While I don’t always agree with the way Apple conducts business, there are alot of things the Windows PC industry can learn from them. I often help people pick a new PC, and there are things I bump into every time that make the process of picking, buying and setting up a new PC unnecessarily cumbersome. Here are five things I think HP, Acer, Asus and all the others could learn from the way Apple does things.
More Five things the PC industry can learn from Apple

Today was one of those days where Steve Jobs gets on a stage and unleashes new Apple products. Being the gadget freak that I am, I usually follow the new announcements through tech blogs or Twitter. Years ago, I used to marvel at some of the stuff they’d put out. But the last couple of years, nights like this leave me with a very uneasy feeling. The hair in the back of my neck are on end. My moral compass tells me something’s wrong. I get that feeling I get when I see someone treated unfairly. Apple has been slowly but steadily turning into an evil company. And people are being misled.
More Apple is now evil, and here’s why!

A couple of days ago, I had an interesting dicussion on Twitter with Dutch media guru @erwblo. He noticed a trend at SxSW, where all exciting new developments seemed to be centered around apps. I tried to argue that apps are “evil”, but found that I needed a lot more than 140 characters to explain myself. Hence this post.

Right now, there’s a war raging. Apple, Google, RIM, Microsoft and others are caught up in a bitter fight over supremacy on the mobile internet. And the stakes are high. The web is about to go mobile. Smartphone sales are up, and dumbphones are getting smarter. Tablets are replacing part of the laptop market, and will soon represent a big slice of overall internet consumption.
More A dystopian future of the mobile internet

Over the last couple of days, rumours that Nokia would adopt Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 platform started gaining momentum. I wasn’t suprised when they turned out to be true today. The leaked internal memo by Stephen Elop had made it very clear that drastic measures were in order, and this seemed like the most likely scenario.

Ever since the news was announced, I’ve been reading bitter tweets and blog posts in which Nokia developers and fans detail why they think this deal is a bad move for Nokia. But as understandable as their frustrations are, almost all of those messages are based on a single assumption. That Nokia would be able to maintain market share in the smartphone market with Symbian and/or MeeGo.
More My thoughts on the Nokia Microsoft deal

Influential dutch technology website Webwereld recently posted an opinion piece in which the author outlines the VLC/Apple App Store situation. As you may know, a video player based on VLC popped up in Apple’s iOS app store a while ago, only to be removed a little while later. Unfortunately, the author of the the article, Job Spijker, had the whole thing backwards. He argued that people involved in open source software should “get with the program” and jump on the App Store bandwagon. Thankfully, this can never happen.
More Why VLC will never be in the iOS App Store

I’ve been a tablet-fan since the now-infamous CrunchPad was announced, long before the iPad. As much as I love my iPod Touch, it’s small screen makes it less than ideal for casual surfing on the couch. In my opinion, five or seven inch tablets make little sense if portability is not a requirement, so I’ve been keeping an eye out for nine or ten inch tablets, preferably with Android.

Let me be very clear about this. I think the iPad is a very well-designed and made product. If anyone but Apple had made it I’d already have one. But I don’t want to be tied to iTunes, and I certainly don’t want the manufacturer controlling what I can and can’t do with it. That’s why I’m glad that a couple of interesting competitors were just revealed at CES.
More Promising new tablets!

Even before Apple’s iPad came out, there was talk of “a tsunami of cheap, Chinese Adroid tablets”. I don’t know about you, but I have yet to actually see one in real life. Or even in stores. The only real reviews I’ve seen are of Samsung’s ludicrously expensive Galaxy Tab, which with it’s small screen I’m not at all interested in. Meanwhile, Google has announced that it considered Froyo (Android 2.2) “not ready” for tablet use. All this makes me wonder. Has anyone out there actually used an Android tablet? What’s it like? How does it compare to Apple’s offering?

If you’ve got a tablet that uses Google’s OS, and would like to do a guest post/review type of thing, please contact me.

When Intel first introduced their Atom line of processors, they told us it was aimed at smaller, so-called MIDs (Mobile Internet Devices). Soon after that, Asus released the first netbook, and a new category of computers was born. But they weren’t really MIDs. In fact, the term MID hasn’t really caught on, and there are very few devices that are generally considered to be MIDs. Nokia’s internet tablet series for and Sony’s Mylo come to mind. But both predate the Atom processor.

Atom’s major advantage over other small, power-sipping CPUs is that it uses the same x86 instruction set as desktop CPUs. This means that Atom-based devices, if powerful enough, can run Windows. Intel probably thought this would be essential for MID adoption. But then Apple released what would prove to be a game-changing device.
More The end of the Atomic Age?

I’ve been following the development of Google’s Chrome OS for a while now, and have played around with some of the early builds that have been floating around online. It’s well on its way to becoming a stable and usable operating system, but I’ve been getting the feeling recently that it may have been been surpassed by that other Google OS, Android. Especially since Android comes with a very good browser.
More Does Chrome OS still make sense?

There’s been a lot of controversy over Apple’s decision to ban Flash (and Java for that matter) from the iPhone since the day it was released. Now, with the iPad about to hit retail, there’s been more debate on whether this was a technical decision or not, and whether it’s a severe limitation for the devices, or a blessing. Being both a Flash developer, an iPhone OS user an open source advocate, I thought I’d weigh in on the conversation.

Before I get started though, let me point out that I’m not a fan of Flash. I think it’s a real shame that there’s no open, official standard that lets web designers do the things Flash can. Adobe has the web in an awkward stranglehold right now, and I’d love to see that change. But the reality is that Flash is an integral part of the web today.
More My thoughts on Flash and the iPad