With the holiday season well underway and the iPhone 4S and iPad ranking near the top of a huge number of people’s wish lists, it seems a great time for companies to highlight their case offerings. One of our favorites, Speck, has a great lineup of cases for the iPhone 4S and they sent over a bunch of them along with a release describing them all. Although they arrived just hours before we left on vacation for the week I took a few minutes out from packing to grab some pictures. (In fact, these were among the pictures I edited on the flight down.) Without further ado lefts jump into the cases and their descriptions. Keep in mind that many of these will be on the way to some lucky readers of the site so, as you look through the cases you might want to do so with an eye toward which you might want protecting YOUR iPhone 4S.… Continue reading on Gear Diary …

The web is abuzz today with the ‘Kindle Fire Usability study from UseIt.com, which can be summed as stating that “Amazon.com’s new Kindle Fire offers a disappointingly poor user experience.” Here are a few points of note: Fat-Finger Problem Makes Mobile Sites Superior The most striking observation from testing the Fire is that everything is much too small on the screen, leading to frequent tap errors and accidental activation. You haven’t seen the fat-finger problem in its full glory until you’ve watched users struggle to touch things on the Fire. One poor guy spent several minutes trying to log in to Facebook, but was repeatedly foiled by accidentally touching Continue reading on Gear Diary …

The segment is urban sport cross(over) and the manufacturer is Nissan and for the many of you (like me, initially) wondering what the heck this vehicle is I present the JUKE. Funky name and a funky style to be sure but one spin around the block and JUKE proves itself a worthy competitor in this, and the global, market. After Cube and LEAF, Nissan brought JUKE to the U.S. showing it is not afraid to release vehicles with somewhat polarizing style and appeal. JUKE is certainly not for someone who wants to blend in – buy an Altima for that. No, JUKE makes a certain statement about the bold and brash personalities of… Continue reading on Gear Diary …

I love almonds. If we are what we eat, I’m a Hershey’s Kiss and a handful of shredded coconut away from becoming an Almond Joy bar. When we’re grocery shopping, Sarah is always trying to find which nuts are on sale and keep us well-stocked. We do try to compare the labels and make sure we’re not getting nuts with tons of additives, but it isn’t always easy to make the right call when they all sound the same. That’s where Fooducate is an incredible useful shopping tool! Fooducate scans barcodes and gives you a breakdown of the ingredients and nutrients… Continue reading on Gear Diary …

When I was young Pearl Harbor Day got a lot of attention, as there were many WWII vets alive and it allowed a focus on something that was NOT Vietnam or Watergate. In the past decade as we have been embroiled in militarism, nation-building and general global conflicts, there has been plenty of other tragedy to pull our attention. Yet forgetting our history dooms us to repeat it, so it is important to remember the events of December 7th, 1941. Here are the historical details: At 7:55 a.m. Hawaii time, a Japanese dive bomber bearing the red symbol of the Rising Sun of Japan on its wings Continue reading on Gear Diary …

There is the commercial for Kohl’s that says ‘it is like getting paid to shop’. Well, Amazon is now taking that to the next level. This Saturday December 10th, use the Amazon Price Check app on your iPhone or Android phone to check the price of an item you want to buy. You can then add the item to your Amazon Price Check cart, and if you buy it within 24 hours you get an additional $5 off the price! Better still, you can do this up to three times! Here are the details: Price Check In-store Deals During the promotional period (see below), we are offering through the Price Check by Continue reading on Gear Diary …

The iBooks apps for iOS, that means iPad, iPhone and iPod touch, just made the leap to version 1.5. It is a nice update that includes a new arrangement of annotations, full screen reading mode, new fonts and an awesome new nighttime reading mode. I used the nighttime reading mode last night for a bit and it worked great. It is nice to see iBooks maturing but it also reminded me that, when it comes to something like eBooks, it isn’t the app that ultimately matters but rather the ecosystem one has decided to use. I decided some time back that I would be investing in the Kindle platform since it is more “universal” so, while I’ll certainly use iBooks for… Continue reading on Gear Diary …

I don’t know who this woman is, or whether she practiced this routine for hours or spontaneously busted out at the gym. I do know that this is highly entertaining, and if I tried it I’d go flying off the treadmill. Fair warning, you will get an unfortunate earworm from this video…but it’s SO worth it! Via Runners World Forums Continue reading on Gear Diary …

Today’s Gear Deal is the brand new 15.6″ Lenovo ThinkPad Edge E520 laptop. Replacing the previous ThinkPad Edge 15, the Edge E520 has a newly redesigned chassis that is 1.1 inches thick and weights just 5.2 lbs. It offers up to 6 hours of run time with the optional battery, has an available SSD, offers 3 USB 2.0 ports, has HDMI output, and 4-in-1 card reader. The base configuration includes 4GB RAM, a 500GB 7200RPM Hard Drive, Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit OS and more. The Sandy Bridge” Intel Core i3 version starts at $1174 but our Gear Sponsor found $625 instant savings -plus an additional 10% off coupon. That brings the price down to just $494.10 and it will even… Continue reading on Gear Diary …

Have you ever heard me complain about Android fragmentation as a major issue? Yeah, you probably have. But there is actually some good news on the fragmentation front – more than half of all Android phones are running the latest operating system Android 2.3.x aka ‘Gingerbread’. Add to that the 35.3% running the previous version Froyo (2.2), and you have more than 85% on a ‘fairly unified’ platform.… Continue reading on Gear Diary …

photos by Kevin My mother has sensorineural hearing loss, and she has worn hearing aids in each ear ever since she was 36. My husband has hearing loss from working with loud machinery, and although he doesn’t wear hearing aids, he misses some tones and quiet speech is sometimes garbled. My friend Angie’s daughter caught a virus several years ago that wasn’t treated quickly enough; the result was that she went profoundly deaf in both ears and has since been fitted with two Cochlear Implants. My point is that hearing loss and forms of deafness are much more common than you might think. According to Gaudelet University, “the world’s only university in which… Continue reading on Gear Diary …

Today the Android Market hit 10 billion downloads, which means a whole lot of people are checking Facebook, Twitter, Google + and playing Angry Birds on their Android devices. 10 billion is a huge number … and to celebrate Google is having a huge sale! The headline on the Market says “10 days of offers. Top Premium Apps. $0.10 Per App”. Plain and simple, it is a great sale! Here is the list for today: •Great Little War Game •SketchBook Mobile •Paper Camera •Sound Hound •Asphalt 6 •Fieldrunners HD •SwiftKey •Minecraft •Endomondo Sports Tracker Pro •Color and Draw for Kids I cannot praise Fieldrunners enough, and there are plenty… Continue reading on Gear Diary …

How much do I love my Oberon Design cover for my Nook Touch? Enough that I was looking forward to a new cover for my Kindle Fire almost as much as I was looking forward to the device itself! From the moment it arrived, I had it the Fire in my large Oberon sleeve waiting for the release of the new cover. It is here now … so does it live up to my expectations? Read on and find out!… Continue reading on Gear Diary …

There is a great awkward scene from just about every teen movie I can remember growing up – the boy and girl are getting passionate, but before anything ‘happens’ he realizes he needs a condom. He heads to the local pharmacy where getting the condoms involves dealing with (a) the girl’s father (b) another authority figure (c) the girl he REALLY loves (d) some combination of these or another cliche. This isn’t used as much today since most people can stroll anonymously into a local Walmart and avoid the difficulty entirely … well, not entirely: the people working there are still part of the local community – and there is… Continue reading on Gear Diary …

Earlier we got a message from frequent commented DBMurray regarding a message he received about what is happening to customer data as part of the EA/Popcap merger I wrote about here. As we were conversing, I got the same message which is shown at top. Although the message says ‘good news’, neither DBMurray nor I find the news all that great. Why? Well, as my earlier article indicated, PopCap is a pretty cool company with great games. EA is a terrible company with a tendency to treat customers poorly, lock people out of their games for vague and inconsistent reasons, gobble up properties and kill them, milk franchises for all they… Continue reading on Gear Diary …