Category: Sony

  • Ah Europe, land of cell phone greatness

    The phone is ringing, it’s 4 a.m. Who do you want answering that (mobile) phone? Me, of course. I’m in London, however, so your 4 a.m. is what we like to call 9 a.m. here in England. I’m on a sort of mini-holiday over here enjoying the many beautiful sights, unusually fine weather and amazing…

  • Tivo already connects your TV to the web content you want

    We’ve been happy Tivo subscribers for almost two years now. We started with a Toshiba RS-TX20 model that also has an integrated DVD player/recorder. That was an awesome combination (just one remote!) but its been discontinued. Not just the model — the whole concept. So when we added a high-definition television set and Verizon’s FIOS…

  • Cheaper noise cancelling head phones work pretty great

    Last year I bought my wife a pair of pretty high-end Sony MDR-NC50 noise canceling headphones to take on airplane (business) trips. They are amazing — pristine sound quality for your music (or anything else on your iPod) while tuning down, down, down environmental sounds like jet engines, train whooshing or even construction equipment working…

  • John Markoff needs a new job or at least a new beat

    Ever know someone who got laid off or otherwise had an involuntary job change mid to late in their career and ended up feeling re-energized and renewed at their next job? Happened to my dad, thanks to Newt Gingrich becoming Speaker of the House, but that’s another story. It’s that time for New York Times…

  • Thin is in but I’m not sure why

    Steve Jobs had a couple of widely leaked “surprises” to unveil at yesterday’s Macworld show. As we’d all read everywhere for the past few weeks, Apple added rental movies to its iTunes download store. The selection is a bit small and the 30-day delay from DVD release to rental seems ridiculous but, hey, these are…

  • Ignore the static: Kindle is great for reading

    Wow, the new electronic book reader from Amazon, Kindle, sure is getting a lot of absurdly misguided and factually incorrect criticism. My fingers are getting sore from responding to such a tide of disinformation in comment boxes scattered across a zillion web sites. Just this morning, I’ve been writing a lengthy comment to a Kindle…

  • Bye bye Shuttle XPC

    Well, good bye Shuttle XPC. We hardly knew you. Thanks to an emergency computer situation at my mom’s, Shuttle XPC had to go over and run TurboTax (which requires at least W2K now). The installer was giving my mom an error message that it didn’t support Windows 98. I kept saying try it again —…

  • New 24″ iMac is mondo big & mondo cool

    I stealthily updated the “tools of my trade” page recently but in case you missed it, there’s a new leader of the (computer) pack around these parts. After going back and forth and back and forth for days, I decided that the future was a desktop and not a laptop. As my brother pointed out,…

  • Google hears my long-tail e-book plea

    Back in October, when Sony’s new and fairly horrific $350 e-book reader gadget came out, I blasted the company — and some of the people who reviewed the reader — for completely misunderstanding the need for such a product. We don’t need to carry around 87 different best-sellers in an electronic format that’s inferior to…

  • Short-tailed Sony reader needs a much longer one

    Sony’s new e-book Reader certainly seems like a marvel of technology but it’s also an example of a company forgetting to ask the most basic question of new product development: what is the customer benefit over existing products? With a nod to Chris Anderson and his much discussed long tail thesis, the real direction for…