Friday wrap-up, keeping tech in context: Microsoft Surface, nifty NAS, mobile apps galore

Thought I would do a brief post on a few different/disparate happenings/observations today. First of all I…

Thought I would do a brief post on a few different/disparate happenings/observations today.
First of all I wanted to thank folks for the kind notes they sent regarding my post that related a little bit to the new Surface tablet in the offing from Microsoft.
Journalists, especially the young ones that live on and cover the bleeding edge of technology tend to lack a knowledge of historical context around what they cover — and by that I mean years not months or weeks.
Anyway, more rumors leaked today, the one I saw most was that early models of the Surface would have only Wi-Fi. This does not surprise me.
So late in the game (meaning the iPad’s total dominance for the forseeable future), Microsoft would be foolish to have invested the time and resources in negotiating a contract with a particular mobile/wireless carrier or settling on a particular type of wireless chipset to go into the device. Wi-Fi chipsets are commodities these days, meaning they can be purchased in bulk at reasonable cost and thanks to a ubiquitous standard will work anywhere there is Wi-Fi.
Not so the various iterations of carrier networks. There is a lot more cost, preparation and engineering involved with that decision.
I would not doubt (having covered Microsoft and reviewed their products for years now) that they intentionally leaked the rumor to simply measure positive versus negative buzz.
Likely they will also gauge the social media chatter among fans of this network or that one to figure out who they should pursue a partnership with.

Nifty NAS roundup

Cloud, cloud, cloud.
Yes, there is no shortage of buzz around all applications heading to the cloud and I am as guilty as anyone of writing about the topic.
There is still a place, however, for digital storage devices and hardware.
Whether for personal storage of all your photography, music, or video or because you want to back up your practice’s blog that is hosted elsewhere, chances are good you will want to have a network attached storage server.
Check out this great little roundup of network attached storage (NAS) products put together by networking product reviewer Samara Lynn at my alma mater.
These devices are available for relatively low cost, tend to have easy-to-follow graphical user interfaces, sometimes even reporting software to track what files are accessed most and other things.
They also tend to have much faster performance, including the read-write speeds of the discs themsleves and can, in some circumstances even replace traditional servers for serving up relatively low-volume web content.
I recall during my days at PC Magazine when we got our first 1-terabyte NAS server into the lab. It was a behemoth with multiple drives and I think it was sometime a year or two into the new century (I tried doing a search but alas, what was the company when I was there has changed hands too many times).
Now there are single multi-terabyte drives.

Proliferation of adviser/investor-focused mobile applications

I will leave off his full name, but wanted to thank Tom today for asking about a top-10 list of mobile applications he thought we had put together.
Alas I do not think it was us but I have certainly written about and/or reviewed many over the last two years. We do not have a page on our site dedicated as yet to mobile applications but I have saved links to all those that I have covered.
Here they are: