Faster Forward: June 27, 2010 - July 3, 2010
New Kindle software, hardware expand Amazon's e-book system, blur its identity
Over the last few days, Amazon has shipped three major updates to its Kindle electronic-book system that expand its capabilities but also confuse its identity. Its first move came last Sunday, when it announced a multimedia upgrade to the free Kindle application for Apple's iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad that...
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Rob Pegoraro
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July 2, 2010; 4:05 PM ET |
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Apple blames iPhone 4 reception issue on 'totally wrong' software
All you southpaw iPhone 4 users can relax: Apple says it's figured out why its new smartphone seems to lose reception when held left-handed, and it's not a hardware problem. A note titled "Letter from Apple Regarding iPhone 4" explains that Apple's engineers realized their software didn't correctly display the...
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Rob Pegoraro
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July 2, 2010; 10:18 AM ET |
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Don't read too much into Steve Jobs' e-mails (updated)
Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs has allegedly answered yet another customer's e-mail with a terse reply, and this time the bespectacled corporate founder supposedly ended the exchange with some pithy advice on life itself: Retire, relax, enjoy your family. It is just a phone. Not worth it. The subject of...
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Rob Pegoraro
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July 1, 2010; 5:28 PM ET |
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Digital culture
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Microsoft's Kin smartphone: No, it kin't
Less than two months after they showed up in stores amid a burst of hype over their social-media capabilities, Microsoft's Kin smartphones have roamed into a dead zone. The company is scrapping the entire project, although Verizon Wireless will keep selling the Kin One and Kin Two models.
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Rob Pegoraro
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July 1, 2010; 11:02 AM ET |
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Nielsen study shows smartphone users' appetite for data
How big of a dent has your smartphone left in the Internet? A new Nielsen survey suggests that it's bigger than you'd think, especially compared with a year ago. Specifically, on average smartphone users used 298 megabytes of data a month in the first quarter of 2010, way up from...
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Rob Pegoraro
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June 30, 2010; 3:42 PM ET |
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Mobile
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Amazon crumples for an afternoon from 'technical problems'
Did you notice anything strange about Amazon yesterday? Like, say, an inability to browse or buy at a site that exists only for those purposes? It wasn't just you. The Web retailer's site had some sort of bad-hair day, or at least afternoon. The problems stretched from its home page,...
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Rob Pegoraro
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June 30, 2010; 11:12 AM ET |
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Shopping
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No, not another 'Verizon iPhone' story!
"When will Verizon get the iPhone?" has become the "are we there yet?" of tech journalists: a question we got tired of long ago but which continues to be asked.
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Rob Pegoraro
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June 29, 2010; 5:14 PM ET |
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Mobile
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Hulu adds 'Hulu Plus' premium service for smartphones and other gadgets
You can now use Hulu to catch up on your TV viewing on an iPad or iPhone -- but it will cost you, and you'll have to wait to tune in. The popular TV-show site announced a new $9.99/month Hulu Plus service today that will offer access to more shows...
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Rob Pegoraro
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June 29, 2010; 3:16 PM ET |
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Google to defy China's censors a little less
Google is backing down, but only a little, in its standoff with the government of the People's Republic of China. Three months after it began redirecting traffic from its censored, China-based google.cn site to a less-regulated site based in Hong Kong, google.hk, Google said Monday night that it would stop sending Chinese users to the Hong Kong page automatically.
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Rob Pegoraro
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June 29, 2010; 10:40 AM ET |
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Policy and politics
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Search
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PostPoints tip: Blogs I like: Google Operating System
Keeping up with Google's been up to do can be a full-time job (unfortunately for my sleep schedule, so is following Apple, Microsoft and Facebook, among other tech companies). So I often have to rely on more specialized sources that focus exclusively on one of these companies. In Google's case,...
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Rob Pegoraro
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June 29, 2010; 9:35 AM ET |
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Tips
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Supreme Court 'Bilski' ruling doesn't rule out software, business-method patents
The Supreme Court had an easy call to make in a patent-law case and took the easy way out -- leaving problems with software and business-method patents for another court or Congress to solve.
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Rob Pegoraro
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June 28, 2010; 5:28 PM ET |
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Policy and politics
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Messy math about Microsoft and the iPhone 4
The technology industry runs on numbers: millions of bits per second in bandwidth, processor clock speeds by the gigahertz, millions of pixels of camera resolution, etc. So what could be a fairer way to evaluate a company's success than yet another set of stats? Well, that depends on the rest...
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Rob Pegoraro
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June 28, 2010; 11:32 AM ET |
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Mobile
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Windows
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