Gadgets

Former Apple evangelist and professional self promoter Guy Kawasaki spent Friday morning at Macworld Expo helping developers pimp their software. While he was at it, he managed to deliver some obligatory jabs to Microsoft and Google.

“Back then the Mac division was the largest collection of egomaniacs,” said Kawasaki, reflecting on his past job evangelizing the Mac platform. “But that record has been broken by Google.”

From 1983 to 1987, Kawasaki was Apple’s Mac evangelist, who reached out to software developers to convince them to develop applications for the Macintosh back when the platform had a diminutive install base.

Before Apple’s iPad was even confirmed to exist, several publications (including Wired) flaunted concept demos of tablet apps to show how excited they are for the future of magazines. And now Andy Warhol’s Interview is next in line, claiming it will have an iPad version of its magazine ready to launch when the tablet ships next month.

The video, which is posted on Huffington Post and not embeddable (grumble), looks swanky. The app seamlessly blends together video, audio, photos and text.

Computer geeks over the weekend had a dorkgasm at the sight of a report hinting at an upcoming MacBook Pro equipped with Intel’s latest mobile processor.

Readers of MacRumors.com spotted Geekbench benchmark results for what appears to be a MacBook Pro featuring a 2.66GHz Core i7 M620, a high-end dual core processor featuring Intel’s Hyperthreading and Turbo Boost technologies.

The benchmark results appear plausible, as they suggest the alleged Core i7 MacBook Pro outperforms 2.66GHz MacBook Pros with the current Core 2 Duo chip.

Tablets are all the rage this year and now with the launch of the iPad, Apple rival Google can’t resist getting into the game.

A user interface designer at Google, Glen Murphy, has posted mock-ups of a tablet running Google’s Chrome operating system along with a video demo of how users could potentially interact with the machine.

Google introduced Chrome OS two months ago as a lightweight, browser-based operating system that would boot up in seven seconds or less.

Remember the classic Atari joystick, a sure candidate for the least ergonomic game controller in history? Now you can buy a new one.

In case you have successfully blotted the memory from your brain, let me remind you how things were. The joystick, curiously named as it brought he very opposite of joy to your poor wrists, was a short, stiff stick wedged into a thick, hard to grip base. Moving the stick away from its center was akin to crushing a ball-bearing between your fingers: impossible, painful, and it resulted in bruising.

Now the folks at Retro Thing, a blog dedicated to the wonders of yesteryear, have re-fashioned this wrist-twisting classic, and brought it into the modern age.

In addition to launching its tablet Wednesday, Apple will likely introduce a new programming solution for iPhone developers to easily tablet-enable their apps.

Developers polled by Wired said they expected additions to Apple’s software-development kit that would help make iPhone apps work at any resolution, for full-screen support on the rumored device.

Instapaper, the incredibly useful “read later” service for the web, the iPhone and pretty much any e-reader, has just updated its Kindle support to make it even better.

Instapaper lets you click a bookmarklet to save whole articles, recipes or anything in your browser for reading later. Using an iPhone app or e-reader, you can then read long articles offline, and at your leisure.

Previously, as we have detailed, you could download a .mobi file from the Instapaper site for use with the Kindle, or opt to have it send direct over the air (Amazon will charge for the latter method).

Before Toyota made cars, it made robots. It’s making them again, and wants to use them in a most unusual place.

When it was founded in 1926, Toyoda Automatic Loom Works (as it was then known) manufactured automatic fabric looms that could detect problems and shut down automatically. It marketed these revolutionary devices as having “autonomation” — automation with human intelligence.

Now Toyota, looking ahead at the second half of this century, sees a mounting health care crisis and aging population coming to Japan.

Hidden among the barcode readers, music players and games in the marketplace for Android software may be apps that could steal your online banking credentials or infect your phone.

Google removed about 1 percent of the apps posted to the Android Market last year, according to a 2009 filing Google made to the FTC (.pdf). While most of those apps were removed because of user complaints about adult content or copyright violations, two apps attempted to gain access to users’ financial information, according to InformationWeek.

Some say that memories are priceless. This may be true, but memory has a price, and it’s a high one. Panasonic’s new anxiety-inducing, eggs-in-one-basket SDXC card packs 64GB into a sliver the size of a toenail. The price is an equally disturbing $600.

John Nack and John Peterson over at Adobe decided to see just how much this was, comparing the price of memory to the price of gold.