Much was said in recent days and weeks about Research In Motion’s BlackBerry PlayBook, but that was based on the pre-launch software, which was updated yet again on the April 19 launch date. We can expect extremely frequent further updates to the PlayBook software for the foreseeable future — for all I know, almost every ...

We hear a lot about the impact of Apple’s iPad 2 these days, and we will surely hear as much about the expected iPhone 5 in June. Estimates of annual shipments for these products vary, of course, but they tend to be in the general ballparks of 50 million and 100 million units, respectively. The ...

Here are four reasons why the  iPad is a guaranteed success. 1. The stores. The stores are Apple’s main weapon. Anyone else can make a tablet for Web surfing, book reading, movie viewing, whatever: Dell, HP,Acer,Google, Amazon, Microsoft or Lenovo. But none of those companies have the stores. There are two reasons why this is ...

Tuesday night, Hewlett Packard reported a 12% decline in the “consumer” portion of its personal systems group. That’s mostly laptops. With this news fresh in mind, I decided to visit 15 of the cafes located closest to the HP headquarters, mostly within a 2-mile radius, to see what the people closest to HP were using ...

Nokia claims that it will unveil its long-term operating system roadmap on Feb. 11. We all know why this is crucial. Most of us have not seen a Nokia smartphone user since before the last Iraq war, and Nokia smartphones no longer show up on airport radar or sonar systems. Just by looking around, one ...

Among the numerous thousands of new products and announcements at CES (Consumer Electronics Show) Las Vegas 2011, there were only two that really mattered, in terms of moving the ball forward for the tablet category. These were the first display of Google’s Android 3.0 Honeycomb software, showed for the Motorola Xoom tablet, as well as ...

Amid Android’s strong success in 2010, Google has been hard at work preparing its “silent killer” attack on the highly concentrated PC operating system market. This was originally announced in July 2009, with further clarification by November 2009. I saw it clear as crystal then, but it was too early for an investment theme. It ...

The new frontiers in personal computing have unmistakably become the smartphone and the tablet. In the smartphone arena, Apple(AAPL) is hampered by its reliance on AT&T(T), while it is enjoying a supremely successful near-monopoly in the 10-inch tablet segment. This all changes in January, 2011. Here is a timeline for how it will likely unfold: ...

Amazon reported spectacular September quarter results — sales up 39% and profits up 16%, from a year ago. At the same time, the U.S. federal government concluded a September fiscal year-end with a $1.3 trillion budget deficit, or $325 billion per quarter on average. More than any other retailer in America, Amazon has its sales ...

For all the talk of dramatic change in the smartphone landscape over the last two or three years, they pale in comparison to the impact of what’s next: The shift from circuit-switched voice to VoIP, or Voice over Internet Protocol. This has been talked about for 10 years, but the stars are finally aligning to ...