Mike Elgan

The Apple iPhone rules the smart phone landscape and the Amazon Kindle dominates eBooks. But the future of their leadership was called into question this week. Today’s leaders will become tomorrow’s losers, according to forecasters. Here’s why they’re wrong. Why the iPhone will rule Gartner predicted recently that by 2012, smartphones running Apple’s iPhone OS […]

Most big, long-term trends in computers and technology are well understood. Everyone knows, thanks to Moore and his Law, that gadgets get smaller, cheaper and faster. But the least appreciated trend is the inexorable transition from mechanical to solid state. Don’t look now, but we’re about to reach the end of the trend — soon […]

After months of struggling to understand the iPhone phenomenon, I have finally come to understand what makes the device so completely different from any other gadget. No, it’s not a phone, a “mini PC,” or even a portable media and entertainment system. The iPhone is a disease. One you catch this particularly virulent bug, you […]

The U.S. government says China is out to steal your secrets — and will successfully do so, unless you take extreme precautions. Symantec chief technology officer Mark Bregman told an IT publication this week that he was “advised by people in three-letter agencies in the U.S. Government” to not bring his phone and laptop to […]

The new iPhone 3G S is much faster, more elegant and more usable than any other iPhone. With each new version, the high quality of the iPhone stands in stark contrast to the low quality of its exclusive U.S. carrier: AT&T. I think it’s time for Apple to drop AT&T — or, at least offer […]

As murder-mysteries go, this one is baffling, in part because the corpse is still breathing. The one-word answer is: Oprah. But the full truth is far more interesting. Twitter was the hottest, fastest-growing, most attention-grabbing social service for a while, but suddenly it appears that many of its users don’t actually use it and its […]

Google rolled out today some of the best new search tools ever. My favorites are the “Wonder Wheel” and the “Timeline.” I’ll save my over-enthusiastic gushing about these features for another column. Instead, I’d like to address the many comparisons being made between Google’s new “Recent results” feature and the search function of Twitter. Is […]

Google has a “Facebook killer” on its hands. And, no, I’m not talking about Google’s Orkut social network (unless you live in Brazil, where Orkut has already “killed” Facebook). Google is just one acquisition away from offering a social network that does everything Facebook does, minus all the things everybody hates about Facebook. This social […]

New technology requires the invention of new words — which used to be coined by engineers. Some were descriptive (“electronic mail”), others whimsical (“mouse”). Fast forward to today, and technology is big business. The marketing people now coin words, motivated less by descriptiveness or amusement and more by profit. Sure, It’s the job of marketers […]

The recession is bad. And it could get worse before it gets better. But the downturn will end. And when it does, the consumer electronics and IT industries will look very different from those that entered the recession in late 2007. There will be winners and losers — many companies that have been with us […]

Amazon’s new Kindle for iPhone application shipped this week. The software lets you read any of Amazon’s 240,000 Kindle books on an iPhone much like you would on an over-priced Amazon Kindle. Unfortunately, the launch exposes Apple’s biggest blunder since the Apple Newton. Apple could have, and should have, competed head-to-head with Amazon in the […]

When Twitter was a scrappy underdog in the Web 2.0 eyeball wars, chatter about the service was like some kind of 1969 San Francisco love-in. But now that major newspapers are writing about it, celebrities are using it and Congressmen are abusing it, the haters are coming out of the woodwork. I understand. Twitter feels […]