An interesting article by Arstechnica state that 40% of Blackberry users are willing to trade in for an iPhone. Does this mean Obama’s BlackBerry endorsements are wearing off?

The more likely scenario is that RIM is unable to keep up with features consumers want more of that are incorporated in the iPhone and Android. To muddy the waters even more, Windows Mobile 7 has been rebuilt from the ground up and will become more of a threat in 2010 to BlackBerry business. In fact, I know several gigantic enterprises that have switched from RIM to Microsoft’s Mobile devices porting apps and removing all traces of RIM from the environment.

It seems current iPhone and Android users are happy with their device as 90 percent plan to stick with their current platform for their next upgrade.

There are two distinct camps when it comes to the iPad… those who have pre-ordered and are anxiously awaiting April 3rd by researching iPad accessories and those who call anyone that ordered an iPad a fanboy.  Let’s get some perspective on the iPad pre-order that started this past Friday.

There are estimates that over 150k units were pre-ordered online through the weekend.  Friday an estimated 25k were sold per hour but over the weekend only 1k unit were sold per hour totaling more that 150k units in 60 hours.  This was determined by tracking over 120 order numbers submitted by volunteers on a message board.  This number includes only those pre-ordered through Apple’s online store and the estimates do not include iPad reservations or any large-volume orders that have been placed directly with Apple’s sales force by businesses.

Daniel Tello (the analyst for the above study) estimates that Apple will hit the 1M unit sold mark the first week of sales.

These numbers sound impressive… but are they?

Considering the original iPhone took 74 days to sell 1M units and there are only 3M-4M tablets across all brands and makers selling globally every year, this Geek thinks Apple may have a hit on their hands.

Chief Gadgeteer wrote a post about specs and his initial thoughts of the tablet. To summarize in a word his thoughts on the iPad it would be “meh”.

I like to think of myself as an Vendor-agnostic Geek that doesn’t take sides in the Linux/Mac/Windows debate, but I have a different view than my fellow writer/editor.

Read the rest of this entry »

While cleaning up some old bookmarks today, I ran across a company that was acquired by Twitter which lead me to one of the owners Twitter’s feed. The last item in the feed then pointed me to a brilliant web experiment called Readability which is a arc90 lab experiment that provides a bookmarklet that you simply copy to your modern web browser’s toolbar. As you surf the web and find an article really worth reading, click on the bookmarklet and the article reloads in a reader friendly interface providing options to return to the original page and email or print the article. Read the rest of this entry »

MP3 players are again among the Geek’s top 12 Gadgets of Christmas and Apple’s iPod continues to outsell and rule this market. If you’re looking for our list to include Zune, SanDisk, Archos or Creative… you’ll be disappointed because they simply do not make the best seller list.

The bestselling iPod is the Apple iPod touch 3rd Generation ($179.99 for the 8GB to $359.99 for the 64GB) that comes installed with the iPhone OS 3.1 software and a 3.5″ widescreen Multi-Touch display.

Apple iPod nano 5th Generation with 8GB with a smaller profile 2.2″ color TFT display.

Finally, the Apple iPod classic 7th Generation with 160GB is a great choice for someone who loves to carry all their music with them (roughly 40k songs) but they don’t care about grabbing apps from the iTunes store. Also, this is a hard drive based iPod so don’t exercise or run with this one!

Gaming systems have always been a hit for our holiday gifts wrap-up and this year, even in a recession, there is no exception.  Over the past three years we have the same players with consoles from Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft with minor changes to the consoles such as a “Silver Edition”, “Slim Edition” or some other sort of “Limited Edition”.  In any case, the changes between editions are slight including better energy efficiency or support for the latest HDMI standard, etc…

Our first pick is the best selling console probably due to price and the ease of use for casual or party gamers… the Nintendo Wii. Additionally this console has really created a new genre of popular games with the advent of legitimate exercise games.

The Play Station 3 is the second best selling console on the market with incredible high definition graphics and an excellent Blu Ray player converging high definition video with a console.  It’s easy to make the leap from a $200 Blu Ray player to a $300 Play Station 3 that includes a Blu Ray player.

Finally, XBox 360 is a great gift choice for the hard core gamer as some of the best titles exist only on the XBox 360 platform. Gears of War and Halo franchises are both exclusive to the XBox 360 console so if you’re giving a console to a true gamer, XBox 360 should be at the top of your list.

With many Blu Ray Players dropping to sub-$100 around Black Friday and through the holidays including combo deals with new TVs, Blu Ray Players will be under many trees this Christmas. While DVD sales will still far outweigh Blu Ray Discs, the Blu Ray Players will become a hot commodity.

The best seller at Amazon and other retailers is the Panasonic DMP-BD60. The player is constantly either bundled or on sale so this unit is always competitively priced for a major name brand. Additionally, the player provides 1080P up-convert for DVDs and Viera Cast allowing you to pull up YouTube, Picasa and Weather. This geek got this Blu Ray Player through a bundle deal and after watching Up (great movie, I laughed and cried) on a new Samsung LED LCD TV, my socks were absolutely blown off!

Next, the Sony BDP-N460 allows for instant streaming online entertainment from leading providers at a medium price point.

Finally, if you have a wall-mounted TV, you need to check out the Samsung BD-P4600. This wall-mountable Blu Ray player directly matches the Samsung LED TVs, but you can use with any wall mounted TV. Besides being sexy, some of the features include Wi-Fi capable, Netflix video and Pandora music streaming not to mention all the Audio/Video features you’d look for in a higher end Blu Ray Player.

The number nine slot in the Geeks countdown goes to Mobile Phones. Typically we’ll list a few types of mobile phones (conventional mobile phones, smart phones and multimedia phones); however this year we are going to exclusively concentrate on smart phones. Perhaps we hang around with too many geeks, but if someone we know purchases a mobile phone that’s not a smart phone… they are shunned by our geek society!

The top selling consumer mobile phone still is the iPhone. The app store and interface will continue to allow Apple to see strong sales for the iPhone. Next, the Blackberry Bold 9700 has strong sales and is currently number one on Amazon’s bestselling mobile phones with it’s full QWERTY keyboard and touch-sensitive optical trackpad, Wi-Fi networking, camera/camcorder (this phone has great quality) and Bluetooth stereo music. Finally, the Palm Pre deserves at spot at number three with Palm’s new webOS featuring Synergy technology to auto-pull together your contacts and calendars into one screen.

This year we felt digital cameras needed two entries, one for the less expensive small cameras that fit in your pocket and the DSLR (Digital Single-Lens Reflex) cameras. DSLRs are becoming more prevalent in households because they allow an accurate preview of framing close to the moment of exposure with a variety of interchangeable lenses to choose from.

Our top pick in the DSLR category is the Canon EOS Rebel T1i. With continous shooting speed of around 3.4 shots per second and the ability to use over 60 Canon EF/EF-S lenses, this DSLR will be a hot item this year. The next choice is the Nikon D3000 with Nikon EXPEED image processing allowing in-camera image editing and Active D-Lighting.

The last pick is by far the best selling DSLR on the market today… Canon Digital Rebel XSi. This is the entry level DSLR from Canon and a step down from the T1i mentioned as the first pick, with slightly less optical sensor resolution at 12.2 MP still shooting over 3 frames per second. No matter which DSLR you pick, you’ll love the quality of the shots and how many frames per second you can take rather than seconds per frame.

GPS units represent our 11th pick in the countdown. Our predictions for the best selling units will be the basic and least expensive model such as the Garmin nüvi 260W.

While most will not splurge, some of us simply “need” some advanced features! For example, the Magellan RoadMate 1470 includes advanced features such as multi-destination routing, highway lane assist, spoken street names, AAA TourBook and a Roadside Assistance menu while the TomTom GO 730 tauts IQ Routes Technology giving you the fastest route every time by using actual average speeds of travel on your route and Advanced Lane Guidance using photorealistic images to bring even more clarity to complex multi-lane exits so you can be more confident on the road.