Nicholas Kolakowski

Should Microsoft have kept its Courier tablet project alive? In April 2010, Microsoft announced its decision to kill the in-development project, which involved two touch-screens bound together along a central hinge. The book-style device would have offered users the ability to write notes or draw longhand, potentially attracting architects, designers and other creative types. Heading […]

Barnes & Noble could be readying a tablet response to Amazon’s new Kindle Fire, a 7-inch device capable of playing video and music in addition to displaying e-text. The bookseller’s invitations to a Nov. 7 event, at its store in New York City’s Union Square, are topped with a large “N” in the same typeface […]

Apple iPhone 4S Battery Issues According to online reports and several irate commenters on Apples discussion threads, a subset of iPhone 4S units are experiencing significant battery drain in a relatively short period of time: 15 to 20 percent an hour, in some cases. Solution? Apple has yet to release an official statement on the […]

Apple will lose its overwhelming dominance of the consumer tablet space within the next three years, according to a prediction from analyst Jack Gold. His research note also predicts that Microsoft will own roughly 10 percent of the consumer tablet market by that 2014-2015 timeframe, beating out Research In Motion’s QNX operating system with less […]

Asus will release Windows 8 tablets before the end of 2012, according to a corporate slideshow leaking its way across the Internet. That slide popped up first on Netbooknews.de, before drifting over to ZDNet and TechRadar. Beneath a “Windows market” subhead, it suggests Asus will offer a “ticket for selling Windows 8 tablets in Q3’12,” […]

Research In Motion’s BlackBerry Bold 9900 and Torch 9860 will debut on AT&T’s 4G HSPA+ network Nov. 6. The carrier also plans on making the BlackBerry Curve 9360 available Nov. 20. The three devices, all of which run BlackBerry 7 OS, represent part of RIM’s attempt to hold the market-share line until it can release […]

Apple’s iPhone 4S could be experiencing battery issues. According to an Oct. 28 report in The Guardian, Apple engineers have been reaching out to iPhone 4S users in the United Kingdom, in an apparent attempt to grapple with tumbling battery life on the devices. The newspaper quotes one user as saying their battery power dropped […]

Apple has apparently acquired a 3D-mapping company, C3 Technologies, with an eye toward buttressing its topographical capabilities. That news arrives courtesy of the blog 9to5Mac, which suggests that the C3 purchase, combined with earlier acquisitions of mapping-software companies Placebase and Poly9, means Apple is trying to wean its iOS devices off Google Maps. C3 Technologies […]

Microsoft will launch a Kinect for Windows commercial program early in 2012, further expanding the hands-free controller beyond the gaming realm. In a press release, the company described the program as a way to give “global businesses the tools they need to develop applications on Kinect that could take their businesses and industries in new […]

Walter Isaacson’s “Steve Jobs” is set to become the definitive biography of the recently departed Apple CEO, if only because he was granted unprecedented access to not only Jobs, but also a wide variety of friends and rivals and colleagues. For that reason alone, in terms of delving into the psychology and motivations of its […]

Don’t you love it when the kids come home again? Earlier this year, it looked as if Hewlett-Packard, one of Microsoft’s larger manufacturing partners, was planning to flee the Windows reservation. Then-CEO Leo Apotheker not only made the webOS operating system the cornerstone of the company’s TouchPad tablet and smartphones, but suggested the platform would […]

Research In Motion is offering its business customers three BlackBerry PlayBook tablets for the price of two, as it tries to spur adoption of its QNX-based tablet. RIM certainly faces an uphill battle when it comes to tablets. Apple’s iPad dominates the space, in terms of market share, and a variety of Google Android devices […]