New != Good
Sticking with the old version != unwillingness to learn

If the old version works better, why should they change? That's looking at it's own merits. Changing just because it's newer isn't.

Change for the sake of change == bad

I think The Old Reader is the best replacement for Google Reader because it seems to be the only RSS reader I've found that is actually trying to do what Google Reader did. The others I've tried (specifically Feedly and Netvibes) seem to have different goals but can be adapted to behave similarly (but not the same) to Google Reader. I actually went with Netvibes for about the first month after the GR announcement because TOR was pretty lacking in the feature department and extremely slow due to the crush of new users. However, TOR had been rapidly updating the feature set, and I switched back over after they fixed up the mobile site and expanded their keyboard shortcuts among other tinngs (they've been great at adding features requested on the user feedback site).

When picking out a replacement to GR, I thought the most important thing was having the same goals as GR did in order provide the same functionality, and TOR has that in spades. I've never figured out why Feedly gets so much love in the GR replacement posts on tech sites. Need to install a browser extension? Yuck. The app wants to look like a magazine? Yuck. If you want to a pretty app to read articles like a magazine on your tablet, Feedly is nice, but it's not a replacement for Google Reader. The Old Reader is, especially now that the mobile site works as well as the Google Reader app ever did.

Yeah, but then you might have the ability to buy things through an avenue in which Apple can't take a cut, and why would you ever want to do that?

Also no steering wheel on that side. As long as they are just stealing valuables from the car, it's one less obstacle to pull stuff around and no chance of hitting the car horn and alerting the people in the house.

The problem is preventing abuse of this implementation. How soon until companies are notifying Google that they are offended because they don't like what autocomplete is associating with their product? For example, right now when I enter "iphone" in the Google search bar, one of the autocomplete options is "jailbreak". What if Apple notifies Google that they are offended by that? I think it would get even worse when products have negative reviews or make negative news.

As someone with daughter that just turned two years old, meaning we now have to pay for a ticket for her to fly, this sounds like a great deal to me.

Great. Now all they need to do is expand coverage - as much as I want to switch from Verizon to T-Mobile, it won't do me much good if half the time I can't get a signal.

Question for anyone with T-Mobile currently: I've been talking with my wife about switching to the prepaid, 100 minutes/month, unlimited text/data plan, but a big hangup is that her hometown is in the "Service Partner" coverage area on the T-Mobile coverage map. What data speeds/caps do the prepaid plans in service partner areas, if they are allowed to use data at all?

Now that I've been trying Netvibes for a few hours, a few things are bothering me:
- Do I really need to confirm every time I want to mark all items as read?
- Why can't it put all the "new" items at the top? Sure, it was posted yesterday, but you didn't find it until right now. Why display it after all those other articles I've already read? Google Reader sorted by the time it found the new articles, putting new stuff at the top above all the stuff I already marked as read.
- Why so slow to update feeds? Maybe this is just the crush of new traffic, but it is finding new articles multiple hours after they showed up in Google Reader.

It's ok, but the only thing it has going for it for me right now is that it isn't completely crushed by all the new traffic. Maybe once I can get my feeds imported to Old Reader or Newsblur those will fit my usage patterns better.

Two main advantages Google Reader had over Firefox RSS bookmarks:

• Sorting: Instead of needing to go into each bookmark to check if it has new items, just visit Google Reader and it'll have an updated list of all new items for all feeds (or just per folder if you set them up).
• Syncing: The list of new items you haven't read is constantly in sync no matter what device you access Google Reader on or what device you last accessed it.

Firefox RSS bookmarks provide a workable RSS solution, but it was just much easier to keep up to date on a large number of feeds with Google Reader.

You have no clue. Google Reader aggregates all of those bookmarks into one web site. With your method, if you have 35 web sites you like to read, you have to open 35 bookmarks to see if they've posted anything new. With Google Reader, you only have to visit one site to see if any of those 35 sites has been updated. And even if they only post snippets in the RSS feed (most I use show full articles), it's still tons more convenient than visiting each website to see if they have new articles.

Netvibes seems ok to me for now. I'd like to try Old Reader, but it's limiting feed imports for now due to the huge influx of traffic and I haven't been able to import all my Google Reader feeds yet. I'm avoiding Feedly out of principal - it keeps asking me to download the app for Firefox in order to view it. I shouldn't have to download an "app" to view a web page, especially if I'm not on my own computer and just want to check my RSS feeds quick. Just give me the web page.

Well then you just buy another Surface Pro and a new copy of Office to go with it. What, you aren't really planning on fixing your old computer, are you? Well then you don't really matter.

Oh, that's easy to figure out. Just look at what Apple did in the last year and expect Microsoft to go there in two years.

Mine does too. And even plugged into a wall, it takes well more than a few minutes of charging to last more than a half hour in the type of usage that drained the battery by the middle of the day. If I'm using my phone that much needing to charge it every half hour is a pain. Sure, if you don't need to use your phone, your method is fine, but every time I run out of battery early I'm on the go and doing lots of things with my phone.

I don't know about that. I have a portable charger, and while it was nice to be able to charge any device, it takes more than a few minutes to get any significant charge out of it. So if you're only charging for a few minutes at a time, you're charging for a few minutes at a time several times for the rest of the day. And if you're using your phone so much it needs a recharge in the middle of the day, you're less likely to be able to set it down and let it just charge. It was nice when I got my Galaxy Nexus with a spare battery - take a minute to swap the battery and then I don't have to worry about it the rest of the day.

Assuming you get a charger that can charge the battery outside of the phone, this shouldn't take any longer than charging the portable charger.