As Seen Through PeriVisioN

I know most of you have seen this, but what the heck, I’ll through it up here for people.  I wonder what the other apps are?  I know they are made up, but what would you guess?

We pick up in the war after the CrunchPad came and went, various ‘tablets’ from other manufactures have taken up position on the field.  Apples iPad is the first heavy into battle, and with great surprise, not to much effect.  The general reception to the iPad has been even at best.  Now comes Googles tablet, or Gpad, or Gslate. (I really cannot see GPad after the ribbing iPad has taken). It basically looks just like the iPad except for one thing. Its running Chrome!  Funny, i would have figured Android.

Now lets take all this with a grain of salt, its conceptual and so far I have not seen anything to make me jump at the moment.  So in regards to our war, the Google Tablet is still at home base, and until it joins the field, the battle ground is still Apples to define.

Here is a shot with the keyboard at full screen…

Check out this video on the tablet..

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The Apple #iPad is out, and to no surprise iPad jokes were trending on twitter within a few hours.  But there is one company that does not think its so funny, and that is Fujitsu.  They made a claim for their iPad device a few years back and dropped it because of conflict with another company called Mag-Tech.  Fujitsu did re apply, but nothing final on that application.  So is this going to be another battle just like when Apple fought Cisco Systems for the name iPhone?  Might.  I would not be surprised that they settle out of court.  Would make sense.  The NY times did a more complete write up, you can check it out here.

The apple iPad is finally out. And it’s pretty much what we expected; a really big and hyper powered iPhone/iPod.  Anyway, all in all, that’s ok. So why am I not buying one? Well it’s because I already have an iPhone. Now, if I was a big iPhone game player, we would be having a completely different conversation right now. Gaming on the tablet is the greatest. I think the demos was proof enough of that. Reading? Kindle killer. (yes I said it). But outside of gaming and reading, there is just not enough value that I do not already have on my iPhone to validate the cost.

Now, what would I need to make the jump???

First; jailbreak on the tablet. It’s running what I call iPhone OS4, so what, 3 months till jailbreak? That will go a long way for allowing me to perform VPN, Tethering, etc…  Next; untethered this from iTunes!! And; Better google docs integration. I do not plan on writing a full doc from scratch or anything, but come on. How about Flash? I know it’s dying, but it’s not dead yet, but I know that will never happen. …

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I have not had much time for writing and this will be a really quick post, but I fell pretty sure that whatever the Apple slate or iPad will be called, it will not be the iTablet because there is already one.  At CES I saw an iTablet (and I will post the images up tomorrow) already working and branded.  The people at the booth said they already owned the trademark. Now they could have been lying to me, but they had the device and the branding.  Now this device was nothing special, simply a normally webbook running win 7 with touch capabilities. And I expect to see ALOT of these over the year as the Apple device sets the standard for user interaction, and win7 app area created to mimic those UI elements.

The company that makes this device is called AMteK out of Taiwan.  I’m still trying to get a hold of them to confirm the claim that I was told at the show.

{update} Heard from AMteK.  They have iTablet and they say Apples device WILL be called the iSlate, and they are wrong.

I’ve heard iSlate, and I think that could be the name.  I wonder if anyone is taking bets on this?

{Update} Its called the iPad.  I would have lost my bet.

from Kevin C. Tofel

I still do not have the Nexus One, and still trying to get my hands on Google’s phone, although I ‘could’ just go out and buy the bloody thing, but where is the sport in that? Plus, I’m not looking for a replacement phone… yet.  So again, anyone have a Nexus I can borrow or want to sell used, let me know.  Now on to the tip.

I read this on a site called jkontherun by By Kevin C. Tofel Since I do not have the device, I can only go by what he states and the comments that seem to back him up, but based on dealing with dropped calls with the iPhone, this fix makes sense.  What he did is go into the phones settings and have the phone ‘rediscover’ the towers in the area.  I remember doing this back in the day with my treo and once with the iphone when it first came out. Here are the steps.

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Just came across this new Facebook feature on my iphone today.  I clicked on ‘update’ but did not select ‘overwrite’ .  What this new feature does is take every one of your phone entries and checks to see if they are also your friends on facebook.  If so, they insert the profile image they have on facebook into the profile image in your iphone address book!  Nice. Even adds a link to their facebook account.  Caution though, if you have lots of entries and lots of people on facebook, this can take awhile, so make sure you are not already low on batteries and can spare the time to let it do its thing.  Once it has going through and you close the app, I cannot seem to find away to get it to work again.  If someone knows how, please share.

{Update} I heard from @jaymandel that it replaced all of this pic AND created duplicate entries.  I’m not sure what story is there.  I checked mine and I did fine some duplicates, but I’m not sure which were created by the program or were my own duplications. Also, if this happens to you, I know that yahoo address book had a deduplicate featrue, so you can sync your itunes address book with yahoo and remove dups if this happens to you. Does anyone know if itunes has a deduplication function for iphone address book?  What about google address book?

Earlier today, I was using Google maps to find a repair shop in Patterson.  As I typed in the address, I got this..

What the heck?  It looks like my search was intercepted and redirected to some Chinese map. I searched again and got no response for about a min. After that minute, Google Maps seemed to be working fine.  So what does this seem to indicate?  Whomever was hacking Google decided to let them know they can make things rough for Google.

{UPDATE}

Looks like it was the Chinese Govt.  So we can go from someones in China, to China.

“iDefense report unambiguously declares that the Chinese government was, in fact, behind the effort. The report also says that the malicious code was deployed in PDF files that were crafted to exploit a vulnerability in Adobe’s software.”

And just in case you do not already know, Google found they were being hacked by some group in China trying to get to civil rights workers and other ‘people of interest’ to the Chinese. Google, whom have been pretty uneasy about the agreement they have with China to allow their searches to be censored, have finally decided this was enough, and threaded to leave China altogether if they do not lift the censorship and providing a list of all people in China using Google.

Today, I saw the image below on flickr by Grace Kwok from Google.cn (Google in China).  They are already laying down flowers and saying bai bai to Google. More images here..

Further, I just noticed this link at the top right of my GMail account.

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Ok, you know the drill.  The top ten (10) android apps.  Not everyone will think these are the best  or greatest Android application, but hey, have to start somewhere. If you have an issue, with my list, let me know.  It normally takes a bit of time and revision before the list settles in.

Starting at No 10

10. TasKiller

This app is basically a task manager for Android. The big win here is not only killing that rouge app, but force clean up of memory when you are about to run that hard core 3D game you just downloaded.

We can all tell #CES is coming (here) because of the flurry of #netTablets, #iSlates, #SmartBooks or whatever we are going to call it is hitting the interwebs.  Today I got a message from gdgt on a new class of laptop.  Called the Lenovo Skylight, its beyond the netbook in that it uses a 1 g snapdragon processor and 20 GB of standard flash running a customized Linux install.

If you were to take the keyboard away and insure screen touch, we would have another runner for the iSlates/GTablet war. Still. If this had a good enough browser, then I can see this completing with the netbooks.  So add a new one to the lexicon.  SmartBook.  Gezz.. If this had an full on OS, it would be a palmtop no?