Daniel Eran Dilger:
Open Source enthusiasts love to tell you Android is winning, and that it is winning because it is open. But they’re wrong on both counts. The history of computing makes that abundantly clear, as do the current leaders in profitability.
Some great points in this article.
Philip Elmer-Dewitt does a little investigation on the company that says the iPhone 5 is the most hated smartphone and the Galaxy one is the most loved. It’s funny.
Mike Elgan:
Apple sells hardware and software. To Apple, services are free things they offer to support the sale of their hardware and software. So Apple wants to de-commoditize hardware and software and commoditize services.
[…]
Google, on the other hand, is a services company that makes hardware and software to support its services. So Google wants to make services less commoditized and hardware and software more commoditized.
Great article.
I think the shine is starting to come off Samsung.
BlackBerry (BBRY.O) will likely face tough questions about its future at its annual meeting on Tuesday after dismal quarterly results last week triggered a 28 percent plunge in the Canadian smartphone maker’s share price.
Seriously? Now you ask the tough questions?
Continue the age old saga of a wanderer who was born a Prince! The wanderer returns, in search of his unknown past on a journey to redefine his future. Prince of Persia The Shadow and The Flame is a pick up and play, smooth adaptation of an epic classic easy to handle but challenging to master. Play as the Prince who must battle the odds again to save his Princess and kingdom on a journey that will pave the path to his origins.
Apple seems to win customer satisfaction everywhere.
Note: The link goes to a Google translated page.
That implies a net present value of about $40 for each account. This is quite a drop from early 2010 when the value was $866.
Wow.
Makes perfect sense now.
Jean-Louis Gassée takes a look at recent events at BlackBerry. The outlook isn’t good.
Today on the quarterly conference call, BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins announced that BlackBerry 10 would not be coming to the PlayBook as previously expected. Apparently the performance wasn’t up to snuff, and Heins want the focus back onto core products.
It’s not like there’s enough PlayBook users to bother with anyway.
Justin Esgar built iCloud syncing into SignMyPad so users could access the documents on their iPhone as well.
Nonetheless we were denied for our use of iCloud. Apple’s reasoning was that they will not allow iOS applications to use iCloud to sync “non-user-generated” data between devices. After some lengthy followup, we learned that while using a “drawing application” to create a new piece of art and then saving that file would be considered “user-generated”, using our app to add a signature and content to a PDF and saving it as a new file is not “user-generated”. The exception, of course, being for Apple’s own iOS applications, like those in iWorks. So after a long phone call with Apple that equated to my logical arguments being repeatedly contested with the same sentence from an apparent script (“your app does not follow our guidelines regarding user-generated documents in iCloud”), what was their recommendation for how to get over this hurdle? Use a 3rd party iCloud competitor. Wow.
I don’t get it.
A lot of them won by a huge margin too.
Adware is the most prevalent app-based mobile threat around the world today. In the past year, Lookout estimates that more than one million American Android users downloaded adware. In fact, 6.5 percent of free apps in Google Play contain adware.
Everything is perfectly fine. Between the malware and adware, every Android user will be infected soon.
iOS 7 provides powerful new ways to configure and deploy devices across institutions and features to help schools purchase, distribute and manage apps with ease. App Store license management, seamless enrollment in mobile device management (MDM) and single sign on are just some of the capabilities in iOS 7 that make it ideal for education.
Microsoft Corp will offer its popular “Age of Empires” game for Apple Inc’s iPhone and other smartphones through a tie-up with Japan’s KLab Inc, seeking to capture growth in a booming mobile game market.
Benjamin is a task manager based on the FranklinCovey method of time management. Built specifically to help replace your heavy Franklin Planner, Benjamin stores your master task list, daily task lists, projects, and daily notes so they are always at your fingertips. Best of all, Benjamin lets you sync your information between iPhone and iPad so that it’s conveniently available whether you’re at your desk or on the go.
I remember using the paper version of this. Of course, it didn’t sync and correcting entries was a pain. This looks good.
These looks like a great idea, especially since I often hum voice memos to myself about ideas I have.
Brent Simmons on his QA person Nick:
Nick does excellent work.
Which means that when I’m busy and have a lot to do, I curse his name, the air he breathes, and everybody who’s ever been nice to him. I suspect his heart is black and terrible and full of hatred toward me personally.
Which is just to say, again: Nick does excellent work.
Perfect.
I want to take a time machine back to when I was 20 and Gibbs-slap myself… hard.
A great story from Kevin Hoctor about writing software and a wonderful bit of advice for writing an app.
Everything you need to know about the settlement.
Apple owns the future of mobile devices, not because it has erected a near monopoly market position protected by major barriers to entry like IBM in 1970s or Microsoft’s DOS and Windows in the 80s and 90s or Google’s search and Adobe’s Flash in the 2000s; Apple sells its products within a very diverse and openly competitive market and maintains minority unit market share in smartphones.
It just happens that Apple is making the vast majority of all the profits in mobile hardware, software, media and services. And the mobile segment happens to have much brighter prospects than the rest of the consumer technology market, particularly WinTel PCs.
Very well thought out and lengthy article from Daniel Eran Dilger.
Basically there is no fragmentation.
Clearly they did.
Microsoft Corp. was recently in advanced discussions with Nokia Corp. about a purchase of the Finnish company’s device business, according to people familiar with the matter, in a marriage that could have reshaped the mobile-phone industry.
The talks have faltered, they said. One person said talks took place as recently as this month but aren’t likely to be revived.
The two sides made significant progress on a plan that would stitch the U.S. software giant with a mobile-phone pioneer. Both companies have struggled of late, as each has tried to adapt to a world in which consumers prefer smartphones built by Apple Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co.
I doubt this merger would have any significant impact on Apple or Samsung. It may help Nokia and Microsoft shake things up, but there’s already a lot at stake in the mobile market, so if they aren’t working closely already there’s little chance they ever will.
Neven Mrgan:
Just about the most asinine, presumptuous, hubris-filled thing a designer can say is that someone else’s design is “wrong”. That word is reserved for judgments of absolute truth or ethical guidance; for flawed mathematical proofs and crimes. And yet, allow me to declare the following: Jony Ive’s icon grid in iOS 7 is wrong.
Oopsie.
Matt Drance on iOS 7:
Now the hardware has caught up, and the Apple design team has a new leader. We don’t need the deception of “photorealism” anymore. Despite the loss of these tricks, iOS 7 feels more real. The parallax effect conveys an entire living world under that glass, not just abstract pictures and icons. This is reinforced by the launch and quit animations: your eye never loses sight of where you’re going, or where you came from.
John Moltz with a very important distinction in my “Don’t worry about iOS 7” article from earlier today.
Judging from my inbox, Twitter and Messages, people are losing their minds over iOS 7 and some of the changes Apple introduced at WWDC last week. Here is my advice to you—sit back, take a deep breath and relax.