THE GOOGLE DROID: and Other Thoughts From Scottsdale

Even though I’m on vacation in beautiful Scottsdale, Arizona, I can’t resist telling you about the latest techie innovations.

Recently a new phone was made available to Verizon customers in two models with a new Droid OS from Google. At first look it is quite an impressive smart phone. The two models covered are the Motorola models that flip open to reveal a keypad, and the Eris, which is a touch screen accessible device, similar to the iPhone.

The Motorola Droid has a slide out keypad and is presented with 24 bit color ( 16.7 million ) and the Eris has 16 bit colors with ( 65,536 ). The HTC Droid Eris has a 528 MHz MSM7600 processor with 147 MB of memory.  The Motorola Droid has the 550 MHz ARM Cortex A8 with 256 MB of memory.

It is only a matter of time before different versions of the Droid OS will make it to additional US carriers. Hopefully other carriers will not do what Verizon has handed to their customers.

If one cancels a contract with a smart phone at Verizon, the company punishes their customers by doubling the cancellation fees to $350.00.  In this economy that may be interpreted as an arrogant move. Ya think?

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Apple recently introduced some new products that have quite a shine to them. The new 27inch iMac has a drop dead gorgeous screen and is outfitted with a faster set of processors and its upper limit on Ram now tops out at 16GB.

Also Apple spiffed up its Mac Mini line. It’s amazing what they stuff in such a small footprint. In addition to its $599.00 and $799.0 model they have brought out a Mac Mini server for $1000.0

This is a steal at this price, the profile comes with Mac "Snow Leopard" Server installed and two 500Gig drives for a total storage of 1Terabyte.  The amazing part of this deal is that Mac OXS Server usually sells for $499.99 alone. Not do you get a Server with one of the most modern OS’s in the world but an actual server, with unlimited client licenses.

The Mac Mini server will run a home office network, a small business with no problem. Yes, this server can be set up just the way an ordinary server can be set up with, web clients, standard directories, mail application serving, blogging and podcasts.

The footprint is the same size as the regular Mac Mini, this one just has two drives instead of one drive and a super drive (CD/DVD read and write capability).  It can be set up headless ( without a monitor) just like most other servers and it can be controlled remotely if desired with the appropriate permission settings. For those wanting a real server at a budget price, this very well may be the way to go.

Apple has also recently released Mac OSX update 10.6.2 for Snow Leopard, which fixes the very random disk erasure problem along with a host of other fixes and enhancements.

The iPhone has a new security application for $5.00 named Undercover, which will allow one to report a stolen phone. Here is a video that shows how Undercover works.

Apple being very proactive this week also released Safari 4.0.4 update, which contains stability, security and performance enhancements.

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Microsoft has opened two new stores to sell Windows PC’s and Microsoft products. The stores are in California and Scottsdale Arizona. I recently visited the store in Scottsdale and was reminded how well done the store layout was presented for the customer.

Much like the Apple stores there were wooden tables with ample spacing for customers. There were Sony Vaio laptops, Dell laptops along with HP and Acer. Obviously one could purchase Windows products from the Microsoft store as well.

The store employees were as courteous as in the Apple store, with less tattoos and body piercings noticed as a casual observation.

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NASA’s Ames Research Center has developed a chemical sensor for cell phones, which can detect small amounts of ammonia, chlorine gas or methane in the ambient air surrounding you. This is accomplished with a silicon based microprocessor having 16 nanosensors that will transmit data to other phones or a computer via WI-FI or telephone.

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Your security is being assaulted every day, as I have written about in previous articles. A current attack was the attempt by the Federales to subpoena the IP address of every visitor to a website on a given day. Read about it here: Anatomy of a Bogus Subpoena.

As the dollar continues to drop, our government is becoming more totalitarian in nature, as Democrats and RINO’s attempt to steal your children’s future. Governor Perry of Texas came out and said publicly what a lot of us have been thinking:  that Obama taking us down the road to socialism.

As I replenish the spirit and energy on vacation this week in Scottsdale, I am reminded of what a great vast country this is. We have so much to defend and protect and cherish.

The most important technology is you, protect it, nourish it and be grateful for what we have. San Antonio is going to be quite a Rendezvous.  See you all there.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Marco