Buzz is a fickle thing. It can carry you away on waves of anticipation, promising the fulfillment of all your dreams. But buzz can turn on your just as easily. Nothing can be as good as pre-launch hysteria will make it out to be, and when that new device we’ve been waiting for with such yearning doesn’t turn out to be the cure for all the world’s ills, it can get ugly.

Apple is very familiar with the changeable nature of buzz. Anyone remember the Newton? I do. I wrote two books about it. (No really, two books.) I’m sure somewhere in Apple’s collective hind brain lurks that traumatic memory. Just as I’m sure more than a couple of Apple execs enjoyed some truly epic night terrors on the lead-up to the iPhone launch, probably involving iPhones morphing into Newtons on the store shelves and angry mobs of disappointed consumers hurling globs of egg freckles at Apple’s corporate headquarters. (more…)

It took three fruitless pilgrimages to our local Apple Store before The Geek Beat could achieve iPhoneness, and even then an insider tip was required (a tip which allowed us to bypass the lines altogether and didn’t even require we beat the sunrise – see below).

In the last 24 hours we’ve done little else but play around and take some photos (Exhibit A to your right). Our initial impressions? Wow! I mean, it’s not perfect – lack of an instant messaging client currently tops our list of complaints – but still, wow! (more…)

Arthur C. Clarke’s Third Law states, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” And if there is a downside to being a tech geek, besides the whole not-being-able-to-get-a-date thing, it’s that this is an almost impossibly high standard for most technology to reach. Nothing is magical to us, because we know how it works.

Except for I-Tech’s Virtual Laser Keyboard (VLK). (more…)

There’s not much in life dad can lay claim to; unless, of course, you count taking out the trash. By the time your kids reach adulthood, just about everything Dad considered to be his and his alone has been borrowed, broken, beaten-up or just plain co-opted by others in the house.

Except the remote.

The last vestige of alpha maleness remaining in our PC world (the other PC), many “enlightened” men still reserve exclusive control of the TV remote like some treasured weapon of war from a bygone era. Even the most sensitive philosopher will viciously smack any hand that dare reach for this treasured icon of masculine domination, and grunt, “remote mine!” like some irritated Neanderthal.

We at The Geek Beat say celebrate this last crumb of Dad exclusivity by giving your pop a shiny new remote for Father’s Day. We offer the following two reviews for your consideration:

Logitech’s line of programmable remotes have long been the king of multi-device controllers, allowing users not just to control a device, but to cluster device operations into tasks that make it easy to run even the most complex home entertainment set-ups.

With the Harmony 1000 Advanced Universal Remote, Logitech has severed its last tie to the traditional remote by eliminating 90 percent of the buttons. Instead, most of the remote (which isn’t even remote-shaped anymore), is a big touchscreen that configures itself automatically with the controls necessary for the task at hand, and that task alone. This makes the 1000 capable of controlling a plethora of devices while at the same time operating like a single-device remote. (more…)