The Brooks Review

Author: Ben Brooks

  • Twitter Places: More Context For Your Tweets

    Twitter:

    Starting today, you can tag Tweets with specific places, including all World Cup stadiums in South Africa, and create new Twitter Places. You can also click a Twitter Place within a Tweet to see recent Tweets from a particular location.

  • Apple Store for iPhone

    Even this can’t buy you a new iPhone 4 just yet – damn you AT&T.

  • Apple Releases New Unibody Mac mini

    I want this in the worst way – HDMI, 320m graphics, beautiful enclosure. The old G4 Mac mini that I have currently hooked to my living room TV is looking pretty dated – honey can I buy a new one?

  • iPhone 4 Available for Pre-Order (kinda)

    The iPhone 4 went live on the Apple Store today or pre-order. The catch?

    You can only pre-order the black models – oh and the AT&T servers are being hit so hard that most people can’t place a pre-order. I have been trying since 6:00a and have not been able to do so (it is now 10a). Lame.

  • AirStash Wireless SD Card Reader: Perfect iPad Companion?

    Charlie Sorrel:

    The AirStash is a USB card reader combined with a Wi-Fi hotspot. Its purpose in life is to stream media to other devices, which means sending movies, music and video to phones, tablets and other memory-limited gadgets.

    This has potential.

  • I Can Has Cheezburger Blog Leads to a Web Empire

    These sites are great and funny – but they don’t have all that much of lasting appeal in my mind. Perhaps I am the minority though.

  • Thoughts on the Impact of Starbucks’ Free Wi-Fi

    This Starbucks free Wi-Fi announcement is a lot bigger than most people probably think it is, here are a few unfermented thoughts bouncing around in my head about it:

    • With Wi-Fi being free in 6,700 U.S. stores, and me living and working in the greater Seattle area – do I need a Mi-Fi device any longer?
    • It is about damn time – I mean wake up and smell the coffee already (sorry).
    • Oh I hope hotels follow suit.
    • This is not going to be good for small coffee shops that relied on their free Wi-Fi as a selling point. Time to start making better coffee.
    • They are working with Yahoo to get free paid content for customers for sites like WSJ – amazing.
    • Biongo is going under.
    • I think my iPad wet itself.
    • Starbucks needs to add more seats in its stores.

  • Which Device for Which Task?

    My usage seems pretty consistent – a great table to look at if you are thinking of getting an iPad.

  • Starbucks to Offer Free Wi-Fi at All Stores Nationwide

    ZOMG! Short of news that the Oil Spill has been cleaned up – I think it is safe to mark this down as the best news of the day.

  • A Nerd in a Cave

    Must read for all nerds and significant others of nerds.

  • The FT’s experiment with paywalled blogs

    Felix Salmon:

    But the fact is that blogs and paywalls just don’t mix.

  • Resolving the iPhone resolution

    Phil Plait:

    So in my opinion, what Jobs said was fine. Soneira, while technically correct, was being picky. So I mildly disagree with him about that. I had to laugh, though: his dismissing (near the bottom of the Wired article) of the Quattro TV’s use of a fourth, yellow, pixel is dead on. When I first heard of that I knew right away it was a silly claim.
    Still, the headline used by Wired.com was clearly incorrect; Jobs wasn’t falsely advertising the iPhone’s capabilities at all. I’ll note that I like Wired magazine quite a bit, and what we have here is most likely just an overzealous editor. But a lot of people read the headlines and it taints their view; someone reading that article may be more likely to think Jobs, once again, has overblown a product to excite people. He didn’t.

  • I Was Wrong About the iPad

    Clive Crook:

    Contrary to my earlier thoughts, it not only surpasses the Kindle but for many uses supplants the laptop too. Far from being neither one thing nor the other, it  is all things to all men–a good thing in a piece of electronics.

    The Kindle is only better if you need to read in sunlight – otherwise buy an iPad it is better in all other circumstances.

  • Facebook: Calacanis Is Lying

    A lot has been going on about Jason Calacanis’ Facebook profile these past few days. It started with Calacanis saying that his Facebook account had been reactivated (Facebook takes 14 days to actually delete the account once you request it) and that he was not the one that reactivated it. Now Facebook has come back to say that they only way this could happen is if he explicitly clicked a cancel deletion button.

    Whoever is to blame it doesn’t matter. What matters is that Facebook has made it overly hard to delete your account. If a user clicks delete then you need to delete it on the spot (after confirmation) – you nobody needs the 14 days to “think about it”.

  • Silvio Rizzi’s Reeder for iPad

    This app is amazingly good, best RSS reader on any platform ever. I can’t decide if Instapaper or Reeder is the best iPad app, they are that close.

  • 8 iPhone 4 Alternatives to Consider

    Umm yeah, nope. He even recommends a 5″ yet to be released tablet, WTF.

  • iPhone 4 Miscellany

    Shawn Blanc:

    When the 20% battery warning comes up on my 3GS it means I go into iPhone survival mode, keeping usage to a minimum to prolong death before I am able to charge it next. But on the 4 a 20% warning will simply mean charge at my earliest convenience (the same way it is for the iPad).

  • How Does Office Web Apps Compare to Google Docs?

    Great look at the two platforms.

  • Safari 5 tested: Chrome, Opera still have JavaScript edge

    One thing is clear: Firefox has lost its edge.

  • Adobe sees Flash on over 250 mln smartphones by 2012-end

    Sue Zeidler:

    By predicting its Flash Player would be in over 250 million smartphones by the end of 2012, Adobe said it expects its Flash software to be supported in 53 per cent of the more than 300 million smartphones expected to ship in 2012.

    I can’t say that I see this happening – ever.