Gadgetell | Tech News, Reviews, and Interesting Things

Surveys like this are always very interesting as they show the real truths behind the reliability of products, not just the output of the company’s marketing department.  In this case, SquareTrade, a research group, have taken it open themselves to tackle smart phones and to see their reliability (or lack thereof, as the case may be) over the first year of purchase.  And what better to use than 15,000 handsets consisting of BlackBerrys, iPhones and Treos.

As my not-so-inconspicuous title suggests, the Treo performed poorly, in fact, surprisingly poorly!  After one year 5.6% of all iPhones malfunctioned, followed by a sizable jump to 12% for the BlackBerry and a massive 16% of Treos.  This is incredibly worrying if you have just a bought a Treo, but comforting if you have selected the iPhone!

Read the full details after the break.

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Things aren’t looking good for Yahoo right now.  Google has pulled out of the advertising deal that looked so promising for both companies citing potential antitrust issues.  Now, CEO Jerry Yang is saying that the Microsoft buyout was probably the best thing that could have happened.  This coming even after a rumor saying that Microsoft and Yahoo “were in advanced talks to sell the company for between $17 and $19 a share,“ that Yahoo discredited.

Aside from turning down the Microsoft deal, Yahoo’s problems aren’t necessarily its own fault.  It is slowly rolling out the new Yahoo homepage to compete more against iGoogle.  It still owns Flickr, one of, if not the most popular photo hosting site.  Yahoo Answers seems to have grown quite a lot as well. 

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Sections: Web, Web 2.0, Google

Since it is Halloween, Gadgetell is taking a look at some the tech horror stories our writers have experienced.  Here is one tale.

This is a true story of my encounter with a monitor of the worst kind.  I have always relied on CRTs for two main reason; the first is the consistently good picture quality it provides and the second was that I couldn’t bear to pay for a new one.  However, one day it occurred to me that two monitors are better than one, so after investigating my graphics card I borrowed a VGA-to-DVI adapter from a friend (it was a very nice lilac color!).

So, I squeezed two clunky 15” CRTs onto my desk, the table creaking in protest and that is where the problems started.  Firstly, the cable, non detachable, could not reach the PC.  Fifteen minutes, later I moved the PC, connected the two monitors up, and switched it on. . . .

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It’s a problem that most Web-based companies would love to have: their website servers crumple under the weight of popularity and pent-up demand (as long as denial-of-service attacks are not involved.) It usually means a lot of people have come to rely on your services, or at the very least are checking out what you have to offer.
It has happened most recently to leading e-tailer Amazon and up-and-coming short form messaging service/social network Twitter. Public relations officials at both companies have had to work overtime explaining why users were not able to access the sites. Amazon’s problems hit on June 6th and 9th and were initially chalked up to a hiccup caused by company systems that are “very complex and on rare occasions, despite our best efforts, they may experience problems.“ Twitter’s problems happened a couple of weeks ago and included outages and public viewings of supposedly-private “tweets.“

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Sections: Tech News, Web, Web 2.0, Web Apps, Websites