Linked List: March 2, 2011

Wednesday, 2 March 2011

Video of Today’s Apple Event 

Jobs seemed happy, no?

‘The Xoom Is a Clear Winner’ 

Charlie Sheen, writing for Computerworld:

As I explained in a previous blog, Eight reasons the Motorola Xoom beats the iPad, the Xoom is far superior to the original iPad. And now that the iPad 2 has been announced, it’s clear that the Xoom is superior to the new iPad, for almost all of the same reasons.

Update: My bad. That was written by Preston Gralla.

Charlie Sheen Quotes as New Yorker Cartoons 

“I’m tired of pretending I’m not a total bitching rock star from Mars.”

iPad 2 

If you do nothing else, watch the video for the Smart Cover. Seriously, it’s amazing.

The Battle for Second Place 

John Paczkowski:

Isn’t this ironic. Hewlett-Packard and Research in Motion, two companies that haven’t officially launched their first tablets yet, talking smack to one another the day before Apple debuts its second.

To the Victor Goes the Pricing Power 

Terrific piece by Joshua Benton at The Nieman Journalism Lab, responding to my “Dirty Percent” piece yesterday. I had forgotten that Amazon does subscriptions for the Kindle:

The Kindle does actually offer subscriptions, both to newspapers and blogs, like Daring Fireball itself. (Given where DF ranks in the Kindle Store, he probably has about 5-8 people paying $1.99 a month to read the site on their Kindles. We have 16! That’s likely to be the only traffic-related number where we edge Gruber.)

I don’t think any publisher would consider Amazon’s Kindle subscription model an improvement over Apple’s, though, for a host of reasons — not least that it’s Amazon who controls pricing, not the publisher, not to mention Amazon takes an even steeper cut than Apple does.

So why aren’t those who are criticizing Apple for taking a 30 percent cut of subscription revenue criticizing Amazon? My theory: everyone understands, intuitively, that the Kindle is a closed proprietary platform; but many people view iOS (incorrectly) as a platform like the Mac or Windows, where third parties are free to do what they want.

Malware on Android Market 

Aaron Gingrich, for Android Police:

Openness — the very characteristic of Android that makes us love it — is a double-edged sword. Redditor lompolo has stumbled upon a perfect example of that fact; he’s noticed that a publisher has taken “… 21 popular free apps from the market, injected root exploits into them and republished.” The really scary part? “50k-200k downloads combined in 4 days.”

Uh-oh:

There’s another APK hidden inside the code, and it steals nearly everything it can: product ID, model, partner (provider?), language, country, and userID. But that’s all child’s play; the true pièce de résistance is that it has the ability to download more code. In other words, there’s no way to know what the app does after it’s installed, and the possibilities are nearly endless.

Macworld’s Live Coverage of the iPad 2 Intro Event 

I’m sitting next to Snell and Moren here in the theater. If the network stays up, I’ll peck out a few comments on Twitter.