The CES in full swing and notes on the February Voice

The Consumers Electronic Show in Las Vegas is in full swing.

The big winner in hardware this year? ARM. They have licensed their designs to both makers of Android tablets and to makers of Windows products.

Yes, Windows has diverged from the x86 platform to the ARM platform. The reason? Power consumption. That’s the reason Apple went to its A4 chip for the iPhone and iPad. It’s a design licensed from ARM.

They demonstrated Windows on ARM and it’ll come out…when? Still got to recompile a LOT of code for Windows 7 , or more likely Windows 8, to appear on a tablet using an ARM chip at its heart.

The 800-pound gorilla is, of course, Steve Jobs and Apple. Every tablet maker in a booth knows that their product must compete not only against the iPad 1, but the forthcoming iPad2. Android Honeycomb must compete against iOS 5.0.

The Mac App Store

It looks great, but I can’t get into it to buy Angry Birds! So if you have gotten into the store and made a purchase, please tell us about it in the comments section!

I have two more weeks to go before The Voice goes to press, so I’ll keep trying it. I want to try out Angry Birds.

Note: I just noticed that Angry Birds will not run on my 2006 vintage MacBook. Darn!

The Voice goes to Press

I’m working on articles for the Voice. I’ve written an article on importing Outlook Express for Windows e-mail files from your old Windows XP box. Apple Mail does not import Outlook Express directly, and you have to go through a conversion process. I outline this process so that even the least experienced user should have minimal trouble importing their mail into Apple Mail.

If you bought a Mac because your old Windows XP box finally gave up the ghost and died on you, I have an article for you. As long as your old XP box can come up to a blank screen with a blinking cursor, I think you can get data from it using a Ubuntu Linux CD and a USB drive. You’ll need a flash drive for a few files, a USB hard drive for a lot of files, such as your music and photo collections.

And if you share a printer with someone who has a Windows 7 machine, I have an article on how to share that printer between you. Particularly if it’s “their printer” and they don’t want to unplug it from their Windows 7 machine to give you access.