Linked List: April 3, 2012

Tuesday, 3 April 2012

Josh Topolsky Reviews the Nokia Lumia 900 ★

He loves the hardware build quality and found battery life to be good, even with LTE, but:

Let me just put this bluntly: I think it’s time to stop giving Windows Phone a pass. I think it’s time to stop talking about how beautifully designed it is, and what a departure it’s been for Microsoft, and how hard the company is working to add features. I am very aware of the hard work and dedication Microsoft has put into this platform, but at the end of the day, Windows Phone is just not as competitive with iOS and Android as it should be right now.

Before you cry foul, keep in mind that I went into this review wanting to fall madly in love with this phone. But like a book with a beautiful jacket and a plot full of holes, I found myself wanting more. A lot more.

I’ve been trying a Lumia 800 on and off for a few months, and I couldn’t say it better myself — especially regarding third-party app design and performance, and the quality of IE compared to Mobile Safari and Chrome for Android. It’s like Topolsky took the words right out of my mouth.

(As for the hardware, I haven’t tried the 900, but I strongly suspect I’d prefer the 800. The physically-bigger 900 seems like the worst of both worlds: a 4.3-inch display that’s too big to traverse corner-to-corner with your thumb while holding the phone one-handed, but with the same exact 800 × 480 pixel count as all other Windows Phone devices to date. At least with cutting-edge big-ass Android phones, you get more pixels, up to 1280 × 720. The 900 offers two advantages over the 800 — LTE and a front-facing camera. I think I’d rather have the smaller form factor and superior battery life of the 800, if I were in the market for a Windows Phone.)

Compare ★

Same scene, same filter (Amaro), taken side-by-side with Instagram using an iPhone 4S and Galaxy Nexus. (I think the difference is attributable mostly, if not entirely, to the iPhone 4S’s superior camera. The Galaxy S II has a better camera than the Nexus, but I don’t have one of those to test.)

John Moltz’s Very Nice Web Site ★

New from the inimitable creator of the late, great CARS. Do yourself a favor and subscribe to the RSS feed now; that way you’ll know when I steal links from him, like I just did a few minutes ago.

Papermill ★

Speaking of Instapaper and Android apps, developer Ryan Bateman has written a fascinating postmortem on Papermill, a well-designed Instapaper client for Android. He covers everything from the development to its financial results:

I think this unhappy end-scenario — of applications that either compromise on quality or have not had the necessary time invested in their design — is as a result of Android users not being willing to pay for an app whose focus is quality and whose price reflects this. Instead, these users opt for a free but less refined experience. This has led to a race to the bottom, with independent developers creating applications are de-facto free instead and relying on ads for profit. The quality of the design and user-experience are subsequently not a factor in their creation, as there is both no great impetus to provide it nor any expectation from the user that it will be forthcoming.

I must gently disagree with the following parenthetical, however:

While “cheaper smartphones” is an entirely valid core market to target (and one that is actually Android’s strength — while device manufacturers will always be creating mid-range Android handsets and can edge into the high-end market, Apple is highly unlikely to create anything but a high-end smartphone), the resulting user expectations, and subsequent race to-the-bottom app development, is reflected in the current general quality of Android apps.

Apple may never release a new non-high-end phone, but they do have mid-range and low-end smartphone models: the iPhone 4 and 3GS. The brilliance of Apple’s move-last-year’s-model-one-slot-down-the-totem-pole pattern is that even their low-end model is a former high-end model, just two years removed. Apple gets to hit lower retail price points while avoiding additional fragmentation for developers. And a consumer who buys a new free-with-contract iPhone 3GS today gets a phone that is of significantly higher build quality than the free-with-contract Android phones I’ve seen.

Privacy Is Not an Option ★

Nick Bradbury:

Software developers need to look at privacy the same way we’ve learned to look at security: it’s not an add-on or a feature that customers have to turn on, it’s something built-in that shouldn’t be turned off.

The difference, though, is that with security, the biggest problem is a lack of attention from developers. With privacy, the biggest problem is purposeful obfuscation by developers looking to profit by having users think their information is more private than it actually is.

A Comparison of Instagram for Android and iPhone ★

Nice rundown by Matthew Panzarino.

Úll ★

Looks like a great conference in Dublin later this month “iOS / OSX / mobile web developers and designers.” Sounds like tickets are selling fast.

Instagram for Android ★

Speaking of Android and mobile photography:

Today, we’re excited to bring you Instagram for Android. We’ve already seen more than 30 million people join Instagram to create and share beautiful photos on their iOS devices, and now we’re thrilled to offer a way for Android users to join their iOS friends on Instagram to share their photos with the world.

While using an Android phone, I probably missed Instagram more than any other iPhone-only app. The Android version looks almost identical to the iPhone version, following iOS idioms like on-screen back buttons (as an alternative to the system-wide Back button) for navigation.

Flickr’s Digital Camera of Choice: iPhone ★

Speaking of usage stats, John Paczkowski:

The four most popular camera phones on Flickr currently? The iPhone 4, iPhone 4S, iPhone 3G and the iPhone 3GS — in that order.

I’m sure Android phones top the list at Picasa.

Charlie Kindel: ‘Google Will Abandon Android’ ★

Charlie Kindel:

Moving forward, Google will invest heavily in the Play brand. To effectively create new brand you have to mute your usage of other brands in the same space. At the most, any further use of the term “Android” in consumer marketing and branding will be relegated to “ingredient brand” status (“Certs with Retsin!”). Google will start distancing itself from the Android brand completely.

Bold prediction, but I wouldn’t be surprised by this at all. They spent $12.5 billion buying Motorola — they’ve got to start making money from this, and the current plan isn’t working.

iPhones Have Significantly Higher Rates of Wi-Fi Utilization Than Android Phones in the U.S. and U.K. ★

ComScore:

A U.S. analysis of Wi-Fi and mobile Internet usage across unique smartphones on the iOS and Android platforms reveals that 71 percent of all unique iPhones used both mobile and Wi-Fi networks to connect to the Internet, while only 32 percent of unique Android mobile phones used both types of connections. A further analysis of this pattern of behavior in the U.K. shows consistent results, as 87 percent of unique iPhones used both mobile and Wi-Fi networks for web access compared to a lower 57 percent of Android phones.

Another data point backing up the theory (to which I subscribe) that a large number of Android owners use their devices just like they did their previous non-smart phone. Hence the discrepancies between device unit sales (where Android leads) and stats like app sales and Wi-Fi usage (where iPhone leads).

Wind Map ★

Beautiful and fascinating.