Hasta La Gadget!

Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about consumer technology.

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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Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about consumer technology.

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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HEach week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about consumer technology.

Facebook’s management doesn’t see any dichotomy in the phrase, “Go big or go home,” at least as far as it might pertain to Facebook Home. After being dogged for years with questions about whether the Land o’ Likes would create its own smartphone despite consistent denials, the company explained that its own phone wouldn’t give it the reach it would need for its more than 1 billion members. With the exceptions of the iPhone and the Galaxy S series, a successful handset today might sell 20 million units. That’s a number that many services would dream of reaching, but it’s just one-fiftieth of Facebook’s user base.

And yet, Facebook Home will start out factory-installed on only one device: the HTC First, a mid-range Android device available exclusively from AT&T. Home is also available as a download from Google Play for a handful of other popular Android handsets, including the Galaxy S III.

Filed under: Cellphones, Software, Apple, Samsung, HTC, Blackberry, Facebook

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Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about consumer technology.

The power of crowdfunding is that, by aggregating relatively modest donations from what is often hundreds or even thousands of backers, consumers can help artists and inventors turn ideas or concepts into reality. The Pebble smartwatch that set the record for funds raised on Kickstarter was noteworthy for breaking the $10 million barrier. That money, though, came from nearly 69,000 backers.

Today, the two biggest crowdfunding destinations, Indiegogo and Kickstarter, offer different approaches to what gets presented on their sites. Indiegogo is a completely open site; there is virtually no screening of projects. Kickstarter, on the other hand, is a curated site. Projects must meet a range of criteria. As co-founder Yancey Strickler recently explained at Engadget Expand, the roots of Kickstarter were in the funding of creative and social pursuits. Kickstarter has been a haven for artists such as photographers looking to create a photo book or musicians seeking to cut a first album or create a music video.

Filed under: Misc, Internet

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Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about consumer technology.

If Chrome OS didn’t start out with an inferiority complex living in the shadow of the massive adoption of its cousin Android, and with Eric Schmidt dismissing the hardware that would run it as cheap and interchangeable, the hardware companies that were early to adopt it didn’t help matters. Chrome OS arrived on devices that weren’t priced competitively against then-popular netbooks.

Since then, though, the Chrome hardware story has been on a steady upswing. Thanks to Acer, Chromebooks broke the $200 price point. Thanks to Samsung, they made the leap to the ARM architecture, enabling longer battery life in a thin form factor. And thanks to HP and Lenovo, Chromebooks have joined the portfolios of two of the biggest names in corporate computing. While it may be nowhere near Android’s scale in terms of overall devices, Chrome OS is now offered by three of 2012’s top Windows PC manufacturers. That is certainly enough to show up on Microsoft’s radar. Into this fray comes the Chromebook Pixel and it has clearly learned from other successful ecosystems.

Filed under: Internet, Software, Apple, Microsoft, Google

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