Linked List: July 22, 2010

Thursday, 22 July 2010

HP Slate No Longer a Consumer Product, Supposedly Set to Arrive for Enterprise This Fall ★

Good idea to unveil it at the year’s biggest consumer electronics show.

Farhad Manjoo:

The carriers constantly measure how well specific devices perform on their networks, and they send detailed dropped-call information to the manufacturers. But neither the phone makers nor the carriers want to make that data public — and they won’t say why, either.

College Humor Spoofs Apple’s Antennagate Press Conference ★

The “here’s how you should hold it” bit says it all.

Amazon Quarterly Results ★

Revenue and net income are up, but it sounds to me like they’re trying to position Kindle as a software platform rather than a hardware one:

“We’re seeing rapid growth in Kindle, Amazon Web Services, third-party sales, and retail. We’re also encouraged by what we see in mobile. In the last twelve months, customers around the world have ordered more than $1 billion of products from Amazon using a mobile device,” said Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com. “The leading mobile commerce device today is the smartphone, but we’re excited by the potential of the new category of wireless tablet computers. Over time, tablet computers could become a meaningful additional driver for our business.”

Amazon stock is way down in after-hours trading. Update: Perhaps the stock hit is because despite revenue being up, they missed their EPS estimate by $0.08?

Microsoft’s Record Q4 Earnings Keeps Revenue Ahead of Apple ★

MG Siegler:

Microsoft has just reported its earnings for Q4 2010 (their fiscal calendar is a bit odd). Given Apple’s blockbuster quarter announced on Tuesday, there was a lot of talk that Apple would surpass Microsoft in revenue for the first time in recent history. That hasn’t happened. Instead, Microsoft had its best Q4 ever with $16.04 billion in revenue (Apple had $15.7 billion in revenue last quarter).

Android 2.2 Handily Beats iOS4 in JavaScript Benchmarks ★

Pretty dramatic performance difference. I think Android 2.2’s JavaScript performance gains are from JIT compilation, which isn’t possible under iOS 4.0 because of a security feature where once a page in memory is marked writeable, it can never be made executable. It’s a nice security feature, but one that comes at the expense of significant potential performance gains.

Motorola’s Attention to Detail on the Droid X ★

This might epitomize the difference between Android and iOS.

Portrait of Bill Atkinson ★

Made, of course, using MacPaint.

The Ever-Arrogant Apple ★

Ken Segall:

How dare Apple think they can make this problem go away with a free case that makes the problem go away. […] Look what they’ve done to poor Adobe, yanking away their right to spend more than 3 years figuring out how to run Flash on mobile devices.

(Via Faruk Ateş.)

Android in China ★

Ryan Paul:

That is exactly what the Chinese mobile industry is doing with OPhone. They are creating a completely distinct third-party Android software ecosystem that is independent from Google and they are building a heavily-customized userspace stack that integrates with completely different Web services and allows them to deliver the kind of user experience that they want.

In effect, they are using Android—but not Google’s Android. They don’t need Google’s Android Market and they aren’t necessarily integrating with Google’s search or other services. When you think about it in those terms, it makes Android’s ascent towards dominance in Asia seem like a hollow victory for Google.

Wired: ‘Bloatware Creeps Into Android Phones’ ★

Priya Ganapati:

Samsung’s Vibrant phone that launched last week on T-Mobile is a good example. The device includes apps such as Mobi TV, GoGo Flight internet and Electronic Arts’ The Sims 3 game. Both Mobi TV and GoGo are applications that require users to pay a fee beyond the trial period. Motorola’s Backflip phone, introduced on AT&T a few months ago, includes Where, a location-based service app, and YPMobile, a Yellow Pages app. Even the HTC Evo is packed with programs such as Sprint’s Nascar app, Sprint Football and Sprint TV, among others.

It seems more clear now why Google made the Nexus One: it’s hard to get a phone with the default Android OS. It also seems clear that Android’s openness is largely about being open to the carriers’ ability to customize the user experience. The difference between Android and iOS isn’t that Android comes with undeletable default apps and iOS doesn’t. Lots of iPhone users wish they could get rid of apps like Stocks and Weather. The difference is who gets to decide on those default apps. With iOS, it’s Apple. With the Nexus One, it was Google. With these new Android phones, it’s the carriers.

The ABC News App for iPad ★

They brought out the big guns for the commercial. Not so sure about that “globe” UI, though.

Oil Spill in Dalian, China ★

Horrifying photos from The Big Picture.

BP Cleanup Workers Gone Wild ★

Great reporting from Mac McClelland.

Skype for iPhone Now Supports Multitasking and No-Charge Calls Over 3G ★

They had been planning to charge for calls over 3G.

Henry Blodget’s Kids Are Addicted to Their iPad ★

Henry Blodget:

Again, a month after we bought it, the iPad has become so central to our household that we have to hide it. And in relatively short order, to preserve my family harmony, I’m probably going to have to buy two more of the damn things.

Makes you wonder how the iPad is going to do in the holiday quarter.

Legendary Dallas Cowboys Coach Jimmy Johnson to Be a Contestant on ‘Survivor: Nicaragua’ ★

Not like a celebrity edition of Survivor; regular Survivor. Holy shit.

Zaky: Apple to Surpass Microsoft in Revenue This Quarter ★

Andy Zaky:

In fact, when Microsoft reports second quarter calendar results after the bell this afternoon, its likely that Apple will have surpassed Microsoft in revenue for the first time in the company’s recent history — and that it will continue to do so in the future. Apple reported $3.25 billion in net income ($3.51) on a whopping $15.7 billion in revenue on Tuesday, smashing analyst expectations, and reporting more or less in line with my forecast.

Microsoft, on the other hand, is expected to earn $4.1 billion in net income ($0.46 in EPS) on $15.26 billion in revenue when it releases results after the bell today. That is nearly $500 million less than what Apple reported in revenue this quarter.

Apple passed Microsoft in market cap a few months ago, and now revenue this quarter. The big one is net income — profit — and it’s looking like that might happen within the next year.

Microsoft’s Innovative New On/Off Slider Checkbox Controls ★

Innovative stuff. (Scroll down to the second screenshot.) Also looks like they’ve switched to hierarchy disclosure triangles instead of those asinine +/- toggles they’ve been using for decades.

Sledgehammer and Whore ★

Great story from a TV screenwriter. (Via Andy Baio.)