Month: September 2012

No Easy Day

Read Mark Owen/Matt Bissonette’s No Easy Day. It’s a narrative of the author’s getting into SEAL Team 6 aka DEVGRU, his eventual involvement in the assault that ended UBL, and some of the events afterward.The book is written in a first person perspective. Normally, I’m not a fan of the first person but it’s appropriate for this case and it’s written in a straightforward, easy-to-read manner. I was done in a few hours worth of reading.

There’s really nothing new in No Easy Day if you’ve already read a few SEALS books and you’ve already narratives of the UBL raid. Sure there were some deviations from other narratives but then pretty much all the narratives deviate from each other. It could have been just another narrative, just another SEAL book except for the noise the US government had been making. Only made the book more fascinating and even raised the author’s credibility. But with or without the noise, it’s an entertaining read.

Rating: 4/5

New Kindle Fires

Amazon has announced a whole raft of Kindle e-readers and tablets. But the interesting ones to me were the tablets. There are 3 of them, the Kindle Fire 8.9″ HD with 4G, the Kindle Fire 8.9″ HD, and the 7″ Kindle Fire HD. The bigger Kindle Fire HDs compete directly with the iPad while the smaller competes directly with the Google Nexus 7 and the much rumored iPad Mini. The battle of the big three is heating up even more. What’s interesting is that while Amazon started with books, Google with ads, and Apple with songs, pretty much all of them are now selling the same stuff: books, ads, songs, movies, etc. But Amazon has a huge leg up: shopping. Google and Apple would do well to get into that, maybe by buying eBay?

It’s Almost Here

Apple has finally sent out invites to their much anticipated September 12 press conference. What is almost here? Why, the iPhone 5, of course!

It’s not the new iPhone because, well, there’s that shadow there. It will be a taller phone with an aluminum back but still following the general design pattern of the iPhone 4/4S. Pretty much what all those leaked purported iPhone 5 photos all over the net show.

Although the display will be taller, the horizontal resolution will remain the same as the iPhone 4/4S because they want to leverage the current existing Retina apps. Apps not automatically supporting the new display size will be letter-boxed.

It will have a quad-core processor, 1GB RAM, and 64GB storage in line with current smartphones specifications. But these will not be highlighted or maybe even mentioned.

Finally, it will support glasses-free 3D and will have a second rear-facing camera at the lower section for taking 3D photos and videos.

Now let’s see if I got anything right.