Joe Hewitt — one of the lead guys on Facebook’s iPhone app — in a letter to Tech Crunch:
My decision to stop iPhone development has had everything to do with Apple’s policies. I respect their right to manage their platform however they want, however I am philosophically opposed to the existence of their review process. I am very concerned that they are setting a horrible precedent for other software platforms, and soon gatekeepers will start infesting the lives of every software developer.
While the press and rivals obsess over market share, Apple quietly comes in and makes an insane amount of money. It’s the same in the computer industry. Small market share, huge amount of money. The most important thing for all of these are companies is the bottom line. Apple wins that battle.
According to the report, Apple made $1.6 billion in operating profit off of the iPhone in Q3. Nokia, meanwhile, made $1.1 billion. Let’s put this in perspective. Recent numbers suggest Nokia controls roughly 35% of the worldwide handset market. Apple? About 2.5%.
On perhaps the more complex end, users can type in complicated math equations or even ask Bing to display a graph plotting an equation and get results.
More practical applications perhaps for a wider audience include answers to questions like which fruit, an orange or a kiwi, has more vitamins. Searching for a food item on Bing will return a nutrition facts label, much like the one attached to most food products, that summarizes the information.
It shouldn’t be long before some clever hacker figures out a workaround and releases a patched kernel to the world, re-enabling the OS on Atom based computers. But that’s not the story. The bigger message is that Apple has finally stopped ignoring the incessant buzz of the hobby-hacking, Mac netbook scene and instead pulled out a fly-swat and dealt it a whack. The war is officially on.
And ironically, this will only hit the hobbyists and tinkerers. Psystar, that other flea in Apple’s ear, is unaffected, as the fake Macs it sells do not use the Atom chip.
The littlest MacBook Pro finally gets all the features of its larger brethren, making it pound for pound one of the most impressive laptops on the market today. For starters, the aluminum unibody construction is solid to an extreme: There’s no wiggle or shimmy when you lift up this laptop. It’s a high-tech brick that, if you gathered enough of, you could probably pave your driveway with.
I couldn’t agree more. From my review of the machine back in August:
More than 100,000 Droid phones were sold in the first weekend since the device’s launch, estimates Mark McKechnie, an analyst with Broadpoint AmTech. That’s about half of the initial stock made available to Verizon and Best Buy stores nationwide.
“Demand seems brisk,” says McKechnie. “While we heard of no stores that were completely sold out, the majority reported that more than half of the initial stock was sold, and some said they had just a few remaining.”
If Android hardware diversity is already a problem for third-party developers, it’s only going to get worse.
It’s the fundamental problem with Windows, too.
Add a line of code to your pages and choose from hundreds of fonts. Simple, bulletproof, standards compliant, accessible, and totally legal.
Google announced an agreement to acquire AdMob, a mobile display ad technology provider, for $750 million. This acquisition will enhance Google’s existing expertise and technology in mobile advertising, while also giving advertisers and publishers more choice in this growing new area.
AdMob currently hosts ads in many mobile applications, including those on the App Store.
At the core of that legal issue, according to Mr Huang, is that Intel wants to standardize the technology that computer manufacturers use and computer manufacturers, like Apple, wants to differentiate. Mr Huang said “Apple wants to differentiate. So inside your MacBook is a NVIDIA chipset. Because Apple wants to build fundamentally different computers than just the Intel platform. They want to add value.”
Mr Huang said that in his home they’re “all Apple.” According to him “Apple uses the best technology for their [computers]. Apple says to their customers: if you buy a computer from us you can be sure we have selected the best technology inside for you. That is their promise to consumers. Their promise to consumers isn’t we’ve selected the best technology for you with the exception of what Intel allows us to use. That’s not their promise. And that’s why Apple uses the best technology where they want whenever they want. And that’s why I’m all Apple! At home it’s just Macs everywhere. It’s NVIDIA’s technology in all of them but I use Macs. My son has two Macs, my daughter has a Mac, there’s an extra Mac just in case and my wife has a Mac. It’s just Mac, Mac, Mac! Because I know it’s got the best stuff inside.”
Wired’s Dylan Tweney, on why he’s not switching to the Droid quite yet:
The second big reason is that I’ve grown dependent on two iPhone apps: Instapaper Pro and Tweetie. I also occasionally use RunKeeper, Stanza, Pandora and a handful of games, but Instapaper and Tweetie are the killer apps. They’re the things that, together with e-mail capability, make the iPhone useful to me.
Tweetie I could probably learn to live without: There are plenty of Twitter apps for Android, and the most popular one, Twidroid, seems to work fine, even if it lacks Tweetie’s elegance and speed. But Instapaper’s ability to collect, reformat and display news articles and blog posts I want to read — even if I’m offline — has made it an indispensable commuter and downtime companion. I would sorely miss it.
