Category: General Tech
An Open Letter to Motorola
Dear Motorola,
Your new phone — the Droid X — is a pretty sweet device. It’s fast and light. The camera, screen and body are all what we have come to expect from Moto. Your hardware engineering continues to impress.
The software, however, isn’t as thrilling. The Droid X is running some new variant of Blur, your super-crappy social media integration skin you keep tossing on low-end Android phones. I don’t have a problem with skinning cheap phones — mainly because I don’t plan on buying any of them. Ever. But why skin Android? HTC Sense is wildly popular, but all that extra cruft adds time to updates and takes away processor cycles from useful smartphone tasks.
New FaceTime Ads Super Awesome
Damn it, that one with the grandfather just about made me cry.
Update: The “Big News” one is also crazy touching.
On Choice
Louis Gray, on switching to Android:
I also will never tell you that Android is perfect - in software or in hardware.
[…]
The momentum is clear and the option of multiple choices is clear. If I like Android and hate my new carrier, Sprint, I can switch to Verizon and get the Incredible. If I have an aneurysm and love AT&T, I can get the Aria. If I want a small screen, I can do that. If I want a physical keyboard, I can find a device that does that. But for iPhone, I simply would have to take whatever Apple offers and believe that their choices are right for me. I’ve chosen Apple many times and will again in the future, but I don’t think I should buy into a system that restricts my choices when another one is out there that enables my choices.
Arrested Development Action Trailer
I’m sure the eventual Arrested Development movie won’t be this intense, but man, this trailer is sweet.
Flash Running on Jailbroken iPads
The Friend Bar
Another brilliant Apple-related Onion piece.
Prince, on the Internet
The internet’s completely over. I don’t see why I should give my new music to iTunes or anyone else. They won’t pay me an advance for it and then they get angry when they can’t get it. The internet’s like MTV. At one time MTV was hip and suddenly it became outdated. Anyway, all these computers and digital gadgets are no good. They just fill your head with numbers and that can’t be good for you.
On Day One Greatness
The original iPhone was great on day one. It couldn’t do as much as today’s iPhone, but it performed its feature-set extremely well. There were almost no rough edges or unpolished areas in its hardware or software, and nearly everything seemed justifiable, well conceived, and well executed.
Apple tends to do that a lot. It’s deeply ingrained in their culture, priorities, and product development practices. In brief, their philosophy seems to be to ship only what’s great and leave out the rest. That’s why, instead of having a bad copy-and-paste implementation for the iPhone’s first two years, we just didn’t have one at all.
iPad Passes Android in Browser Share
In just three months on the market, Apple’s iPad has come to represent 0.17 percent of all Web browser traffic tracked by Net Applications. The iPad’s June total managed to exceed Android, which represented 0.14 percent of all Web browsing traffic.
Behind both of them was another iOS-powered device from Apple, the iPod touch. In June, the iPod touch took 0.12 percent of the Web browser share, according to Net Applications.
HP and Palm Become One
HP:
HP today announced it has completed its acquisition of Palm Inc. at a price of $5.70 per share of Palm common stock in cash.
The combination gives HP significant headway into one of technology’s fastest-growth segments with Palm’s innovative webOS platform and family of smartphones, plus a rich portfolio of intellectual property from the smartphone pioneer.
I really hope they can release some killer WebOS devices. It’s a great mobile OS, but Palm’s hardware sucks.
Amazon Buys Woot
Woot announced the deal in what may be the best CEO-written letter ever.