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Hewlett-Packard is rolling out a new TouchSmart, a desktop computer with touch-controlled software. The hardware and software are better. It’s attractive, more versatile and fun to use. But the latest effort still has some problems.
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.
Apple’s new Time Capsule packs both a giant hard disk and a speedy Wi-Fi wireless router into one slender case, allowing computers to easily back up their hard drives wirelessly.
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’s MacBook Air is a beautiful, amazingly thin computer, but one whose unusual trade-offs may turn off some frequent travelers. It’s impossible to convey in words just how pleasing and surprising this computer feels in the hand. But there’s a price for this laptop’s daring design: Apple had to give up some features road warriors consider standard in a subnotebook, and certain of these omissions are radical.
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.
Verizon’s new Voyager looks remarkably like the iPhone and even beats Apple’s product in certain respects. But Walt Mossberg says the Voyager suffers badly in the area where Apple’s phone shines: software.
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.
The iPod Touch is an elegant and capable music player, but this cousin of the iPhone is short on battery life and lacks some important software features, writes Walt Mossberg. (Video)
Walt Mossberg tries out two new smart phones ahead of the iPhone’s highly anticipated release. One is the latest attempt by BlackBerry’s maker to appeal to consumers. The other is a high-resolution camera phone by Nokia. (Video)
Walt provides some tips for making laptop purchases. First, you may want to wait to get that new laptop until later this year or early in 2008. There are a number of interesting new hardware features coming.(Video)
Edited by Walt and written by Katie Boehret, this is a guide to gadgets, web services and other consumer technologies.
Ethics Statement
Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.
