Linked List: December 7, 2011

Wednesday, 7 December 2011

Eric Schmidt: Google TV on ‘Majority’ of New TVs by Summer 2012 

Jeff Blagdon, writing for The Verge:

Eric Schmidt thinks his company is doing great — much better than we had even realized. Onstage at LeWeb in Paris this afternoon, Google’s Executive Chairman told the audience that, “By the summer of 2012, the majority of the televisions you see in stores will have Google TV embedded.” The claim would seem to run counter to mixed reviews, disappointing sales numbers to date, and the growth of competing connected TV platforms. Perhaps Schmidt knows something we don’t?

Maybe he’s high? Are there any TVs for sale today with Google TV embedded?

Update: Sony has them, with that great remote control.

‘Whether You Like Android or Not’ 

Marco Arment, on Eric Schmidt’s “Whether you like Android or not, you will support that platform” comment:

Is that a prediction or a threat?

If it’s a threat, I don’t think he meant it as a threat from Google, but rather a threat from Schmidt’s assumed laws of economics: that to avoid Android will be to assure irrelevance.

Is he implying that Android is widely disliked, and it doesn’t matter to him?

I can’t see any way to read his remarks other than as an acknowledgement that Android is widely disliked by developers, and that he doesn’t mind this because he doesn’t think it matters. Numbers are all that matter. If Android is shipping on the most handsets then Android is winning, period.

Why does Google let Eric Schmidt speak publicly? Has it ever turned out well?

I think he was just trying to be honest, and that he honestly believes that numbers alone will win the day for Android. It’s easy to refute this, though. Developers aren’t focusing on iOS first only at the expense of Android. Many developers are focusing on iOS first at the expense of all other platforms — including two platforms which have far greater numbers than iOS or Android: Windows and the web. Of course that’s not true for all developers, but it’s true for many of the hottest ones. The big news today was Flipboard expanding its platform support — from the iPad to the iPhone. We used to think of social networks as websites, but that’s just because all the early ones were web-first. Now, social networks are launching iPhone-first: Instagram, Path, and Stamped, for example.

Windows didn’t win developer support two decades ago because it had the numbers. It got the numbers because it had the developer support. I think Schmidt has the cause and effect backwards.

Ice Cream Sandwich: From Source Code Release to Software Upgrade 

Sony Ericsson company weblog post explaining the exact same thing as the aforelinked one from Motorola: why it will be months from now, at the earliest, before any of their phones get Android 4.0.

Coincidental timing?

Motorola Update on Ice Cream Sandwich 

Motorola company weblog post explaining why it will be months from now, at the earliest, before any of their phones get an upgrade to Android 4.0.

LG Nitro HD 

From David Pierce’s review of the LG Nitro HD Android phone:

There’s one big, huge, giant tradeoff to using an LTE handset, and that’s battery life — if you’re using LTE with any kind of regularity, the battery meter can barely go down fast enough. I’ve never gotten a full day’s battery life out of the Nitro HD, even when not using it regularly; the phone seems to lose its battery even while in standby, which means leaving it unplugged overnight is going to make for a rude awakening (or a missed one, if your phone dies) in the morning. Using Wi-Fi whenever possible largely solves this problem, but it also defeats the point of LTE. When you do use it regularly, beware: streaming a 20-minute episode of Arrested Development lopped 12 percent off my phone’s battery. There’s no way to toggle LTE on the device itself, but third-party developers have made apps that do so for other phones, so keep your fingers crossed that one comes for the Nitro too.

It sucks your battery continuously, even while idle, and you can’t turn it off. But it’s fast. I can’t think of a single paragraph that better encapsulates the difference in mindsets between Android phone makers and Apple.

As usual for The Verge, the video review is excellent. Gives you a good idea of what the hardware (chintzy to my eyes, other than the display) and software (god-awful) actually look like.

Eric Schmidt: ‘Android Is Ahead of the iPhone Now’ 

Speaking of people upset by developers favoring iOS over Android, here’s Eric Schmidt, speaking at the LeWeb conference in Paris:

“Ultimately, application vendors are driven by volume, and volume is favored by the open approach Google is taking. There are so many manufacturers working to deliver Android phones globally,” Schmidt said. “Whether you like Android or not, you will support that platform, and maybe you’ll even deliver it first.”

[Update: Schmidt was slightly misquoted above. What he actually said was, “Whether you like ICS or not, and again I like it a great deal, you will want to develop for that platform, and perhaps even first.”]

“Whether you like Android or not, you will support that platform” sounds a little arrogant, but maybe that’s just me. But it got me thinking. Maybe “whether you like Android or not” is exactly wrong. I think maybe the biggest reason iOS has such strong developer support is that developers like iOS. They use and prefer iPhones and iPads personally, they like Cocoa, and they like the App Store.

The sheer number of Android phones being sold does matter, but I don’t think it’s enough. Developers were clamoring to write iPhone apps before Apple even announced that they were going to allow it.

One Android-toting audience member said he was frustrated to see iOS apps beating Android versions to market. But in part because of Ice Cream Sandwich, “my prediction is that six months from now you’ll say the opposite,” Schmidt said.

Noted!

Microsoft Releases Xbox Live App for iOS 

What I find interesting is that on the iPhone and iPad, it doesn’t feel wrong to see an app using the Metro UI. Whereas a Mac app that looked and felt as Windows-y as this app feels Metro-y would feel like nails on a chalkboard. I think it has something to do with every app being full-screen and immersive on iOS. Also: the fact that Metro is nice.

(Funny to read the comments on this post from Android users. E.g. “iOS before larger market share Android? LAME.”)

5 Minutes on The Verge: Paul Thurrott 

Interesting interview by Thomas Houston:

Q: Is Ballmer still the man for the job?

A: No, and Ballmer was never the right man for the job, which pains me to say because I really like the guy. Microsoft is an engineering driven company, and it needs a voice at the top who understands this world, and not a salesman. My vote is for Steven Sinofksy.

I agree. And I agree about this too:

To use Steve Jobs’ terms, Windows on ARM is a car and Windows on Intel is a truck. If Microsoft is successful in this transition, ARM becomes the volume version of Windows and the company splits the market for “mainstream computing devices” somewhat evenly with iOS and Android. If not, Microsoft is relegated to the truck market. Or what we might call the business PC market.

Silk (Slightly) Faster With Cloud Acceleration Turned Off? 

Interesting tablet browser benchmarks from Steve Souders. Ends up Silk is slightly faster with Amazon’s touted cloud acceleration turned off:

The test results show that some of the obvious optimizations, such as concatenating scripts, aren’t happening when acceleration is on. I expect we’ll see more optimizations rolled out during the Silk release cycle, just as we do for other browsers.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Souders is right, that the cloud acceleration just isn’t doing enough yet.

Flipboard for iPhone 

Nicely done.

Windows Store Revenue Split 

Microsoft:

The revenue share base is 70%, but when an app achieves $25K USD in revenue — aggregated across all sales in every market — that app moves to 80% revenue share for the lifetime of that app.

So, once an app establishes a bit of success, we increase the revenue share to 80% to reflect and reward that success.

So they are undercutting Apple on the revenue split here.

We have full platform support for free apps, trials (both time-based and feature-based trials) and paid apps, including in-app purchase. […]

I sure hope Apple is working on a way to enable free trials. The way it works on Windows Phone is great.

That said, developers can also choose to manage their customer transactions directly, for example, with newspaper subscriptions, or to adopt a business model with offline fulfillment, such as for auctions. We don’t mandate a specific transaction engine and developers can use their own.

Another big difference from Apple. I wonder though, with the various antitrust agreements Microsoft has made around the world, whether they could even consider an Apple-style “if you use our store, all transactions must go through us” policy.

Microsoft Previews Windows Store 

Ina Fried, live-blogging from yesterday’s announcement event:

Microsoft has shipped 500 million Windows PCs since Windows 7 shipped, compared with 247 million Android devices, 152 million iOS devices and 30 million Macs. “The reach of Windows is just so much bigger,” he says, noting that all of those rivals combined don’t add up to the number of Windows machines sold. “That’s what you get to participate in by developing Metro-style Windows apps.”

Kind of stunning that iOS is even that close. Think of it this way: iOS is five times bigger than the Mac, and only slightly under a third the size of Windows.

Leblond said the goal was to return the most money to developers. Pricing can be from $1.49 to $999.99. “A thousand bucks is just too much for an app,” he says.

Curious that they start at $1.49 rather than 99 cents. (Apple doesn’t hold a patent on that, do they?)