Walt Mossberg’s conclusion:
>The Samsung Galaxy Note isn’t for everyone, and I can’t recommend it as the main mobile phone for most people. But as a stylus-driven small tablet, it might be just what some users are looking for.
*I’ve been dying to get my hands on a “stylus-driven small tablet” that’s at once too big to use as a phone and too small to replace an iPad. Sounds fantastic.*
John Paczkowski:
>“Apps that collect or transmit a user’s contact data without their prior permission are in violation of our guidelines,” Apple spokesman Tom Neumayr told AllThingsD. “We’re working to make this even better for our customers, and as we have done with location services, any app wishing to access contact data will require explicit user approval in a future software release.”
That’s about the *only* response Apple could give at this point.
Kim Zetter reporting for Wired.com on the alleged targeting of attractive women for the porno scanners:
>“She says to me, ‘Do you play tennis?’ And I said, ‘Why?’‘You just have such a cute figure,’” Ellen Terrell recalled to CBS News in Dallas.
The best part of this though is that there are over 500 complaints — so the TSA responded by:
>When asked about the complaints, the TSA released a statement to CBS saying that scanners at the Dallas-Ft. Worth airport, as well as at the Love Field airport, had been upgraded so that they now showed only a generic body outline, rather than a detailed image.
Why even bother with these scans then? Wasn’t the point, from the get go, to have a detailed accurate scan to see if there is hidden contraband on the persons body? How then does this make sense?
Also: “Upgraded”???? I think the word you are looking for is “downgraded”.
My mind hurts.
Holy amazing. Prime shipping here I come. ((The wife and I are moving right now.))
Shawn Blanc perfectly sums up, in his review of Clear, [why I am using both Clear and OmniFocus on my iPhone](https://brooksreview.net/2012/02/clear/):
>But the biggest caveat with OmniFocus is its speed. It takes more than a few seconds to launch the iPhone app and enter something in. New OmniFocus items beg to be given contexts, projects, start dates, and due dates. While this is OmniFocus’s greatest strength, but there are moments when this is also OmniFocus’s greatest weakness.
I love OmniFocus and if forced to pick between Clear and OmniFocus, the latter will win every time — no hesitation. Luckily I don’t have to choose one or the other.
Apple CEO Tim Cook on the iPad market:
>We started using it [the iPad] at Apple well before it was launched. We had our shades pulled so no one could see us, but it quickly became that 80-90% of my consumption and work was done on the iPad. From the first day it shipped, we thought that the tablet market would become larger than the PC market and it was just a matter of the time it took for that to occur. I feel that stronger today than I did then. As I look out and I see all of these incredible usages for it, I see the incredible rate and pace of innovation, and the developers — If we had a meeting at this hotel, and we invited everyone doing cool stuff on PC, we wouldn’t have anyone here.
If he did 80-90% of his work/consumption on the iPad *before* it launched — do “we” think he even uses a Mac anymore?
An astute observation from Will Simons.
Jon Brodkin reporting on the Google acquisition of Motorola:
>But regulators on both sides of the pond went out of their way to warn Google not to abuse the patents, with the Justice Department comparing Google’s patent statements unfavorably with what Justice views as more responsible statements made by Apple and Microsoft.
Read that again: “more responsible statements made by Apple and Microsoft”. In 2003 I would have bet money that such a statement would never have been said — let alone be true.
Watts Martin on Apple’s responsibility to users of iOS (with the Path address book hubbub as the central issue):
>Apple has explicitly made the case that a platform advantage of iOS is that Apple does verify that developers aren’t being shady dipshits.
[…]
>Once you’re pitching that as an essential platform differentiator—and I think it’d be hard to argue Apple doesn’t make that pitch—then “is it Apple’s job to keep developers from being shady dipshits” is not the right question. “Why do apps only have to inform of you of some potential privacy issues, not all” is the right question.
That’s a really good question. Also see his comments on those dialog boxes that people are suggesting (like the ones used for location services) because he brings up a damned good point there.
Abdel Ibrahim and Jon Dick:
>The Galaxy Note’s tagline asks if the device is a tablet or a smartphone, but like a girl in Spanx, it’s so much more.
That maybe the best line I have ever seen on a blog.
Matt Gemmell on those annoying “I entered to win” tweets:
>It’s bad enough trying to artificially turn a prospective customer into a delivery mechanism for your marketing, but requiring that they advertise to their chosen social circle is nothing less than appalling. The customer’s credibility, impartiality, judgement, taste and sense of personal ethics are all assaulted if they choose to take part in such a promotion, and the existence of the promotion invites such an assault.
Artemisia Ng in Hong Kong and Melanie Lee in Shanghai:
>A Chinese tech firm claiming to own the “iPad” trademark plans to seek a ban on shipments of Apple Inc’s computer tablets into and out of China, a lawyer for the company, Proview Technology (Shenzhen), said on Tuesday.
It’s a boring legal dispute, but imagine the repercussions of Proview winning this.
1. No one would be getting iPads — the import **and** export will be blocked.
2. Foxconn workers would be laid off.
Basically this is more than just not being able to buy an iPad, or seeing iPad delays — it would have a huge impact on the Chinese work force and one of the largest employers: Foxconn.
Should be interesting to watch.
(Apple, of course, says they already own the trademark from Proview.)
Spencer E. Ante and Jessica E.Vascellaro:
>Verizon Wireless and AT&T Inc. will sell a version of the coming iPad that runs on their newest fourth-generation wireless networks, according to people familiar with the matter, as the battle to cash in on big investments in mobile broadband heats up.
If true, and the iPad also gets a retina display, then I want to know one thing: where is all this battery life coming from? (My assumption being that Apple wouldn’t sell a new iPad with less battery life than the device it is replacing.)
Well done.
This article so perfectly encapsulates everything that is wrong with RIM — it actually astounds me that people listen to Mr. Martin. Gordon Pitts writing:
>In a rare outpouring of candour by a RIM director, he heaps scorn on the notion that the board should have hired a star outsider to re-energize RIM – a strategy that, he points out, failed abysmally at other stumbling tech giants, including Dell, Hewlett-Packard and, in its troubled 1980s, the now seemingly flawless Apple.
>”So we’re supposed to hand it over to children, or morons, from the outside, who will destroy the company?” he [Martin] says. “Or should we try to build our way to having succession?”
Nah, just stick with internal morons, which is clearly the better option.
>Mr. Martin agrees the two ex-CEOs made mistakes, particularly in the U.S. market for smartphones, where Apple and Google-based products have stolen the BlackBerry’s thunder. And he concedes the board failed to push for more marketing muscle in anticipation of serious competition.
Yeah, because everything would have been fine with better/more marketing.
Ok one last quote:
>But today, he is distracted by two pressing issues – the Super Bowl loss by his beloved New England Patriots and the fate of RIM, a company perceived to have lost its way in the smartphone market, causing its stock price to plunge.
“Perceived” — really?
Robert Krulwich building off something that [Jason Kottke calls ‘Human Wormholes’](http://kottke.org/12/01/human-wormholes-and-the-great-span):
>There are people who live long enough to create a link — a one-generation link — to figures from what feels like a distant past, and their presence among us shrinks history. When “Long Ago” suddenly becomes “So I said to him …,” long ago jumps closer.
There are some fantastic stories in here, a must read.
Brett Kelly:
>You just created a bookmark for a website that you commonly use, but now it will automatically fire up 1Password and fill in the login for you and—if you have it configured to automatically submit login forms—just log you right in.
This is fantastic.
Peter Cohen:
>Newell added that “it is probable that the intruders obtained a copy of a backup file with information about Steam transactions between 2004 and 2008. This backup file contained user names, email addresses, encrypted billing addresses and encrypted credit card information. It did not include Steam passwords.”
I mean, no biggie.
A perfect parody of Verizon’s ads. (Flash required, sorry.)
Jonathan Christopher on his less than stellar DuckDuckGo experience:
>I’m about 3 weeks in and so far I’d rate DuckDuckGo about a 7 out of 10. The search takes longer, and results are not what I expect. I often find myself hitting the 5th or 6th link instead of the first I found very common when using Google.
His complaint isn’t uncommon. I have had a lot of people switch to DuckDuckGo as a result of my comments about it here — personally I love it — but it *is* slower than Google.
I, however, have not had less relevant results — in fact I think the results on DuckDuckGo are of a far higher quality than what I get out of Google.