Practical Technology

Yes, Android has a forking problem. Google forked its mobile, open-source operating system into two versions: Android 2.x for smartphones and Android 3.x for tablets earlier this year. It also doesn’t help Android any that there are so many different supported versions out in the market. But, what Amazon and Baidu are doing with their [...]

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I wish Amazon would stop being coy about its plans for an Android Linux-based Kindle tablet and just announce it already. While Amazon still won’t tell me that they’re building one, the Wall Street Journal is reporting that Amazon is planning releasing an iPad Rival. OK, enough is enough. While I don’t have any hard [...]

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Recently one of my readers asked me how I felt about my prediction a year ago that dedicated e-readers were doomed to decline. This was before the Pew Internet & American Life Project reported that “The percent of U.S. adults with an e-book reader doubled from 6% to 12% between November 2010 and May 2011,” [...]

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Who couldn’t love the idea of the new Amazon Cloud Drive? You get at least 5GBs of free cloud-based storage, and its trivial to get 20GBs of free storage on Amazon Cloud Drive. Used in concert with the Amazon Cloud Player you get a fine cloud-based music player that can be used either from a [...]

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Color me surprised. I knew that Linux, while still only a niche player on the desktop, was continuing to do well on the server and was doing even better than ever on the cloud. What I hadn’t realized was just how much better Linux, and in particular, Canonical’s Ubuntu, was doing on in the market [...]

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