Posted 11/19/09 at 12:30:18 PM by Will Smith

If I asked you in 1993, “What’s a PC?”, you’d probably have pointed to the beige box sitting under your desk at work. In 1999, if I asked you the same question, the odds are good that you’d have shown me a grey box in your den. In 2005, you would probably have shown me a shiny new notebook. But, as I sit here in 2009, I’m finding it difficult to answer this seemingly simple question.

Sitting on my desk, I have four extremely powerful computing devices, each with its own strengths and weaknesses. Let’s decide which of these are personal computers together.

Machine A features four CPU cores, and a host of GPUs and coprocessors. Machine B is more modest, with three CPU cores and a decent GPU. Machine C is even more modest, with a dual-core CPU, but a woefully inadequate GPU. Machine D pushes a lot of its workload onto dedicated processors, but still sports a dedicated GPU.

So, what’s all this powerful hardware? A home-built gaming PC, an Xbox 360, a Lenovo X200s notebook, and an iPhone 3GS.

Continue reading after the jump.

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Posted 10/01/09 at 11:40:00 AM by Will Smith

Once upon a time, I dismissed the iPhone as a wannabe smartphone, lacking the key features that truly warranted that label. Since I wrote that column about two years ago, Apple has gone on a feature-adding rampage—adding push email, support for Exchange servers, third-party applications, and a veritable alphabet soup of new acronyms (GPS, MMS, and 3G, for starters). Two years into the iPhone era, the device is so much more than a phone with an iPod attached— it’s an instant-on, always-connected, pocket-sized computer.

On paper, the 3GS doesn’t seem like a major upgrade from the previous-generation iPhone, especially when you consider that many of the bullet points on the 3GS’s feature list came to older iPhones in the form of the 3.0 firmware release. And at first glance, even the new 3GS-exclusive features—a faster CPU, more memory, a more capable GPU, faster network connectivity, a higher-resolution camera that can finally shoot video, voice control for key features, and a compass—seem like a mixture of unsexy, incremental, shoulda-been-there-already features, and just plain meh. Worse, some of the features require carrier support, so things like MMS messages, higher-speed HSPDA support, and tethering won’t be available in the United States until AT&T deigns to support them.

Continue reading this review after the jump!

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Posted 08/28/09 at 10:10:31 AM by Pulkit Chandna

The Android Market abounds with Augmented Reality (AR) apps just as the iTunes apps store waits for its own deluge of such apps. Although the first wave of AR iPhone apps was expected to follow after the launch of the new iPhone OS, Yelp has shipped the first installment of augmented fun to keep US-based iPhone users occupied in the interim. The augmented reality feature is only meant for the iPhone 3Gs.

The functionality has been built into the new Yelp app, which can be downloaded from the app store. Shaking the iPhone 3Gs three times when using the new Yelp app invokes a view called “the Monocle.” The app overlays markers for restaurants, bars and other nearby businesses onto the camera view. As is the custom, the app uses iPhone’s GPS, camera and compass to find and display landmarks. This is the first AR app on the US app store.

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