As for Verizon? The company has the popular but critically panned BlackBerry Storm and the rather staid and Wi-Fi–less BlackBerry Tour. The carrier known for the best network now has the least attractive lineup of smart phones.
It’s a puzzling situation for Verizon. The wireless carrier has had the most customers of any cellular operator in the country since its 2008 acquisition of Alltel, and it’s widely regarded as having the largest network coverage area. So the fact that it can’t offer its customers better smartphones is a bit of a mystery.
Category: General Tech
Maybe it’s not About the Hardware
From Engadget’s in-depth Zune HD review:
Perhaps the most compelling reason to buy a Zune HD right now isn’t the gorgeous screen or forthcoming apps, HD radio, or slick design. Make no mistake about it – this is a fine, fine device, and no one would fault you for buying one – but it’s not the device itself that is the most attractive part of this package. To us, it seems like the single most compelling reason to choose this device over something like the iPod touch can be boiled down to one thing: Zune Pass.
Snow Leopard More Popular Than Tiger, Leopard
At the two week mark, OS X Snow Leopard—despite having few user recognizable features—has sold more than twice the number of copies that Leopard did, and four times the number of copies that Tiger did. That makes sense given the $29 price and Apple’s higher percentage in the market these days.
Surely the $29 price — a full $100 less than most OS X upgrades — is helping drive sales, but I also think users see Snow Leopard as less dangerous of an upgrade.
On the Zune HD
Nate Anderson over at Ars Technica, on the Zune HD:
Can it succeed? That depends on whether users buy into the Microsoft way of doing things—a way that includes paying for a monthly music subscription. Those who take the bait will find themselves hooked (in both senses) by one of the best portable music discovery experiences yet created. The full subscription experience on the Zune is now unbelievably compelling, offering something that feels like more than the sum of its parts—but consumers have so far shown little interest in subscription music services.
SimpleNote in Fluid
SimpleNote is a wonderful $2 app that syncs text notes back and forth between the iPhone and the web. As a web app, it can be run in Fluid very easily, but has always looked… wrong.
John Hicks has released a stylesheet that cleans up the look of SimpleNote-in-Fluid, making it much easier to use.
To complete the package, you can grab a high-res copy of the SimepleNote icon to use for the app icon. Brilliant.
Adam Savage, on Failure
The Electric El Camino
Of all the cars he could have picked to convert, why did Leitschuh choose the mongrel offspring of a Chevrolet Caprice and a pickup truck? Simple. He needs to haul stuff. Besides, why not convert an El Camino?
“The Civic would have a bit more range,” he said. “But which would you rather drive?”
That question answered, Leitschuh, an electronics controls engineer and owner of TDL Electronics, got to work. The project went pretty quickly, taking about 200 hours of his time over the course of six weeks. He got some help with donations from QuickCable and some hired hands to help with welding and fabrication. The tab came to roughly $30,000, which included the cost of the car and a transmission rebuild. The lion’s share of the bill went to the 46 lithium-ferrite phosphate batteries that cost him $18,000. They’re located over the front and rear axles. Because Leitschuh yanked the engine, radiator and other archaic equipment, the weight penalty for the batteries is just 750 pounds. Total output is 33 kilowatt-hours.
On 10.6’s UI Changes
After a huge release like Leopard, which brought very radical change to the way our favorite OS looks, feels, and works, including a complete redesign of its icons and UI ‘theme’, Snow Leopard’s (incomplete) roundup of UI changes can only feel minor. Nevertheless, it shows some beautiful classroom examples of what composes true attention to detail.
Moto Goes Social with Android
The new Motorola phone’s biggest asset will be its custom-designed user interface, Moto Blur.
“The Blur makes text, e-mail, Facebook, Twitter feeds and photos from sources like MySpace, Gmail, Yahoo and corporate e-mail appear in a single stream and sync them together with no different logins,” says Sanjay Jha, co-CEO of Motorola. “This means you can focus on what people have said instead of how and where they said it.”
Jobs, on the Touch
Originally, we weren’t exactly sure how to market the Touch. Was it an iPhone without the phone? Was it a pocket computer? What happened was, what customers told us was, they started to see it as a game machine. Because a lot of the games were free on the store. Customers started to tell us, “You don’t know what you’ve got here — it’s a great game machine, with the multitouch screen, the accelerometer, and so on.”
The Difference Between News, Blogging and Bad Blogging
Earlier today, the site MacJournals recommended TUAW’s coverage of Apple’s “It’s Only Rock and Roll” media event to their readers via Twitter. A few hours later, they followed up with this:
We wouldn’t have recommended TUAW liveblog coverage had we known how vicious it would be. We’ll know for the future.
This didn’t go over well with TUAW. Here’s the crux of MacJournal’s reasoning:
However, we found today’s coverage viciously unaware and unsympathetic of anything beyond TUAW’s own narrow view of the technology world. TUAW aggressively dismissed anything that wasn’t a new product announcement, said that Apple’s failure to meet false rumors were “legitimate complaints,” and provided no context for why anyone should have believed any of the rumors other than the fact that they were actual rumors.
Steve Jobs Back on Stage
In this video, he thanks the person who donated the liver he received, encouraged others to become organ donors and thanked Apple’s team for supporting him.