You know, I have been happily wedded to Android for a while now. I’m typing this on my old Nexus 7, and it’s still a great device. It’s not as hardy under the hood as my Note 3, on which I do most of the art for this site. But even this Nexus 7 is a powerhouse next to my first smartphone from as few years ago, the HTC Surround. I charged it up for a lark recently and realized that as much as I enjoy Android, there’s a lot still…
Windows Phone’s greatest detractor isn’t its lack of ecosystem. It’s that nobody knows why it’s worth using. Remember when Microsoft started advertising Windows Phone? The message was “You won’t obsessively love it, but don’t worry, you won’t hardly be using it anyway.” Compare that to the recent Internet Explorer videos, which directly take aim at the misconceptions surrounding the product and showcase its utility. There’s some savvy at work here, some style and personality. It’s inducing smiles in a way that none of the Windows Phone ads do, and it’s colourful and…
Well now, this is exciting news. Microsoft has been less than forthcoming with details about the Windows Phone 7.8 release. 7.8, the surface-level bump for Windows Phone 7 users, was touted as many as being an appeasement feature, little more than a gesture to WP7 adopters whose phones cannot be updated to the new Windows Phone 8 OS. My position has always been this: Windows Phone 7.x works. It works well. It’s good. And you’re getting what you paid for. Don’t order a pizza and expect it to become duck confit at…
Hot on the heels of my excitement over the video of a Microsoft evangelist telling a Portugese tech site that all Windows Phone devices will get the next big update, Apollo, The Verge has reported that an anonymous source close to the company has quashed that hope, saying that no existing Windows Phones will get the next big update. Funnily enough, even though I use and love Windows Phone, I wasn’t too heartbroken with the news. After all, it’s been up in the air as to whether or not current devices…
It’s the last day of the Great Metro App Roundup, and we’ve got two of the biggest new apps to go! Reader This… this is not one of the biggest two apps today. This document and PDF viewer is, like many of the preview apps, totally functional. But I’m not sold. It’ll very obviously work better in touch mode, and it’s much peppier than Acrobat for loading and viewing PDFs, but the granular control over printing isn’t in place yet; it’s even missing things like being able to print single pages.…
Apps, day the second! Check yesterday’s for Calendar, Mail, and Messaging. Carry on for dumb beauty, region code errors, drama, and cloudy skies! Maps Another gorgeous Metro app. I love Bing maps’ look; the aesthetic is clean and bright, easy on the eyes and extremely readable. It launches quickly and finds your location without much effort. And then you start to use it. Rendering the map isn’t fast on old hardware. It chugs, and refreshes at odd times. Also, its contextual awareness is atrocious, as is its parsing of Bing search results.…
The OS is only half the story of what makes Windows 8 interesting. There are plenty of new apps that come baked in, replacing things like the Windows Live suite, Outlook, widgets, and web apps. Some are fantastic, some show potential, and some just raise questions. Let’s take a look. Remember, these are all still preview builds, so I’m going to try to be fair. But I’m not going to pander. Microsoft is going to need to hustle to fix some of these apps before launch so they’re an everyday…
I’ve been using Windows 8 now for a few days since the surprisingly easy install, and I’ve quickly gotten a feel for how it works. Let’s take a tour of some of the new stuff and see how it stacks up to what we all know and love (or hate, as the case may be). Lappy is not a new computer, so I was pretty concerned about performance when I installed Windows 8. Take a look: Yup, Lappy is a crappy old HP Pavilion dv2700t, without even the max available…
Last night, I braced myself for a painful goodbye. I have been watching a dear old friend become increasingly frail, seeing function lost almost daily. And together, we were going to do something insane. It might spell the end of our long relationship. But it could also be rejuvenating—one final adventure to go out on. My friend’s name—the name I gave him almost five years ago—is Lappy486. He saw me through my undergrad and teacher’s college. He’s been dying by inches. And last night, I installed the preview build of…
Since the latest episodes of both Bent and Throw it Against the Wall have seen me mention Windows Phone 7, I think it’s about time I talk about why I like it. I know there’s a lot of scepticism surrounding it. And why not? Most people I know who were considering jumping the Microsoft ship did so in the dark days of Vista, so that’s their last experience with Windows. Anyone who saw their parents working on a Treo back in the nascent days of the Blackberry know the sloppy,…
It’s been a while since we’ve done one of these, hasn’t it? Well, there’s been some cool stuff this week that I wanted to share with you. BBC Will Give Every Year 7 Student in the UK a Micro Bit Computer – Lizzie Plaugic, The Verge I’ve frequently lamented that my students know so little about the technology that they use. I grew up on DOS and early Windows and Mac PCs, so I had to at least learn file structure and basic command line stuff. I made web pages in the…
I work with a lot of students. And they love video games. Most of them are Xbox owners, or play Xbox at friends’ houses. Not one is excited for the Xbox One. It’s taken some digging to figure out why. They’re pretty savvy. They’ve either watched the reveal or talked with friends who have, and they’re pissed that there wasn’t much time devoted to games. I have an explanation for that — they wanted to get the platform and TV and services stuff out of the way so that they…
