The thoughts of a true technology versatilist
Will the pending explotion of eReaders from famous (Amazon, Apple, Barnes and Noble, DELL, Fujitsu, Lenovo, Microsoft, Sony, etc.) and not so famous (Camangi, Electrovaya, Freescale Semiconductor, Fusion Garage, OpenPeak, etc.) manufactures, finally causes newsstands like Bookazine to go out of business?
Just now Amazon quietly launched the Kindle for Mac.
The new applicaiton is a very basic that fucntions exactly what you expects a Kindle application on the Mac does. It downloads your purchased Kindle books from Amazon, so you can read them on your Mac. The application also use Whispersync to synchronize the spot in the book where you left off when you last read the book. The functionality is not that much different than the Kindle for iPhone app. The only major addition is the Mac version’s ability to resize the screen displaying the book.
Apple began taking pre-orders for their iPad today via their USA online store for delivery to US addresses or in-store pickup.
There are two ways to reserve your iPad for the April 3, 2010 launch date, you can pre-order it and have it delivered to your US address, or you can reserve one for in-store pick up at one of Apple’s US retail store. In either case, Apple limits the iPad pre-order to 2 units per customer. I guess this limitation is to warn off grey market sellers, ensure enough early adopters get their iPad’s, and less likely is the rumor that supplies of iPad will be low on launch day April 3rd (in USA).
There are two specific lines of iPad’s, one with WiFi only connection and another with both WiFi and 3G connections. Which one you buy really depends on how you plan to use the iPad. The great thing about the iPad is that its use will depend on the user and the apps s/he choose to install onto the iPad. People have to stop slotting the iPad into any existing electronic device categories. It is definitely not a “tablet computer” in the traditional definition or a “notebook” or “netbook” computer, so comparing it to any of these are like comparing apples (sorry for the pun) and oranges.
Continue reading “Should non-US Residence Pre-order iPad WiFi+3G?”
Apple has announced the ship date to be April 3, 2010 for iPad in the USA, and begins to take pre-orders on March 12, 2010.
According to Apple’s January 28th announcement, they will released the iPad in stages. The WiFi only versions are expected to release 60 days from the announcement date (approx. March 30th), then the versions with WiFi+3G was to come 30 days (approx. April 29th) after that.
So based on the above understanding the April 3rd ship date should be for the WiFi only versions, and the versions with WiFi+3G are expected 30 days after that; some time beginning of May (approx. May 4th), just in time for Easter.
This morning (10:00 US PST) Steve Jobs introduced the Apple iPad to the highly anticipated crowd at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center.
The specifications on the device are:
| Price/Models | 16GB | 32GB | 64GB |
|---|---|---|---|
| WiFi | USD499.00 | USD599.00 | USD699.00 |
| WiFi + 3G | USD629.00 | USD729.00 | USD829.00 |
During an interview with CNBC yesterday afternoon, the McGraw-Hill’s CEO Terry McGraw told CNBC (at 02:50 in the interview) that the yet unannounced Apple tablet “will be based on the iPhone OS.”
It appears that various media like: Engadget, Ars Technica, FoxNews, have now received the official invitation from Apple for the event on January 27, 2010 at 10:00 (US PST) held at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco.
Fox News even went as far as reporting that they have confirmation of the topics that will be presented by Apple. These being the new tablet, iPhone OS 4.0 and a new version of iLife.
I like to share with my readers the process in which I became a SSD (“Sold State Drive”) user.
The price of SSD drive is still way more expensive than a regular HDD, especially when you compared the cost per GB (Gigabyte).
In Hong Kong on average one can find a reasonably fast 7200rpm 1TB (Terabyte) 3.5″ internal drive for about HKD790.00. Even if you purchase a USB capable external enclosure that is only an additional HKD120.00. Giving you a cost per GB of HKD0.91/GB.
On the other hand the Intel SSD X25-M 160GB cost me HKD3770 at the beginning of January, giving me the cost per GB of HK23.56/GB. This means using a SSD cost 24.89 times more.
How I come to decide on purchasing the Intel SSD X25-M? Partially it is because of the reviews and information gather from AnandTech’s web site, plus the feedback from various people about Intel and OCZ SSD.
goFerry is a Free application created by a Hong Kong investment company, SINO Dynamic Solutions Limited, but own and operated by a Malaysian travel company called AsiaTravelMart. I will go into why this is important later in this review.
The vendor refers to its application as the first iPhone application to allow mobile purchases of ferry tickets between Hong Kong and Macau on one of the three companies: TurboJet, Cotai and New First, which it does.
The steps for purchasing tickets are quite straight forward. They are as follow:
NASA is an iPhone application released by USA’s National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
It is loaded with all sorts of information about the past and present missions of NASA, and is ideal for space enthusiasts plus anyone who has a slight interest in space exploration and wants to find out more.
The organization of the information presented in the application is very intuitive. One can search the content based on a particular mission or scan through the image and video libraries. While scanning through either of these libraries, one can search using keywords or filter the images and videos by source of the videos.