The Biggest Thing in Consumer Electronics

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Christian Zibreg:

Munster’s betting Apple will introduce the rumored product some time this year and is expecting a Fall availability. The key quote:

It’s going to live up to some of the building hype. It will be the biggest thing in consumer electronics since the smartphone.

This is like hearing that Seinfeld will do a reunion episode. The hype is getting so colossal it may even be dangerous.

iPad 3 Has No Home Button?

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Ryan Faas:

The spacing of the icon’s on the iPad pictured on the invite clearly indicate that it’s in portrait orientation rather than landscape.  But there’s no sign of a home button – a design change that Apple has been allegedly been toying with for some time. Google has already deprecated the use of physical buttons on devices and moved to software-only onscreen controls.

I don't think the icon spacing reveals anything. If there is no home button then there needs to be a way to get 'Home' on-screen at all times. No. There is still a home button. The form may change (maybe) but they button remains. I virtually guarantee it.

Nokia 808 PureView

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#Ian Delaney:

Yes, that’s right. But this combination isn’t about shooting pictures the size of billboards! Instead, it’s about creating amazing pictures at normal, manageable sizes. There’s a combination of benefits.

The technology means that taking typically sized shots (say, 5 megapixels) the camera can use oversampling to combine up to seven pixels into one “pure” pixel, eliminating the visual noise found on other mobile phone cameras. On top of that, you can zoom in up to 3X without losing any of the details in your shot – and there’s no artificially created pixels in your picture, either.

Otherwise, you can use ‘Creative Shooting Mode’ to capture images at high resolution – 38 megapixels; then reframe, crop and zoom to find the best “picture within the picture” after the image has been shot and before saving it at convenient sizes for sharing and storage.

Wow. I would be applauding wildly if Apple did this. This is the first time I've seen a feature on another phone that literally blew me away.

Gizmodo's Mountain Lion Review

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Jesus Diaz:

I've been using Mountain Lion for more than a week now, and I got the same feeling I got from Lion: Scott Forstall—Apple's own Doctor Moreau—is still pushing for an ungodly desktop/iPad hybrid. This is not the future; it's a patched up genetic experiment anchored in Apple's past and present successes.

Vastly inferior to Microsoft's Windows 8 effort.

Google on Android Activations/Tablets

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John Gruber:

In a separate article, The Verge confirmed with Rubin that Google’s “activation” numbers include each unique device only once, and don’t count based-on-Android-but-not-using-the-Google-experience devices like the Kindle Fire or Barnes and Noble Nook.

This gives Google's numbers a lot more credibility with me. But why not just state this clearly from the outset? Something about this seems off.

Apple has sold a little over 50 million cumulative iPads to date. Just me or does it seem like you see a lot more than five iPads per Android tablet in the wild?

I have never seen an Android tablet in the wild. Ever.

Yahoo: Patent Opportunist

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Josh Constine:

After years of positive relations, friendly blog posts, and referral traffic, Yahoo may have just been biding its time waiting declare war on Facebook. Today it suddenly accused its former ally of infringing on 10-20 of its patents. It demands a settlement from Facebook or it says it will sue.

The attack comes at a particularly vulnerable time for Facebook, during the quiet period leading up to its IPO. Facebook could be forced to license the patents or settle with Yahoo by paying out pre-IPO stock, the same way Google was coerced into giving Yahoo 2.7 million shares in patent settlement before the search giant’s 2004 IPO.

Shrewd move by Yahoo, but surely this pattern will eventually be noticed and Yahoo won't be able to exploit it's relationships any more. One day they'll have to come up with a non-patent-troll business plan to just admit that they lost.

Andy Rubin Suffers From Magical And Revolutionary Delusions

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Marco Arment:

The more curious phrase, to me, is “make sure we’re winning”. That sounds like they are winning, or they’re almost winning, their victory is almost a sure thing, and Rubin just needs to tweak a few small things to widen the gap between his winning platform and the also-rans. Obviously, such a perception isn’t supported by reality.

I was going to comment on Rubin's statements until I read Marco's take. You should too.

iPhone (2007) beats Windows Phone (2012)

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John Brownlee:

With their Windows Phone 7 booth, [Microsoft is] throwing a 100 Euro Windows Phone challenge, in which they invite showgoers to compete for a crisp C-note by having the smartphone in their pocket go head-to-head with a Windows Phone 7 handset.

[T]hey had a score board of how Windows Phone 7 had stacked yp in their tests. And in one of the tests, an original iPhone tied a Windows Phone 7 handset in “Photo / Social.”

We were curious what this meant, so we asked a Microsoft representative, who confirmed that if it said iPhone, it was an original iPhone. She also said that she believed that specific showdown involved how long it took to take a photo and then upload it to a social network.

If so, that’s astonishing. A five-year old phone without any semblance of multitasking and running an operating system that is over two years old held its own against one of Microsoft’s biggest and best devices.

Not to mention that the original iPhone only had EDGE. It's been 5 years since the introduction of the iPhone.

Flash on iPad… Yay?

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Killian Bell:

If you still haven’t gotten over the fact that your iPad doesn’t have Adobe Flash player, than OnLive Desktop Plus may soothe your pain. As you may have guessed, the new app is a premium version of OnLive Desktop, whichbrought Microsoft Office to the iPad earlier this year.

In addition to Office, the premium version offers Flash Player...

Flash is to computing as Denise Crosby was to Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Facebook: The Internet's Big Brother

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Nancy Messieh:

In September, Facebook confirmed that user-information was being collected from third party sites, even when logged out of their accounts, but that it was in the process of fixing the issue. That hasn’t stopped the lawsuits from raining down on the social network.

Anyone who thinks they're anonymous on the internet is a fool.

Samsung's Ships Don't Sail

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Matt Brian:

Samsung says that the figures only account for the number mobile devices it shipped to operators, not the number of smartphones it has sold. Yet again, we aren’t give a real picture of Samsung sales, as demonstrated in the company’s quarterly financial reports.

There's only two reasons not to report actual sales numbers:

  1. You don't know them.
  2. They suck.