The Brooks Review

Category: Links

  • Stephen Elop Unveils Nokia’s First Windows Phone Device

    Tom Warren on what is rumored to be the first Nokia Windows Phone 7 device:
    > The design of the device appears to be identical to the recently announced Nokia N9, powered by MeeGo.

    Surprise!

  • Walt Mossberg’s Samsung Series 5 Google Chromebook Review

    Walt Mossberg:
    >The Chromebook starts up almost instantly—in 10 to 15 seconds in my tests—much more quickly than most Windows machines. This is partly because it’s really just a big Web browser. In my tests, Apple’s MacBook Air started just about as quickly, but it costs twice as much.

    He neglects to mention that the MacBook Air can do far more than twice as many things as the Chromebook. Mossberg spends the entire article trying to like the Chromebook, but ultimately can’t recommend it (no surprise) — what strikes me as odd is that he seems to think this is the way of the future:

    >So a cloud-centric computer isn’t a crazy idea.

    I agree, but the Chromebook idea is far more than just a ‘cloud-centric computer’ — it is a web-browser-centric computer, and that is a crap idea. Small storage is fine on a computer with a strong cloud offering, but doing everything in a web browser is far from ideal.

    For an example of a real “cloud-centric computer” look no further than future iOS devices once iCloud launches, and no I am not joking.

  • More Apple Patents

    Nilay Patel laying the smack down:
    >So Apple got yet another patent granted today, and now there’s yet another media firestorm over whether it means Cupertino will be able to sue every other phone manufacturer out of business, or at least out of the business of making multitouch devices. And, as usual, most of the hysteria is based on a fundamental misinterpretation of what the patent claims actually say, and what behaviors they actually cover in iOS.

    The end result of his analysis: a boring patent.

  • David Heinemeier Hansson On Third Party Apps for Mobile

    David Heinemeier Hansson commenting on the Nokia N9 and the apps he needs to make a phone useful:
    >But the established wisdom now is that you cannot win without hundreds of thousands of apps.

    I have to disagree, DHH is arguing that if you get the core apps right (for him those are: Safari, Camera, iPod, Clock, Weather, Photos, Messages, Mail, and Maps) then you have a rock solid device. That is a hard argument to argue with because he is right, 3rd party apps don’t make a device good.

    Third party apps make a good device, great — and that is where I disagree with him.

    With DHH’s argument you would also have to wonder why someone just doesn’t own a dozen or so items of clothes, after all if you have one really good shirt, why do you need two from two companies? It’s really about choice and whether those choices are good or bad it doesn’t matter, it’s what the current market is demanding — to ignore the current market, well ask RIM how that works out.

    This late in the game it is downright foolish to think that you can compete with iOS jsut offering the “core” apps.

  • RIM Becoming Too Radioactive to Takeover

    I have no clue why anyone would want to take over RIM — it surely would make the stock drop of whatever company acquires them.

    Ed Sutherland reporting on RIM’s woes of late:
    >Once worth $83 billion, the Waterloo, Ontario BlackBerry maker has slid to around $15 billion

    Yikes, if I was the board I would be so mad I would wish that I had two CEOs to fire — oh wait.

  • The Brooks Report Card

    Myke and Terry were kind enough to have me on the Bro Show again. This time around we talked about WWDC, hardware rumors, the Nokia N9, and ArringtonCrunch/Aol. These guys are a lot of fun so be sure to check out this episode.

  • That Flickr iPhone Data

    Amazing iPhone camera usage being reported by Flickr, especially after you take into account the fact that they can’t count all the photos taken with the iPhone.

  • Steve Jobs: Wedding Photographer

    Carolyne Zinko and Carrie Kirby:

    >No official wedding photo was available because the photographers — Jobs and Ellison’s son, David — had not finished preparing them for the photo album yet, Ellison said.

    That would be Steve Jobs they are talking about. This isn’t really news, but it leaves me with so many questions:

    1. Will Jobs create the photo album from iPhoto or Aperture?
    2. What camera did Jobs use, Canon/Nikon/iPhone?
    3. How long before Jobs considers the photos ‘finished’?

    Lastly: How cool is it to say that Jobs was one of your wedding photographers? (Technically I know the answer to this one: awesome.)

    [via Viticci]

  • 5 Months of Customer Service Hell with HTC

    Lucas Dailey writing about getting a replacement for his HTC EVO:

    >It took over 5 months, between 18-22 long calls to HTC (and a few to Sprint), explaining the problem in great detail to maybe 10-15 people, and easily hundreds of hours without a working phone. All to fix a defective phone under warranty with HTC.

    I don’t post this as a knock against Android, but as a knock against HTC — this is pitiful customer service. Compounding the issue is the odd warranty that makes the carrier responsible for the battery and the manufacturer responsible for the rest, I find that very odd.

    The fact that it took a YouTube video to convince HTC that there was a problem — that shows a general lack of caring for your customers. Now THAT is something I can assure you I have never experienced with Apple (and yes I have worked with many problematic Macs with Apple).

  • WordPress Breach

    Matt Mullenweg on today’s WordPress security breach:

    >Second, if you use AddThis, WPtouch, or W3 Total Cache and there’s a possibility you could have updated in the past day, make sure to visit your updates page and upgrade each to the latest version.

    Passwords used on WordPress.org have been reset too. Be sure to update.

    (I feel like nothing online is safe anymore and am damned glad that I have 1Password.)

  • Maximizing OS X with an SSD plus HDD Setup

    Matt Legend Gemmell has an awesome walkthrough on how he has maximized the speed of his iMac using both the SSD and HDD, very nice. Worth a read if you have a machine like this.

  • Why not Windows?

    Omnigroup CEO Ken Case on why they don’t develop for Windows:
    >And again, our goal is not to make the most money—it’s to make the best software.

  • Hipmunk Out for iPad

    My favorite flight search app (forget the web version) is now out for the iPad, and it is better than [its iPhone version](https://brooksreview.net/2011/04/quick-takes-on-five-apps-7/).

  • The Real Reason There Was No Email On The BlackBerry PlayBook

    Jay Yarow:
    >Turns out it had to skip native email support on the PlayBook because its architecture can’t support two devices with one person’s account, according to a source.

    Man, you would think with two CEOs you would be able to foresee this kind of thing.

  • Read & Trust Newsletter

    Today is newsletter day for those subscribed to the Read & Trust newsletter, the current edition is written by yours truly. It’s all about quality and creating quality. Sign up today and you not only get to see that one but you get the last four issues as well as news ones every week.

  • The Dropbox Security “Bug”

    Arash Ferdowsi n the Dropbox blog:
    >Yesterday we made a code update at 1:54pm Pacific time that introduced a bug affecting our authentication mechanism. We discovered this at 5:41pm and a fix was live at 5:46pm. A very small number of users (much less than 1 percent) logged in during that period, some of whom could have logged into an account without the correct password. As a precaution, we ended all logged in sessions.

    This is a big deal and if you read through the comments on that post it is littered with pissed off customers, many claiming they won’t be using the service anymore. The smart move at this point is not to keep anything sensitive in Dropbox until Dropbox proves competent at security.

    I have seen a few people worried about their 1Password data that they sync with Dropbox, it’s important to remember that 1Password data is encrypted before syncing. Meaning this data was still secure.

    Dropbox, you can and need to do better.

  • The price of “Free”

    Richard Muscat in what may be the best thing I will read all month:
    >Free rarely works, and all the times that it doesn’t, it undermines entrepreneurial creativity, destroys market value, delivers an inferior user experience and pumps hot air into financial bubbles.

    This is a *must* read if you always are wondering while I loathe “free” options.

  • F’in Color

    Claire Cain Miller:
    >Photos might not even be a part of Color in the future, he said, though an engineer hired away from the computer-in-a-pen company Livescribe is working on ways for people to doodle on photos. Analysts are curious about whether Color can pull off a do-over — and whether it and other high-priced start-ups can beat the long odds that all fledgling companies face.

    They received $41 million for a half-cocked idea around social photo something. They spent almost as much money on domain names as Instagram used to startup and actually make a useable product.

    The quoted App Store review sums it all up:

    >“It would be pointless even if I managed to understand how it works,” one reviewer wrote in the Apple App Store.

    I don’t think that sums up just the app, but also: the company, the investors, and the “idea”.

  • Android’s Patent Challenge

    Brandon Bailey:
    >Calling it “breathtaking” and “out of proportion to any meaningful measure,” Google (GOOG) attorneys revealed late Friday that an expert working for Oracle (ORCL) has estimated Google may owe $1.4 billion to $6.1 billion in damages in a patent dispute over the popular Android mobile operating system.

    Trial isn’t scheduled until the fall, but it has been very clear from the outset that Oracle wants big money from Google for patent violations stemming from Oracle’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems and it’s Java programming language.

    I’d say this is a far bigger deal than Lodsys.

  • Bamboo Paper

    The icon is terrible and the market is saturated. Even with those caveats I think Bamboo Paper may have one of the best “ink” engines that I have seen. I actually think the replication of writing with a felt tip pen is done better in Bamboo Paper than it is in my old stand-by Penultimate.

    I haven’t tried it with a stylus because I gave me stylus away, but even with your finger it works pretty well — as well as any other drawing/handwriting app. A few testers have noted that it doesn’t get tripped up when you rest your hand on the screen and I found that it still does get tripped up, but not to the degree that *most* iPad apps do.