Linked List: May 4, 2012

Friday, 4 May 2012

Ron Amadeo, writing for Android Police, thinks many of the design changes in the Galaxy S III — both hardware and software — were made in response to Apple’s trade dress infringement suit against Samsung:

So there you have it. A darn-near perfect explanation of the GSIII design. Sure, it’s butt ugly, but it’s also 100% (well maybe 90%) lawyer approved. An amorphous, unsymmetrical blob that doesn’t come in black, with a non-permanent dock and non-square icons. There’s no way Apple can add this design to their Samsung lawsuit.

It really does look a lot less like an iPhone than previous Galaxy S models.

‘Write It Down, in Big Letters. I’m Not Going Out Like This.’ ★

Best thing I’ve read all day.

Chitika: iPad Accounts for Nearly 95 Percent of Tablet Web Traffic ★

Chitika:

Based off of impressions across our network, the iPad accounted for 94.64% of all tablet based traffic. This is impressive in and of itself but to put this number into perspective, the next closest competitor, the Samsung Galaxy tablet, boasts a lack luster market share of 1.22%. Coming in last, in respect to traffic share, was the Barnes and Noble Nook with a meager 0.53% traffic share. In defense of the Nook, it is used primarily as an e-reader, with the capabilities of a tablet.

Android is winn… ah, forget it.

(Via Ina Fried.)

Tom the Dancing Bug’s Inner Hive ★

Ruben Bolling:

The comic strip is more well-read and well-known than ever, but it makes far less money than it used to. This seems to me an anomaly — as the comic is enjoyed (hopefully) by more people, it should generate more, not less, revenue.

This anomaly is one of the defining features of the digital world, and it’s up to me to figure out how to make it work. That led me to this idea:

I’m selling subscriptions to the appropriately cheesily-named INNER HIVE. It’s not a charitable support-me program, because I don’t think that will work by itself in this context. I wanted to make it a real transaction where the buyer gets something of real, greater value than the money spent. Plus I didn’t want to get involved in the logistical nightmare of distributing tote bags.

$9.99 every six months to support one of my all-time favorite comics. Boom, done.

Steve Jobs Plays FDR in Long-Lost 1984 Internal Sales Movie ★

I’ve got nothing, other than that I wish this had stayed lost.

The War on Drugs ★

Ian Lovett, reporting for the NYT on a college student who was locked up by the DEA for four days in a cell with no food, no water, no toilet, and no human contact:

But for Mr. Chong, the celebration ended in a Kafkaesque nightmare inside a San Diego Drug Enforcement Administration holding cell, where he said he was forgotten for four days, without food or water.

To survive, Mr. Chong said he drank his own urine, hallucinated and, at one point, considered how to take his own life. By the time agents found him on the fifth day and called paramedics, he said he thought he could be dead within five minutes.

AnandTech: The iPad 2,4 Review: 32nm Brings Better Battery Life ★

Great find by AnandTech: a new version of the $399 iPad 2 using a significantly smaller and more efficient A5 system-on-a-chip.

iOS Dropbox App Kerfuffle Ends, but Highlights Confusion About Guidelines ★

Nice piece by Jacqui Cheng on the recent rash of App Store rejections of apps that integrate with Dropbox. (Spoiler: it’s all about the benjamins.)

iPad Keyboard Prototype ★

Quite clever iPad text editing concept video by Daniel Hooper. I am not convinced that this is a solution that Apple would actually consider, but the problem it tries to solve is very real. Once you get used to it, the iPad keyboard isn’t bad for typing, but no matter how acclimated you are it’s poor for editing. It’s fiddly, slow, and (because you have to take a hand off the keyboard) disruptive to select text.

Father Time, Still Undefeated ★

Yours truly, on 42-year-old Yankees great Mariano Rivera’s tragic, fluke, season-ending knee injury:

Time’s effects, even against Rivera — the most graceful and elegant ballplayer I’ve ever seen, the closest thing in sports to an ageless wonder — are ignominious. The Yankees often win, but in the end, time always wins — the one opponent against which even the Yankees will forever be underdogs. To struggle against time is to struggle against the inevitable. We all know you can’t beat time, but the joy of these aging Yankees is that sometimes you can get lucky and race ahead of it for a while. But now this.

‘I Had All the Ideas for Star Wars and Everything’ ★

Swiss film director Nathaniel Hörnblowér, righteously calling out the travesty of the best director award at the 1994 MTV VMAs. (Skip to 2:15.)

Beastie Boys Co-Founder Adam Yauch Dead at 47 ★

Rolling Stone:

Adam Yauch, one-third of the pioneering hip-hop group the Beastie Boys, has died at the age of 47, Rolling Stone has learned. Yauch, also known as MCA, had been in treatment for cancer since 2009. The rapper was diagnosed in 2009 after discovering a tumor in his salivary gland.

Not Getting It ★

Ben Kunz, writing for Businessweek, wants Apple to make some sort of “petite glass” small TV screens that aren’t computers:

Second, Apple’s real play will be content sales, not TV hardware profits. As I noted last September, the typical U.S. consumer still watches 5 hours and 9 minutes of television a day, but only about 18 cable channels out of the 130 received by the average home. There is huge bloat in what we subscribe to, and we pay cable companies about $74 billion annually for this privilege. Add the $70 billion in TV ad spending, and Apple could grab a slice of a $144 billion video market if it could convince us there’s a better way to stream moving images.

This betrays a complete lack of understanding of how Apple functions financially. They make almost all their money, both revenue and profit, from hardware. Media content — movies, TV shows, music, apps — is icing on the hardware cake. Compare Apple’s financials to, say, Amazon’s. And Amazon’s model is pretty much exactly what Kunz is espousing here — lower-cost low-margin hardware that exists not as a profit center unto itself but rather as a platform for media content sales.

Amazon’s most recent quarter: $192 million in profit. Apple’s: $11.6 billion. The quarter was 90 days long. That means Apple made $128 million in profit, on average, per day. Let that sink in: Amazon made $192 million in 90 days. Apple made $128 million per day. Methinks Apple will stick with its focus on hardware profits.

Third, consumers want to watch video everywhere while multitasking. Recent studies by Nielsen show that for most of the day, except for prime time in the evening, consumers watch TV while doing something else — texting on phones, typing on laptops, folding laundry, skimming magazines. More than 1 in 5 U.S. adults have read a book on an e-reader. Younger demographics in particular are watching video via Hulu and YouTube on computers. We want more screens, and we want to do other stuff while watching, so why wouldn’t Apple sell pretty little panels to spread throughout our homes?

They already make these “pretty little panels”. They’re the displays in iPads and iPhones.

Facebook Made $9.51 in Ad Revenue Per User Last Year in the U.S. and Canada ★

How many ad-based media companies could survive on $10 per reader/viewer/user a year? Facebook makes it work by having a staggering number of users.