One of the highlights of my year was a visit in September to Silicon Valley, which was basically a drunked tour of Napa Valley with side trips to Apple, Google, Craigslist thrown in. It all culminated in the Pole Blacks Segwway Polo match against the Silicon Valley After Shocks. Unfortunately we came out of that [...]
Griffin’s Gadgets has been quiet for an unacceptably long period of time by blogging standards - over a month! I’ve nevertheless been busy on some creative projects, at least one of which will hopefully bear fruit in the coming months. In the meantime here’s a wrap of some of the stuff I’ve been writing in [...]
Philip Baker, who worked on Apple’s Newton PDA device back in the early 1990s has an interesting blog post about the iPhone. The hype surrounding the new device which will be released on June 29, is reminiscent of that which greeted the Newton, says Baker. The Newton was killed by poor handwriting recognition. Ironically, Baker [...]
A story of mine in the Herald about the design concepts coming out of HP Labs for the computers, tablets and personal devices of the future. Minimalism seems to be the design trend of the future for HP. Their mock-ups of future devices seem like scaled down, skimpy gadgets of the Apple variety. Everything is [...]
First came the “I’ve been thinking…” memo from Steve Jobs which showed his desire to pursue a DRM-free future for iTunes music. Now he’s signed a deal with record label EMI to feature music at higher quality (256Kbps compared to 128Kbps), for US30c more per track and with no DRM. That means, when it comes [...]
For once, we get something Apple-esque at the same time as everyone else. Apple is extending its “Complete My Album” to the New Zealand iTunes store. It’s a very good idea. The problem up until now is that if you like a particular song and buy it and then take a shine to the album [...]
My overnight pit stop in Hong Kong on the way home from China gave me the opportunity to buy a new iPod to replace the 30GB video iPod I left on a Brisbane-Christchurch flight after the Indy 300 last year.
Some aircraft cleaner inherited one massive progressive rock collection when they plucked that out of the [...]
Some unimaginative editing in the Herald on Sunday led my feature about the psychology of desire, the lust for new gadgets, to be cut in half. Here it is in full…
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF WANT: GADGET PASSION
On January 30, the day Microsoft launched its new computer operating system Windows Vista, Amit Govind walked into Dick Smith [...]
Here’s a link to an article I wrote a couple of weeks ago, but only ran in the Herald today. It’s about the formation of Merlin, a worldwide organisation that bands together independent music trade groups to give them better bargaining power when it comes to negotiating online music and mobile phone download deals with [...]
This release just arrived in my Inbox from Cisco. It was clear that Apple hadn’t nailed down a deal with Cisco when Steve Jobs walked onto the stage at MacWorld in San Francisco yesterday. But most people expected that he must have made some informal agreement with John Chambers that would be followed up with [...]