Google, Microsoft and Yahoo are all offering some form of courtesy Wi-Fi through the holiday season, at venues such as airports, hotels and Times Square.
Each has a relatively new service it’s hoping to attract consumers to, whether it’s Google’s Chrome browser, Microsoft’s Bing search engine or Yahoo’s revamped home page and customization features.
China Unicom may have gotten a bad rap for its lackluster iPhone announcement this week, but its launch upstaged the event at the Apple store.
The iPhone did, in fact, draw a crowd today, despite a rare rainstorm that had streets jammed in Beijing. At China Unicom’s outdoor event, several hundred people lined up to be first to buy the phone.
For the business traveler (and the traveler in general, really), Wi-Fi is important–crucial, even.
Is this the year that location-based applications, already popular among mobile users, migrate to desktops and laptops as well?
Ryan Sarver, director of consumer products at Skyhook Wireless, which operates a Wi-Fi-based positioning system, is betting so. “It feels like 2009 is a huge year for location on laptops,” he told the crowd of techies at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco Wednesday.
So here I am. In a hotel room in New York. The writing desk and its view of xth Avenue are all but obscured by: 7 x Mini USB cables. Two of them are the new Micro type that Blackberry has switched to for the Storm only, the rest are standard. 1 x Ethernet cable. Into wall-socket of hotel room. 8 bucks a day.
This weekend in San Francisco, the second annual iPhoneDevCamp 2 is underway. Whereas the first confab focused primarily on Web applications, this one has a definite native application flavor, thanks in large part to the fact that the iPhone software development kit (SDK) is out of beta and now available for developers.
When the iPhone was released in June, many developers were disappointed by the absence of an SDK for writing third-party applications on day one.
Having seen Apple’s MacBook Air notebook computer up close, I’m as dazzled as everyone else who’s had a chance to examine this delicious piece of industrial design. Dazzled doesn’t translate to handing over a credit card, however–at least not yet, and not solely because it’s almost never a good idea to buy Apple’s (or anyone else’s) hardware immediately after its initial release.
As a columnist, I ought to personify the conventional wisdom that distance is dead: All I need to get my work done is a place to perch and a Wi-Fi signal. But if that’s true, why do I still live in London, the second-most expensive city in the world? If distance really didn’t matter, rents [...]
Whenever I talk or write about my own security setup, the one thing that surprises people–and attracts the most criticism–is the fact that I run an open wireless network at home. There’s no password. There’s no encryption. Anyone with wireless capability who can see my network can use it to access the Internet. To me, it’s basic politeness. Providing Internet access to guests is kind of like providing heat and electricity, or a hot cup of tea. But to some observers, it’s both wrong and dangerous.
Apple’s new iPhone may well be a revolutionary product in some ways. But after testing one of the devices that went on sale late last month, I’m steering clear, at least for now, of the most shamelessly overhyped consumer product since Windows 95. For all its admirable features–the large screen, gorgeous industrial design and advanced user interface in particular–the iPhone feels like a beta product.
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