It’s hard enough for developers to build apps and make money with the iPhone due to very low prices that the fierce competition has caused.  A large percentage of apps cost 99 cents, and 20% of that goes to Apple.

The saving grace is the huge number of iPhones in the market and the fairly well organized and promoted App Store.

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Well has the mighty Microsoft ‘banstick‘ hit you?  Perhaps the economy whacked you, but you need your video game fill.

Maybe it’s as simple as wanting an extra Windows Media Center unit to watch your stuff on another TV in the house.

This is a refurbished unit, but does include a headset.  But still, quite a good price.

Shipping is about $18.

Get it HERE.

Woot.com, is a very popular, ‘deal a day’ website that is known for having great prices for one item per day.  They stay on sale from midnight (West Coast Time) until midnight the next day or until they run out of stock.  Products tend to lean toward tech such as GPS, computers, etc but a variety is out there.

Since starting they’ve added

• kids.woot.com for kids oriented stuff
• sellout.woot.com which is basically a second daily deal but done in conjunction with Yahoo!.
• wine.woot.com … Self explanatory
• shirt.woot.com for daily cool shirts

There are numerous copycat websites, although none seem to have the quality of the deal they have and they don’t have the sense of humor woot does in their product listings.

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Full disclosure.  I haven’t touched a Droid yet.  I have an iPod Touch and use a Palm Pre as my everyday device.

Here is my humble opinion.

The Motorola Droid will sell well.  Not awesome, but well.  There is a lot of pent up demand from those locked into Verizon who wanted a serious smart phone, and they definitely get it here.

I see very few people dumping an iPhone to switch to this.  Sure it has a few benefits, but it also has a fair number of weaknesses when compared, and nobody is switching carriers over the differences. Continue Reading

Although I’m a fan of the Palm Pre, let’s just say, the app selection and quality is a ‘mixed bag.’  Apps that are mediocre get pretty popular because there are few alternatives and many people have lower expectations.  Sort of like the fact you can’t open a mediocre pizza joint in New York City as you’ll be out of business in a month.  In other parts of the country, there is much less quality competition so you can pull it off.

Up until now, there have been a handful of NewsReaders, some Homebrew, some app catalog.  Most of the App Catalog news readers are ‘dedicated’ apps to a particular site such as The New York Times or AP News. The exception is ad supported ExpressNews from Handmark, which aggregates a number of preselected news sites.

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We purchased the WiLife surveillance system about 2 years ago for extra security at the house.  In terms of a system, if it works for you, it is one of the least expensive and difficult to install ways to get real time video surveillance both as a traditional DVR as well as Internet Access.

On Halloween, we got more than we bargained for!  Read On…

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Billshrink.com just did an analysis comparing the iPhone 3GS on AT&T,  the Palm Pre on Sprint, and Motorola Droid on Verizon.

If you are looking at an unlimited voice and data plan, you will spend $1,250 less over two years.  There are still substantial savings even with more limited plans.  The phones, on paper, have fairly similar specifications and capabilities and in terms of Network quality, speed, coverage ranking I would say Verizon, Sprint, AT&T in that order.

It makes it all the more painful why Sprint had such bad results as discussed earlier today. Sprint really is one of the best valued carriers at the moment.

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It seems you can’t catch a break these days.

Most will agree that Sprint has:

• Good coverage.  Not the best, but very decent.
• Excellent pricing for ‘all you can eat’ data and data/voice plans
• Very aggressive calling circle scenarios including inexpensive options for unlimited calls to any cell phone 24×7.
• Their advertising is everywhere (at least everywhere I look).  Tons of creative web ads, all over Hulu, lots of product placement work such as Heroes etc
• They got the first true iPhone competitor this year with the Palm Pre.
• They have substantially improved customer service
• They just released the HTC Hero Android Phone.  So except for the iPhone, they have almost major smartphone and device available.

And yet… This came out today:

• They lost 478 million in the last quarter.  Significantly worse than a year ago, even with these new devices.  (Yes, I know the Hero won’t affect things until the next reporting quarter)
• Revenue slipped 9%
• They lost 545 thousand subscribers net, including 801 thousand from traditional ‘post paid’ plans.  This while AT&T added 2 million and Verizon 1.2 million.  (The power of the iPhone…amazing)
• They trade at about $3.18 per share.  Just 2 years ago they were trading at around $20/share

You almost have to feel sorry for them.  What does a CEO have to do to win these days?

Sooner or later it was inevitable.  I’ve started seeing fishing emails posing as Facebook communications.  Simply “click” to update your password.

After that, they use a Bot to get into your account, and push out spam messages to all those that follow you, friends, family etc.

As always, no matter how legitamate looking an email is, assume  it is a phishing expedition.    Most email programs and sites have a way to check the links.  In Microsoft Outlook, simply hover over the linke (The underlined “here” above) and you’ll see the full link.  Most scammers will put the legitimate name within the domain such as http://facebook.com.slkjsdf.eu  in hopes that somebody will see the facebook and not realize the only thing that really matters is the characters before the final period in the URL.  In this case, slkjsdf which is, obviously, not facebook.

Sprint recently announced that the latest Palm OS device, the Palm Pixi,  will go on sale in the U.S. on November 15th.  The original Palm OS device, the Pre was released in June of this year.  There has been a lot of commentary relative to the Pixi positioning.  It’s got some great design features and some head scratching limitations as well.

Let’s take a closer look. Continue Reading

I’ve been a business smartphone user since the category was invented.  I started with Palm and have been loyal to them through the years as the market has developed from a niche geek market to the fastest growing segment of mobile communications.  Analysts say it will easily overtake conventional cell phones in developed countries very soon.

As a business user, I’ve always assumed the ‘next’ new device would be better than the previous device at getting the job done.  That job being primarily communicating with colleagues via voice or text.  Originally email was the exclusive text method, but of course today we have SMS, IM, Twitter, Facebook etc.

So why am I upset with what Palm has done in their latest ‘comeback kid’ device, the Palm Pre?

Read on to find out.

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Dealert recently appeared in the App Catalog for the Pre.  At $1.99 its a very reasonable price for what it does – which is keep an eye open at all times for great shopping deals.  I haven’t seen anything quite like it in terms of usefulness – most of which is caused by the ability of the application to sit in the background and constantly keep an eye out for deals. Continue Reading

One of my first favorite ‘free’ Internet programs was Claria’s “Gator”. What I naively found out later is, so far as I’m concerned, Gator essentially invented the Spyware industry.

It originally allowed you to store passwords to all your websites so that rather than remember them, you could allow it to fill them in automatically. However, over time they started pushing pop-up ads onto your computer and started overwriting Google search results. Eventually people found out about the adware but the product itself actually worked until Gator was shut down in 2006. In came RoboForm which has nothing to do with adware and instead offers a great password keeper program. I’ve been using it ever since and love it. Here’s why. Continue Reading