The Kindle Fire will be arriving in the eager hands of the millions of people who have pre-ordered this groundbreaking and low cost alternative to Apple’s popular iPad tablet as early as next Thursday.  There have been lots of other Android based tablets sent to compete with the iPad, which runs Apple’s iOS, but none have been completely successful either because they are overpriced for what they were, or due to issues with touch screen gestures and glitchiness caused by all the variations of Android itself;  while the Amazon tablet will be running Android’s Gingerbread version, it’s going to be Amazon’s special sauce that makes this device so appealing — and a $199 price tag doesn’t hurt either.

Years ago, Bill Gates was the one insisting that tablets were the way of the future, yet Microsoft has failed to produce either a decent tablet design or an operating system that can power one.  Home security has made more technological advancements than Microsoft in that regard. Where did Gates get this idea, and when, exactly, did the world’s obsession with tablet computers get started?  Let’s take a look back at the tablet’s humble beginnings to help connect the dots.

Whether you’re a recent convert from PC (here, referred to as any hardware running Windows or another inferior operating system) to Mac, or a long time Mac user who is just curious about how the other half live, the infographic here will be of some assistance to you.  Many people are used to accessing their files and programs from the Windows Start Menu, in Windows 7, this is the round icon with the Windows logo in the lower left side of the screen. Long term Windows users often complain that they can’t find their way around on a Mac, because there is no familiar Start Menu.  The thing is, on a Mac, the file system is so much easier to navigate than the Windows file system, some people simply can’t believe it when they finally realize it’s true.

Here is an infographic that shows you how to get around on your Mac. The icons in Finder help you navigate to Applications, your Home Folder, the System and Library folders, and more.  Click to expand the graphic:

Former Apple CEO Steve Jobs, who still serves as chairman of the board at Apple, Inc. after his announcement that he was officially stepping down as CEO, has been a household name since he co-founded Apple Computer back in the 1970s with friend and business partner Steve Wozniak.  Over the years, destiny has taken Jobs on several adventurous detours, sometimes away from or back toward Apple.  What can’t be disputed, however, is the impact he has made on the company he founded in a garage — the company that would years later go on to create the Mac, iPod, iPhone and Apple TV (among many other inventions that we now can’t imagine living without.)  This infographic attempts to follow Steve through his career and show us where he ended up and for how long at each stop.  It’s a cute tribute to the tech giant whose name will forever be mentioned right alongside contemporary Bill Gates, long considered to be Jobs’ Arch Frienemy.  You will need to click on the image to make it full sized.  Enjoy the blast from the past.

The long awaited Google+ app has finally landed in the iTunes App Store, or so we read.  At press time, the editors here at likeageek.com were unable to find the app in a search from the App Store app on any of our iPhones.  We’re told that we can definitely get it by launching iTunes, but none of us brought an iPhone cable to work this morning, so we can’t hook up to the PCs and Macs.  Brilliant!

So, despite all the waiting and longing (and the fact that we can’t try it out for you yet,) we remain determined to live up to our mission to bring you the best in technology news in up to the minute fashion, just as our readers have come to expect.  No, we can’t tell you from personal experience how this app works.  Neither can we even speculate as to how it compares with its Android counterpart.  In fact, there is actually very little that we can tell you.  Here’s what we know so far:

Apple delayed approval of Google+ for iPhone for a long time.  We still have no real explanation for this, other than the fact that the typical process in getting an app approved by Apple can be lengthy and tiresome.  We can report that this has been one of the most hotly anticipated apps of the summer.  Google+ has already surpassed 10 million users (as of the weekend) and this is while the service is still not opened up for the public.  That’s impressive, folks, and Facebook is right to be scared.  So is Twitter.

If the iPhone app is in any way an improvement over the HTML 5 version of the Google+ web page, we’re going to love it.  The scaled down version of the page just didn’t do anything for us, and severely limited the potential for interaction with all the feature Google+ has to offer.

People who successfully downloaded the Google+ App within an hour or two of its initial availability have reported many crashes and issues.  That, we have learned, is because an unfinished version of the app was accidentally released into the iTunes store — not the real version.  This is being worked on as we speak.

Its’ also not compatible with iOS 5 beta 3, which has disappointed developers who are working on that platform.  More as soon as we learn it!  Stay tuned.

We all have a geek in our life — someone we cherish as a beloved member of the family, perhaps a close neighbor, or even a friend from work.  You know the type:  they always seem to be on a natural, legal high of some kind as they peel through page after page of PC Magazine or Scientific American.  They can take apart your old Dell laptop from the early 2000s and repair it on the spot, because they collect extinct laptop parts in their closets.  These are some serious nerf-herders, and it’s going to take something off the beaten path to impress them when it comes to gift giving occasions. Here are some ideas to get you started.

For the computer geek:  try a clock that only a programmer could love.  Geeks love to laugh when they “get” something other people can’t comprehend.  What do programming geeks know that ordinary people don’t?  Binary.   A wise geek once said there are only 10 types of people in the world: those who know binary, and those who don’t.  A cool LED Binary clock will amuse and delight your programming geek to no end, and wake him or her up each day on a zero and one note.

A cool gift for any anime geek would be Dragonball Z Dragonbox 1, featuring episodes 1-42 of the series.  This box covers the Vegeta Saga and the first part of the Namek Saga.  Hardly anyone doesn’t love Dragonball Z, but a geek will love it more than most people, so keep this on your list of things to buy in case of a geek giveaway.

For gadget geeks, there’s no such thing as too much power.  You might want to try out a cool Coffee Cup Power Converter (from ThinkGeek.)  The Coffee Cup Power Inverter is a shaped just like a cup of coffee.  It’s a versatile power source that coverts your car’s DC current into two 120-volt AC outlets.  The outlets can be used to recharge DVD players, tablets, cell phones, and other portable electronics on the go.  It also comes with a USB charging port, and fits perfectly in the cup holder between the seats of most geekmobiles.

Two years ago, Apple CEO and co-founder Steve Jobs went on the record, admitting that MobileMe was a big mistake.  At $99 per year, a subscription to Apple’s failed first cloud attempt got you an email address @me.com, some online storage space, a gallery, access to web hosting using iWeb, and calendars.  MobileMe was finally dealt its killing blow yesterday in San Francisco at the 2011 Apple Worldwide Developers Conference with the announcement of iCloud, a new product that utilizes an enormous data center in North Carolina to create an entirely cloud based set of services that sync all of a person’s Macs and iOS devices automatically.  Apple has touted the new service as far more than just a replacement of MobileMe. With iCloud, the synchronization of music, photos, email messages, calendars, and notifications will  ”just work.”  In Apple’s own words: “oud stores your music, photos, apps, calendars, documents, and more. And wirelessly pushes them to all your devices — automatically. It’s the easiest way to manage your content. Because now you don’t have to.”

iCloud will be free to all users of Mac OS X Lion (also announced yesterday) and iOS 5 due out this Fall, and includes 5 gb of free storage space. That doesn’t sound like much, considering that MobileMe came with 20gb of online storage space.  But wait, there’s more:  the 5 gb of free space will not count the music, apps, and ebooks you’ve purchased, or even the pictures you’ve uploaded to your PhotoStream (another feature announced yesterday.)  So, if it doesn’t count all those things, then what is it for?  Mail, documents, Camera Roll, account information, settings, and other app data.  You’ll also get a free email account, like the one MobileMe users have had to pay for.  Email is free.  Find My iPhone is free.  Calendars, syncing, online photo and music streaming — all free.

Plus, Apple now stands up to rival RIM with services that outpace Blackberry by miles.

As we look forward together to the rest of the post-PC era, let’s look back at the prophetic words of the irascible Steve Jobs himself, on MobileMe:

“Team,

The launch of MobileMe was not our finest hour. There are several things we could have done better:

- MobileMe was simply not up to Apple’s standards – it clearly needed more time and testing.

- Rather than launch MobileMe as a monolithic service, we could have launched over-the-air syncing with iPhone to begin with, followed by the web applications one by one – Mail first, followed 30 days later (if things went well with Mail) by Calendar, then 30 days later by Contacts.

- It was a mistake to launch MobileMe at the same time as iPhone 3G, iPhone 2.0 software and the App Store. We all had more than enough to do, and MobileMe could have been delayed without consequence.

We are taking many steps to learn from this experience so that we can grow MobileMe into a service that our customers will love. One step that I can share with you today is that the MobileMe team will now report to Eddy Cue, who will lead all of our internet services – iTunes, the App Store and, starting today, MobileMe. Eddy’s new title will be Vice President, Internet Services and he will now report directly to me.

The MobileMe launch clearly demonstrates that we have more to learn about Internet media services. And learn we will. The vision of MobileMe is both exciting and ambitious, and we will press on to make it a service we are all proud of by the end of this year.

Steve”

It certainly didn’t happen by the end of that year, or the year after that, or even the year after that — but iCloud is finally here, and it’s everything Jobs promised, and more.

There was a time when the two largest and most successful avenues to the World Wide Web were CompuServe, and America Online.  Millions of Americans dialed up on a daily basis, and relied heavily on their ISPs for every imaginable Internet service.  A hallmark of these two giants in their respective hey days was the cul-de-sac, proprietary software that filtered the user experience in the way deemed best by the companies themselves.  Subscribers depended on this software for web browsing, email access, and interaction with other members (and sometimes featured celebrities) on exclusive message boards.

Eventually, Internet users evolved.  They learned that the proprietary software wasn’t necessary, just convenient.  CompuServe and AOL stayed in the game for several years during this transition by tweaking their ad revenue models and moving away from the proprietary software – but still focusing on content as the primary attractant for subscribers.  Having something that no one else had created a market.  But this was only successful for part of the next decade.

What happened to AOL?  Its original purpose was to provide Internet connections, and secondarily, unique content.  Now, AOL does neither.  It has drifted so far from its reason to exist, that it might not survive the current decade at all.  No longer does AOL offer a consumer anything.  Now, it is more like Yahoo! – not even offering its own search engine, but piggybacking on Google Search.  Granted, there are still a lot of people who still use their @aol.com email addresses – but beyond this, AOL simply has nothing original for anyone to need.

Which brings me to my next question:  could Yahoo! be the next household name to go the way of AOL?  If you find this idea disturbing, you’re not alone.  Currently, Yahoo! is still riding the waves of popularity it has enjoyed throughout the 2000s.  Yahoo!’s award winning web based email service is still among the top 3 most popular webmail providers in the world.  But let’s take a closer look:

According to http://www.d3q.com, when Yahoo! began, its primary function was that of a search engine.  It was, in itself, a search engine and directory, with the added benefit of webmail and other services formerly provided by ISPs.  Now, Yahoo! uses Bing for its search.  What, then, is Yahoo! now?  The world’s most popular choice for free email?  And if so, is that enough to keep it going for ten more years?  Will Yahoo! need to redefine itself to avoid becoming the next AOL or Netscape?  (AOL bought out Netscape, if you recall – but never capitalized on what was best in it.)

Everyone wants to be safe on the internet, a task that a number of expensive security tools can accomplish. The good news is that protecting yourself online does not need to be expensive in fact you can protect yourself for free.

The iphone, as its name suggests is a phone. I am not going to be writing about that though. Its second main use is probably as a music player and music storage device. I am not really that interested in that either. I will be writing about how the iphone’s third most used function is revolutionizing an entire technology sector. That third function is its camera.

The Nintendo 3DS is the newest addition to the Niontendo family. Like all of its relatives in the DS series, it is a portable game console produced by Nintendo. It is a worldwide known game console. It first launched in North America through an all day event on March 27, 2011.