Nicholas Kolakowski

Seeking to regain some momentum in the e-reader space, Barnes & Noble introduced its full-color Nook at a New York City event Oct. 26. In addition to the color screen, the new Nook includes features-most notably, Web surfing-that bring it more in line with a tablet PC. This raises the inevitable question: Does the Nook […]

Apple has reportedly struck a deal with Unisys to help expand its corporate and government footprint. Under the terms of the agreement, Unisys will provide maintenance and support for Apple products in use by those enterprises. “Most of those organizations are still pretty heavily PC-based,” Gene Zapfel, a managing partner at Unisys, told Bloomberg in […]

Microsoft released Office for Mac 2011 on Oct. 26. For the first time, the Mac version of Microsoft’s productivity software includes Outlook for Mac. Otherwise, the old stalwarts of Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and Messenger continue to be offered-with a few tweaks. Those tweaks include the Office “ribbon” interface, imported from the PC version, and support […]

Barnes & Noble seems determined to blur the line between tablet PC and traditional e-reader, unveiling a full-color Nook at a New York City event Oct. 26. In addition to the 7-inch color display, the Android-based device includes social-networking features via Facebook and Twitter. But will the new Nook actually give the bookseller an advantage […]

Microsoft has unveiled a Release Candidate (RC) for Service Pack 1 for Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7. The final version of SP1 is due early in 2011, according to the company. In addition to a handful of operating system updates, the Release Candidate includes new features for Windows Server, according to an Oct. […]

Microsoft could find itself in a dire position unless it corrects course, seems to be one of the messages in departing Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie’s much-publicized Oct. 28 blog posting. The solution, he wrote, will involve “embracing that which is technologically inevitable”-a future of varied devices connected to the cloud. Across the blogosphere, Ozzie’s […]

Amazon.com may be reluctant to share exactly how many Kindles the company’s sold since it debuted the e-reader, but that hasn’t stopped it from discussing-yet again-the device’s supposedly best-selling status. “It’s still October, and we’ve already sold more Kindle devices since launch than we did during the entire fourth quarter of last year-astonishing because the […]

Amazon.com plans on introducing two new features to its Kindle e-reader franchise: the ability to receive newspapers and other periodicals via the free Kindle app, and lending for Kindle, which will allow e-books to be shared between users. “Each book can be lent once for a loan period of 14 days and the lender cannot […]

In an April letter posted on his company’s Website, Apple CEO Steve Jobs wrote that Adobe Flash “is the number one reason Macs crash.” Furthermore, he added, “We don’t want to reduce the reliability and security of our iPhones, iPods and iPads by adding Flash.” Flash-forward seven months, and now Apple has actually escalated its […]

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer found himself confronted with a particularly hard question at last week’s Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2010: What’s your company’s riskiest bet? “The next release of Windows,” he told the inquiring Gartner analyst. At first that response seemed odd-after all, Microsoft’s latest operating-system release, Windows 7, has sold more than 240 million licenses in […]

Microsoft took another big leap into the cloud this week. On Oct. 19, the company released Office 365 in limited beta. Essentially a rebranding of the company’s BPOS (Business Productivity Online Suite), Office 365 consolidates Microsoft Office, SharePoint Online, Exchange Online and Lync Online onto a unified cloud platform. The beta launch will involve a […]

Apple CEO Steve Jobs used his company’s Oct. 18 earnings call to talk some serious smack about Google Android, referring to it as “very fragmented” and a “mess.” That was in the context of Android phones and tablets. But now, it seems, Jobs will have to combat Android in another area: portable media players. An […]