512 Pixels

Joshua Topolsky:

If you must compare the DROID to the iPhone, then know that the Android platform still has a ways to go before the experience of using the phone is as seamless as the one Apple has created — but also know that Apple has a long way to go before its messaging, email, and customization can match what Google is offering. Both products have very distinct strengths and weaknesses.

Macworld, in their look at Apple TV 3.0:

Perhaps Apple is content with Apple TV never being anything more than a front-end for the iTunes store. Or perhaps Apple is well aware of its device’s limitations and is hard at work on a new version with upgraded hardware and improved support for the rest of the stuff that’s out there on the Net.

It’s sad, really. The Apple TV could have been awesome. Instead, consumers are opting to install a Mac mini, which can do everything the Apple TV can do plus a whole lot more. Of course, Apple makes more money off of the Mac mini than the Apple TV, so maybe this whole thing is designed to sell Mac minis.

I can see Apple treating (internally, at least) the Mac mini like the MacBook Pro, while the Apple TV is a MacBook: nice, and will get the job done, but not as great as what you could get for a few hundred dollars more. But they don’t advertise either product that way, leaving Apple TV fans hoping and waiting for that miracle update that may not ever be coming.

Wired:

Even though many anonymous sources have described Apple’s tablet as a “larger iPhone,” you’re unlikely to win if all you do is re-size a photo of an iPhone. That would be yawn-inducing. Challenge yourselves artistically, have some fun and make a compelling device worthy of all the hype.

Honestly, the artwork with the story is more compelling than any of the ones entered so far.

Many, many non-iSight iMac G5s died after having capacitors on their logic board fail like these little guys. This machine joined their ranks today, after getting dropped off at our shop for repair.

The New York Times:

Motorola’s Droid is the first phone to use the latest release of Android, called Éclair, which features free turn-by-turn directions from Google and sophisticated speech recognition. The biggest problem was the balance between design, which was once a Motorola hallmark, and the phone’s performance. “When you are trying to make something small and powerful, everything is a tradeoff,” Mr. Osterloh explained. “You have to iterate the design thousands of times to get it right.”

Even a small change, like the color of the paint, means that the design of the several radio antennas embedded into the phone’s case have to be rearranged.

Verizon worried that the angular design of what was to be the Droid appealed more to men than women. Motorola quickly rounded some of the phone’s edges and added a rubberized backing to create a softer feel.

It’s encouraging to see an engineering-driven company like Motorola taking design so seriously. Because of Apple, other companies’ products have to be as pretty on the outside as they are well-built on the inside.

PreCentral:

Here we go again. Apple has updated iTunes to version 9.0.2 and Palm Pre sync is dead again using webOS 1.2.1, despite Palm’s Hurculean efforts to spoof nearly every aspect of USB identification known to mankind. As with previous breakages, iTunes does launch when you connect a Pre with Media Mode, but it doesn’t appear as a device on the sidebar.

Palm needs to get over this and build a good, cross-platform syncing solution to interface with iTunes, instead of having their hacked-together solution break every time Apple updates their software.

Not surprisingly, it sports a new interface and iTunes LP.

The first revision of Android looked like Windows 3.1 — this is way nicer.

As told to Shawn Blanc.

John Gruber:

Is the App Store popular because the iPhone is great? Or is the iPhone great because the App Store is popular? There’s a big difference between those two arguments. The latter is the argument Microsoft has long made regarding the advantage of Windows: Windows is great because Windows has the most software and most developers.

[…]

But my interest remains, as ever, in the quality of the apps, not the quantity. Let’s say that when the dust starts to settle in this market, Android winds up with far fewer total apps than iPhone OS, but they’re of generally higher quality. That would make Android the Mac to the iPhone’s Windows. I would switch to that platform. (Feel free to substitute WebOS for Android in the above hypothetical.)

The fact that Apple’s advertising campaign for the iPhone over the last year has been focused on the apps that run on the iPhone — and not the iPhone itself — is telling.

It’s nice that my iPhone can do it all, but it’s real annoying to get text messages while using it for turn-by-turn GPS.

Ars Technica’s Peter Bright, in his 15 page review of Windows 7:

So while Windows 7 may not right all of Vista’s wrongs, it is absolutely superior to its predecessor. It has three years of improvements, so it can’t help but be better. But if you hated Vista’s UI, you’re going to hate Windows 7’s. Worse, in fact, because 7 forces you to use the new Start menu and taskbar, with no possibility of reverting to the old behaviour. If your applications didn’t work in Vista, they almost certainly won’t work in 7. Sure, 7 has some virtualization tools to help, but this was always possible in Vista too. If you felt Vista was too big and too slow, well, 7 isn’t going to provide much joy there, either. Marginal improvements, perhaps, but nothing more. Everything “bad” about Vista—and I use the word in the loosest possible sense, because the things that garnered most complaints have negligible legitimacy—is still “bad” in 7.

Does this make Windows 7 a bad operating system? Not in the least bit. Windows Vista, for all its (alleged) flaws, was the best version of Windows ever shipped. The underlying changes it made were essential to the longevity of the Windows platform, and user features like the searchable Start menu remain an absolute joy that make XP look clunky and ancient in comparison. Windows 7 is even better than Vista, so XP holdouts should upgrade with confidence. Windows 7 is a great OS.

In my own testing, I’ve found 7 to run faster than XP and Vista on the same hardware, respectively. But it’s clear that Windows 7 as is to Vista as Snow Leopard is to Leopard. Which isn’t a bad thing at all.