Category Archives: Technology and Gadgets

What’s new among the plugged in? Video games to new gadgets, rising tech trends and more.

04.26.13
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Samsung pushes back Canadian Galaxy S4 delivery date

There are going to be an awful lot of disappointed Samsung fans this weekend. April 27 was tagged as the shipping date for Canadian pre-orders of the Galaxy S4 smartphone, but Samsung Canada just posted this on their Facebook page:

Samsung is excited to see the level of pre-orders that Canadian consumers have for the GALAXY S4. Samsung Canada had intended to ship pre-orders by the 27th, but due to the overwhelming global demand of the Samsung GALAXY S4, we will not be able to meet the pre-order date of April 27th for all customers. These orders remain the highest priority with carrier and retail partners and will be fulfilled in the coming days.

via Samsung Canada.

It has to be something of a two edged sword for Samsung — they must be thrilled to have this kind of demand for their new product, but fans who are willing to pre-order a device get justifiably upset when it doesn’t ship on time. It will be interesting to see if this does any lasting damage to Samsung’s brand in Canada.

04.20.13
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Cel phones extensions could ring in the end for landlines

HTC Mini - Landline killer?Our family’s landline has long been an expense that I’ve greedily eyed for elimination. After all, we’ve got 3 cel phones in our house, do we really need these extra handsets just because we’re at home?

The argument against moving to strictly cellular phones (mostly from others in my house) is generally that without extra handsets we’d have to carry our cel phones around all the time. If we go into the basement or upstairs, we’d have to tote our cel phone around all the time if we want to be able to answer it.

Not so anymore, thanks to the HTC Mini.

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04.02.13
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What Games Are: The PC’s Struggle To App-Up Continues

A fascinating post showed up on TechCrunch recently.

The article is worth a read and is actually quite thought-provoking. In short, the premise is that by trying to integrate the app mentality of phones and tablets, computers have short-changed users, resulting in “a junky experience”.

I’m not sure I agree. Looking specifically at Windows 8, there’s not question that the experience is not quite entirely ‘appified’, nor is it entirely a traditional program based experience. Continue reading →

01.20.13
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The killer Windows 8 problem that no one is talking about … yet.

Windows 8 new 'Modern UI Interface' desktop layout

Windows 8 new ‘Modern UI Interface’ desktop layout

Much has been made of the Windows 8 Metro Modern UI Style interface and the problems some users are having with it – especially in a desktop computer environment.  Even on the tablet side, where opinion generally seems to be more positive, there are concerns about the way Microsoft is rolling the software out – and specifically the confusion the two different versions will likely cause.

Up to this point I’ve been a pretty loud supporter of the new operating system anyway. I installed the consumer preview on a Samsung ultrabook and that process went fairly smoothly, with only a few snags (that are to be expected in any operating system upgrade). I played with the new interface and actually liked it – even on a laptop.

But then I realized how tightly integrated the new OS is with Windows Live  – and that’s when the whole thing started to go right off the rails.

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