Now that Microsoft has given its quick reveal of the new Xbox One game console / set-top box, we have a pretty good idea of what we should be expecting once the machine comes out. We know how it'll be controlled; we know what games we'll be playing on it; and we know how it will keep us connected and entertained.

But we don't know if people will use all these new things. Are we ready to look at our game consoles as more than a game console? Are we already there? I mean, we all use Netflix on our machines, right? May as well let them run our TV viewing too, right?

Right?

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The announcement of the Acer Aspire R7 was the best example of the company's assertion that it was moving from computers designed with touch to computers designed for touch. But if having a fancy, even unprecedented, hinge is what defines a touch-optimized notebook, Acer is a bit late to the party.

Last October, Switched On discussed the role that laptop-tablet hybrids -- namely convertibles and detachables -- would play in the differentiation of Windows 8 devices. Both types have seen their share of support. Detachables have included HP's Envy x2, ASUS' Transformer-inspired VivoTab and Microsoft's Surface. (Dell's XPS 10 is available only with Windows RT.)

Filed under: Apple, Microsoft

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I'm hanging out in Atlanta right now, getting ready to speak at Digital Summit 2013 about things you're probably not terribly interested in. Most importantly, I'm sitting at a bar and just ordered what looks to be a monster of a burger called the "Hot Mess" at a place called Park Bar near my hotel. Despite my disdain for online review sites, it was either this via Yelp or the hotel bar and, well, I find hotel bars depressing.

It's also pretty clear that the only reason I ordered the Hot Mess is because my wife isn't here to give me a hard time about it. No, I'm not a kept man, but I respect her knowledge of health and try to let her guide me most of the time. But when I'm on the road, I sometimes let all bets fall to the floor so that daddy can dig into a burger uninterrupted.

Filed under: Misc

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The television. The PC. The cellphone. We take the things in these sentence fragments for granted today, but they took many years to enter the mainstream. Could Google Glass herald the next great product that we will one day wonder how we lived without? Based on three days of not using the product, you may want to ask someone else.

Filed under: Misc, Wearables, Google

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I've known my friend Jeff since I was 2 years old. He was one year ahead of me in school, but in everything else -- little league, school, girls -- we were extremely competitive. We both had two sisters and looked to one another as brothers and yardsticks for prepubescent success. He was better at baseball and I usually had better luck with the ladies. Being better at baseball helped him with the ladies and having a way with the girls made the baseball thing kind of irrelevant. In short, I was better.

I saw Jeff last week, and as we reminisced about the good old days of baseball and babes, he reminded me of what he called The Great Computer Cold War of 1982.

"The great what?" I asked him.

Filed under: Misc, Software, Apple

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In the early days of the internet economy, the saying went that webpages were created on Macs, served on Unix and viewed on Windows. In the iOS app economy, it's often the case that apps run on devices by Apple, but connect to services by Google. With the exception of many games, at this point, apps increasingly strive to be internet services.

Google has been investing in more of these services for a longer time and in a way more directly tied to apps than Apple has. Google Maps has been the best example, but others include Google Drive (with its editing features), Google Voice and Google+. In contrast, Apple's biggest consumer online service success (other than the iTunes store) has been iCloud, which is less app-like and more of a silent shuttle for documents and files among iOS devices.

Filed under: Software, Apple, Google

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My first computer was a Commodore VIC-20. It raged with 3.5K of RAM, a high-speed cassette deck, and built-in BASIC. I used to copy game programs string-by-string from the back of COMPUTE! magazine -- tens of thousands of lines of code -- and small errors were not an option. One syntax error and the program wouldn't work. When I did make those errors, I'd go back, line by line, and check for differences. There was nothing -- at the time -- more annoying than seeing hours of code crash because of one bad POKE statement.

That digital fastidiousness has stuck with me since. I keep all my computers' files in order, keep operating systems updated, backup constantly to a remote storage device and quickly go after a machine that's behaving strangely. The net result, and I may be tempting fate, is that I have never had a computer completely fail in the thirty years I've been using them.

Filed under: Misc

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Based on last quarter's global PC shipment numbers, Microsoft continues to feel pain in making the case for Windows is a viable tablet operating system. Theoretically, the dual-identity (Windows 8/RT) operating system has everything it needs to be a contender, but the promise is ahead of the reality on three interdependent fronts: chip-level hardware, legacy support, and app software.

For example, if x86 chips were more competitive with ARM processors from a performance-per-watt perspective, then Microsoft wouldn't be as reliant on Metro-style apps for functionality. And if more developers were creating Metro-style apps, then consumers wouldn't have to go to the legacy desktop mode as much to get things done. (Until the company releases a Metro-style Office, Microsoft really can't wag its finger too much at third parties.)

Filed under: Tablets, Apple, Microsoft, HP

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