Jason Brooks

Nokia’s E71 is a slim, feature-packed smart phone with an excellent thumb keyboard and enough battery life to last a full work day. In my tests of the E71, I found its many hardware and software features a bit awkwardly implemented in places, particularly compared with the more modestly equipped-and more elegantly implemented-Apple iPhone 3G. […]

Back in January, I wrote a column, “I want more from Firefox,” in which I described how my growing affection for Web applications was coming into conflict with my growing impatience with the immaturity of Web browsers as application hosts. Isolation between the Web pages or apps running atop my browser is what I sought […]

During my recent interview with Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst, I was struck by his assertion that if you don’t need–and aren’t getting–bulletproof uptime from your desktop operating system, then it doesn’t make sense to be paying for it. He has a good point. The fundamental job of an operating system is running applications and […]

Red Hat, which bills itself as the world’s leading open-source solutions provider, has managed to make free software pay by gathering, extending and packaging Linux and complementary open-source components into certified and supported products that are ready for enterprise consumption. As the focus of IT attention shifts to new platforms, including virtualized environments, Red Hat […]

Platform-as-a-service providers, such as Salesforce.com, Amazon.com and Google, offer developers a means of coding their applications and allowing a provider in the cloud to not only handle the details of hosting and scaling these works, but make them available for sale as well. Etelos is a PAAS provider with a familiar twist. Where other frameworks […]

Maybe you can’t judge a book by its cover, but the label that Apple has chosen for the second version of its popular smart phone sums up the unit awfully well. The iPhone 3G is more or less the same device as the one Apple launched in June 2007, with the addition of a faster, […]

Recently, my colleague, Jim Rapoza, expressed his concerns that today’s relatively wide-open world of computing will give way to a future that’s locked down and boxed away into convenient little appliances that perform simple, constrained tasks and that cannot be easily hacked. The PlayStationization of computing is nigh, and I say, bring it on.Freewheeling, tweaked-to-the-gills, […]

Our own Scott Ferguson is reporting today on the licensing snafu stemming from the ESX Server 3.5 Update 2 that VMware began shipping on Aug. 1: “VMware released an alert Aug. 12 to warn customers and partners about problems with an update to the 3.5 version of VMware ESX and ESXi virtualization products. The update […]

Lately there’s been a lot of chatter about an operating system merger made in tech echo chamber heaven: Symbian plus Android. Most recently my colleague over at the Storage Station recounted a conversation between himself and Nokia Forum Director Tom Libretto that called to mind a familiar movie scene. So you’re telling me there’s a […]

After spending some time with Microsoft’s forthcoming Exchange Online service, I’ve been thinking about the promise-as well as the current reality-of the company’s software-plus-services strategy for addressing IT’s apparently cloud-filled future. The software-plus-services pitch goes something like this: Rather than dive headfirst into cloud-based services, organizations and individuals should pursue a blended strategy, based on […]

In one of the most substantial incarnations of its software-plus-services model to date, Microsoft is preparing to throw its hat into an already-crowded ring of hosted Exchange providers. In fact, Microsoft’s Web site lists more than 30 hosted Exchange providers operating in the United States. Perhaps the most significant thing about the company’s Exchange Online […]

Whether you call it hosted e-mail or e-mail as a service or utility e-mail, alternatives to traditional on-premises e-mail have been growing in prominence recently. And it makes sense: At best, e-mail services represent a simple cost of doing business-something that diverts a portion of IT staff resources away from projects more closely aligned with […]