Joe Levi presents Greener Living through Technology

Today Apple announced a long rumored “tablet” pc.

Except it’s not a pc, it’s not even a Mac. It runs the iPhone operating system.

For the most part, it’s just a big iPhone. Well, sort of. It doesn’t even have a phone. You read that correctly: no phone.

There’s no web cam either, so you can’t even do video conferencing. Oh, and no still camera.

So, for the price of a very well equipped netbook you get:

• no physical keyboard
• to wait until late-March/April to actually buy one
• no netcam
• no camera
• a scaled down operating system that runs proprietary applications
• no phone
• an app store that severely limits your ability to run any “phone-like” software (and other’s)
• a pretty screen
• a pretty UI
• “bragging” rights

Or spend the same amount of money on any netbook from any manufacturer, and get everything the iPad is missing, but maybe not the “bragging” rights.

What are your thoughts and opinions? Who among you is brave enough to admit that you’ve pre-ordered one?

Yes folks, you read that correctly. It is now possible to dual boot Android and Windows Mobile on select Windows Mobile devices.

Similar to what we’ve seen in the past, running Android on your WinMo hardware requires that you have a distro of Android to play with. That’s easy enough since Android is open-source. The drawbacks are drivers and configuration which vary by device. In other words, just because you can run Android on your WinMo hardware doesn’t mean everything will work correctly.

Give it a shot and see what you think!

(Hat tip to pocketnow.com for covering this!)

Google Voice is amazing. But I’m not going to tell you why, or try and convince you fence-sitters in this post.

This post is about iPhone and Pre users being left out in the cold and not able to really use Google Voice because there wasn’t an app available for them. Well, that’s not entirely true. There is an iPhone app, but Apple rejected it because Google Voice “duplicated functionality built into the phone” or some nonsense like that.

To combat that, Google has been working feverishly to get a web app completed which duplicates much of the functionality of the app itself. The web app can be located at m.google.com/voice

At the core of Google Voice is its unified voicemail inbox where your SMS and voicemails (and recorded phone calls) all go.  This web app takes care of that. But to really make it useful, you need to be able to make phone calls and send SMS texts through your Google Voice account. This web app allows you to do that as well.

Obviously this isn’t as elegant a solution as we’d all like for iPhone and Pre, but it’s a good example of what can be done via a web app, and how to tell AT&T (et. al.) that users aren’t going to stand for locked down app stores.

Freedom of choice means freedom to walk away from your product and eventually your brand.