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by Michael Fisher | March 29, 2013 7:01 AMRead OnAt the halfway mark of the last decade, the Motorola i930 was a beast. It packed a 180MHz processor, 32MB of RAM, a VGA camera, and Windows Mobile 2003 into a 167g casing more than 30mm thick. It was a hard-core, ruggedized device built at a time when rugged feature phones still commanded a premium, and durable smartphones were practically unheard-of. It also packed the fastest walkie-talkie in the industry, and a carrier label that, at the time of the phone's release in 2005, was among the most-respected brands in the United States: NEXTEL. The i930 wasn't all sunshine and polish, though: ...
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by Michael Fisher | December 26, 2012 7:01 AMRead OnBack when voice communication was still king, phone calls weren’t the only game in town. Some carriers offered a service called “push-to-talk” - a two-way radio, or walkie-talkie-like solution, for when a phone call just wouldn’t do. In America, most carriers found little traction with PTT. The iDEN-based carrier Nextel -now part of Sprint- saw success for a few years offering dispatch service to its customers, at one time numbering around 20 million people. These days, that number has shrunk to below 5 million, but other carriers are still trying to pick the Nextel carcass clean. ...
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by Michael Fisher | August 20, 2012 3:14 PMRead OnPicture this: you're lying in bed with your favorite tablet, catching up on the latest episode from the AMC series Hell On Wheels. You can substitute any TV show, movie, or YouTube series there, really, but Hell On Wheels is pretty amazing. Anyway, you're lying there, jaw agape at the realization that maybe the rapper Common can actually act, but you've got a problem. While the visuals are stunning on your 2012-edition iPad's Retina display, or passable on the lighter, slimmer Nexus 7's screen, you can't really hear anything. You reach to the volume toggle, hoping to avoid a repeat of ...
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by Michael Fisher | May 29, 2012 8:35 AMRead OnRight now, I'm on a ferry, heading back home from a holiday weekend. My Samsung Galaxy Nexus sits on the duffel bag at my feet, providing a wireless hotspot for my Macbook (3G only out here on the open water; even Verizon Wireless has its limitations). It's also streaming an instrumental playlist of "writing music" to the bluetooth headphones on my head, and it beeps dutifully every few minutes, letting me know about a friend's Foursquare check-in or Facebook update, or some such. It does all this while maintaining a relatively small footprint, and presenting a fairly attractive ...
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