Linked List: June 3, 2009

Wednesday, 3 June 2009

Mossberg likes the Pre, too, but says its App Catalog isn’t yet ready:

The Pre’s biggest disadvantage is its app store, the App Catalog. At launch, it has only about a dozen apps, compared with over 40,000 for the iPhone, and thousands each for the G1 and the modern BlackBerry models. Even worse, the Pre App Catalog isn’t finished. It’s immature, it’s labeled a beta, and Palm has yet to release the tools for making Pre apps available to more than a small group of developers.

In fact, during my testing, one of my downloads from the App Catalog caused my Pre to crash disastrously — all my email, contacts and other data were wiped out, and the phone was unable to connect to the Sprint network or Wi-Fi. Palm conceded the catastrophe was due to problems it still has getting the App Catalog to work with the phone’s internal memory, and explained that this is one reason it hasn’t widely distributed the developer tools.

David Pogue’s Palm Pre Review ★

Pogue gives the Pre a rave review:

The Pre, which goes on sale Saturday, is an elegant, joyous, multitouch smartphone; it’s the iPhone remixed. That’s no surprise, really; its primary mastermind was Jon Rubinstein, who joined Palm after working with Steve Jobs of Apple, on and off, for 16 years. Once at Palm, he hired 250 engineers from Apple and elsewhere, and challenged them to out-iPhone the iPhone.

That the Pre even comes close to succeeding is astonishing. As so many awful “iPhone killers” have demonstrated, most efforts to replicate the iPhone result in hideous designed-by-committee messes.

He dings it for battery life, but says poor Sprint reception at his house may be the reason. No performance comparisons to the iPhone, though (I’m interested in side-by-side web page rendering tests), and he says some apps take “8 or 9 seconds” to launch.

Fortune: ‘SanDisk Is Happy to Be Number Two’ ★

Jon Fortt, for Fortune:

Some fads, however, don’t pass. And in his sunny Silicon Valley conference room one recent morning, the founder and CEO of SanDisk admits what many music lovers have known for a long time: the iPod wars are over, and Apple won.

“You can’t out-iPod the iPod,” Harari now admits.

Apple Set to Build Billion-Dollar Data Center in North Carolina ★

Even the world’s most successful hardware device maker is investing heavily in data centers.

Purported Revenue for Apple’s Fifth Avenue Store: $440M ★

New York Post realty columnist Steve Cuozzo, regarding Fifth Avenue retail space:

The real mind-boggler, though, is Apple.

Before the GM Building was sold to a Boston Properties partnership last year, a prospectus shown to possible purchasers revealed the Apple store under the famous glass cube was doing an incredible $440 million a year. By comparison, sources said, Apple’s outpost at Prince and Greene streets does $100 million. (The uptown Apple is larger, but not by much — it has an estimated 10,000 square feet of selling space compared with 8,500 feet in SoHo.)

As a quick point of reference, Palm had $1.3 billion in revenue for 2008. So Palm’s entire worldwide revenue was just three times more than the revenue Apple booked from this one 10,000 square foot store.

Another Example of Microsoft’s Branding Magic ★

DigiTimes:

Microsoft plans to redefine mini-notebooks that Intel has categorized as netbooks with a new term — low cost small notebook PC, according to Steven Guggenheimer, general manager of the Application Platform and Development Marketing Division at Microsoft.

Rolls right off the tongue, no? I agree with the sentiment, but good luck getting “low cost small notebook PC” to stick as the name of the product class.

U.S. Justice Department Inquiry Into Hiring at Silicon Valley Companies ★

Cecilia Kang, reporting for The Washington Post:

The Justice Department has launched an investigation into whether some of the nation’s largest technology companies violated antitrust laws by negotiating the recruiting and hiring of one another’s employees, according to two sources with knowledge of the review.

The review, which is said to be in its preliminary stages, is focused on the search engine giant Google; its competitor Yahoo; Apple, maker of the popular iPhone; and the biotech firm Genentech, among others, according to the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation is ongoing.

‘There Is Bad Taste and Then There Is This’ ★

Armin Vit on the Bing logo:

There are plenty of other blogs and sources critiquing the functionality and efficacy of Bing, so what truly brings us all here today is the sad, awful, unforgivable mutilation that has been done to these four poor letters of the Latin alphabet.