Category: General Tech

Engadget’s lawyer-turned-blogger, Nilay Patel, on the AT&T iPhone exclusivity deal:

The term of Apple and AT&T’s iPhone exclusivity deal has long been a mystery – although USA Today reported a five-year arrangement when the original iPhone came out in 2007, that number has never been independently confirmed, and it’s been looking suspect in recent weeks as Verizon iPhone chatter has gotten louder. But we’ve been doing some digging and we can now confirm that Apple and AT&T entered into a five-year iPhone exclusive in 2007, based on court documents filed by Apple in California.

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Nielsen:

The iPad etched-screen aesthetic does look good. No visual distractions or nerdy buttons. The penalty for this beauty is the re-emergence of a usability problem we haven’t seen since the mid-1990s: Users don’t know where they can click.

It’s a good read, but in the real world, the device is a breeze to use. I think the days of this type of thinking are limited.

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Brian Chen at Wired has some advice for Apple, and he doesn’t pull any punches.

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Jon Wiley, Senior User Experience Designer at Google, on the search giant’s revamped design:

During our process we focused on people’s rising expectations for search. As the web has evolved over the past decade, people have been typing more sophisticated searches and seeking out specialized search tools to match. To keep pace with rapid change online, we have teams of engineers working across Google to develop new ways to present and refine search results. Our central challenge with our latest redesign was to figure out how to squeeze all these tools and technologies into a single page.

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Delightful.

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ChangeWave:

As in previous ChangeWave surveys, Verizon remains the clear industry leader in customer satisfaction – with nearly half of Verizon’s customers (49%) saying they are Very Satisfied with their cellular service. We note that Sprint/Nextel (35%) is now second in terms of customer satisfaction, with T-Mobile (23%) and AT&T (23%) lagging well behind.

And:

AT&T’s low churn rate – despite its relatively poor Very Satisfied rating and its high percentage of dropped calls – is attributable to the huge advantage it continues to maintain as the exclusive U.S. service provider for the Apple iPhone.

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The Wall Street Journal:

Phone and cable companies opposed the FCC reclassifying regulation of Internet lines under Title 2 of the Communications Act, which was written for traditional phone networks and includes provisions such as rate regulations.

Internet providers fear the agency could try to impose rate controls or require them to share their networks with rivals and warned the decision could prompt them to stop investing in new Internet lines. FCC officials say Mr. Genachowski’s proposal won’t suggest that and that the agency will propose only applying some parts of Title 2 rules to Internet lines.

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Apple:

This update addresses an audio anomaly that some customers may hear coming from inside their Mac Pro computer when using FireWire audio devices.

I know of at least one machine doing this — hopefully this update will address it.

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Engagdet blogger Nilay Patel breaks it down:

There’s a crucial difference between “open” and “free” here. Although H.264 is an open standard, in that it was developed by a consortium of companies and anyone can make and sell an encoder or decoder, it’s not free – you’ve got to pay for a royalty fee to use it, and the rates are set by the MPEG-LA, which collects payments and distributes them to its members.

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David Airey has put together a wonderful tour of the history of the Batman logo:

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Apple PR:

“One million iPads in 28 days—that’s less than half of the 74 days it took to achieve this milestone with iPhone,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “Demand continues to exceed supply and we’re working hard to get this magical product into the hands of even more customers.”

Most impressive.

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spiritjb.com:

On iPad, all this is still sort of beta. Some packages in Cydia, not designed for iPad, might screw up your system and require you to restore. Be careful. (And no, Cydia’s appearance is not final.)

When it comes to jailbreaks, this seems even riskier than normal. I won’t be going down this road quite yet.

[ via Engadget]

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