I hate rushing reviews for tech stuff.
This is a bit antithetical to what the industry is like now. Everybody wants their hands on a gadget first and to put out the earliest review (usually right when an embargo lifts) and rack up those page views from curious Googling readers.
But given the kinds of stuff we’re talking about — tablet PCs, smart phones, stuff that you really have to live with a while to get your head around and really sort usefulness from novelty, I just don’t think you can review something like an iPad or a radically new kind of phone in a few hours or even a day or two. So I tend to play with stuff over time and then realize that a month has gone by and I still haven’t written anything about (insert name of gadget). Right around the time the PR people start e-mailing me, asking, “So, uh… are you ever gonna review this thing and mail the product back?” is when my crack timing, motivation and work ethic kick in and I write the damn thing. Sometimes I write two in the same article just to clear the decks.
So, here’s some recent stuff that ran in the paper. I did a review that appeared as a Sunday secondary taking a look at the Motorola Xoom tablet and the T-Mobile G-Slate. I liked them both for different reasons, but not as much as the iPad, which should be no surprise to anyone who’s spent some serious time with an iPad or iPad 2. The article in the paper was reverse-published from a Digital Savant blog entry from a little while ago.
A bit of a companion to that is a first-impressions I did of the BlackBerry PlayBook this week.
I’ve got a more detailed story about migrating to a tablet running June 11 that’ll offer tips, app ideas and more to those thinking about moving away from a laptop or desktop to something a little more portable.
Also had a review of the new Mortal Kombat game, which I quite liked. Spent a lot of nights trudging through that story mode (which was ridiculously awful/awesome) and getting back my moves from all those years of Kombo muscle memory.
And on Saturday, I wrote a lengthy “Raising Austin” column about kids, security and Facebook. I got to talk a little about a trip I took to Dallas last year to speak at a panel for Jewish Family Services on the topic and to tie it in with some recent news. Sometimes I do speaking stuff or freelance and worry that it won’t be useful for anything but making a little money, but other times it pays off in other ways and helps me a lot at my day job.
That’s about it for now. Summer has kicked off her in New Braunfels and we went to Schlitterbahn three times in one weekend. That is how the Gallagas roll when it is hot outside and we have season passes.