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Archive for June, 2006

Price Wars by PC Makers

Wednesday, June 14th, 2006

There are a bunch of news stories around this morning about Dell announcing “more aggressive pricing”. Analysts are writing about potential price wars.

Dell apparently also announced a planned improvement to its customer service and support, but either the analysts just didn’t believe it or they didn’t think it was important enough to write about. But I think a serious customer service war between Dell and anyone would be such a huge benefit to the PC users of the world.

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NewsBreak and ListPro Get More Action

Friday, June 9th, 2006

A great review of NewsBreak by Todd Ogasawara showed up on Microsoft’s website. Thanks very much, Todd, for cheering up a day that really needed it (though the weather’s beautiful) (though not as beautiful as it no doubt is in Hawaii).

ListPro got a bunch of sales from being featured on Bits du Jour, and one very nice comment about how well it runs on Kubuntu under wine. I’m fuzzy about what that is, but am very happy it works!

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Many Nice Words about ListPro

Thursday, June 8th, 2006

Thanks, Andrew and Jeff for the very nice words about ListPro.

And thanks to Pocket Goddess and Clinton Fitch for the great reviews too!

To the people who commented and asked: Yes, we’d like to do a Mac version, but I’ll be honest here and say don’t hold your breath waiting for one. Each additional platform takes away from adding features. It’s a difficult trade-off.

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Motorola Q Review

Thursday, June 8th, 2006

Don McDougall has a review of the new Motorola Q phone on the Mobility Site. The “Q” looks a bit like a Pocket PC but is actually a Windows Mobile-based Smartphone with a high-resolution screen. Thanks very much to Don for his kind words about our NewsBreak RSS reader.

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The More Things Change

Friday, June 2nd, 2006

Our second product, back in 1997, was called PhoneTone. It generated touchtone sounds on a Handheld PC, so people could hold up their handhelds to a phone, and have it dial the number. This was before everyone had a cellphone (though they did exist). The program was fairly popular, given that there weren’t all that many Handheld PCs in use at the time. I’m mentioning it today, not out of nostalgia, but because I just ran into information about how to do the same thing on an iPod.

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9 Years

Friday, June 2nd, 2006

I should have some profound thoughts about lasting 9 years. But I don’t.

My less-than profound thoughts are:

9 years is a long time. It probably feels a lot longer to me than it would for many people (I keep hearing people say “time flies” but around me it never does), but it’s a long time in softwareland. Especially handheld software land. We’ve outlived a lot of companies – every time I go through old papers or business cards I’m amazed at the companies who have quietly disappeared, or dropped out of the PDA market.

I have no idea what the next year will bring, except change. This has been true every anniversary (OK, every day) so far, so this isn’t anything new.

I’m sure some of what’s helped us last so long is the fabulous support from our loyal users and friends in the press, so even though this blog isn’t really public yet, I have to say thanks so much to everyone who’s helped. You know who you are.

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