My original review from the Jan 29, 1984 Los Angeles Times

by Larry Magid
As published on January 29, 1984 in the Los Angeles Times

I rarely get excited over a new computer. But Apple’s Macintosh, officially introduced last Tuesday, has started a fever in Silicon Valley that’s hard not to catch. My symptoms started when I talked with some devotees from Apple and the various companies that produce software, hardware and literature to enhance the new computer. By the time I got my hands on the little computer and its omni-present mouse, I was hooked. Apple has a winner.

The Mac, which retails for $2,495 is about 14 inches tall and takes up about the same amount of desk space as a piece of 8 1/2 x 11 paper. It is smaller and lighter than most of the so called “portable” machines. The entire system can be slipped into an optional ($99) padded carrying case to be hoisted over your shoulder or placed under an airline seat. The case and computer together weigh 22 pounds.

Of course any computer’s real value is based on what you can do with it. For the first 100 days, Apple is including two valuable programs, MacPaint and MacWrite free with the machine. MacWrite has most basic word processing features with one outstanding addition. It can vary the size and style of your type on the screen and on paper, when used with Apple’s new $495 Image Writer printer. This computer/printer/software combination produces the first truly “what you see is what you get” word processing system on a moderately priced microcomputer. You can vary the type size from 9 point (about the size used in most newspapers) to 72 point headlines. You can also change your type style, selecting an Old English font or one of the more common type styles. Your type can be in bold, italic, underline or even shadow print. All this magic is controlled by the computer itself — the software merely takes advantage of it. › Continue reading…

by Larry Magid
reposted from CNET.com

A long awaited report from the Internet Safety Technical Task Force concludes that children and teens are less vulnerable to sexual predation than many have feared. The report also questions the efficacy and necessity of some commonly prescribed remedies designed to protect young people.

The task force was formed as a result of a joint agreement between MySpace and 49 state attorneys general.

Over the past couple of years, several state AGs have been looking into potential dangers to youth, and some have called for social-network sites to use age verification technology to confirm the ages of users in an attempt to prevent adults from or interacting online with minors. The task force includes representatives of Internet and social-networking companies, security and identity authentication vendors, and nonprofit advocacy organizations. It’s chaired by John Palfrey of Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

Disclosure: I served as a member of the task force, representing ConnectSafely.org, a nonprofit internet safety organization I co-founded along with Anne Collier. ConnectSafely receives financial support from MySpace, Facebook, Google, Yahoo, and other Internet and social-networking companies. I am also founder of SafeKids.com and am on the board of directors of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which is represented on the task force.

Based on data analyzed by its Research Advisory Board, the task force concluded that “actual threats that youth may face appear to be different than the threats most people imagine” and that “the image presented by the media of an older male deceiving and preying on a young child does not paint an accurate picture of the nature of the majority of sexual solicitations and Internet-initiated offline encounters.”

While the task force found that youth risk from predators is a concern, the overwhelming majority of youth are not in danger of being harmed by an adult predator they meet online. To the extent that young people have received an unwanted online sexual solicitation, data from a 2000 study and a 2006 follow-up from the Crimes Against Children Research Center concludes that “youth identify most sexual solicitors as being other adolescents (48 percent in 2000; 43 percent in 2006) or young adults between the ages of 18 and 21 (20 percent; 30 percent), with few (4 percent; 9 percent) coming from older adults, and the remaining being of unknown age.” › Continue reading…

One of the biggest surprises of CES was Palm’s Pre smart phone that some are calling an iPhone killer. While I don’t expect this or anything else to kill the iPhone, it does appear that Palm could again become a major player in the smart phone market.

As a product reviewer I will reserve final judgment until I can carry one around and put it through its paces, but based on the few minutes I got to use the phone at CES, I am very impressed.

Until now the iPhone was the only mobile device with a decent browser but it looks like Palm might break that stronghold. Like the iPhone that Pre has a touch screen with a “multi-touch” feature that lets you pinch two fingers to zoom in or out of a web page. There is also a gesture that lets you see a single column of text which will make it easier to read news sites. You can also use the pinching gesture on photos and, like the iPhone, you can use a finger to flick a picture or other object to move it on or off the center of the screen.

One thing I like better than the iPhone interface is Palm’s use of “cards,” which are like windows for applications and tasks. A web page would appear as a card as would an email message, an instant messaging session or any other application. You can have as many cards as you want and easily flick from one to another with a finger. This avoids cluttering up that little 3-inch screen with overlapping windows while still providing a multitasking environment. Nice touch.

Like the iPhone the Pre has WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS and 3G cellular data service. It will come only in an 8-gigabyte model. The good news is that the battery is removable, but unfortunately there’s no card slot for additional memory. The phone also has a two megapixel camera with an LED flash.

A big difference between the Pre and the iPhone is that the Pre has a pull out physical QWERTY keyboard below the touch screen. The keys appear to be pretty small and close together but they are rounded in such a way as to make it pretty easy to avoid making mistakes – at least based on the one paragraph of text that I typed. Palm has a lot of experience building mobile devices and they know something about sculpting little keyboards. You can dial the phone with the keyboard or bring up an onscreen dial-pad. There is no optional on-screen QWERTY keyboard. It seems as if that would have been an easy thing to offer for people who want it.

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CBS News Technology Analyst Larry Magid speaks to Wall Street Journal columnist Walter Mossberg about Palm’s new Pre cell phone and Yahoo’s new Internet TV.

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What I like most about the Pre is the way it synchronizes data between the device and your various online profiles. Although you can plug in a USB cable to copy media and other files to the Pre, you don’t use a cable to synch it to Outlook or other software as you would with the iPhone and most other smart phones. Instead, you give it your profile information for Gmail, Yahoo, Facebook and other “cloud” services and let it automatically gather information to populate your contact list and calendar. If you change data on the web or on the phone it automatically updates and it can assemble information from different sources. For example, it may grab a contact’s business phone number from your Gmail contact list and that person’s cell phone from his or her Facebook profile. If that person changes or adds contact information to his or her profile, the Pre gets it right away. Ultimately this could greatly simplify the way we keep up with our friends and associates by letting them update and maintain their own contact information that you access on your device.

As Apple proved with its application store, the ability to run third party programs is important to a lot of smart phone users. Palm is working with third party developers to create applications based on standard web development tools including HTML and CSS. Tom Conrad, the CTO of Pandora told me that his company was able to develop a Pre application in three days compared to the “three month process” it took to develop a similar application for the iPhone.

Palm has signed an exclusive deal with Sprint whose 3G network, from my experience, is quite good. For heavy users, Sprint offers a $99 per month “Simply Everything” plan. AT&T has a $99 unlimited voice plans but charges an extra $30 for a data plan.

The phone is expected to be available “in the first half of 2009″ but pricing wasn’t disclosed. I’m guessing it will cost about $199 to compete with Apple’s 8-gigabyte iPho

The first event at the Consumer Electronics Show, called CES Unveiled, actually takes place a couple of days before the show officially opens. The press reception, which is sponsored by CES’ host organization, the Consumer Electronics Association, is an opportunity for a small group of exhibitors to preview what they plan to show at CES.

As usual, products range from somewhat wacky to actually practical. One of the more unusual products was a 3D Webcam from Manchester, U.K.-based Promotion & Display Technology.

The Minoru 3D Webcam has two lenses, which makes it look a little like a cute creature from outer space. You mount it on your monitor, and it transmits moving images in 3D and, yes, your viewers need special glasses to see you in 3D. The software that comes with the Minoru has “stereoscopic anaglyphic processing,” that creates the 3D effect.

The $89 price includes the camera, software, and five pairs of red and cyan 3D glasses. I have no idea if it will catch on with the public, but it did win the Fan Favorite award at the Consumer Electronics Association I-stage event in October. The folks behind this product had better hope that those fans, and plenty more like them, have the vision to turn into customers for this unique device.

Lenovo’s ThinkPad W700ds has a second pull-out screen.

(Credit: Lenovo)

Also on the wacky side, Lenovo showed off a notebook that definitely looks strange but might actually be practical. The ThinkPad W700ds has two screens (the “ds” stands for dual screen). The primary screen is 17 inches, but if you need extra screen real estate, you can slide out the 10.6 secondary screen from the right side of the unit, adding about 40 percent more screen space.

The secondary screen can be adjusted to your preferred viewing angle, “similarly to how a car’s rear-view mirror tilts,” according to Lenovo. The idea is to give you additional space while working with photographs, Web browsers, or other applications that might otherwise overwhelm the notebook’s main screen.

Lenovo, which several years ago acquired IBM’s personal-computer division, also introduced its first all-in-one integrated desktop PC, which features a remote control that gamers can use like the innovative controller of the Nintendo Wii. Its “motion drive” feature allows the user to use the remote as if it were a virtual tennis racket or other moving object.

The remote also doubles as a voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) handset that you can use to make Internet phone calls. The computer itself uses various flavors of Intel Core 2 Duo processors, an optional ATI Radeon graphics card, up to 4GB of memory, and as much as a terabyte (1,000 gigabytes) of hard-drive space.

And for anyone coveting the ultrathin MacBook Air whose wallet might be too thin to actually afford one, help is on the way from MSI, a Taipei-based company that showed off its X-Slim Series X320 “Super Slim” Notebook PC which, at its biggest point, is only .77 inches thick, which is pretty close to the thickness of the Apple MacBook Air.

Unlike the Air, which starts at $1,799, the MSI notebook is expected to sell for between $700 and $1,000 when it becomes available later this year.

After devouring plenty of finger food at the reception, I’m not sure how thin I’ll be, considering that hard-working journalists like me will have to attend several more receptions before CES is over. But it’s my duty to press on, so damn the calories, and pass the egg rolls.