Micro Fondle: Sprint 4G HTC EVO Phone

After Borders, where I micro-fondled the Kobo Reader, I stopped in Sprint. The large posters trumpeting the HTC EVO caught my eye and I figured I’d take the shot.

Click = big

There it is, displaying the mobile version of my Tumblr.

Archos To Take On iPod Touch With New Device

Via a tweet from ArchosFans, came the tip that J&R accidentally leaked news of a new iPod Touch-class device from Archos.

I think Archos remains well behind the curve here again. Despite the low price, who wants a 400×240 screen? I have an ancient Palm LifeDrive with a 480×320 screen! And I have no problem playing Divx/Xvid AVIs on it. It’d be nice to have a camera, but hey, that’s what the next generation of iPod Touch will likely offer me.

Archos should stop wasting its time. The Archos 7 Home Tablet needed Android 2.x and a muscular processor to begin with.

This is FAIL from the start.

Copy and paste of the text that will soon disappear:

Archos 32 8GB 3.2″ Touch Screen Multimedia Player

Android 2.1 Eclair / 802.11n WiFi / Bluetooth / Built-in camera & microphone / Accelerometer / Multiple audio & video formats / Surf web & download Apps

J&R Item # AHS 501570
Mfr. Part # 501570

Buying Info
List – $149.99
You save (2%) – $2.99
Your price – $147.00

Amazon, Customer Service, And Twitter

Had problem w refurb Kindle. Called AMZN & they are shipping out a replacement immediately. That is some pretty awesome CSMon Jul 26 13:57:29 via Osfoora HDJane L
jane_l

@jane_l What was the problem?Mon Jul 26 14:03:26 via EchofonMike Cane
mikecane

@mikecane scratch on the screen or something on the screen.Mon Jul 26 14:06:18 via Osfoora HDJane L
jane_l

@jane_l And you noticed after how much use?Mon Jul 26 14:07:55 via EchofonMike Cane
mikecane

@mikecane ah, recently? (a little shy of a month)Mon Jul 26 14:14:02 via Osfoora HDJane L
jane_l

@jane_l And now this will be a post!Mon Jul 26 14:16:41 via EchofonMike Cane
mikecane

@mikecane I’m glad I can serve a blog fodder for youMon Jul 26 14:20:51 via Osfoora HDJane L
jane_l

#DellFAIL

Why you should never, ever buy a product from Dell.

The gory details at my Tumblr.

Is A War Brewing At HP?

HP Android tablet coming later than you think, or not at all

HP Slate 500 with Windows 7 surfaces on HP’s site

HP files for ‘PalmPad’ trademark — a webOS tablet, perhaps?

HP confirms that Slate is still kicking, ‘next steps’ being determined

This looks like two factions at HP battling it out.

Since you guys can’t seem to figure this out, let me do it for you.

Kill the Windows 7 tablet!

Haven’t you learned anything from Apple? Don’t you understand how to focus your attention?

You can’t have HP offering both kinds of tablets. You’ll confuse the hell out of people.

Don’t give me any crap about addressing two different markets. Focus!

webOS is your future. Anyone else who says otherwise needs to be ousted from HP now. Get rid of the Old Guard.

They’re probably the ones responsible for this tasteless ghastliness:

And that’s just one of an entire series of WTF? bad TV ads from HP.

Cheap Chinese Android Tablets: Do Not Buy

If you swan through eBay or Craigslist, you’re bound to come across ads for devices that look like this:

Or this:

Do yourself a favor and stay the hell away from these things. Aside from the fact they’re all crappy fall-apart sucker bait, there is an important functional issue that makes them worthless: No Menu or Back buttons.

I’ve gotten a report that states people who wasted their money on these wind up trying to use Aldiko for eBook reading — and become stuck! There’s no Menu button to call up the options for things like type size, etc. And once you’re in a book, you can’t go back to the Library to select another.

Forget trying to get some sort of Sekrit Deal via China. That’s not going to happen, period. I’ve posted about the Pandigital Novel and the Cruze Reader and the Archos line of Android tablets. Stick with those if you desperately want/need want Android on a tablet.

Apple Needs To Bring Back HyperCard ASAP

This is Apple’s wake-up call:

App Inventor for Android
Google’s Do-It-Yourself App Creation Software

Google is bringing Android software development to the masses.

The company will offer a software tool, starting Monday, that is intended to make it easy for people to write applications for its Android smartphones.

The free software, called Google App Inventor for Android, has been under development for a year. User testing has been done mainly in schools with groups that included sixth graders, high school girls, nursing students and university undergraduates who are not computer science majors.

The thinking behind the initiative, Google said, is that as cellphones increasingly become the computers that people rely on most, users should be able to make applications themselves.

Boldfaced emphasis added by me.

Google is now copying Palm! Months ago Palm released its groundbreaking Project Ares web-based development environment.

Meanwhile, Apple went all Code Nazi with Section 3.3.1 and killed a wonderful little development environment for children called Scratch (see also)!

With that move, Apple has been going against its own unstated principles:

7) Help people create. When the original Macintosh was introduced, it came with a program called MacPaint. While the rest of the computing industry was focused on word processing and spreadsheets, Apple took the next step: marrying creativity to computing.

Steve Jobs himself acknowledged that in its time HyperCard was a really big deal.

So why doesn’t Apple bring it back?

If Jobs fears a flood of Stacks clogging the App Store, let me give him the solution to this. (It’s obvious Apple needs the help, since they still don’t see the value of hiring librarians.) You create a Category in the App Store called — wait for it! — Stacks!

It’s time for HyperCard, Apple. Again.

To see what a big thing HyperCard was in its day and to see how people still cling to its memory, I’ve pulled some links I compiled earlier:

HyperCard:
HyperCard Stacks
HyperCard Stacks and Scripts
Rescue your old HyperCard stacks with HyperPort
TileStack: HyperCard comes back from the dead and onto the Web
Charles Kelly’s Hypercard Stacks
Welcome To HyperCard Complete
DIFfersifier (HyperCard converter)
Converting a HyperCard stack to Revolution
Freebie HyperCard Stacks
HyperCard stuff
IHUG: HyperCard Around The World
Conversion from HyperCard, SuperCard, or OMO
HyperCard Forgotten, but Not Gone
1: tilestack
2: Why on earth would you resurrect HyperCard?
3: “iPhone – Create stacks that look and feel just like native iPhone apps.”

FaceTime In 2001 Versus 2010

When I saw a demo video of FaceTime over at Engadget, I immediately saw echoes of the 1968 movie 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Sony: All Baloney

Electrons cloned from Drudge Report:

Sony CEO gets $8.8 million annual pay amid losses

Sony expects to return to the black in the current financial year to March 2011, forecasting a net profit of 50 billion yen on revenue of 7.6 trillion yen.

I highlight that paragraph because I want everyone to mark that in their calendars.

I expect Sony will still be in the red.

In the meantime, I expect the Sony Reader Touch to remain at $199.00 (a higher price would altogether doom it) and Sony to come out with a rotten tablet that will be laughed at by everybody.

And Sony’s 3D TVs will go down as one the biggest disasters in the history of both Sony and consumer electronics — which is what Howard Stringer himself has already been.

Dial M For Mother

The iPhone Of The Future

Not much there about the “future,” really.

So go read this: Mother Box.

I see I’m not the first person to notice this.

Not even second.