Google TV
The best thing I can say about the Google TV platform is that it may finally motivate Apple to move AppleTV from being a hobby to a device worth updating more than once every three years.
iPad apps: Get ready for the second wave
Andy Ihnatko:
The brilliance of the iPad is the understanding that many notebook features aren’t relevant in a slate computer. I’m likely to use external hard drives and printers with a notebook. Not so with a slate. So why bother cutting three USB ports into it, and adding all kinds of troublesome third-party device drivers to the OS? And why bother adding all kinds of features to an app that will only be used 1% of the time, and which ruin the clean lines of the interface every time the app is launched?
36 hours in to my iPad experience, and I agree completely.
Category: News
Undercover Foxconn Investigation
One day in the near future, the people who buiild these gadgets at near slave wages will revolt. Hopefully before that happens, some enterprising and responsible companies will move their manufacturing back to America.
An excellent read.
Category: News
Search Warrant for stolen iPhone unsealed
You can read it here in all it’s glory.
Highlights:
- Hogan (the “finder” of the protoype) was turned in by his roommate.
- Hogan’s roommate tried to talk him out of selling the iPhone to Gizmodo, by arguing that it’s sale would ruin the career of Gray Powell (the engineer that lost it). Hogan’s response was “Sucks for him”.
- Hogan states that he was originally offered $10,000 for the phone from Jason Chen.
- Part of the sale to Gizmodo called for Hogan to be given a bonus in July if the prototype turned out to the real deal.
One of the more particularly juicy parts of this document is the email exchange between Brian Lam and Steve Jobs. Lam tries to justify to Steve why they are going to publish the story about the phone, knowing that it will hurt sales for Apple. Lam tries to negotiate a response from Apple where they would acknowledge it was a prototype, but not a production unit. You can almost smell the shit coming out of Lams mouth in this email.
Reading this affidavit, you can’t help but come away with very bad impressions of Lam, Chen, and Hogan. Three really douchey people.
Category: iPhone,Jackassery,News
Adobe, You Brought An Advertisement To A Gun Fight
Money Quote:
When you’re leaving notes all over the web trying to convince people how open your technology is, maybe leave out the Registered® Trademark® logos next time.
Category: News
Internet Explorer Falls Below 60% Market Share
More good news for those who appreciate browsers that push the envelope and advance the use of HTML5/CSS3.
Steve Jobs: Thoughts on Flash
Steve Jobs has penned another detailed missive, this time on Flash and how/why Apple doesn’t support it on it’s mobile devices. It’s a 1600 word opus that breaks down the argument in to 6 reasons – openness, full web, reliability (and security/performance), battery life, touch, and platform issues.
I can’t argue with most of the points, however this one is not entirely accurate:
Adobe’s Flash products are 100% proprietary. They are only available from Adobe, and Adobe has sole authority as to their future enhancement, pricing, etc. While Adobe’s Flash products are widely available, this does not mean they are open, since they are controlled entirely by Adobe and available only from Adobe. By almost any definition, Flash is a closed system.
The Flash plugin is proprietary, but anyone can build an application that exports to the Flash format. Applications like Swish and others offer Flash creation tools that export to the Flash format. It’s a minor point to quibble with, as the Flash plugin is proprietary.
It will be interesting to see how Adobe responds to this. Adobe, from the CEO on down, has been dissing Apple’s mobile offerings lately in hopes of preserving it’s Flash kingdom. Having Steve Jobs and his 1600 word megaphone broadcast a detailed defense of why Apple avoids Flash can’t go unanswered. Can it?
HP buys Palm for $1.2B
HP decided it wanted to be a player in the mobile handheld space, and they made a smart acquisition.
From the Press Release:
Palm’s current chairman and CEO, Jon Rubinstein, is expected to remain with the company.
I bet he sticks around about 3 months.
Details of AT&T 3G Data Plans for Apple iPad
AT&T has posted a PDF detailing the terms/conditions of 3G data service for the iPad 3G.
Category: News
Microsoft brings it’s Linux grudge to Android
Many of you will remember years ago when Microsoft was so afraid of Linux, it threatened to sue any company that used it with patent infringement. These threats resulted in many companies, including Novell, to set up cross-licensing agreements with Microsoft. These agreements were basically agreements that said if “you license this technology from Microsoft, we won’t sue you for patent infringement”.
Down late in the mobile game, Microsoft is going back to that play, now with Android as the target. And can you blame them? It worked the last time, and they were in a position of dominance with Windows versus Linux. In the mobile space, they are getting creamed by the iPhone and Android. And Microsoft’s answer to both those threats won’t be out until the 4th quarter of this year.
So Microsoft has exerted patent pressure on it’s cheating lover, HTC. HTC was once the top producer of smart phones running the Microsoft Mobile OS. Now, they are one of the top producers of Android phones.
Under this “agreement”, Microsoft will receive royalties from HTC for using the Android OS on their phones. Think about that for a second. Android is open source. Google doesn’t require any licensing fees or royalties when a company uses Android. Of course, Google is usually the default search provider on these devices, and receives most of its compensation from that service. But the precedent here is huge. HTC now pays Microsoft for the privelege of using Google’s operating system on it’s phones.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out. I can’t believe that Google will let this go unanswered. Android has just started to pick up steam in the mobile arena, and this precedent could turn off a lot of hardware manufacturers from going the Android route on their products.
Of course, the big winner here is Apple. Having it’s two other rivals fighting each other means that they aren’t directing their resources at fighting Apple.
Category: News
