Phil is off this week, after a lengthy trip to Asia to learn cool smartphone stuff (and play in the snow!) he needs a day or two to rest. This week I'm going to talk about (you guessed it) the Blackberry Priv. But not about what I think of it, or how to do something with it. I want to talk about the controversy around the reviews.
The folks behind the Big Android BBQ really know how to make a person feel like they belong. They have me itching to get out more to see more things.
We've reached that point of the year in which I have a serious problem I have absolutely no reason to complain about: Too many new phones.
My grandmother turns 89 years old today. And I like to think the things she experienced when she was my age 50 years ago (!) would be as historically amazing to me now as holding an iPhone is for her.
Do not make the mistake of ignoring the Samsung Gear S2. It's an imperfect smartwatch, but also one that's lightyears ahead of its similarly Tizen-powered predecessors.
So here we go. New Nexus week. The phones are just part of it, of course. We'll have a more in-depth preview Monday of what we're expecting Tuesday. But me? I'm hoping for a few surprises.
And things are about to get real exciting around there the next few weeks. And months. Probably through the end of the year.
Fall is in the air (I hate that cliche, but what the hell — it's true this weekend). Football is back. Baseball is starting to get interesting. The U.S. Open is just about behind us (Serena! Whoa!), the fall IFA (excellent!) and CTIA (why is this still a thing?) shows are in the books.
Think how much has changed in the tech world in the past 10 years since Hurricane Katrina kicked the hell out of the Gulf Coast. Now think how much outside gadgets remains woefully the same.
Now that the Great Security Scare of 2015 is behind us, we can all go back to letting the professionals do their jobs. Right?
In hindsight, it's not all that surprising that the new Moto G is as good at it is. Motorola's gotten really good at the mid-range phone. Better than anyone else, I'd argue. And it's not surprising because Motorola told us a long time ago what its game plan would be.
Well that was one hell of a week.
I'm spending the first hour or so of Father's Day in the usual position — hunched over a keyboard while at least one of my kids is buried in a tablet. I know that's not the best way for either of us to spend a Sunday morning. But it's also familiar. And like all things in moderation, it's probably not too bad for either of us. Kid No. 1 is fixated on her screen, playing some awful...
I've always known where my pictures are. For years now they've been sitting in a small box in my living room, on an aging Linux-based NAS box. (This one, if you're curious.) And I kinda loved that thing, insofar as one can have feelings for a NAS. It doesn't look half bad tucked in my entertainment system cabinet. And it did its job well, giving me an easy place to stash backups. And I...
We finally got rid of our home landline a few months ago. But one thing my wife and I quickly realized was that we still needed some sort of "home" phone, just in case our soon-to-be-9-year-old gets off the school bus and finds there's no one here to meet her. I'd rigged up a Nexus 7 with Google Hangouts Dialer, but that was a clunky solution. We needed a real phone. Besides, I figured...
I and the other Mobile Nations editors spent much of last week in Miami, working on the future of the organization of our organization. And giving me the excuse to use this picture you now enjoy here. (From the G4, with some HDR and post-processing love.) It's always great to actually see the people you work with. We don't get to do that often enough. And that we tend to do it at the...
It's not often that we have a consensus on things around here. That's by design, actually. Dissent and argument are important in this line of work. Nobody's ever always right about something. Nobody's ever always wrong. But it's been fun this past week to see our internal reaction to the new LG G4. As I wrote a week ago, it's foolish to go into the launch of a phone — even one as highly...
At some point in the final days leading up to the launch of the LG G4, you'll read words that read something to the effect of "Well, we pretty much know everything there is to know about this phone ..." It certainly won't be the first time such a line has been belched into a keyboard, nor will it be the last. (And I'm pretty sure you could search our fair site and find one of us — quite...
Ah, the silly season. We've got a couple of the year's biggest phone releases under our belts. (That's the Samsung Galaxy S6 and the HTC One M9, in case you've been living under a rock.) And you pretty much couldn't have two more polarizing phones. One is an iteration of a couple solid designs from the last year, keeping the same look, feel and features. The other has significantly...
This is not the column I intended to write today. That one lies one tab over, not yet deleted, but never to be published. No better time than right now to make things better. Or at least try to. It's not that there was anything particularly bad about it. I love the idea of asking "What kind of Internet do you want to live in?" And I thoroughly enjoy discussion of the open web,...