The PS4 is a great piece of hardware on paper – but actually, Sony said so itself: it’s a super charged PC. This signals that the era of innovative gaming hardware has finally come to an end for the console manufacturers. Sure, there are peripherals such as the Move controller but for what it’s worth, the PS4 as well as the new Xbox (720?) will be based on good old x86 architecture. This isn’t Sony’s fault of course – it’s simply a fact that chip advances by Intel and AMD for high performance workstations and servers have continued to scale Moore’s mountain.

Android is often cited as being a too fragmented ecosystem. Supposedly
this is the reason why Nokia decided to go to bed with Microsoft (actually,
it’s still debatable but I’ve written my thoughts about it here). It doesn’t help that
hardware OEM’s such as Samsung and Sony are slow to upgrade their firmware with
the latest Android release and hence the reason why still almost half of all
Android devices in the market run on Ginger Bread 2.3 (as per http://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/index.html
accessed on 1/28/2013) - but to make things more complicated, it’s no
longer enough to develop and test apps on smartphones and tablets, there is a
whole slew of devices running android coming, and these do not fit in any
particular category.

I had the opportunity to play around with Windows 8 tablet and had some initial observations in how I think Microsoft still fails to make it a viable iPad competitor. But first off, this is not a review and as such, these flaws can be fixed in future revisions. It is also not a Metro focused overview since there are not that many Metro apps available. One would hope that the full Office assortment becomes Metro at some point whereby some of these shortcomings could be better addressed.

Steve Jobs famously proclaimed that the stylus was too cumbersome to use and would not in fact improve workflow and input method. He proofed us right with the iPhone and the iPad – in contrast, Microsoft was all wrong – not just with Microsoft tablet PC that started in 2001, they were wrong even in the early 90’s with Windows for Pen Computer. Bill Gates is a true believer in tablets with stylus but in the last 20 years, he could never muster the innovative minds in his own company to make it work. Likewise, Apple spent a lot of time and money in the 90’s to perfect what was called the Apple Newton. The Newton could decipher handwriting and convert the result into Ascii text.

By now, iPhone apps are so ubiquitous that it’s actually hard no to find an app for a particular problem. Case in point: I had to use a calling card for a conference call which meant entering about 30 digits (including the actual phone number) but most of these digits never change (calling card number, pin, conference code, conference ID) or in other words, there ought to be an app that would dial the number(s) and enter the correct pin at the appropriate time. Turns out there are several apps that do just that.

Much has been said about Siri – I’ve made the case early on here that Siri is a big deal and it seems I’m not the only one thinking that (here, here and here). But besides its relevance in the near future – Siri is not the end solution of computer interaction, in fact its strength is also its biggest limitation: spoken commands.

Blackberry’s are dead – make no mistake. There is one reason and one reason only why RIM even still has a business and that is the infrastructure investment by large corporations in RIM’s secure email system. Nevertheless, even that is rapidly falling out of favor because of low-cost implementations from Good Technology and Microsoft. RIM will continue to sell Blackberry’s for a foreseeable time but it won’t stop the inevitable demise of the business.

Apple and Google are high-flyer's, no doubt – Nokia plays catch-up. Yet, this market is rapidly advancing. Therefore, here are five reasons why I think Nokia is in a great spot to catch up.

Todd Bradley gave an interview on Bloomberg to qualm the latest rumors about WebOs and to discuss HP’s PC business reversal-decision. In that interview, he suggests that HP is going to be everything to all people – corporates, end-users: “consolidation of its parts”