WadeMeredith.com

Having already screwed up all devices they offer, RIM moves on to other com­pa­nies’ devices.

Quick, were Egyptian pro­test­ers suc­cess­ful in their bid to over­throw long­time pres­i­dent Hosni Mubarak ear­lier this year?

According to a new poll (PDF) from Fairleigh Dickinson University, if you watch Fox News you are sig­nif­i­cantly less likely to know the cor­rect answer to that ques­tion than if you mostly avoid news shows and news­pa­pers all together.

Not a joke.

–Khoi Vinh: On the Grid

Truly astounding. It starts to get mag­i­cal about 45 sec­onds in.

My daily carry…

• Nixon wal­let — had it for­ever and really like it cause it’s very slim
• Timex mil­i­tary style watch — love these things even though they are cheap
• Cross pen
• Notebook
• Sunglasses
• Car/House keys
• Cell phone (not pic­tured)
• Lightsaber (green blade) - obvi­ously for dual pur­pose, light and defense.

the Kinetic Device is extremely flex­i­ble and responds to being bent and twisted to nav­i­gate its sim­ple UI. It’s built entirely out of plas­tic, which includes the bendy and attrac­tive AMOLED dis­play up front

Don’t miss this must-watch video of some really slick hardware/software design pair­ing by Nokia. You lit­er­ally bend or twist the the phone to manip­u­late the interface.

Is chang­ing the way you’re hold­ing onto a device a more intu­itive way to manip­u­late the user inter­face than reach­ing out and touch­ing the actual display? I’m not sure…

Direct manip­u­la­tion of a touch screen sur­face seems unbeat­able, but adding flex and twist com­mands seems akin to adding on another  dimen­sion. This is pretty cool, although just like ges­tures it would be tough to dis­cover a lot of these com­mands with­out being prompted.

I wouldn’t have caught most of these.

While brows­ing Hackernews/Reddit yes­ter­day, some­thing astound­ing kept com­ing up over and over. This is what Apple released yes­ter­day.

• iOS 5 (iPhone, iPad, and Apple TV versions)
• Mac OS X 10.7.2 (and maybe 10.6.9?)
• updates to each of the three iWork apps for iOS
• iPhoto 9.2
• Aperture 3.2
• iCloud Control Panel for Windows
• iTunes Movie Trailers app
• Find my Friends app
• update to iOS Remote app
• update to iOS iMovie app
• update to iOS Find My iPhone (Find your Mac)
• store for text message/alert tones
• the iCloud web apps
• some Lion Recovery Update
• AirPort Utility for iOS
• New iPod Touch and iPod Nano
• …and of course the iCloud (and iMes­sage, etc) ser­vice itself, includ­ing migra­tion tools for MobileMe

All with nary a card­board box in sight. I guess that’s what you do with a 500,00 sq ft data cen­ter.

(Oh yeah, and the launch of their best sell­ing hard­ware prod­uct ever is tomorrow.)

Web server built into an Ethernet (RJ-45) jack. Contains an embed­ded web server, a com­plete TCP/IP stack, email alerts, upgrade­able firmware, and 128-bit encryption.

via http://​hack​erthings​.com/

Please let us give you more money.

You promised the free update in a dif­fer­ent era, prob­a­bly expect­ing dif­fer­ent cir­cum­stances. Things have changed.

We’re very con­fi­dent that these Android smart­phones rival or beat any smart­phone out there in terms of func­tion­al­ity, speed, over­all expe­ri­ence and fea­tures – includ­ing the iPhone.

The word “very” is the bullshit-o-meter tip off. Don’t get me wrong: I love T-Mobile. My ser­vice there was above and beyond any­thing I’ve expe­ri­enced at ATT or Sprint (I’ve never used Verizon). But I don’t think Cole Brodman, Chief Marketing Officer for T-Mobile USA believes this for second.

Incidentally, when the iPhone 4 came out I left T-Mobile to get it (I was using a hacked iPhone 3G on their net­work at the time). As much as I liked T-Mobile, I’m glad I made the switch. Dealing with ATT’s sub­par cus­tomer ser­vice on occa­sion has been worth the trade of a bet­ter user expe­ri­ence with my phone day-to-day.

Here’s my open let­ter to T-Mobile:

Dear T-Mobile,

If you ever get the iPhone in the US, I’ll be back.

–Wade

It doesn’t get much bet­ter than this…

Maybe Marco should “drop the com­puter on the desk” and see if that fixes it?

EDC stands for Every Day Carry and it just means, uh, what are you car­ry­ing around with you every day. As a gad­get geek and tool mon­ger, this is right up my alley. I love to see what peo­ple have in their pockets/on their per­son as they walk around.

There are a sur­pris­ing amount of guns on the site,but I think that stems from the name of the blog, which sig­nals a fire-arm-friendly cura­tor. “EDC” is used in law enforce­ment and mil­i­tary cir­cles to specif­i­cally refer to a weapon for every­day use. (At least that was my first expo­sure to it.)

Anyway, EDC is basi­cally gear porn, so I’m lov­ing it.

Why is this hap­pen­ing? Because the future of Netflix is stream­ing videos. Period. Not mail­ing them to your house via the U.S. Postal Service, but deliv­er­ing them to your TV and devices over the Internet.

This seems like a smart move to me. From a brand­ing and busi­ness model stand­point the DVD and stream­ing ser­vices need to be sep­a­rated. Each ser­vice is unique in that one has a future and one does not.

Zen mar­ket­ing at its finest.

via The Kid Should See This

Sony is prepar­ing to ban gamers from the PlayStation Network (PSN) unless they waive the right to col­lec­tively sue it over future secu­rity breaches.

The firm has amended PSN’s terms and con­di­tions and users have to agree to them next time they log in.

The move comes months after a string of hack­ing attacks com­pro­mised over 100 mil­lion accounts of the PlayStation Network subscribers.

This is typ­i­cal Sony anti-customer behav­ior that has gone on for almost a decade now. Ever since Sony will­fully installed mal­ware on pay­ing users’ com­put­ers and then denied it, I’ve refused to do busi­ness with them.

Sony is obvi­ously and openly a user-hostile cor­po­ra­tion show­ing no signs of course cor­rec­tion or remorse for stupid/dangerous crap that they are will­ing to put their sup­port­ers through.

Hot.

It’s not a tablet mar­ket, it’s an iPad mar­ket.

“If we believe what we have been told, the iPhone 5 will be released on 15 October,” Mr. Richard told a group of reporters, accord­ing to TechCrunch. He didn’t say if that date was for the iPhone’s world-wide launch, or if it could roll out in the United States ear­lier in the month.

Mr. Richard is the same CEO that let slip Apple was plan­ning on using micro SIM cards in the iPhone 4, which does add a lit­tle more cred­i­bil­ity to his iPhone 5 launch date.

Why does any­one tell this guy anything?

I get asked this ques­tion a cou­ple times a month by friends and fam­ily who know I’m a com­puter geek​.So I’m com­mit­ting the com­mon response I give to writing…

For those in a hurry: the answer is mostly yes.*

A com­puter is an oven, an iPad is a microwave.

Some peo­ple could live with only a microwave in their house. When I lived by myself for a cou­ple years in col­lege, there was an oven in my apart­ment. Not once dur­ing my tenure did it know the warmth of a human touch. But some­one seri­ous about cook­ing would never get by only on a microwave, the same way some­one seri­ous about har­ness­ing the power of a com­puter could never get by on an iPad alone.

Like a microwave, the iPad is new and very very good at a hand­ful of things and ter­ri­ble at every­thing else.

Stuff it’s good at:

• Surfing the web
• Short email correspondence
• All types of reading
• Watching movies
• Playing games
• Listening to music
• Creating music
• Finger paint­ing (I’m serious)
• Massive bat­tery life
• Intuitive inter­face
• Great value for the money
• Etc…

Stuff it’s ter­ri­ble at:

• Long form typing/coding
• Complex image/video editing
• Complex spread­sheet manipulation
• Complex audio editing
• Connecting to mul­ti­ple exte­rior devices
• Multitasking
• Etc…

When microwaves really went main­stream in the 80’s (by that time about 1/4 of all US house­holds had one) there were all kinds of lame cook­books about how to make a turkey in a microwave or a roast or any num­ber of other unlikely culi­nary can­di­dates for your nuke box. That’s because when you have a new ham­mer every­thing looks like a nail. Have you ever eaten a roast cooked in the microwave? Yeah, nei­ther have I, because it’s a ter­ri­ble idea. If your going to be mak­ing roasts, you prob­a­bly should own and oper­ate an oven.

The iPad is new and shiny. If you love gad­gets and com­put­ers, you should get one, but it’s not going to replace your desk­top com­puter any­time soon. They’re great at a small, but impor­tant sub­set of com­put­ing tasks, and they make them enjoy­able like no other device I’ve owned. The only skep­tics I’ve met so far are peo­ple who haven’t used them.

Here’s the three-way breakdown.

1. If you don’t care about that list of, “Stuff it’s good at” tasks up there, then you shouldn’t get one at all (obviously).
2. If you only care about those tasks, then you should get one immediately.
3. If those tasks are a small but impor­tant sub­set of what you do with com­put­ers then maybe you should get one or maybe not, it will prob­a­bly come down to budget.

*Once again though, the answer is mostly yes. I say this because if you’re ask­ing, and your bud­get allows for it, you should prob­a­bly get one. People that do do a lot of seri­ous com­put­ing most likely already know the answer to this ques­tion and the iPad is per­fect for peo­ple who don’t do a lot of seri­ous computing.