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.

Hallmark have a new greeting card product that incorporates augmented reality. You just need a computer with a webcam, visit www.hallmark.com/extra and hold the (dead tree) card you received in front of the webcam to see the whole show.

Take a look at this video to see how cool it is. Next step, holocards.

Oh well. So much for the big G trying to throw their weight around to convince the big C to give a little on their censorship stance, following the hacking attacks. Google will most likely close its search engine business in China, google.cn.

They’re going to make an orderly exit, and take steps to protect their employees there. Does China care? Not really. They can (and have) created their own search engines that are more compliant with their way of thinking.

via FT.com

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.

In case you got tired of waiting for the iPhone to show up on Verizon, why not consider an Android phone, say perhaps the Google Nexus One, which you can currently get on T-Mobile.

HTC will be shipping these to Verizon by April. If you’re in Britain, expect Nexus Ones to show up on Vodafone too.

Meantime, enjoy the Nexus One Ninja video!

via Digitimes

UK company RSLSteeper, maker of prosthetic, orthotic and assistive technology products has what looks like an amazing fully articulated prosthetic hand called the BeBionic. You have to watch the video on the BeBionic site.

Tell me this doesn’t remind you of Luke’s new artificial hand in Star Wars: ESB!

Another technology that will see its latest revision usher in dramatic increases in capacity is SD cards. The latest incarnation is called SDXC (Secure Digital eXtended Capacity) and has a maximum size of 2TB. Just imagine 2048GB in a card small enough to swallow.

What you need to know about SDXC
Don’t expect 2TB cards to appear just yet. 48 and 64GB cards from Panasonic and Toshiba should start appearing this Spring, with other vendors to follow closely.

You should also have some restraint; don’t rush out to buy SDXC cards without having devices that can read them. SDHC devices can read a small subset of SDXC cards only, and not at full speed.

The other major point that you should keep in mind is that only Windows 7 currently supports reading SDXC.

You can get more detailed information from the SD Card Association.

You may also want to read about USB 3.0, HDMI 1.4.

Nokia is still in 1st place in Greenpeace’s Guide to Greener Electronics. The order of the 18 companies ranked here hasn’t changed much in the past 6 months, so apparently this list isn’t enough to shame them into changing their ways.

You can take a look at the list on their site, or pull down the full PDF.

I much prefer to receive e-mail than snail mail (unless they’re checks!) and so I’m really like the idea of this new service called Zumbox. It’s a paperless mail/postal system. Zumbox has created a virtual mailbox for each street address in the US and anyone can send virtual mail to your Zumbox mailbox.

Now, this is not the same as your e-mail address, but something you need to sign into which works well because you don’t necessarily need to check your snail mail every single day, nor would I want all that advertising coming straight to my e-mail inbox.

The best part is that it’s free. In case you’re wondering what the catch is, they probably are able to resell their service to marketers and advertisers, so yeah, your virtual mailbox may end up being clogged with virtual spam, but hey, better than my actual mailbox.

Hit Zumbox.com to sign up and claim your mailing address.

One of our great readers sent in this set of 7 pieces of free software that you can, and in most cases should, use to protect your PC laptop. Most of these also apply to your desktop as well.

I happen to use most of these and recommend them as well. At a minimum, you should be using antivirus, a firewall and backups.
Read the rest of this entry »