Lazy Man and Money

Ten Things I Think I Think (and Personal Finance Links)

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  1. Download Portal for Free – I think you should jump on this freebie. I haven’t been into video games since the days when EA changed John Madden Football to require approximately 17 fingers and 4 sets of opposable thumbs. However, a few friends have quietly said that Portal is the best game to come out in years. Here’s our chance to find out: Portal is free until September 20th. Usually it will set you back $10. Don’t blame me if you get addicted and end up buying Portal 2 for $30.
  2. HP TouchPad – I think if you didn’t score the HP TouchPad for $99, it is well worth it to get one on Ebay if you can find one for under $250. It’s an amazing amount of functionality in such a small package. Went to a sports bar to watch my favorite out of town NFL team and there were at least a dozen people with tablets following their fantasy football team. I followed an ESPN chat and got all the injury information. I ran a little demo for a couple of people who had iPads, and they were blown away by the TouchPad’s ability to multi-task.
  3. HP TouchpPad Insurance – I think it doesn’t make sense to buy the insurance that HP is selling. HP is selling TouchPads for as low as $99, but the 1-year support with accidental damage protection is $49. For two years it will cost you $179. I got a $1000 laptop from Dell. They aren’t charging me $1800 to insure it for two years.
  4. Denim at Target – I think that with back to school sales being done, I am going to miss this Target commercial – catchiest jingle in a long, long time:
  5. Sony PlayStation Network (PSN) Terms of Service (TOS) – I think that consumers should think twice about any Sony products. I don’t have a Sony Playstation Network or a PS3, but I saw that Sony is requiring everyone who uses their PSN to waive away the right to sue. Hidden in a pile of legalese, you must agree to waive a class action lawsuit against the company. I’d venture that 99.99% of people (probably a few more nines in there) will never read the terms of service. For those that do read it, wish to use the service, and retain their legal rights, they have snail mail a letter to Sony within 30 days. I think it’s pretty rotten to combine the hidden TOS with the rebate breakage phenomenon (a large percentage of people will not follow through with the process of snail mail) on a small chance that they’ll be able to get $5 from it someday.
  6. Political Thoughts – I think that I rarely have anything to say in the world of politics. In fact, most of the time, I kick, punch, scratch my way to not get involved in them. Here are a couple of reasons why…
  7. Rick Perry, Social Security, and Ponzi Schemes – I think Rick Perry calling the Social Security a Ponzi scheme is extremely ignorant. Perhaps it is something that he said to get votes as a lot of people are upset with the state of Social Security. However, it reflects badly on himself and his understanding of both Ponzi schemes and Social Security. Expect more on this in an article this week.
  8. Michelle Bachmann, HPV Vaccines, and Mental Retardation – I think that Rick Perry is lucky to have the spotlight pulled to Michelle Backmann for this comment about HPV vaccines causing mental retardation. I don’t care where you stand on the issue of mandatory HPV vaccines, the fact is that there’s no link to mental retardation at all. It is irresponsible on the highest level for Michelle Bachmann to go off something that a random person told her. If this is the way Michelle Bachmann would run any kind of office, I wouldn’t elect her to manage my recycling bin. She conjured up thoughts of MonaVie distributors saying that it cures cancer and autism.
  9. MLM Article of the Week – I think that makes the obligatory MLM segue a lot easier than usual this week. Here’s my MLM article of the week: MLM Scammer: Then Why Hasn’t [My MLM] Been Shut Down by the Authorities?
  10. Bridge School Concert – I’m excited to go the Bridge School Benefit for the second year in a row. The $52 lawn seat includes the following acts: Tony Bennett, Dave Mathews, Arcade Fire, Foo Fighters, Eddie Vedder, Carlos Santana, Beck, Mumford & Sons, Neil Young. I’d pay that for the historical significance of seeing Tony Bennett and Carlos Santana, but the alt. rock acts are really my style. The only surprise is that they aren’t getting Paramore to jump parachute in with their instruments. There’s always hope for next year.

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Ten Things I Think I Think (HP Touchpad Edition – and Personal Finance Links)

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With all the news about the HP Touchpad over the last three days, regular readers could have guessed this was coming. Read through for what ZDNet says “may be the deal of the year” (though you probably know about it unless you’ve been living under rock).

  1. I think I’ve put my next out there with a couple of articles on the HP TouchPad: HP Touchpad: A Practical, Smart Buy? and Samsung Chromebook: webOS Clone in a Netbook?
  2. I think that, like everyone, I shocked when HP announced to the world that it was ending not only sales of smartphones and tablets, but also PCs. However, as shocking as the news was to me, I feel for the employees who learned the news from two sentences in a press release.
  3. I think this is the best commentary about how and why Palm and HP failed webOS from the former editor of PreCentral, the leading website about all things webOS. Many people perceive webOS as a failed platform that consumers do not want. They couldn’t be more wrong. Those people should read the preceding article. Palm that didn’t have the money or business partners to compete with Apple (partner: AT&T) and Google (partner: Verizon). HP had the money, but miscalculated how difficult it would be to compete and decided that it wasn’t worth the risk. For months HP claimed that they were in mobile business for the long haul often saying that it isn’t a sprint, but a marathon. HP announced their first tablet, the Touchpad four and half months before it launched. They annonced they’d exit the tablet market 49 days later. That’s some marathon.
  4. I think this article gives the best insight as to the strong emotional response HP actions (or lack thereof) have caused from Derek Kessler, the current editor of PreCentral. The article goes through just some of the things that HP failed on with regard to webOS. Specifically I like the last paragraph.

    “I’ve never, I repeat, never, been so disappointed, frustrated, and angered by a single company. HP, you botched almost everything you could possibly botch with webOS, and now when things didn’t go as well as you would have liked – almost entirely because of your missteps – you give up. That’s the mark of a really classy company right there.”

  5. I think I would have liked to been in the room with Derek the next day when a new 64GB white Touchpad showed up on HPs website as being for sale. This was the day after HP announced they would not be making any more webOS hardware. On second thought, perhaps I should be thankful I wasn’t in the room.
  6. I think that the news of $99 HP Touchpads (down from $499) is the deal of the year, not just “may be the deal of the year” as this ZDNet said. This SlickDeals thread has 2.7 million views and as of this writing over 1300 pages of comments (15 comments per page). It got to be so much that they’ve had to archive the old comments… twice. Before the end of the day they’ll likely do another archiving of comments.
  7. I think that if you haven’t been able to get a $99 Touchpad, you should sign up at HP to be notified when new stock arrives. You might also try Best Buy if you live in the middle of nowhere – chances are that every place has sold out of them (Best Buy coupons here). Lastly, if you can find one at full price somewhere, like RadioShack, buy it and leave it unopened for a few days. They’ll like reduce the price and you can return it for a price adjustment then.
  8. I think that because of these deals, the $500 in cash back that I’m getting from my Chase Sapphire Preferred Card is no longer going to go to a TouchPad. I bought two of them from HP (one for me and one for my wife) on Friday night for around $200. This leaves me $300 for an HDHomeRun Prime, which would eliminate my cable box fees.
  9. I think that it took around 24 hours for my “lifetime” boycott on HP products to end. I decided that as long as HP is going to lose around $225 on each sale, I’ll capitalize on it. That said, I enjoyed the title of this Forbes article HP: Down 20%; Now Officially Hated By Almost Everyone. Of course that was before $99 TouchPads came about. Still, I think that many people will continue to boycott HP for quite some time.
  10. I think that I have mixed options the future of webOS. HP announced that they weren’t going to make any more webOS devices. However, they did say that they were still going to work on webOS software until they decided what they were going to do with it (license it, sell it, or open source it). The wild card is that with all the people having webOS in their hands for the first time, the platform ironically has more of the market and mind-share than it ever has. Depending on how many Touchpads were made, there might be more of them in consumer hands than Honeycomb tablets by the end of next week (if not already).

Now for the personal finance links

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Samsung Chromebook: webOS Clone in a Netbook?

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Last week, I wrote briefly why the HP Touchpad may be a smart buy. I apologize for another technology article so soon, but it was entirely unexpected. As luck would have it, I currently find myself testing what, in many ways could be considered a competing device, the Samsung Chromebook. It turns out that Google was lending them out on flights from San Francisco to Boston and Boston to San Francisco. The price… everyone’s favorite: free. In fact, it came with free Gogo Inflight wi-fi, worth about $13. If nothing else, it would be a convenient way to catch up on the last week of email while I was away.

For those who aren’t tech savvy, the Chromebook is a netbook that runs Google’s new operating system, ChromeOS. At 3.25 pounds and with a 8 hour battery life, it is perfectly suited for travel. It has Intel Atom processors that have become extremely popular on netbooks. It also has a SD card for bringing your data with you, as well as a couple of USB ports for expansion. The 12-inch screen is extremely bright… so bright that I turned it down to less than half it’s full brightness just so I don’t blind myself. Other than that, the most noticeable difference is the keyboard. One of the first things I noticed is that there is no delete key. The only way for me to edit text is to go to the end of the word and use backspace on it. In addition it has a couple of keys that I haven’t found on other keyboards. There’s a magnifying glass that opens up a new web browser tab for searching. That’s extremely handy. There is a left arrow and right arrow key on the top of the keyboard. Because I am composing this, I was in a word processing state of mind and figured that it would do something related to that. Nope, they are back and forward keys on the browser. That may be handy as well – once you figure it out.

At this point, you might be wondering why I would compare a Chromebook with the HP Touchpad. One is a netbook with physical keys and USB ports, and the other is a tablet that is half the weight with almost no expansion capabilities. They are alike due to their software philosophy. The HP Touchpad runs webOS, a mobile operating system designed around the idea that the web browser and web technologies is the future. Google’s ChromeOS is the same concept using the slogan, “Nothing but the web.” HP has announced that they intend to put webOS on netbooks in the future. One would imagine that the result of that would be very similar to the Chromebook. I could imagine Google merging ChromeOS and Android functionality in the future and the result of that would be something very similar to the HP Touchpad.

In the end, I really do buy into the “web is the future” mantra of both platforms. They are on a collision course. The interesting thing to me is that there’s a lot of optimism around ChromeOS and a lot of pessimism behind webOS. It’s something that I haven’t been able to reconcile unless people are not judging the technologies independently, but instead focusing on the companies behind them. I have to give Google a lot of credit for putting the promotion together. Letting people try the Samsung Chromebook while flying – and giving them the incentive of free internet access is a great way to spread the word about a different way of computing.