Robert L. Mitchell

My family vacation in Florida last week was heaven, but the travel was hell. From dealing with air carrier woes to an extreme traffic jam in Orlando, we had more than our share of issues. When problems cropped up, we turned to a few basic iPhone apps in the clutch. The apps we used were enormously helpful in some cases. In others, not so much. Here's two things I learned about using the iPhone in a travel pinch.

App schmap: In a crisis a live travel agent beats a travel app every time

Our family just spent hundreds of dollars on college textbooks for the Spring semester. Will Apple's recent attempt to break into the textbook market, and other rapidly evolving e-book distribution models, help to moderate soaring textbook prices? From what I've seen so far, it could do just the opposite.

Theoretically, e-book prices should be cheaper, since publishers don't incur the costs of printing and distributing physical books. In effect, the e-book distribution model shifts those costs from the publisher to the school or student, which must pay for a device on which to read the content.

The idea of creating your own plastic objects using a 3D printer is very cool. Imagine, for example, being able to print Christmas gifts at home. Looking for a special toy? No need to visit the toy store when you can download that race car design file from a library of toys on the Internet and send it to your 3D printer. Or perhaps you'd like to customize the item first by opening the file in a simple 3D modeling program and add a few personal touches. That's the vision.

The reality is a bit different.

Richard Smith needed to build a wall-climbing robot for a customer -- so he printed one.

Smith, director of Smith Engineering Gb Ltd., used a CAD program to design a 3D model of the WallRover, a dual-track roving robot with a spinning rotor in the chassis that creates enough suction to hold the device to a wall. He then sent the design file for each component to a 3D printer, which sliced the objects into sections less than 1/100th of an inch thick by printing it, one layer at a time, using molten ABS plastic as the "ink."

When I began using TurboTax Online I never thought about what might happen if I had to file an amended return. Now that I need to do so for the 2009 tax year I wish I had installed the software on my own personal computer instead of trusting Intuit's cloud.

Here's the situation: The easiest way to file an amended return is to start with the original TurboTax data file. While the online version of TurboTax 2009 is no longer online, users can download and run the TurboTax 2009 software on their own personal computer at no additional charge.

At the stroke of midnight on New Year's day, Google Health, the personal health record data aggregation service for consumers, will shut down for good.

Google first made the announcement quietly, in a blog post last June. But the closure of Google Health next month is also an important inflection point for public cloud-based services.

When Netflix's e-mail announcing a $5 per month increase arrived in my inbox yesterday I was upset -- for about a minute. In one sense this first big price jump is much ado about nothing. But in the long run, as Netflix's price advantage continues to narrow, it may begin to look like just another cable television provider.

Everyone likes to get something for nothing. Netflix gave users access to quite a bit of content for next to nothing when compared to the typical monthly cable television bill.

In the world of retail, Apple's approach with its Apple Stores in some ways flies in the face of current conventional wisdom, says Doug Stephens, president of Retail Prophet, a consultancy focused on the future of retail.

Stephens says the key to the future in retail is bottom-up marketing, including getting real-time reactions to products you're selling (or planning to sell) through social media and mobile channels and then reacting quickly to ramp up the winners or dump the dogs. This especially applies to manufacturers of fashionable, "must have" items.

Editor's note: This is the third of a four-part series on red-hot display technologies.

No. 3 on our list of display tech to watch this year is e-paper, the technology behind most of today's popular e-book readers. Apple's April 2010 launch of the iPad media tablet and its runaway success gave e-reader manufacturers a scare. But while the market has bifurcated, the pie has gotten bigger and both markets continue to grow.

Editor's note: This is the conclusion to our four-part series on display technologies to watch in 2011.

If the screen on that sleek smartphone you just bought looks unusually bright and colorful, you might not be looking at an LCD at all. The displays in models such as the Samsung Galaxy S, the Google Nexus S and the HTC Droid Incredible rely on active-matrix organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs), an alternative display technology that's faster, thinner and lighter, offers more vivid colors at higher contrast, and uses as little as one quarter of the power consumed by your typical backlit, active-matrix LCD.

iPads may give e-readers more of a challenge than marketers think. The conventional wisdom, doled out by analysts and vendors in this week's story about the future of e-paper displays, is that the e-reader market has been cloven in two. Multimedia content consumption is to be ceded to the iPad while plain old black-and-white e-book reading should go to e-readers such as Amazon's Kindle.

When a growing pie splits no one gets too worried. Strong growth in sales of both e-readers and iPads would seem to bear out the argument that there's plenty of room for everyone in the pool. Right?

Haptic technology is on a roll; it's been adopted in more than 20 smartphone models, including the Nokia N8 and Samsung Galaxy S series, because it can help people interact with touch-screen applications more accurately and otherwise enhance the user experience, says Jennifer Colegrove, an analyst with DisplaySearch.

DisplaySearch, a Santa Clara, Calif.-based research firm that focuses on the display market, hasn't yet released growth projections for haptics, but Colegrove notes that tablet PCs are ripe for the technology. One tablet that already includes haptics is Samsung's Galaxy Tab, which has sold 2 million units since its launch in September of last year.