better designs I've seen.
We received one of the iPad cases and an iPhone 4 case earlier this month for review, and while the iPhone case was inadvertently used as a giveaway for our TUAW meetups, I still have the iPad case and decided to give it a try. Vindi Sedey, the CEO of iChair, is trying to get funding on Kickstarter to start manufacturing the iPad 2 and fourth-generation iPod touch versions of the combo case and stand. At this point, he's quite a bit away from his goal of $15,000 worth of funding, but given the quality of the iChair for the original iPad, I thought I'd give the product a little push here on TUAW.

Saturday, April 9, 2011

The Top 5 Paid iPhone Apps | Of All Time


Ever wanted to know what the most popular iPhone apps of all time are,You're in luck: Apple has revealed the list as part of its run up to the 10 billionth app download.
Infozonex first published the list and what follows is a list of the most popular paid apps sorted from the least downloaded to most.There's one big surprise on the list: Angry Birds isn't number one. It's not even number two!

#1: Doodle Jump, App Store superstar

Doodle Jump is the heavyweight of the App Store. Make your Doodler climb higher and higher until he falls off a platform or gets hit by a monster. The perfect game to pick up and play.
Price: $0.99









Top 10 Iphone Paid Apps l

The top 10 free appsfor iPhone




Ever wanted to know what the most popular iPhone apps of all time are?
You're in luck: Apple has revealed the list as part of its run up to the 10 billionth app download.

Wednesday, April 6, 2011

App review | SPB Shell 3D for Android


As we all know, the beauty of Android stems from the fact that you get a wide variety of choices when it comes to devices and interface, though the latter can sometimes be a double-edged sword. Luckily, users who are fed up with their bloated Android UI but don't want to (or can't) mess around with ROMs now have another easy solution. Joining the handful of Android launchers is SPB's Shell 3D app, which installs as a replacement (but removable) home screen that comes with some nifty widgets (radio switches, backlight dimmer, weather forecast with a 3D chart, clock with over 60 skins, world time with a 3D globe, etc.) and resizeable folders.