Few punters and even fewer tech-sayers saw the tablet boom coming even after the dawn of the iPad. Smartphones, yes, but not so much the larger swipey, jabby, tappy tabs. Who needs an iPad? They’re just toys. Like laptops and netbooks but not as useful.
Nobody knows anything.
Five more smartphones that are marginally smarter than the measly bunch that constituted the last Fogey 5. Increasingly clever, expensive and desirable they are the non-pareil time-wasting devices of our generation. Skitter your restless fingers over that smooth Gorilla glass and feel as one with the ever-expanding technopolis. How did we ever manage without them?
With so many digital cameras on the market – from hybrids to compacts to DSLRs to superzooms – even the most equable snapper could get brain-ache deciding which to buy. Anyone who wants to be seen as though they know what they’re doing, though, will buy a DSLR. And this lot (apparently) are the best.
Many of Apple’s competitors now seem to believe that really high-powered business thruster-types will pay through the nose for a laptop that mirrors their inflated opinions of themselves, so they’re all ploughing the high end furrow as well.
Speaker docks for iPhone, iPod and even iPad can liberate your tunes and annoy the neighbours. Just make sure your music files are recorded at a high enough quality to make these units really sing.
Want Full HD content for your 1080p Full HD TV? Then get a Blu-ray disc player. And spend fortunes on Blu-ray discs, which are more expensive than nasty, standard def DVDs, naturally.
The five best pairs of serious ‘cans’ – the like of which are worn by recording studio knob-twiddlers who sit, sagely behind mixing desks the size of an aircraft carrier. They are also cherished by audiophiles – older men with no friends who still live with their mums and listen to music with a devotion that verges on religious.
Strictly speaking the ear muffs sported by Geordie footie God and honorary Irishman, Jack Charlton, should be illustrating the over-ear, ‘circumaural’ style of headphone. But they’re not. These are the best five pairs of headphones that sit on your precious lugs.
For the lightweight jet-setter, commuter or runner-about earphones such as the five highlighted here are definitely the way to go. Small, unobtrusive, comfy for long-ish periods and, if you have the requisite dosh, often very high in the fidelity department.
The quality and performance of some of the latest compact digital cameras would boggle even the tiniest mind. The five featured here are nothing short of palm-sized miracles. Now we can all be David Bailey. Or just ‘Bailey’ as he insists on being called these days.
No one forces anyone to buy a book, whether it’s digitally rendered or paper and print. If Apple had set their prices too high, a lack of sales would have suggested their error. And there are always alternatives for the consumer such as libraries and those dusty repositories known as ‘book shops’
This isn’t so much built in obsolescence we’re talking about here, rather a deliberate and unnecessary removal of functionality from an otherwise perfectly serviceable device. That we paid good money for. And is now worthless, in every sense.
This bit of kit is integrated into a skull cap (a headband version is in the works) and displays the force sustained by head impacts on an LED display that sits at the back of the neck.
That’s what happens when you eavesdrop on conversations about subjects of which you know nothing. You find that the person upon whose eaves you were dropping doesn’t know anything either.
At 4pm the seething hordes of the geek media were let in to swarm around buffet tables groaning with free food and bars serving equally free booze. Somewhere amidst the platters of shrimp and beef skewers there were selected brands showing their products at very many small stands.
CES is now a curious circus, notable as much for some of the biggest names in tech that choose to be absent: Apple, Google, Amazon.
Users of social networks reveal far more about themselves than they should or that they are aware of and that in doing so they put themselves where the law, which has been tortoise-slow to try and get to grips with the new electronic age, cannot help them.
There is plenty written about the digital world that is mildly diverting, in a ‘what will they think of next?’ kind of way, while being unlikely to impinge on the lives of thee and me. Such is Bitcoin.
The HP website assures us that Windows 7 is pre-loaded with the driver that will make it and the 7690 sing sweet printerly music together. They are lying. And that lie is compounded by the fact that the driver we need cannot be downloaded from the HP website.
If you don’t like what’s being done with your online burblings, go offline, go analogue. Or just shut up.
Links to articles we’ve read recently, two from the Independent on Saturday 19th January and two from the New York Times on Sunday 13th January. All are worth a look.
Here’s a fine feature by Sam Anderson from the New York Times Magazine about mindless video games. The sort of things (Angry Birds) that have replaced the fag-break in the nation’s use of snippets of down time. This Fogey has spent an inordinate amount of time on Angry Birds and so far no 3-star level […]
Jeffrey Steingarten is food critic for US Vogue. His writing is wonderful and, since he’s waxed lyrical often about kitchen gadgets and food and cooking technology, he’s a perfect fit for Tech Fogey.
David Pogue is a very funny man who knows what he’s talking about. A rare bird indeed.
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