Word: gadget
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...stretch of the river running from Burma and Laos to Thailand, clearing away islands, reefs and rapids that once blocked the passage of ships. Since then, sleepy Southeast Asian river ports have morphed into boomtowns, with boats from China disgorging cheap electronics, fruits, vegetables and every kind of plastic gadget imaginable. River traffic runs both ways: in December 2006, the first shipment of refined oil chugged up the Mekong bound for energy-hungry China, opening up a potential alternative shipping route to avoid the pirate-infested Straits of Malacca through which roughly half of its imported oil now passes...
Somewhere in the unwritten amendments to the U.S. Constitution it is stipulated that every gadget reviewer is entitled to his or her personal iPhone quibble. Here's mine: when you're transferring content from your computer to the iPhone, you can't simply drag and drop tracks into the phone, in that richly satisfying way you did with your iPod. Moving music and video around is a matter of instructing iTunes to 'sync' the iPhone with one more playlists. The procedure feels clumsy and imprecise - you can't just spear a specific little chunk of content, like a canape with...
...look at the iPhone as a laundry list of features and bugs is to miss the point (though if you did, the former would commandingly outweigh the latter). The iPhone isn't just the gadget du jour, it's a fresh new platform, an exceptionally powerful mobile computer that's still in its infancy. There's a full version of Apple's desktop operating system in there. The Palm and the Treo, et al., were merely harbingers of the era of true walk-around mobile computing that Jobs has just inaugurated. Hail to the chief...
...hours of talk time. Early reviews score the iphone's battery high compared to many competing phones'. But when consumers use the device as an iPod for hours at a time, watching videos from YouTube and listening to their favorite songs, they might be surprised to find the gadget drooping when they're expecting an important call. There's a precedent for problems with Apple batteries, as many who owned an early iPod model know all too well...
...will the distribution channels (cable companies and devicemakers) prove more powerful? The deal with Apple gives Disney a strong presence on both sides. But Iger hopes to go much further--he wants Disney and Pixar characters and programs on the screens of every type of electronic gadget imaginable. "More and more people are using this technology to do all sorts of things," he says. "We need to be in the digital space at a much higher level to serve them better...