Linked List: March 28, 2012

Wednesday, 28 March 2012

Jason Perlow Is Sick to Death of Android ★

Jason Perlow:

When it came time for my two phone contracts to renew on Verizon, I had decided within a span of a few months to purchase the Motorola Droid Bionic and the Samsung Galaxy Nexus.

I had believed both of these devices would be well-supported by Google and would be most resistant to the fragmentation and carrier bloatware issues, as the first device was being made by a company that was about to be acquired by Google, and the second being the flagship Google Experience handset device for Ice Cream Sandwich.

In both cases, I turned out to be wrong.

Can you imagine being so dumb — or blinded by idealism — as to take until now to see how fundamentally broken Android is in these regards?

CNet on ‘Ultrabooks’ ★

Dan Ackerman, writing for CNet, “How the PC Industry Killed the Ultrabook”:

Well, it was fun while it lasted.

No it wasn’t.

The personal computer industry backed a promising candidate in the ultrabook concept, convincing even a skeptic like myself that a new class of superslim, superlight laptops was the key to exciting consumers. Ultrabooks were well on their way to becoming the PC form factor of the future.

And now, it’s already over. In record time — something less than six months — the ultrabook term has become so overused and amorphous that it’s well on its way to being useless.

Maybe the PC industry should focus less on marketing buzzwords and labels, and more on just making good products people want to buy and use.

The Real Foxconn ★

Tim Culpan, writing for Bloomberg:

Mike Daisey claimed to have come across 12-year-old workers, armed guards, crippled factory operators. We saw none of that. And we did try to find them. Nothing would have been more compelling for us and our story than to have a chat with a preteen factory operator about how she enjoyed (or not) working 12-hour shifts making iPads. We didn’t get such an anecdote.

Magic Johnson-Led Group to Buy Dodgers for $2 Billion ★

$2 billion for the Dodgers. Can you even imagine what the Yankees would fetch?

Asus Transformer Pre-Sale Numbers Revealed by Lawsuit: 2,000 ★

Android is winning.

Farhad Manjoo: ‘Why Microsoft, Not Apple, Will Dominate Television Streaming’ ★

Farhad Manjoo, writing for Slate:

Apple’s television set will, of course, be an actual television, so it will probably sell for hundreds more. But why buy the TV when you’ve already got one? And, if you’re one of the millions of people who already own an Xbox and a Kinect, why buy anything else?

Manjoo may well be right that the Xbox’s maximal approach has given Microsoft a lead over Apple (which has taken a decidedly minimal approach, hardware-wise). But he’s making an awful lot of assumptions about what Apple will do. I remain unconvinced, for one thing, that the “Apple TV” we have today — $99 super-simple iOS boxes — is not Apple’s actual strategy.

Microsoft: Entertainment Overtakes Multiplayer Gaming on Xbox ★

Even just a year ago I’d have disagreed with this, but it now seems clear that Xbox and Apple TV are competitive. They’re post-PC devices hooked up to TV sets to access an ecosystem of media content.

‘Stars War’ ★

Hilarious Turkish rip-off action figures from the ’80s.

App Rejections Are a Lousy Way to Communicate Policy Changes ★

Pretty much says it all in the headline:

The problem is the timing. Apple’s established pattern has been to deprecate a function or method in one major version and, at the speediest, remove the call in the next major version. Many developers, myself included, expected that we had until iOS 6 to get off of the UDID.

But instead, without warning, the app review process is being used as an immediate death-penalty for the uniqueIdentifier call.

Jeffrey Zeldman Gets an Invitation to Google I/O ★

Zeldman:

So Google wrote to my zeldman.com address, which they won’t allow me to associate with my Google+ address, to invite me to start a Google+ account (which I already have) on my zeldman.com account, which they won’t support. And if I do that (which I can’t), and some other complicated stuff, they promise that I will then be able to participate in Google IO, whatever that is.