In the months leading to this year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, nobody would have thought that a company many people thought would go under in a while would be the darling of the show.
Palm, was in many ways mired in mediocrity for several years now. Its Treo line of smartphones, which at one time was the king of them all, was struggling for market share (heck, it was struggling for attention, what with the likes of HTC and of course Apple offering seemingly better phones). And of course, its Garnet operating system was aging really badly, having technical limitations that most if not all of its competitors have overcome.
Enter the Palm Pre, with Palm’s all new WebOS. In a bid to combat the iPhone’s dominance, Palm’s engineers made a phone with a capacitive touchscreen that is as responsive as the iPhone’s, then also included a qwerty keyboard for those averse to touch-typing. In other words, Palm gives consumers the best of both worlds: multi-touch, plus physical keys.
In the software department, Palm’s all new WebOS boasts of features that Apple’s iPhone could only dream of, like copy and paste, and real multi-tasking.
From a bleak outlook to a bright future in one fell swoop, Palm has recaptured the imagination of the tech world with its new Pre.
Even the activities with the most complicated planning like the outdoors, information about them are now readily available in the internet. The primary channels of information about these activities are the outdoors forums. The diversity of the outdoor activities also implies a diverse array of information available. Online outdoor forums have tried to resolve this complexity by categorizing outdoor activities.
The key to harnessing the outdoor information is to search on more specific sites. Being more specific means find the category of the outdoor activity. Usually fishing, hunting, and other related outdoor activities are found on the same online outdoor forum. Meanwhile, outdoor activities such as hiking and trekking are under the more general topic of camping.
Outdoor activities like fishing and hunting are more skill-intensive than camping related activities. This is why online outdoor forums share a lot of information from tutorials to seasonal hunting and camping trip reports for example. Critical aspects of the planning such as topics on safety and first aid, navigation, campfire cooking, etc. are also very accessible on these online outdoor forms. They are very helpful on planning an outdoor activity up to the smallest detail. Other discussions such as reliable and cheap suppliers of gear and other outdoor necessities are especially helpful to the budget-conscious and first-time campers for example.