It's finally upon us – the last working week of 2012 – and for those of us at TechZone360, it's been a pretty festive week. No doubt most of our readers enjoyed the same – in whatever fashion each celebrates the holiday.
Next week is more of the same as we head full speed into the New Year, and we'll be back on Wednesday, January 2, 2013 to begin another huge year of technology amazement – all of it covered ongoing in TechZone 360.
That said, we do have some very interesting things to share these last several days. Let's start with the idea of tablets. In our own home, our better half received a 4th-generation iPad. So score at least one for Apple. With the iPad mini, the Surface, the Amazon Kindle and the Google Nexus, among many others, there are plenty of options when it comes to choosing a device for on-the-go needs.
How did the rest of the tablet vendor community do?Meanwhile, though plenty of iPads of some assorted generations no doubt lurked under Christmas trees across the world, there's already some fresh word emerging about the next iPad's specs, as well as a possible release date. The next "big" iPad will no doubt be thinner and lighter. Perhaps we’ll see it soon.
Maybe you and your family love BlackBerry smartphones. In that case, odds are you probably stuck an IOU under the Christmas tree, since the release of the long-awaited new BlackBerry smartphones is just around the corner. If you happen to be wondering for what reason you slipped that IOU under the tree, we have some insights to share along the lines of what the new BlackBerry toys are very likely to look like.
Whatever the next BlackBerry toys are going to be, they better deliver on an Applesque level of WOW factor, or RIM can more or less kiss itself goodbye. Do they?
We're all now busy with our new mobile toys, and one thing many of us want to do is load Instagram onto our mobile devices. But we all know that Instagram decided to try and pull a fast one on us by changing its terms of use in some rather onerous ways that seemed to allow the company free reign over the rights to photos uploaded to the company's servers. This measure included allowing Instagram the right to resell those pictures to whomever it wished, and without having to cut in the people who actually took the pictures and did the uploading.
In fact, Instagram's Terms of Service change has now brought a lawsuit with it. Though Instagram pulled back on its proposed changes, at least somewhat, that wasn't enough to stop the machinery of justice from carrying on apace.
Pay attention; it may all affect you in some ways you may not have considered.
It’s almost 2013, and the Web is of course inevitably loaded up with articles about the way technology will improve our lives in the coming year or years. But the end of the year also happens to be a good time to look back and examine what we’ve lost with technology. We know what digital communication has given us, but what has it taken away? It’s well worth thinking about, especially in light of what Instagram wanted to take away from us.
We'll leave 2012 behind with that in mind. Technology does often take away some of the things we've long cherished, but then again technology adds so many new things that all in all balances everything out between old and new.
We wish everyone an enormously happy and fruitful New Year!
