John Paczkowski

Recent Posts by John Paczkowski

Verizon Droid: Don’t Be a Sissy

vzThe male ego is a fragile thing. The last thing you want is a phone that challenges it with an effeminate form factor and pantywaist performance specs. As a guy, you want a phone that doesn’t emasculate you every time you whip it out. Otherwise, you might become insecure and resentful.

Evidently, that’s the conceit of Verizon’s (VZ) latest ad for the Motorola (MOT) Droid, which touts it as a HE-MAN super-smartphone over Apple’s (AAPL) prissy iPhone.

“Should a phone be pretty,” Verizon’s ad asks. “Should it be a tiara-wearing digitally-clueless beauty pageant queen? Or should it be fast? Racehorse-duct-taped-to-a-Scud-missile fast? We say the latter. So we built the phone that does. Does rip through the Web like a circular saw through a ripe banana. Is it a precious porcelain figurine of a phone? No. It’s not a princess. It’s a robot. A phone that trades hair-do for can-do.”

Droid. It’s a phone, an Internet device and a male-enhancement solution in one. Congratulations, Verizon; this ad is going to kill with the “men 18 and older” demographic.

Twitter’s Tanking

December 30, 2013 at 6:49 am PT

2013 Was a Good Year for Chromebooks

December 29, 2013 at 2:12 pm PT

BlackBerry Pulls Latest Twitter for BB10 Update

December 29, 2013 at 5:58 am PT

Apple CEO Tim Cook Made $4.25 Million This Year

December 28, 2013 at 12:05 pm PT

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I think the NSA has a job to do and we need the NSA. But as (physicist) Robert Oppenheimer said, “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and argue about what to do about it only after you’ve had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.”

— Phil Zimmerman, PGP inventor and Silent Circle co-founder, in an interview with Om Malik