Android G1, we hardly knew you

g1-hppAccording to a Twitter post by an Android developer, it seems that the Tmobile G1 android phone, introduced last year, has so little memory space it won’t be able allow any other further full OS updates after getting the recent “cupcake” release.

That would mean if you have a Tmobile G1, except for minor patches, it’s as good as it’s going to get.

The G1, the first phone based on Google’s open source operating system, was always quirky. It’s physical keyboard was nice — not as good as the Blackberry, but nice. The overall phone has a clunky feel that seems almost more like a breadboard or a lab prototype.

More about this topic, including an underwhelming denial by Tmobile, on AndroidandMe.

Personal note: I have been using a Tmobile G1 since last November but the decision to upgrade was made for me by my 2-year old last week when he tossed the G1 from the bedroom window. It didn’t bounce. I chose to upgrade to a Tmobile My-touch, the next generation Android phone. It doesn’t have a physical keyboard but seems much more polished than the G1. In other news, Sandra’s iPhone didn’t bounce either. Now she also has a Tmoble My-touch.

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

How to connect Google Reader and Evernote

Google Reader, Google’s free online RSS reader is how I keep up with hundreds of websites and Evernote, my “ubiquitous capture” has become the repository of everything I want to do, read and have done.

I use them both every day, but I’ve never been happy about how I get articles I want to save from Google Reader into Evernote.  My solutions have been either pulling up the actual web page from Google reader and then clipping either text or the entire article from the page or trying to highlight text within the reader and clipping it directly to Evernote, both seemed awkward.

The answer is simple.  While in Google Reader you can send articles via email and every Evernote account has it’s own email address that allows Evernote to capture emails that you wish to keep. So I’ve  started happily reading article in Google Reader and then emailing them to my Evernote account. Very simple and very cool.  The command for emailing from Google Reader is letter “e”.

Me? Kind of slow, but eventually I figured it out.

evernote-email

Your Evernote email address found on Settings Tab of Evernote website

greader-email

Entering “E” while reading articles in Google Reader opens an email form, just enter your Evernote email address and send.

Oh, yeah and if the term “Ubiquitous Capture “  sounds overly pompous, it’s from David Allen’s Getting Things Done methodology for the place where you can trust that you can put everything important that needs to get done — it can be a notebook.

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

You do know what a browser is, don’t you?

I went on and on about web browsers last week. I wrote about the different ones and how there was a new browser war underway. Did you follow me?

The reason I ask, is Google sent a team into Times Square in NYC to ask about browsers and found that only 8% of the folks interviewed actually knew what was a browser. Most seemed to confuse browsers and search engines.

Now this was probably a pretty unscientific sample but also probably fairly typical. I’m not sure Google’s point in this exercise but it comes off a bit like a sequence of Jay Leno’s “Jay Walking”.

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Google Chrome for Mac is so cool, now finish it!

The Chrome team has released a developers copy of the browser for Mac and Linux, so far Google Chrome has just been available for Windows.

While to call me a developer would be a gross misuse of the term, I’ve been using the browser ever since it was released last week.  It is so cool.  Well actually so fast!

The team admits it’s far from finished.  Among other things, it doesn’t print, it doesn’t display YouTube-like videos and there seems to be not much in the way of bookmark management.  So let’s give it a number and say it’s 75% done. What it does well is render a web page really fast and when I’m digging around the web that’s what’s most important to me.

The Chronium Blog warns you not to download this version unless “take great pleasure in incomplete, unpredictable, and potentially crashing software.

How incomplete? So incomplete that, among other things , you won’t yet be able to view YouTube videos, change your privacy settings, set your default search provider, or even print.”

It hasn’t crashed for me in about 20 hours of use.  The only gotcha for me was when checking a blog post and panicking when I couldn’t see the YouTube video, but I had been warned.

mac_chrome_screen

Anway, if you live life on the bleeding edge and are so Type A that anything faster is better, download the browser and give it a try on Mac or Linux.

As for me?  I’ll probably use it for most of my work on my slight aging Macbook because it just makes the experience so darn fast!

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Making Real Use of WolframAlpha

wa-logoSearch engines are hot. No surprise there. Google? Search engines also = advertising revenue and revenue is always hot.

The tech world of buzz is constantly on the watch for “killer” apps. Not killer in that they actually do executions, but ones that will “kill” the previous market leader. That’s like Google did  to Yahoo way back when.

In this David and Goliath atmosphere there’s always a watch for the Google-killer.  We were  promised that last summer in the form of Cuil, another search engine that turned out to be rather banal, just maybe better formatted. [Read more...]

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.