Before Going to Buy High-Tech Devices, Learn the New Terms
Walt Mossberg offers a quick glossary of techno terms shoppers may encounter when looking for a computer, television, digital camera or cellphone this holiday season. (Video)
Personal Technology Columns Tagged ‘digital’
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Ford, Microsoft Create Car System That Lets You Ask for a Song
The SYNC system from Ford and Microsoft is a big step forward in integrating cellphones and portable music players into cars, says Walt Mossberg.
Slacker Digital Player Handles the Drudgery for Busy Music Fans
A new digital music player called the Slacker plays music that is absolutely free, contained in preprogrammed Internet radio stations instead of individually selected songs and albums. But the device has some glitches.
Some Handy Scanners Can Trim That Pile of Business Cards
Two new business-card scanners make it easier than ever to organize those cards piled high on our desks, but their software isn’t as easy to work with when manipulating the scanned images.
Asus Offers Travelers Small, Mobile Eee PC, but It’s Too Cramped
A tiny new computer called the Eee PC is better than competing products in certain respects, such as text entry and price. But it still has too many compromises to pry most travelers away from their larger laptops.
Multitouch Interface Is Starting to Spread Among New Devices
“Multitouch,” the iPhone-style interface that lets users manipulate lists or objects without a mouse or keyboard, is catching on. Rival companies are scrambling to add multitouch features to laptops and other digital gadgets.
Solid-State Drives Challenge Hard Drives in Speed, but Not Value
The hard drive is being challenged by the solid-state drive for its role as the principal storage device in computers, but current SSDs offer much lower capacity and have much higher prices.
Apple Daydreaming: Report Predicts Move Toward Home Devices
Forrester Research imagines the Apple products of 2013 in a new report. Their conclusion: While much of Apple’s great successes have been mobile products, the company will seek to colonize rooms throughout the home.
Guest columnist Nick Wingfield is filling in this week for Walt Mossberg, who returns June 5.
Internet-a-Gogo: Airlines to Offer In-Flight Access
This summer, Wi-Fi access will arrive in the passenger cabins of some commercial U.S. airliners with a new system called Gogo. For travelers who want to stay connected in the air, Gogo does the job, but it has its limitations.
Friends and Family Have a New Way to Just Drop In
By Nick Wingfield
Digital-picture frames have started to take off as a way for people to show off their stashes of digital photos in rotating slide shows. A growing number of frames even connect to wireless home networks so they can easily be refreshed with photos stored online and on PCs.
The Littlest iPod Packs In Songs and Finds Its Voice
Walt reviews the first talking music player in the impossibly small iPod Shuffle. Push a button and it will tell you, in a computerized voice, the title and artist of whatever song you’re hearing. Keep holding that button and it will recite a roll call of all your playlists, allowing you to select among them. In Walt’s tests, this worked as advertised.
Verizon Now Sells Subsidized Netbook With Cell Service
Verizon’s H-P Mini netbook is an adequate light-duty computer for a low price, but the charge for Internet service is high if used as a main online connection.
Sharing Where You Are When You Care to Share
By Nick Wingfield
Cellphone location-sharing service Glympse is simple, useful and a non-creepy way to share your whereabouts when you want someone to know.
Little Laptops With Linux Have Compatibility Issues
The companies behind Linux netbooks have made great strides in improving user interfaces, but until they can achieve similar breakthroughs in how the machines work with other devices, Windows netbooks are still a better deal.
New iPhone Is Better Model–Or Just Get OS 3.0
Apple’s new iPhone 3G S and OS 3.0 offer plenty of new features. But the software may be enough of a boost to keep many users from buying the new model, Walt Mossberg writes.
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