When iOS 5 was announced, and previewed last June, many expected it would drastically influence the text messaging world, but no one really knew just how deeply the technology would alter millions of text messaging fiends once Apple shipped iOS 5 the following October. We’re just now starting to get some information on how iMessages is turning the entire text messaging industry on its head.

Neven Mrgan, of Panic, Inc. fame, and the man behind the graphics of the popular iOS game The Incident, decided to check his text messaging stats and provide some information about how deeply iMessage has disrupted his text messaging usage. As it turns out, his usage is down, way down

As is mine… Check out my usage…

Makes sense that AT&T would stop offering smaller plans and basically offer an all you can eat SMS plan only for $20 a month.

Out of curiosity, has iMessage made a dent in your text messaging usage as well?

Source

The chart is interesting because even among phones that were actively being sold, updates weren’t coming, meaning you would buy an outdated phone and it would remain outdated until you moved on two years later.

I think this conclusion nails it, at least for me…

It appears to be a widely held viewpoint that there’s no incentive for smartphone manufacturers to update the OS: because manufacturers don’t make any money after the hardware sale, they want you to buy another phone as soon as possible. If that’s really the case, the phone manufacturers are spectacularly dumb: ignoring the 2 year contract cycle & abandoning your users isn’t going to engender much loyalty when they do buy a new phone. Further, it’s been fairly well established that Apple also really only makes money from hardware sales, and yet their long term update support is excellent (see chart).

In other words, Apple’s way of getting you to buy a new phone is to make you really happy with your current one, whereas apparently Android phone makers think they can get you to buy a new phone by making you really unhappy with your current one. Then again, all of this may be ascribing motives and intent where none exist – it’s entirely possible that the root cause of the problem is just flat-out bad management (and/or the aforementioned spectacular dumbness).

Even though he couches that statement, I’d say he’s probably pretty close to right on with it. Android manufacturers want you to buy new phones to get a new OS. Even if you have an iPhone 3GS, you can add iOS 5 to it if you wanted. While it’s true you won’t get all the latest and greatest features of the 4S on a 2 1/2 year old handset, you will get a new and more secure OS with at least a few new features you’d probably make use of.

Compare that to Android. I dare you.

And as if to make the case even stronger, Google announced that they won’t be updating the Nexus One to Ice Cream Sandwich, the latest version of Android. The iPhone 3GS, introduced six months earlier, runs iOS 5 with no issues.

That speaks volumes about a difference in philosophy if you ask me.

Since iOS 4 was released I’ve seen a number of articles saying that Google stole ideas from Apple for Android. This article points out that all computer systems around these days were preceded by something else. The main point is you can’t say that Android stole ideas from iOS and iOS didn’t get ideas from anywhere outside of Apple. I think that’s a valid point and is how we get a lot of innovation today. Companies improve products they were not the first to develop.
Read the article and let me know what you think.

After the entire piece was digested, I realized how it missed some major details, and it’s some omissions that would make Steve Jobs’ case that Android was stolen even stronger. Before I continue, neither you nor I, not being privy to the conversations and thought processes of either company, cannot comment on things outside of what is visible to the public.

But what’s visible to the public is pretty damning if you take the entire picture into account.

Here’s where I think Horlacher left out details that are important to the story.

Horlacher notes that Android was purchased by Google in August of 2005, but the iPhone wasn’t released until June of 2007 (Horlacher says January; it wasn’t released in January, it was announced). The idea is that if the ideas were copied, Apple copied what was already out there more than Google copied Apple, since Google was “first.” The problem with that analysis is twofold. Firstly, the first commercial Android Phone was the HTC Dream, released in August of 2008, a full year after the iPhone hit the market.

But that isn’t all that’s wrong with the timeline.

When Google bought Android, here’s what Android looked like:

and here’s what the home screens looked like:

That, my friends, was the first Android phone. It was featured in Demo videos galore. In fact, I distinctly remember writing on Twitter at the time that Android was different from the iPhone, but looked like it would give it a serious run for the money. Notice how it was obviously aimed at a certain other product named after a fruit, namely the Blackberry?

When the first Android phone was actually released as the G1 by T-Mobile in August of 2008, it looked like this:

Notice the “refinements” in the look of the OS? Now granted, we don’t know that it was a surefire knock-off, but it’s hard to not see how the drawing board was returned to after the release of the iPhone.

But here’s another interesting tidbit.

Eric Schmidt, member of Apple’s board, was on the board starting in August of 2006 and stayed until August of 2009, even as he was CEO of Google and as Google was actively developing Android.

Coincidence? Maybe. I’m not ascribing bad motives to Schmidt, but it’s hard to argue that Android didn’t change quite a bit from the prototype and even the type of device from the original incarnations that were out there. Horlacher is correct about the timeline in general, but he misses the point: Android changed drastically in that timeline, for whatever reason, and the changes seemed to bring it closer in line to Apple’s offering.

Horlacher also offers up a list of things that existed on Android before iOS. He then points out that they aren’t unique to Google, but that he doesn’t see Google going after Apple for them.

If they weren’t first on Google, how could they?

But Apple isn’t as much going after Android (contrary to the spin being put out there by Fandroids), they’re going after companies like Samsung who have shamelessly knocked off Apple’s products in an attempt to have consumers see them side by side and go “They look alike, they must be pretty similar,” and despite Horlacher’s arguments that if you think like that, you don’t deserve to own a tablet / phone, people do make decisions that way. I’ve been in the business for 14 years and I’ve seen it. In fact, I know for a fact that certain areas of the industry make it a point to make their “competitive” devices look as much like an iPhone as possible in ads in an effort to bait customers who don’t know the difference, and if you don’t think it works, you’re mistaken.

When I say Samsung has shamelessly ripped off Apple, I’m not kidding.

Here’s a shot of the “copying” in question…

This site has an amazing breakdown of Samsung’s copying, including a telling paragraph that really does drive home the point:

There are plenty of ways to design a phone, and nothing before the iPhone could have possibly been mistaken for an iPhone. You can put an LG Prada next to an iPhone and make a case for Apple copying some of their design aspects, but you would never mistake the iPhone for the Prada; and that’s what this lawsuit is about – in their hardware design, interface, icons and through to their packaging, Samsung’s products all-around mimic Apple’s quite closely, and that’s what intellectual property Apple is trying to protect.

Bingo.

Of course, it doesn’t help when you can’t identify your own company’s products when held up agains the product you’re accused of copying:

Apple requested a preliminary US injunction against Samsung in July, and Judge Koh agreed to an expedited trial schedule at Apple’s request. The hearing on the matter took place Thursday, and things didn’t go particularly well for Samsung. Koh declined to issue an injunction on the lone utility patent that Apple asserted for the injunction (there are more asserted for the full trial), but did note that Samsung’s devices clearly violated Apple’s design patents.

To illustrate her point, Koh held both devices up and asked Samsung’s lead counsel, Kathleen Sullivan, if she could identify which one was an iPad and which one was a Galaxy Tab. “Not at this distance your honor,” she said, approximately 10 feet from the bench.

Steve Jobs’ logic seemed to be that since Schmidt was in the inner circle of Apple, and since Android’s UI changed so dramatically toward what Apple was doing with the iPhone, it’s hard to argue that it wasn’t a “borrowed” idea. I think you’d be hard-pressed to disagree on the whole.

But above and beyond what Android “borrowed,” Samsung has made a full-court press into blatantly ripping off the iPhone whole cloth, and that’s something Horlacher left out entirely. Android certainly borrowed features, as did iOS, but companies like Samsung have decided to not go their own direction and that’s a whole different animal altogether. It’s not beyond the realm of possibility that Jobs was pissed off at Samsung, and simply included “Android” as the generic all-inclusive name, but to say that there is no evidence that things were tilted in the direction of Apple while Google had a strong corporate partnership with Apple is silly. It’s clear that that’s the case, and I hardly think Jobs would be upset that someone would knock off an idea.

Every big Apple product was created out of the premise that the product it replaced sucked and needed to be improved.

Computers sucked, Apple created the Mac.

MP3 players sucked, Apple created iPod.

Phones sucked, Apple created iPhone.

Tablets sucked. Apple created iPad.

Given their record of improving on existing ideas, I think taking the position that Jobs is pissed because Android is successful or the position that his criticisms are based on some vague idea of copying with no basis in reality is completely unfair, especially given the evidence of Android’s evolution and Apple’s past in “evolving” existing products.

And if that was the problem, HTC, LG, and others would all be in court with Apple right now.

They’re not.

That’s something to think about it and of itself.

Mind blowing. That’s a phone versus a $3,000 camera.

I can’t believe how much better the 4S camera is, honestly. I used the 4 camera a lot, but the 4S is a whole other level. I don’t know if, by itself, it justifies buying a 4S if you already have a 4 (which I did!) but if you’re a heavy camera user, you might be able to justify the expenditure.

Do I go with the i5 or is it worth the other $250 to go with the i7?

Will I see that big of a performance difference between the two?

Please chime in!

Where’s the question in that message?  Yet the buttons are answers to a question.

Bad UI Microsoft.  Bad UI.

Now I know this is for Exchange 2010, and yes, we geeks understand what you’re saying, but it’s just another example of attention to detail being lacking.

No, I’m not picking nits.

HP reported that it plans to announce that it will discontinue operations for webOS devices, specifically the TouchPad and webOS phones. HP will continue to explore options to optimize the value of webOS software going forward.

Steve Jobs is sitting at a café somewhere, laughing maniacally at how quickly this particular Apple-killer was killed.  Just another notch in the bed post.

Read more here.

Researchers from CA Technologies said that Android users may be at risk of hackers listening in to their phone calls due to a new piece of malware.

The Trojan virus, according to CA, records phone conversations in “amr” format, which could be published online by cyber criminals.

As the a conversation with an infected phone takes place, the Trojan stores the recorded call in a directory in the SDCard, which could then be uploaded to a server under the hackers control.

“Once the malware is installed in the victim device, it drops a ‘configuration’ file that contains key information about the remote server and the parameters,” CA researcher Dinesh Venkatesan said in a blog post

The blog post notes that there’s nothing in the malware itself that uploads the files, but the obvious retort to that is that if you could slip malware onto a phone that records calls, what’s stopping you from updating said malware to upload files?

One thing on the Computer Associates blog caught my eye, though…

As it is already widely acknowledged that this year is the year of mobile malware, we advice the smartphone users to be more logical and exercise the basic security principles while surfing and installing any applications.

The year of mobile malware? Hmmm… I don’t recall a lot of iOS (actually none, honestly) malware or Blackberry malware (none that I can think of).

This isn’t the year of “mobile malware,” it’s the year of Android malware. Plain and simple.

You need to restart the Finder.

Open up a new Terminal window and enter the following command:

killall Finder && open /System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app

That will relaunch the Finder and you should be able to copy files after that. This fixed the problem for me with my USB thumb drive and external hard drive.

Hope it helps you, also.

First, what is Google+? It’s Google’s entry into the social network game. Long-awaited and often expected, Plus represents an attempt at something that Google has never been good at: aggregating people and connecting them socially, and it’s a very good first attempt, but it’s terrible in so many ways that it’s becoming increasingly obvious that it’ll succeed in spite of its design, not because of it.

When you ask the average user what they love about Google+, the first thing you’ll hear is “Circles.” Everyone loves circles. People are acting as if this revolutionary feature has never been tried before, but the problem is that it has been. On Facebook. They call them lists and they’ve been there since February of 2007. Do people use them? Nope, but in reality is that Facebook’s problem? Actually, to an extent it probably is, but one can’t claim they don’t have the feature.

Circles in Plus do have one advantage: incoming. There are people adding me at an alarming rate that’s almost uncomfortable. Every day I see 10-20 new people adding me to their circles even though I have no idea who they are. My Incoming circle is my godsend in that case, because I don’t have to follow them back to see if anything is interesting (more often than not it isn’t). As more and more people join Plus, the fact that they’ve had this classification system for people becomes more and more useful since people have been using it since the beginning. Facebook’s “lists” feature was an addition after people already had friends and they never went back and re-categorized people.

Aside from circles, and the great idea of having them in place from the beginning, what else is new about Plus? Well, not much. In fact, in many ways, Plus is a knockoff of Facebook just like Facebook was a knockoff of Myspace and Myspace of Friendster, and so on. Nothing about the Plus experiment strikes me as revolutionary. In fact, had any company that wasn’t Google released it, no one would even care about it. Google claims to have 10 million people using the service right now (as part of their “beta”) so it’s obvious that someone is interested, but will it sustain itself?

Yes. Because it’s not Facebook or Twitter.

My biggest complaint with Google+ is that it’s a meta wasteland. On any given day, almost every post that I read is some post about Google+. My welcome page is loaded with messages from people telling you how to use it for this and that, what this is and what that does, and so on. Very few people I’ve come across on Plus are creating anything of interest. In fact, Plus is so meta that even when people make jokes about how the whole thing is all about the service, people chime in and explain why rather than realizing that they’re part of the problem!

Plus is loaded with people dying to talk about Plus and nothing else. It’s boring. Painfully boring. But people gravitate toward it because it’s the next cool thing to be a part of. I readily admit that I dip my toe in the waters every once in awhile to see what’s on, but I’m often so turned off by the dearth of interesting content that I don’t stay long.

Now you may be asking yourself “Well, if things aren’t interesting, make them interesting!” Sure. Once Google announces an API for Plus.

On Facebook, life is easy. I use something called RSS Graffiti that pulls my posts from this site into Facebook. I love it because it makes it a one-click affair. I type something and boom, a few minutes later it’s in my Facebook feed for people to read. I churn out 10 or so pieces a day (of varying lengths) so you can bet I won’t be sharing my stuff manually with a network that makes me go to its interface, click the “link” button, paste a link, then write a description. No thanks.

I’m sure that’s by design; Google probably doesn’t want to encourage people to personality spam their service, but what’s happening because of this difficulty is that people not only aren’t posting their content, they’re posting no content! Except, of course, for animated gifs of the Facebook logo getting smacked around. Yay. Bravo.

There’s nothing about Google+ that compels me to use it. I said as much on Facebook a few days ago. That’s not to say that it’ll fail; it may succeed simply because it isn’t Evil Facebook or Stupid Twitter. I just don’t see a benefit to using it. No one I really care about (with a few exceptions) is on it, very few people on it are interesting enough to pay attention to, and the interactions there are just not up to snuff. Will it get where it needs to go? I’m sure it will, and at the very worst, it’ll be “another” network for people that don’t want to play around in the world of Facebook or Twitter. If that’s how Google measures its success for this project, I’m sure they’ll be happy.

But if they’re expecting a titan to emerge out of their offices to roll with people that aren’t Chris Brogan and Jason Calacanis, then they have an enormous amount of work to do because as of right now there’s just nothing in there that someone else hasn’t already done, and in some cases done better.

What makes the ad brilliant is what people love about Apple; it isn’t about the specs, it’s about the experience. Numerous companies have touted their numbers as reasons their hardware is superior, but when you use it, it doesn’t bring any level of satisfaction. A faster processor isn’t worth a damn if the apps running on it suck. More RAM doesn’t mean anything if the apps stutter and stop regularly. A smaller form factor is great, but if the battery is dead halfway through the day, what good is it?

Apple seems to inherently understand this for some reason, and they get it right more often than not. Computer hardware is more than the sum and specs of the parts that make it up.

Just after Christmas, Nokia sent me an N8 to test, review, and play with. I was excited because at the time I was pondering ditching my iPhone 4 for something else. I always have been a big fan of Nokia’s hardware and even (although to a lesser extent) their software, Symbian. I was ready to catapult myself into full-blown Nokia fanboyism.

The design? Stunning. Beautifully made, metallic feel, big screen, amazing camera, and so on. The hardware could’ve come out of Cupertino; it was that good. Then I powered it on. This beautiful hardware was completely betrayed by an absolutely abysmal user experience. Symbian was slow, clunky, and buggy as hell. So buggy was it that I had to put my SIM back in my iPhone and the N8 was pretty much a tinkertoy for the 3 weeks that I had it. I felt so bad about it that I couldn’t even bring myself to write the review. It just wasn’t worth it and I didn’t want to just slag the company. There was no upside. The hardware, while great, was totally betrayed by the software.

Compare that to my experience with Windows Phone 7. I’ve played with a few different handsets and honestly? I think it’s terrific. I don’t know how well it would work for me in the real world, but I’m not even kidding: Windows Phone 7, unlike Android, is the first phone operating system to come out since the iPhone that isn’t trying to knock off the iPhone. Microsoft went in its own direction and created a terrific product, and while I don’t think Samsung’s or HTC’s devices are as good as Nokia’s, the software is infinitely better.

The fact that Nokia is now working with Microsoft to make Windows Phone 7 Phones proves one thing: That the company knew Symbian was the problem all along and that they were truly falling behind Android, iOS, and Windows Phone 7.

I’m hoping these phones really take off. A rich competitive marketplace drives innovation and Nokia, up until Apple came on the scene, was the king of industrially designed phones and tightly integrated software. Combining Nokia’s hardware experience with Microsoft’s beautiful phone operating system, to me, is a win-win for both companies and should go a long way toward getting Nokia back that big chunk of lost market share.

The question is: Who, besides BlackBerry users, is going to want to buy it? The core email and calendar apps are completely tethered to a BlackBerry. Without your BlackBerry, there is no native email or calendar app—just access through the (admittedly good) web browser. But that’s gonna turn off a lot of people. And we didn’t get a chance to see what the new App World looks like, or any of the future apps that could make it a truly killer tablet—or break it.

Wow.  How dumb would you have to be to buy this piece of crap?

Imagine if Apple had released the iPad without an e-mail or calendar app and instead tethered it to the iPhone?  There’d be cries of anti-competitive behavior and much gnashing of teeth.

RIM is a joke.  If this is their best effort, it’s time to throw in the towel.

If you have an iPhone 4, you already know how great the camera is.  Many people have ditched their point and shoot cameras for the iPhone 4′s built-in camera.  I myself am one of them.  Unfortunately, I use my iPhone 4 as a video camera a lot as well, and am constantly on a quest to build the perfect and most mobile portable video blogging studio.  Seeing as my video blogs are self-shot, I need to mount any camera I’m going to use on a tripod and that’s where the trouble starts because the iPhone doesn’t have a tripod screw.

Also panorama apps, time lapse apps, and other photography apps just don’t work as well handheld.  The Glif solves that by adding the unthinkable: a tripod screw.  Now your iPhone can be mounted on every single tripod ever conceived by mankind.

The Glif’s packaging is as simple as the design of the gadget itself.  A simple cardboard card.

Once you get it out, closer inspection reveals a perfectly designed and tightly engineered device made for one purpose.

And attached to a tripod.

And with the iPhone 4 inserted.

The amazing part of the Glif is that you can literally grab the Glif and spin it over and the iPhone will not fall out.  It’s made of a soft enough material that it won’t scratch your iPhone’s glass, but it’s so tight that I can’t imagine a scenario where the Glif will allow its precious cargo to fall.

The Windup

The Glif is now a permanent fixture in my bag.  I take it all the time.  My portable blogging studio consists of the Glif, an Apple Bluetooth Keyboard, and the cheapest tabletop tripod you’ve ever seen.  All of that is more than enough to get the blogging job done and yet it can all fit in a small messenger bag; that truly makes me happy.

The Glif is a brilliantly simple solution to an annoyingly complex problem.  Getting this great camera onto a tripod makes it infinitely more useful and if you’re into using your iPhone as a camera for any purpose, this is something you should carry in your gear bag.

If you’re like me and think this is one of the greatest inventions ever, pick one up for yourself here.

HTC was particularly indignant.

“The reception problems are certainly not common among smartphones, they [Apple] apparently didn’t give operators enough time to test the phone.”

In spite of that slap at Apple, HTC had been warning customers all along that coming into contact with certain spots on its Droid Eris handset would affect call quality.  From the manual:

Well, as it turns out, HTC has been mired in its own controversy with its recently released HD7 which, according to multiple sources, suffers from signal attenuation if you hold it a certain way.  Sound familiar?  So what does HTC, who slapped Apple for not giving operators enough time with the iPhone have to say?  Well, the response is rather Jobsian…

Quality in industrial design is of key importance to HTC. To ensure the best possible signal strength, antennas are placed in the area least likely to be covered by a person’s face or hands while the phone is in use. However, it is inevitable that a phone’s signal strength will weaken a little when covered in its entirety by a user’s palm or fingers. We test all of our phones extensively and are confident that under normal circumstances reception strength and performance will be more than sufficient for the operation of the phone when network coverage is also adequate.

Got that?  It’s inevitable.  Unlike Apple, whose problems were clearly borne from its own arrogance in dealing with the carriers.  It’s amazing how their tune changed when it was their turn to catch crap, isn’t it?

Notice, also, that the tech media is utterly silent on this one while Apple’s iPhone 4 issue was front page news for weeks.  Okay, maybe utterly silent is a bad phrase, but they’re nowhere near as apocalyptic about this one as they were about Apple; guess it just isn’t as much fun to beat up on HTC…

Oh, and if you’re wondering why I’m not using the WordPress app? It’s so far beyond terrible it isn’t even worth discussing.