It's been quite a year for technology "advances" -- particularly in the neighborhood of cloud and social media services, whether free or cheap.
Apple released its iCloud service in October of last year. iCloud enables users to store music on Apple-run servers and access their collection on as many Apple-flavored devices as they care to own, from iPods to iPhones to iPads to ... well you get the picture. iCloud also enables users to sychronize e-mail, contact, calendar data, and other digital ephemera between Apple devices.
E-mail and other messaging in the cloud is old news -- think Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail -- heck, AOL for that matter, or even The WELL -- but Google is expanding its incursion into synchronization-space by bringing its Chrome browser -- now the #1 ranked browser in the world -- and Google Chrome Sync to iOS devices (a.k.a. iThings). Chrome and it sync features are already available on Windows computers, MacOS computers, and Android mobile devices.
Nexus 7 is the 7" tablet announced by Google last month and available today if you can find inventory. The Big G hopes to use Nexus 7 to make a dent in iPad dominance of the tablet market. Indeed, the device looks pretty neat.
Casey Johnston reviewed the Nexus 7 very favorably for ars technica the week before last. On offer for $199 or $249, depending on storage capacity, the price looks astonishingly low, especially compared to iPrices.
Is any of this a problem? Well, yes, I think it is. See why below the fold...
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