“I have a secret project which adds four hours every day to the 24 hours we have. There’s a bit of time travel involved.”
android
Showing 291 posts tagged android
Galaxy S4 Reviews
I’ll just repeat what I wrote a month ago after the initial unveiling:
It almost reads like so many new iPhone initial thoughts these days — “the same, but a little better”. Except that it seems that on top of the good, smaller iterations, Samsung added a bunch of stupid shit that no one will use as well.
Air View? Air Gesture? Smart Scroll? Smart Pause? I’m reminded of the the Dr. Ian Malcolm line from Jurassic Park, “But your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn’t stop to think if they should.”
The last line is especially perfect since I just got home from seeing Jurassic Park in 3D this evening.
stevekovach:
staff:
Tumblr for Android just got a total facelift! We’ve completely redesigned the interface, added fancy post animations, made images pop, and a whole lot more. Download the update today.
:)
This fancy. (Refresh animation is great too.)
(via stevekovach)
HTC First As The Motorola ROKR?
Matt Drance on Facebook Phone/Home:
Remember the Motorola ROKR? Remember what happened fifteen months later?
If you think the HTC First is the extent of Facebook’s mobile phone aspirations, you’re kidding yourself. It’s a toe dipped into the ocean.
If Microsoft Were The Inventors Of Facebook Home, They’d Have Invented Facebook Home
Here we go again.
Frank Shaw, Microsoft’s head of communications, took to the company blog today to “congratulate” Facebook on the launch of Facebook Home. Except that he’s not really congratulating Facebook, he’s passive-aggressively signaling the old “WE DID THIS FIRST!!!” whiny bullshit that Microsoft loves to pull from time to time.
Microsoft, by way of Shaw, seems annoyed that Facebook is getting all this buzz for something they believe they did in 2011 with Windows Phone. They’re pissed off that such a fact which seems so obvious to them wasn’t brought up enough yesterday, so they’re bringing it up themselves.
Not mentioned is that it wasn’t brought up because Windows Phone, while a good product in many regards, is a complete after-thought in the smartphone market. You can yell “FIRST!!!” as loudly as you want to try to change that, but that never works.
Said another way: If you guys were the inventors of Facebook Home, you’d have invented Facebook Home.
What’s deliciously awkward here is that Microsoft is actually an investor in Facebook, and a close partner. It must be especially maddening that Facebook would choose to utilize (or “spoon”) a product by their chief rival — hence Shaw’s comments about Android in his post.
I’ll just repeat what I said a year ago on a similar matter:
If you have to tell people you won, you lost.
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The "Face-Hugger" Phone
Rene Ritchie on the “Facebook Phone”:
Just as they overwhelmed and walled the web to build their desktop platform, Facebook could have a way to face-hugger Android phones and remake them, Facebook-formed…
“Face-hugger” — that’s a good way to put it, I think.
The "Facebook Phone" Lives
Nice scoop by Josh Constine of TechCrunch:
Facebook just invited press to an event at its headquarters on April 4th to “Come See Our New Home On Android”. Sources tell us it will be a modified version of the Android operating system with deep native Facebook functionality on the homescreen that may live on an HTC handset. The evidence aligns to say this is the Facebook Phone announcement people have been speculating about for years.
Others have since backed this up as well.
I was a few months off, but this is basically what I had heard back in January as well.
There seems to be some disagreement over whether or not this would constitute a “fork” of Android. It would seem there is a way for Facebook to do this with Google’s blessing (just as they bless TouchWiz and other “skins”). But make no mistake, this is not stock Android. Facebook will deeply inject their own apps into the core of the OS. As long as they don’t replace Search, Maps, and a few others, Google should be okay with it — for now.
One wildcard is the Play Store. Facebook has their own App Center (which right now links to Play Store and the App Store), which they presumably could make work as a stand-alone Android app store as well. But it’s hard to see how that wouldn’t piss off Google. See: Amazon.
Another question: what will the carriers think of this? Presumably, they’ll have at least one on board with the HTC phone. Facebook has been making a lot of noise about “free calls” within their Messenger apps — this could all but destroy the notion of cellular “minutes”.
Of course, that writing has been on the wall for some time. Data phones are the way going forward. Still, the carriers must be a little scared of the post-minutes, post-SMS world that this Facebook Phone highlights. It’s a huge change. The carriers are finally becoming the dumb pipes they were meant to be.
High-res
Stated a bit more clearly: Samsung makes more money off of Android than Google makes from all of their businesses combined.
This simply does not seem like a tenable situation.
A Changing Of The Android Guard
Andy Rubin is out, Sundar Pichai is in.
This is a fascinating and surprising move given all the success Android has seen in recent months. I won’t attempt to speculate as to why this change is happening now — I’m sure we’ll get plenty of that over the next few days. What I do know is that Sundar Pichai, the Google executive who has been leading Chrome (and will continue to lead Chrome as well as Android — read into that what you will), is a great choice to take over.
I’ve had the opportunity to meet Pichai a number of times over the years — thanks mainly, I can only assume, to my obsession with tracking Chrome in my writing days — and found him to be one of the most thoughtful and open-minded execs I have ever met.
This genuinely makes me excited about the future of Android — even if you’ll still have to pry my iPhone from my cold, dead hands.
Tablets Playing Out More Like Smartphones, Not PCs
I’m generally wary of these estimates (see: netbook projections from a few years ago), but even if IDC is off by a lot, this should be extremely troubling for Microsoft:
IDC said tablets running Microsoft’s Windows 8 platform would grow their market share from 1 percent last year to 7.4 percent in 2017.
Tablets running the Windows RT operating system, which is not compatible with older software that runs on Windows, will see their market share stay below 3 percent through 2017, IDC said.
The tablet market is expected to be close to 200 million units shipped in 2013. According to IDC, the iPad will control about half of that market with all the various Android tablets controlling the other half. Microsoft will be a non-player.
And even by 2017 — four full years from now — IDC doesn’t think Microsoft will control even 10 percent of the market. Yikes.
"Apple devices are still reigning above the clouds..."
Gogo:
Apple devices are still reigning above the clouds, following the tablet trend with the iPad being the device of choice. Among all mobile devices being used to connect through Gogo, 84 percent carry Apple’s iOS operating system while 16 percent carry the Android operating system. If you look only at the smartphones our customers are using, the iPhone makes up 73 percent and all Android devices make up 26 percent, with Blackberry and Windows based devices each making up less than 1 percent of devices being used in air.
Android is winning.
But really, the BlackBerry and Windows Phone numbers are just pathetic.
[via Daring Fireball]
