OK so i’m here in Florida for two weeks, hanging out with Michael Mouse and his friends, and i thought that a good way to force myself awake for another hour (to help with the jetlag) would be to list my observations over the last two days of tech from across the pond.
First thing to note – very similar prices. Thats a pretty dull observation though. Sorry. Swifty moving on:
A lot of emphasis on mobile (cellular) phones. Apparently this is because the country is so huge loss of signal is a big issue. Hence AT&T pushing sales on the strength of their coverage. Seems very odd to me, but i’m sure i take coverage completely for granted having not lost it for about seven years. My phone is handling the country fine, but can’t decide between cingular and T-mobile.
Lots of tech on TV. Many, many ads for specific products, for retailers, even for software! Saw one that was for a diagnostics website. They would tell you if your pc should be running faster than it is. There were a lot of happy people glad that their PCs were “fast, at last!”
Total failure to be amazed at my new Asus eee pc 901, upon which i am writing this post. It’s beautiful, has amazing battery life and my model runs Linux. (though it’s available with XP) Running Linux is proving to be quite an adventure, i’m terrible at it, but i wont learn if i don’t push myself! and running Linux on such a low-spec machine would really be helpful, after all i want this netbook to be ultraportable, long lasting and featuring only Word (or equivalent staroffice8) and Firefox. Installing firefox 3 (or anything) onto the OS is pretty tortuous for now, as i am still a Linux n00b, but give me time.
In any case, so far America has been pretty unimpressed with my new favourite piece of technology. I mean, fair enough i haven’t taken it out the house, or shown it to a single american, but strangely enough i still manage to feel morally outraged.
This certainly says more about me that it does about America however.
Posted by Luke 