Tuesday Tech Talk #71

Hello folks and welcome to a late edition of Tuesday Tech Talk. A lot of news since last week so let’s dive right in.

iOS 4.2 has Arrived!

The big news for iPad users is iOS 4.2 is here! What that means is if you have an iPad, you can now arrange apps into folders saving you lots of screens to slide through to find your favorite app (I reduced my screen from 6 to 1) and you can also multitask on it as well. It is awesome to run Pandora in the background on the iPad now especially when you consider the speakers on the iPad are much better than the speaker on the iPhone (on my 3GS anyway). In addition the update is also for the iPhone and iPod touch, it allows all of the devices to perform AirPlay and AirPrint operations. With AirPlay, if you start to watch say a YouTube or iTunes video on your iOS device, you can choose to switch it over to your AppleTV device. It works pretty awesome as I like to browse YouTube videos on my iPad and play them to my TV. Also it works for music as well. With AirPrint, if you have a supported printer (currently 11 HP printers with ePrint), then you can print documents and photos from your iOS devices. However, if you don’t have one of those 11 printers, there is a sweet workaround from Printopia. For $9.95, it will allow you to print to any printer that is shared on a local WiFI network. They also offer a demo version so you can try before you buy, but it is worth the $10! It also allows you to send files right to your DropBox or directly to the desktop of your computer, so it does more than just print.

Netflix offers streaming only plan

On the same day as the iOS 4.2 release, Netflix revealed a $7.99 streaming only plan for US customers. They also raised prices on the disc plans as well, but with more and more content available via streaming, we decided to drop our plan down from 3 discs to 2 and save about $3 a month.

Stuck at JFK on Delta, play with an iPad

Some eateries at the Delta terminal at JFK airport now have iPad’s at booths where you can order food and drinks from it and use it for general browsing. The good news is you don’t have to order food to use the devices. Course with 10 million iPad’s sold now, chances are you probably already have one.

Microsoft stores not matching Apple Store success

To the surprise of well nobody, Microsoft’s retail stores are not coming close to matching the success of Apple retail locations. Could it be that people know a rip off when they see one and will visit the genuine article? I mean what will Microsoft offer at its stores that is Microsoft made beyond Windows and Office? The computers they sell are third party brands you can find at Best Buy.

Windows Phone 7 a Flop?

Developers are quite concerned about building apps for a phone that despite much publicity, has not had the sales impact it had hoped for. Quite frankly, they are fighting an uphill battle, you have the iOS, Android, and Blackberry fighting for market share and that is not including HP’s PalmOS, all fighting for market share, it is hard to carve out your own with that much competition. Not to mention the interface on the phone is not appealing at all as compared to an iPhone or Android device. Only time will tell but as of right now, they are slow out of the gate.

Well, that is going to do it for this week’s Tuesday Tech Talk. See you all next week back on the normal time frame.