Posts by Adam Z. Lein
Adam has had interests in combining technology with art since his first use of a Koala pad on an Apple computer. He currently has a day job as a graphic designer, photographer, systems administrator and web developer at a small design firm in Westchester, NY. His love of technology extends to software development companies who have often implemented his ideas for usability and feature enhancements. Mobile computing has become a necessity for Adam since his first Uniden UniPro PC100 in 1998. He has been reviewing and writing about smartphones for Pocketnow.com since they first appeared on the market in 2002.
-
by Adam Z. Lein | February 13, 2013 11:34 AMI know a lot of you out there are interested in seeing some real world performance tests with the Surface Pro, so in this video were going to show you just how fast this tablet is at things like rendering HD videos in Premiere Pro, Applying Photoshop Filters, opening RAW images, HTML5 Rendering, and some "League of Legends" game play. Booting up the device from a completely turned off state is extremely fast. If you're not going to use the Surface Pro for a while, shutting it down is not a problem since you can be back up and running within about 6 seconds. The web browser is also ...
-
by Adam Z. Lein | February 12, 2013 12:10 PMOne of the innovative features of the Surface Pro is the way you can magnetically attach the stylus to the edge of the tablet for safe keeping. It takes up a lot less room than a dedicated stylus silo would and it's pretty easy to just pull the stylus off the edge when needed. Unfortunately, the spot where the stylus attaches is also the magnetic charging port where you need to connect the cable in order to recharge the Surface Pro's battery. So what do you do with the stylus while the Surface Pro is charging? Another nice feature, which is not true of most other tablet styli, is the ...
-
by Adam Z. Lein | February 11, 2013 2:54 PMOne of the first things I did after I bought a new Microsoft Surface Pro was to install the Adobe Creative Suite that I often use in other projects. I was very excited to test out the 1024 levels of pressure sensitivity in Photoshop. Unfortunately it turned out that Microsoft did not implement the standard Wintab API's used by most high-end graphics applications to interpret pressure sensitivity from a stylus. The Surface Pro does use Wacom hardware which is what the Wintab API's were originally designed for. We know this because other Wacom styli do function with the Surface Pro. ...
-
by Adam Z. Lein | February 11, 2013 8:49 AMOver the weekend, Microsoft released their new Surface Pro tablet with Windows 8 Professional. Sometimes companies launch new products during the week and people complain that they can't get to the store that day because they have to work. Microsoft released the Surface Pro on a Saturday morning, which you would think would be a great day for people to go shopping. Unfortunately in the New York and Northeastern U.S. area, a huge blizzard hit. So what was supposed to be an early 8 AM opening of the Microsoft Store for sales of the Surface Pro turned into about 20 people waiting in a mall ...
-
by Adam Z. Lein | February 11, 2013 7:00 AMBack when the original iPad came out, all of the tech reviewers constantly harped on about how difficult it was to use on your lap. (Or did they?) Sure the optional cover could flip around to the back and allow you to stand the iPad up on a table, but that didn't work well at all on your lap. It kept falling over when touching the screen, and there wasn't even a keyboard attachment available at that time. Today, history is repeating itself, and again all of the tech reviewers of the world are hung up with how difficult it is to use the Microsoft Surface on your lap. Luckily Apple was ...
-
by Adam Z. Lein | February 4, 2013 9:30 AMWindows Phone 7.8 has been released and most of us with first and second generation Windows Phone 7 devices are able to upgrade. If you didn't receive the upgrade automatically, there are ways to install it manually. Some have been waiting for this for a long time since it brings a few new features including the new start screen with resizable live tiles. Of course Windows Phone 8 has been available for a bit longer, and it offers many dozens more improvements over the 7.8 update for older devices, but it turns out there are a few areas where Windows Phone 7.8 is still a little ...
-
by Adam Z. Lein | January 30, 2013 4:41 PMSince Windows Phone 7.8 was released today for some devices, the folks at XDA-Developers have already capture the URLs for the CAB files that are downloaded via Zune. That means anybody can download them manually, and then use the "Cab Sender" utility to install them to any Windows Phone 7 device in the same way that your Zune desktop software would. Be sure to read the instructions in the first post of the thread to learn how to install the update correctly. You must send the proper CAB files to your phone in the proper order and it is very important that you include the correct ...
-
by Adam Z. Lein | January 30, 2013 3:59 PMYesterday the tech news world was up in arms about the news regarding how much free space would be available on the Surface Pro's 64Gb and 128Gb solid state drives upon first boot. Many articles suggested that the used disk space was "unusable", which of course is not true. The 64Gb model will have 23Gb of free space, and the 128Gb model will have 83Gb of free space. Yes it is kind of unfair that so much should be pre-loaded on the devices, but if you've ever used Windows you might know that there are ways to delete things that you don't want or need. Some have been able to get ...
-
by Adam Z. Lein | January 24, 2013 12:00 PMHave you ever wanted to use Google Voice while driving by using voice commands and speech recognition? With the new soon-to-be-released version of MetroTalk that's possible on Windows Phone 8! It was only a few weeks ago when we saw MetroTalk 3.0 add lock screen integration for Google Voice, and now MetroTalk version 3.1 adds voice commands and speech-to-text features that can be accessed from the centralized speech UI built into Windows Phone 8. In other words, this 3rd party Google Voice app can be used by pressing the Bluetooth voice dialing button on your Bluetooth headset. It ...
-
by Adam Z. Lein | January 24, 2013 7:00 AMJaime posted an article yesterday pointing out a few reasons why he is no longer excited about the Microsoft Surface Pro. I'm a different type of person though, and I was very excited to hear that the Surface Pro would be available on February 9th. Sure it's a couple weeks later than originally expected due to retailer refresh cycle scheduling, but I fully intend to line up to buy one that weekend. The reason I consider myself different from most of the other tech journalists out there is that this isn't my only job. I have other jobs that require other skills that make use of ...
-
by Adam Z. Lein | January 21, 2013 10:23 AMBack around the turn of the century, personal digital assistants (PDAs) were a popular secondary device that people would carry to help manage contacts, appointments, mobile web clippings, notes, and other mobile computing functions that you couldn't do with a mobile phone. PDA's had touch-sensitive screens that were much larger than the mobile phone screens of the time and gave you a nice area to get more work done. The power users of the time would often pair a Bluetooth capable mobile phone like the Sony Ericsson T68i with a powerful PDA like a Compaq iPAQ Pocket PC. The Bluetooth ...
-
by Adam Z. Lein | December 21, 2012 8:46 AMThis week Microsoft announced a new Windows Phone Photo Challenge for holiday themed photos taken with your Windows Phone. I've been taking a lot this month with my Windows Phone already, so we thought it would be fun to share some tips to help you get more interesting holiday photos. Use Fingerprint smears on the lens Usually, fingerprint grease on the lens makes for blurry or distorted images, but it's not always noticeable. When you take pictures of bright lights however, you can certainly get some interesting streaks out of those lights. So why not use some of that fingerprint ...
-
by Adam Z. Lein | December 19, 2012 10:15 AMI know what you're thinking… Are you kidding?! They've got tons of apps! Didn't you really mean to say that Windows Phone doesn't have enough apps? That is the general mantra among Windows Phone criticism, but when someone says that, they usually mean that Windows Phone doesn't have a handful of apps that they used on some other device and wasn't able to find on this new device. They didn't actually install hundreds of thousands of available apps to come to that conclusion. Regardless, really I was thinking more about tablets. Apple's iPad certainly has a lot of apps too, but ...
-
by Adam Z. Lein | December 18, 2012 8:31 AMThere's a lot of people out there hoping to see a Notifications Center come to Windows Phone 8 in order to make it exactly like Apple's iOS, Android, and every other smartphone operating system out there. There are rumors that Microsoft is actually working on this, it's just that they didn't have time to add it into the initial release of Windows Phone 8, but it will probably come in an over-the-air update. That's great, but why do you need it? The whole idea behind Windows Phone is to be different and innovative. Doing things the same way as everyone else isn't innovative at all. ...
-
by Adam Z. Lein | December 17, 2012 11:03 AMLast week we heard that Google had no plans to develop apps for Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8. They're also dropping the widely-used Exchange ActiveSync support on free Gmail accounts. Darren Murph of Engadget even went so far as to say that Windows Phone doesn't stand a chance at success without Google support. We posted about a great new Google Voice app for Windows Phone last week as well, and that didn't get a whole lot of fanfare. Could it be that Windows Phone users just don't care about Google apps? Android users really don't care about things like Apple's iTunes either, ...
