Avi Greengart is the Research Director for Consumer Devices at Current Analysis (Cellphones, Connected Devices, and Digital Home). He also writes for Slashgear, blogs at Home Theater View and Tweets as @AviGreengart. Avi's expertise lies in understanding consumer electronics marketing, consumer behavior, and technology adoption patterns: where new technologies meet the mass market. 

 

 

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January, 2009

1/29/09 - My report on the new T-Mobile/HTC Shadow is up, T-Mobile Shadow Gets Refreshed, Needs More Freshening

1/26/09 - Well here's a bug I've never seen before. A vendor sent over a preproduction QWERTY device and the labels on the punctuation keys don't match what the keys actually do. (I checked to see if there's a key re-mapper working in the background or a foreign keypad layout to blame ...nope.) Strange.

The other bug I ran into was a handset where the phone simply won't stay on after 5 minutes. This is a bug I have, unfortunately, seen before.

Company Assessments on Motorola and Sony Ericsson have been updated. RIM will be next.

Oh, and I finally figured out what the problem was with my other blog, http://www.hometheaterview.com, so it is now showing current posts instead of being frozen in September, 2008.

1/12/09 - I'm back from MacWorld and CES, and my full report on the Palm pre and WebOS will hopefully be finished and published this afternoon [update, the report has been posted: Palm is Back]. In the meantime, here are the other reports we wrote while out West:

bullet CES 2009: RIM’s New BlackBerry Curve 8900 Comes to T-Mobile
bullet CES 2009: SanDisk SlotRadio: Cheap and Easy Content
bullet CES 2009: Motorola Brings the SURF, Tundra and the First Eco-Friendly Phone to Market – the Renew
bullet MacWorld 2009: Apple Keynote

Thanks to issues with our registrar/hosting/DNS/random stupidity this site was down for a week or so. During that time, two reports went live: Samsung Omnia Heads Into the Storm at Verizon Wireless, and my Company Assessment on Apple.

12/30/08 - My report, The Handset Vendor's Guide to Surviving a Crumbling Economy is now up.

12/29/08 -

bulletMy report on Apple has been completed and should be posted shortly. [Update: it's up.]
bulletMy report on Samsung's Omnia at Verizon Wireless has been completed and should be posted shortly. [Update: it's up.]
bulletI'm working on an Advisory Report on 'handsets and the economy' which should be done tomorrow.

12/17/08 - My annual holiday gift guide, the Last Minute, Mostly Non-Obvious Holiday Gift Guide has been posted over at LiveDigitally.com. Due to the bad economy, all items on the list are under $200. Past versions can be found here for 2007, and here for 2006.

12/12/08 - My report, Google’s Android Gains Another 14 Backers – Including Sony Ericsson, Asus and Vodafone is now up.

FedEx has been busy, and I'm testing a bunch of new gadgets which I'm not permitted to name at this time. But, without breaking any non-disclosure agreements, let me just say that I'm starting to wonder whether product designers actually use their own products - or any similar products at all. How hard is it to create a usable "delete" button on a digital imaging device? If you're building a product that has a clock on it, shouldn't it be pretty easy to set the time? Why is it that digital picture frame vendors insist on providing just three or four unlabeled buttons - on the back, where they're out of sight - that have to do double and triple duty?

12/10/08 - I was out last week at Nokia World in Barcelona, so let's catch up on recent reports, shall we?

bulletAdvisory Reports:
bullet What the INQ1 Means for the U.S.
 
bullet Product Intelligence Reports:
bullet Sony Tries (and Fails) to Extend the PSP beyond Games
bullet Palm Treo Pro: Palm’s Nicest Design, But Not Available in Carrier Stores
 
bullet Competitive Intelligence Reports:
bullet Nokia World 2008: Nokia N97 Is the Touchscreen Flagship Nokia Needs… At Least in Terms of Hardware
bullet HTC’s Touch Pro Now Available at Four of the Five Largest U.S. Carriers

My Company Assessment update on Palm is done and will probably be posted next week; my Company Assessment on Apple is underway. I'm also writing up Google's announcement that 14 new companies have joined the Open Handset Alliance; that should be done tomorrow.

I'm testing a whole bunch of devices, including Verizon Wireless' version of the Samsung Omnia, the T-Mobile Cameo digital picture frame, the Samsung Behold (which I really feel ought to have an exclamation point in its name: Samsung Behold!), and a slew of accessories. Some of them will make it into my holiday gift guide, which will be published over at livedigitally.com as soon as I finish writing it.

Apple recently sent over the new MacBook Air and 24" LED backlit LCD monitor. The original Air was underpowered, so using it as your primary PC wasn’t a realistic usage scenario, which meant you’d have a main PC and the Air and two separate sets of data (unless you use something like sugarsync). The notion of plugging the Air into a big monitor/keyboard/mouse when you’re stationary and then taking just the Air to go… it’s a very seductive setup. My original objections to the Air's design -- just a single USB port, no Ethernet, no built in WWAN, and no removable battery -- remain unchanged. But there are advantages, too. I particularly like the Air on the road for its instant sleep/wake capabilities, the stability of OS X, and the ability to slip the Air into the seatback pocket on airplanes. There are plenty of netbooks and subnotebooks that are lighter or smaller, but the combination of 3 lbs., a full sized keyboard, a 13.3” screen, and a huge monitor when stationary is compelling. I feel like Ferris Bueller (describing a vintage Ferrari), “It is so choice. If you have the means, I highly recommend picking one up.”