Samsung Galaxy Note

Samsung Galaxy Note Gets My Attention

Some of you may have seen my Tweet shortly after 1pm today:  it simply said, “Gone Android.”  Cryptic, yes.  Plausible, hardly.  True, absolutely.  It all began this morning when a coworker showed up at the office sporting a Samsung Galaxy Note.  No, actually it began a couple of weeks ago as I was drooling over the announcement of the upcoming Samsung Galaxy S III, but it got worse this morning when I laid eyes on the Galaxy Note.  While working within the confines of Apple’s 3.5″ display for several years, I’d curiously observed the procession of larger, thinner, sleeker looking Android phones unveiled by their various makers.  Now, here was my friend from work with the largest Android phone of them all — something more like a small, razor thin tablet than a really big smart phone — and it was all over for me.

Apple:  Size Does Matter

One month ago I posted my iPhone Ultimatum rant during a particularly bad week for iPhone 5 rumors.  No one ever really knows what Apple will come up with until an official announcement is made, but previous speculation that the next iPhone might have a 4.3″ display were all but crushed that week.  In the meantime, Android and even Windows Phone devices were exceeding 4.5″ in display size.  Siri and I had been on the outs for a while, so there was little left in the most recent iPhone to hold my attention.  This is when I first noticed I was infatuated with Google’s Android OS and several of the recent phones powered by it.  And as much as I like to think I’m above such petty things, the screen sizes were what really got me interested.  Flash forward to today:  I’m not sure exactly what pushed me over the edge, but I spent my lunch hour at Best Buy upgrading a qualifying line on my AT&T family plan, and now I have my very own Samsung Galaxy Note.  I hope whatever denizens may lurk in the underworld have warm coats to wear, because it just froze over.

The Android Option

True, the ability to customize the overall user experience was also a strong selling point;  Apple has gone to great lengths cultivating the perfect gated community of apps, but the allure of the Android side of life lies in the adventure to be had walking off the beaten path.  After spending only a day with the Galaxy Note, I’ve learned two things:  1)  there really isn’t much difference in iOS and Android — they are both superb mobile operating systems, and to favor one over the other is really a matter of personal taste and one’s needs, and 2)  I’m not drifting uncomfortably far from my very Apple-centric world by adopting this new pet, since I still have my iPad and Macbook Pro — with no plans to abandon either.  This is just a good option for me right now.  I’m enjoying it immensely.

Review Coming Soon

In a few days, after I’ve had the chance to put the Galaxy Note through the paces and make a fair comparison (I’m not committed yet, as I have 30 days to decide whether this is a good fit for me,) I’ll give a point by point review.  Have any of you had experience with the Samsung Galaxy Note, or switching from iOS to Android? Let me hear from you.  Comments are welcomed.

iPad 2, Apple Wireless Keyboard, Incase Origami Workstation

This morning I logged into my Amazon app to track the package containing my Macbook Pro’s soon to be new internal hard drive, and the 1tb portable external drive I’ve ordered for running regular Time Machine backups.  I was greeted with the cherished words, “Out for delivery,” and became giddy with geek girl excitement.  This means a couple of significant things for me and my Macbook Pro:  a) tomorrow I can finally have my internal battery replaced, and the new hard drive installed, and b) I will soon be without my laptop for at least a little while.  The Apple Authorized Service Provider I’m working with let me know the operation wouldn’t take too long, and I could probably just wait there and take my laptop home with me the same day — but I’ve learned from experience that the best laid plans often go awry when we readily count on things to go according to them.  So, I’ve prepared for the potential temporary loss of my trusty Macbook Pro by making sure I know how to use my iPad 2 to carry on pretty much as usual in its absence.  Here’s what you can expect when trying to use your iPad as a laptop if you ever find yourself in a pinch.

Keyboard

The iPad’s virtual keyboard is in the top of its class.  No rational human being will argue that fact.  Similarly, no rational person can reasonably deny that the virtual keyboard has its shortcomings for anyone who needs to do some serious writing, like this article for example.  That’s because the iPad’s digitizer has advanced multitouch technology.  If you touch the screen’s virtual keyboard in more than one place at a time, it can’t tell which letter you really meant to touch, which leads to a lot of mistakes.  I’m blazing fast on a regular keyboard, but that’s because the tactile experience of touching and pressing the keys has become second nature to me.  Not so with the iPad virtual keyboard.  Thankfully, there are several great hardware options available today:  iPad cases with small tactile bluetooth keyboards built in work well for some people.  I’ve tried a few of them, and they’re really not bad, except they all tend to have proprietary key layouts due to the size constraints imposed by keeping the iPad case form factor in their designs.  I like a more robust, full sized keyboard.  For me, that meant picking up the Incase Origami Workstation into which a full sized Apple bluetooth keyboard can be snapped, and the back folded into a shape that will support the iPad in landscape or portrait mode.  You have to have an Apple keyboard of course, so I ordered one of those, too.  It wasn’t a terribly costly expense, but was more than it would have cost to buy one of those cramped little built into the case solutions I wanted to avoid. For me, it was well worth the expense, and I can now type just as fast as I do on the iMac or Macbook Pro.

Trackpad

Unfortunately, there is no way to get around the trackpad problem:  the Apple Magic Trackpad doesn’t work with the iPad.  Further, the Apple Wireless keyboard’s shortcuts don’t fully work with iPad, so getting that cursor where it needs to be means reaching out and touching your iPad’s screen.  This does break the rhythm somewhat and slow down typing when you are dealing with forms and other documents that require a lot of jumping around.  The only good thing I can honestly say about this is that it does serve to remind you you’re dealing with an iPad, rather than the touchless display of a laptop.  Besides, isn’t touch what the iPad is all about?  Being without a trackpad feels foreign at first, but eventually you do adapt to switching between typing and touch.  It gets faster.  It’s not as good as a trackpad by any means, but still functional.

Documents

Working with documents created and stored on your iPad is easy, but what about documents that are stored elsewhere?  How will you get them to the Cloud or some other destination?  How do you use your iPad for day to day business?  To write more about this would be redundant of me, given that Apple has a complete guide available on its website.  (Click here for iPad at Work and learn about all the options.)

Have you, or do you, use your iPad as a laptop?  Please leave comments.  We’d love to hear from you.

15" Macbook Pro 5,4

Today at The Apple and Paw, yours truly is tidying things up on her mid-2009 Macbook Pro 5,4 unibody and getting it ready for an early week trip to Mac Tutor and Service for a built in battery replacement.  While my Macbook Pro is in the shop, I’m also going to upgrade my hard drive from the stock 250gb 5400 rpm Fujitsu to a 750gb Hitachi Travelstar SATA II at 7200 rpm.  Things should be roomy after that.  A couple of months ago I upgraded the RAM myself to the full 8gb, so along with the new hard drive and fresh battery upgrade, my Macbook Pro will be humming along nicely for another two or three (or possibly many more) years.  It will be nice not to become immersed in all the drama of the upcoming revision to the Macbook Pro line — expected literally any day now.  While lots of people are justifiably chomping at the bit to ditch their current Macbook Pros for whatever Apple is about to announce, there are also plenty of us with a perfectly good, if older, model.  We’re just as happy to invest a few hundred dollars in our current machines, max them out and keep them with us a while longer.  Here’s some advice for you if you’re on the fence.

Upgrade Your Macbook Pro

The Macbook Pro is always the top of the line Apple laptop.  It’s also the most expensive, especially if you have it built to order with a lot of extras.  Many people, like me, just order the stock model with the intention of making gradual upgrades as they go.  Here are some simple upgrades you can make yourself that will add a few more years of value to your Macbook Pro:

Upgrade Your Hard Drive

When deciding whether to go with a larger HDD or a solid state drive, set your priorities early:  do you want a faster overall system, or more disk space?  SSDs are more expensive and have less space, but they’re awfully fast.  The largest capacity SSD I’ve been able to find as of the time of this writing is 480gb — for nearly $700 USD.  That’s a lot of cash.  My 750gb HDD only set me back $142.  For me, the storage space is my main priority.  For you, it might be overall system speed.  If both are of equal importance to you, there’s the hybrid drive option that delivers speed and room by letting you add a second hard drive to your optical drive bay. (See this kit from OWC.)

Upgrade Your RAM

A memory upgrade becomes less expensive for most laptops with each passing year, and can add a lot of power to your system for cheap.  Earlier this year I swapped out my two 2gb memory cards for a pair of 4gb — all for under $35 with some coupons from Best Buy.  There are probably even better deals out there now.  Because most laptops built in recent years come with more than enough memory, upgrading RAM isn’t going to result in any epic performance increases for most people — but coupled with a faster hard drive, maxed out RAM does provide a noteworthy boost.  It’s definitely worth doing.

Maintain Your Battery and MagSafe Adaptor

Keeping your battery in good health is important to maintaining the life of your Macbook Pro.  My particular model 5,4 is one of the only 15″ Macbook Pros with the “built in” battery that isn’t easy to upgrade at home, but most people can order higher capacity replacement batteries and DIY the project when needed.  It’s also good of your batteries to be recharged with the proper MagSafe adaptor  – either the 60 watt or 85 watt variety sold by Apple or an authorized reseller.  While battery maintenance and a careful eye on the power adaptor don’t exactly qualify as upgrades, they certainly fall under preventative medicine.

Hopefully this article has given you some valuable tips as to how to get the mileage from your Macbook Pro.  I’m glad I decided to upgrade my existing laptop this time rather than buying a whole new one.  This will give me a chance to focus on the one Apple device I do plan to buy just as soon as it’s available:  the iPhone 5.

Google Cracks Down, Again

Two weeks ago when Matt Cutts let the cat out of the bag about Google’s plan to crack down on over optimized web sites, SEO teams from all over the world found themselves scrambling to conduct fresh site audits and backlink profiles in anticipation of upcoming changes. Over optimization has become the latest buzz word in search engine optimization, but no one is 100% sure how to go about checking their sites for signs of over optimization that Google may be most likely to notice and penalize them for. Today we’ll be discussing the kinds of optimization that will throw up a red flag to Google, drawing their unwanted attention, and possibly penalties, to your SERPs.

Three Things to Look At

The inbound anchor text, title tag, and URL have always been important in terms of getting a site optimized for Google ranking: the more tightly these are bound together in a corresponding way, the better it looks to Google, right? Not so fast. These three things perfectly honed and aligned in a consistent way on a site every time without fail are something Google will begin to see as a sign of artificial optimization. The deliberate targeted matching of anchor text to links and the ratio of keywords appearing on a page are important: too little of this will get you promptly ignored by the search engines, but too much will get you blacklisted. Some SEO companies will claim to have a magical formula for balancing these factors in content. Don’t fall for it. And all those SEO WordPress plugins you’ve been using to get a certain number of keywords with an exact length for your titles and other fancy optimization tricks? They could be hurting you now. It’s time to reappraise those tools and make some tweaks.

This article was originally published at Technorati.

Read the rest here: http://technorati.com/technology/article/google-over-optimized-site-crackdown-is/#ixzz1tFCXdSfB

Tiny iPhone Size

There.  I said it.  Maybe that makes me fickle.  Maybe I’m not as loyal as all the other Apple fanboys and fangirls who swear the 3.5″ iPhone display is the magical size of perfection because Apple would not be making it if it were not so.  But I don’t think that’s true.  I’m just as devoted as anyone else.  My personal array of hardware includes a 2009 15″ Macbook Pro with 8 gb of RAM, an iPhone 4S, and an iPad 2.  The home computer in the family room is a 21″ iMac (late 2010.)  I’ve had the pleasure of owning every iPhone to date, with the exception of the original iPhone.  I just wasn’t able to grasp how great an invention it was early on.  So why is it that now, when I see all the shiny new gigantic smart phones with deliciously roomy displays and exotic gestures and strange operating systems, that I suddenly find myself thinking different?

The Android Option

Samsung Galaxy Note with Large Display

Android, for me, has never before seemed like an option. I can’t get used to the operating system — but I have seen several gorgeous phones lately that could persuade me. I’ve played with several Android devices — all with different versions of Google’s mobile OS — while it’s difficult to navigate the loosely organized Android Marketplace I don’t see this as an impediment.  I’m smart and I could learn to get around.  The endless possibilities for UI customization are tempting, even though the OS is pretty scattered at the moment.  I believe that a day is coming when handsets and tablets and developers will all be able to design for a unified and updatable Android OS, and things might be different then.  At the moment, however, I’m not comfortable enough to break out of the update in place system I’ve grown accustomed to.  I will say that the Samsung Galaxy Note has lured me powerfully.

Windows Phone?

The Nokia Lumia 900

I never thought I’d be saying something like this, but today, after a week of resisting the temptation to drop by the AT&T store for a look at the Nokia Lumia 900, I finally caved.  My work buddy Thomas and I had just picked up lunch and were heading back to the office, and we both were curious, so we stopped in.  I went straight for the Cyan, and he, for the black.  The associate helping us was carrying the cyan Lumia 900, wearing a shirt exactly the same shade, and even had her nail polish matching.  Breathless, I picked up the Lumia display model and FELT it.  So much thinner than any iPhone I have ever had, and yet so sturdy without all that glass, I was captivated.  The grippiness combined with the unique form factor just felt good.  The usability of the live tiles was impressive: every swipe was flawless, and each attempt to access something was astonishingly snappy.  The only thing we had trouble with, oddly, was connecting to AT&T’s HDSP+ network, right from inside the AT&T store.  Since there is no LTE coverage in the area, 3G HDSP+ is our fastest data connection off wifi.  Unfortunately, a software issue that has plagued the Lumia 900 since it went on sale was the likely culprit in our failure to connect (however, that issue is also the reason the phone, originally priced at $99 with a new or extended 2-year contract, is now free — and all it takes to fix it is a software update.)

Oh, the temptation.  But for now, I’m holding out, hoping that Apple comes through with a sleek, thin new iPhone with a spacious screen, and maybe even new ways to trick out the GUI without having to jailbreak.  Apple:  your’re on notice.  You have five months, and I’m done. Get me that big screen!

Nonetheless, this fake iPhone phenomenon has captured my attention.  Apparently, the most popular fake iPhone is willingly purchased for what it is by plenty of people.  More readily known as the Airphone, this wannabe iPhone 4 looks remarkably similar to the real thing.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t work like the real thing, which should come as no surprise at all.  The so called “5 megapixel camera” reminds me of the old attachment I got for my Gameboy back in the mid 1990s — minus the image quality.  Yes, it’s really that bad.  And the “capacitive touch screen” is actually a cheap, plastic resistive touch screen.

Anyway, I thought I’d share this video I found during my exploration on YouTube.  Just for laughs.  Or a good cry.