Linked List: July 11, 2011

Monday, 11 July 2011

What Would Don Draper Do? 

This calls for a drink.

Why Taylor Martin Switched From an HTC ThunderBolt to an iPhone 4 

Taylor Martin, writing at PhoneDog:

Seeing as I’m not exactly a big fan of the Cupertino-based company, a lot of people were surprised when they discovered I had switched back to the dark side. But to be honest, it was a much wanted and needed switch that had to be made. The ThunderBolt – despite being a great device – has been driving me crazy for the past three months.

He cites five reasons: design, stability, battery life, apps, and camera.

Other than that, how’d you enjoy the play, Mrs. Lincoln?

Update: Don’t miss the comment thread on this one.

Martin Burgers 

Dean Martin’s recipe for hamburgers. Sounds perfect.

Microsoft: Windows 7 Hits 400 Million Licenses Sold 

Todd Bishop, for GeekWire:

At its Worldwide Partner Conference in Los Angeles this morning, Microsoft updated its Windows 7 sales figures — saying that the current version of its operating system has sold 400 million licenses, significantly outpacing Windows XP’s growth over the same period of its life.

Impressive.

HP’s Tortured WebOS Positioning 

Jean-Louis Gassée:

The less-than-perfect features widely remarked upon by reviewers will be taken care Real Soon Now. According to Walt Mossberg’s TouchPad review, “H-P acknowledges most of these problems and says it is already working on a webOS update, to be delivered wirelessly in three to six weeks that will fix nearly all of them.”

But, wait a minute, if the bugs can be exterminated so quickly, why didn’t HP wait “three to six weeks” and execute the perfect launch promised by their CEO? Did Apotheker get to test the product himself and decide it met his standard for perfection, or did his staff tell him bedtime stories?

Shawn Blanc Reviews the HP TouchPad 

Copiously detailed review. Great eye for detail. A must-read if you’re intrigued at all by WebOS. Hard to pick a pull quote, but I’ll go with this one on the TouchPad’s support for Flash Player:

In theory, the TouchPad gives you “the full web”. In reality you get less.

Proposed Name for a Retina Display iPad 2: ‘iPad Pro’ 

Jin Kim:

This new high-end model will be called iPad Pro, not iPad 2 Plus. Why? Well, first Apple isn’t Samsung. The com­pany doesn’t add pre­fixes and suf­fixes except for ‘i’ and ‘Pro’.

If — and I think it’s a big if — Apple were to unveil an iPad 2 with a retina display, sold alongside the existing iPad 2 models as a premium option, then yeah, I think “iPad Pro” sounds about right.

But Apple still can’t make the existing iPads fast enough, and none of their competitors on the market seem to be making any dent in the market. So even if Apple could do a retina-display iPad this year, I’m not sure there’s any reason they should.

Android Could Be a Billion-Dollar Business, for Microsoft 

Trefis Team, writing for Forbes:

All these patent agreements could generate revenues well in excess of $1 billion for Microsoft by the end of 2012. Currently, Microsoft Office and the Windows operating system are the most valuable segments for Microsoft; however, Android could turn out to be its next billion dollar business and one of its largest revenue generators – surpassing the value of its own Windows 7 platform and perhaps Bing in the not too distant future.

Nice work if you can get it.