Yesterday I finally had enough. I headed over to the local AT&T store, indulged myself in a mild rant about the POS (Samsung Infuse) that they’d sold me last summer, and then paid through the nose to upgrade it early to an iPhone 4S. Since I don’t intend to replace this one any time soon,…
Read More Back into the walled garden, with enthusiasm (and an emptier wallet)I’ve just left Yahoo, mostly because it became clear that I wouldn’t be able to do what I was originally hired to do. Frustrating, but never mind. So now I’m checking out the alternatives (of which there are quite a few), and in the meantime I’ve joined US Venture Partners as an entrepreneur-in-residence.
Read More New year, new directionWell, 2011 has given way to the New Year, and AT&T have failed to fulfill their promise to upgrade the Android software on all of the 4G phones which they sold in 2011. Back in the summer I embarked on an experiment to see what life outside Apple’s walled garden would be like. The results…
Read More Time to root – or dump – my AT&T Samsung Infuse 4G phoneJust after sunset this evening. (Warning: full size image is 5.8MB.)
Read More SunsetI had hoped, almost selfishly, that Christopher Hitchens’ cancer might spare him for a little longer, so that we could enjoy more of his wonderful writing. Alas, no. Hitch was just about a year older than me, and like me he moved to the USA in 1981. We were both socialists in our youth, and…
Read More Christopher HitchensI got my Kindle Fire yesterday, unboxed it, and… I was horribly disappointed. The out-of-the-box experience was awful: slow, inconsistent, stuff timing out, difficulty connecting to the network. I put it aside, because I had a busy work schedule. This morning I picked it up again. Still unusable. I checked the online help resources, FAQs……
Read More Kindle Fire and Apple Airport ExtremeIf all goes according to plan, this will be my penultimate posting on the subject of my cataract surgery. The second (left eye) procedure has gone even more smoothly than the first. Intra-ocular pressure didn’t fluctuate, and recovery was uneventful. At the end of my post-op checkup on Wednesday, they tested my vision as 20/20…
Read More Penultimate vision postingMy HP TouchPad has finally arrived. It looks beautiful. (Of course, it looks like every other black rectangular tablet with rounded corners – are Apple’s lawyers listening?) Unfortunately, I can’t set up email on it. My IMAP configuration for geoffarnold.com, which works on my MacOS, iOS, Android, and various other clients, won’t work in webOS.…
Read More HP TouchPad arrivedThis morning I had the second cataract surgery, replacing the lens of my left eye with a synthetic replacement. It was uneventful, which is — in its way — an interesting comment on human adaptability. I was surprised by how a procedure that I had experienced for the first time in my life a few…
Read More "We're doing the left eye, correct?" "Right… er, I mean yes, correct, left!"Tim Bray just posted a nice blog piece about his new phone: a pre-production Nexus Galaxy running Android 4.0 (code-named “Ice Cream Sandwich”). There are some really nice features in this release, which is, of course, what we’ve come to expect. These days, competition in many markets is driven by features, and less attention is…
Read More Feature driven competition, and the Android problem