Category: review

  • I’m over at The Boston Globe

    As of June, 2021, I’ve left Fortune (and the Data Sheet newsletter) and joined The Boston Globe as a reporter on the newly formed tech team in the business section. My focus will be more on the local Boston/New England tech scene, but with occasional forays into broader topics. You can find my stuff on…

  • Looking for the best Google Reader replacement, don’t forget the plumbing

    Google is shutting down Google Reader, its RSS feed collector, in July. Google’s bare bones reader web site was never the greatest way to actually read your RSS feeds, automatically updated collections of all your blog post subscriptions. There were plenty of alternatives for that function — I was using Reeder on my iPad and…

  • It’s not about the specs – dumping my fancy pants camera

    For the past year or so, I’ve been taking pictures with one of the most well-reviewed and highly spec-ed out digital cameras on the market, the Sony NEX-7. It didn’t come cheap and a couple of additional lens added to the bill but this was supposedly one of the great cameras out there. Considerably smaller…

  • Simplification disaster: The Case of Shafer v Civilization

    How does it happen that a shining success fades into failure, that a popular series falls out of favor, that a great product line drops off into obscurity? Those are the questions I’ve pondered for the past few years after my favorite video game series, Sid Meier’s Civilization, went completely off the rails at version…

  • Post PC Vacationing: kids, cameras, iPads but no laptops

    Just back from a short family vacation to San Francisco where much fun was had. We traveled light, or at least light-ish, for this wired day and age. We took smart phones, digital cameras and iPads but we didn’t bring a laptop. For the most part, everything went well. The iPad makes a great travel…

  • I know Apple, Apple is a friend of mine. Lenovo, you’re no Apple

    Lenovo CEO Yang Yuanqing made an interest declaration the other day. He’s going to split their PC business into two units, one that does basic stuff aimed at consumers and businesses and another one that will get the Thinkpad brand and shoot for the higher end. The “Think” brand is needed to better compete with Apple, he said.…

  • iPad, Nexus, Kindle Fire – which tablet should I buy?

    What a crazy time to be shopping for a tablet computer. There are so many, many choices. Which tablet should you buy? I have some advice — and please give me your intelligent feedback in the comments section below — on the biggest sellers, all of which I have personally used: Apple’s iPad line, Google’s…

  • Best apps for Amazon Kindle Fire tablets

    Looking for the best apps for your new Kindle Fire HD tablet? Unfortunately, Amazon doesn’t give you easy access to the Google Android app store with its hundreds of thousands of offerings. Instead, you get just what is in Amazon’s much more limited store, missing plenty of good stuff especially Google’s own apps. But there…

  • Online storage prices come down slowly — Apple still the max

    Drastic price cutting has hit the online storage space, or so you may read. But, unfortunately, most of the price cutting is for big time corporate users not us little guys. Well, that’s not completely true. There have been some serious price cuts on online storage for us ordinary users since I last wrote about…

  • Great Google Voice apps for Android and freedom from cell phone plan tyranny

    Are you a big user of Google Voice like I am? Here’s my best advice about apps and some cool tips to use Google Voice with an Android phone. You can also use these apps to make calls from an Android tablet. One of the most important reasons I switched from an iPhone to Android…