Linked List: June 6, 2015

Saturday, 6 June 2015

The Talk Show: ‘Everyone Needs a Jerk’ 

The WWDC 2015 prelude episode of my podcast, The Talk Show. My special guest is Mark Gurman, and talk about anything and everything you’d want to know heading into WWDC next week.

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The Inside Story of How the iPhone Crippled BlackBerry 

I missed this excerpt from Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry, by Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff, when it ran in the WSJ two weeks ago. It’s a good read:

The iPhone’s popularity with consumers was illogical to rivals such as RIM, Nokia Corp. and Motorola Inc. The phone’s battery lasted less than eight hours, it operated on an older, slower second-generation network, and, as Mr. Lazaridis predicted, music, video and other downloads strained AT&T’s network. RIM now faced an adversary it didn’t understand.

“By all rights the product should have failed, but it did not,” said David Yach, RIM’s chief technology officer. To Mr. Yach and other senior RIM executives, Apple changed the competitive landscape by shifting the raison d’être of smartphones from something that was functional to a product that was beautiful.

“I learned that beauty matters…. RIM was caught incredulous that people wanted to buy this thing,” Mr. Yach says.

Sounds to me like they still don’t understand the appeal of the iPhone. It wasn’t (and isn’t) only about beauty. It’s about being a real, true, personal computer in your pocket or purse.

Update: Here’s a link to work around the WSJ’s paywall.

Why Android Camera Phones Still Suck 

Evan Rodgers, writing for Motherboard:

Android phones do have good cameras, but what we need is better software. RAW support allows us to see what these cameras are technically capable of, but until we can trust phone makers to invest in quality processing algorithms, Android cameras will continue to lag behind Apple and Microsoft’s.

Shot on iPhone 6: Films 

I look at these gorgeous little movies, and all I can think is that eight years ago, we were all anxiously waiting for the original iPhone — which didn’t even shoot video at all. From that to this in eight years.

HTC Introduces 24-Karat Gold One M9 Using a Photo Taken With an iPhone 

You really can’t make these things up.