Thord D. Hedengren

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Tag: tablets

  • Cheap Android tablets aren't secure at all

    Bluebox tested sub-$99 Android tablets, and – shocker! – found them to be security nightmares.

    Bluebox Labs purchased over a dozen of these Black Friday “bargain” Android tablets from big name retailers like Best Buy, Walmart, Target, Kmart, Kohl’s and Staples, and reviewed each of them for security. What we found was shocking: most of the devices ship with vulnerabilities and security misconfigurations; a few even include security backdoors. What seemed like great bargains turned out to be big security concerns. Unfortunately, unsuspecting consumers who purchase and use these devices will be putting their mobile data & passwords at risk.

  • Nokia N1

    Nokia, who sold their device business to Microsoft, has announced a new device. The Nokia N1 is an Android 5.0 tablet that’s trying to channel the iPad mini. It’s almost ridiculously close to Apple’s device, and so is the imagery on the product website. On the flipside, this also means that the N1 might be the best looking Android tablet thus far.

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  • Google and Microsoft just made the iPad a better choice

    Vlad Savov, writing for The Verge, argues that the disappointing Nexus 9 and Microsoft making Office free for iOS has made the iPad an even better choice today than it was a few days ago. It’s both true and silly, if you ask me, but the piece makes a valid point. I especially enjoyed this paragraph:

    The iPad still doesn’t have a clearly defined reason for its existence. Apple never bothered to give it one, focusing instead on the engineering and trusting that users will figure out ways to adapt it to their lives. As Apple design chief Jony Ive puts it, “I don’t have to change myself to fit the product; it fits me.” Time has proven this philosophy correct, as the iPad has risen above its physical limitations and secured itself a niche in hundreds of millions of homes.

  • Then And Now

    Bill Gates thinks that iPad and Android tablet owners are frustrated. It’s primarily the lack of keyboard and Microsoft Office that’re to blame, the Microsoft chairman thinks. And thus there’s a bright future for the Surface line, because that’s essentially a laptop with tablet form factor, and that’s what consumers really want.

    Bill Gates obviously lives in an alternate reality, in which Windows 8 is a success and people really just want to use Windows with their greasy fingers.

    I’m afraid that’s not the case in the real world. The reboot of Windows 8 should be evidence enough of that.

    Surface Pro, pretty in pink
    The Microsoft Surface Pro, pretty in pink

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  • The Magazine And What Marco Arment Got Wrong

    Marco Arment, of Instapaper, and more recently The Magazine, fame has written a post on the future of publishing. He says that several parties have contacted him about licensing The Magazine’s platform, a business he is reluctant to be in. He also says this:

    The last thing I’d want is for a bunch of The Magazine lookalikes to flood the App Store with mediocre articles that haven’t passed through an editor and should just be (or already are) someone’s mediocre blog posts, just so they can easily charge for a subscription.

    Well, too bad. Success will be copied, and The Magazine is not only successful, it is successful within a niche where people are starving for a solution, any solution really. I’ve already explained why that is, so let’s all take a moment to remember, shall we?

    Marco Arment then says this:

    If the App Store gets spammed with hundreds of bad clones, The Magazine itself will lose credibility and potential subscribers as people make incorrect assumptions about its article quality.

    I disagree. With that reasoning there could not be any blogs with credibility, since there are so many “bad clones” out there. Still there is, and still there is quality writing, bloggers with fanbases large enough to launch niche tablet magazines even…

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  • The Daily And Tablet Magazines

    Rupert Murdoch shuttered The Daily yesterday, the iPad only newspaper with a staff of a 100 or something like that. Quite an operation, quite a project, and quite a project propelled by the dreams of an old media publisher and their hopes of doing the same old thing on a new media format such as an iPad. No wonder it failed, right?

    The iPad magazine business, if we can call it that, is in an interesting spot right now. To understand this, it is important to remember where it all started, with bloated versions of paper magazines, more or less behaving like an interactive PDF really. Not only did the format, with its “tap to view video” and similar, not engage readers as much as magazine makers might’ve thought, it also meant huge file sizes for every issue. The weight issue has been handled somewhat, but magazines clock in at over 150 MB more often than not.

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  • Talk is cheap, especially on Twitter when the subject is complicated

    I love Twitter, 140 characters truly brings you down to the essence of whatever you want to say. Sometimes it gets a bit rich though, like this statement from Gustav von Sydow (@vonsydow) about tablet magazines:

    Compared to what it could and should be, tablet magazines must be one of the least well executed media experiences of all time.

    To be fair, Gustav von Sydow isn’t the only one expressing this point of view about tablet mags, and at a glance you’ll probably nod your head and agree.

    The problem is that you are probably wrong and you just haven’t realized it yet.

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