The Brooks Review

Category: Links

  • The Price of Free

    Eric F. Myers in the Google Reader support forums:
    >If you’ve come here from the”Something is Broken” forum thinking that this problem has been Answered, I’m sorry to say that it has not been. It’s been six months since I’ve posted this question and there’s still no answer from Google. The post in question still has a star next to it.

    Another 283 people seem to echo his problem, that’s [what happens](https://brooksreview.net/2011/03/fragility-free/) when something is “free”.

    [h/t to reader King Yip]

  • Facebook Is Not as Truthful as Previously Thought — Shocking

    Kevin Sablan:
    >All tolled, the like buttons claimed that those pages were liked or recommended 4,622 times. In fact, they were liked or recommended only 1,790 times.

    Shocking, I’m sure. More information [here](http://almightylink.ksablan.com/statistics/facebook-button-count-is-wrong-use-realshare/).

  • Smartphones Killed the Video Star

    Cisco is shutting down Flip and canning its 550 employees — I feel bad for those employees and wish them the best. This was a company that made a great low-priced product, but the ever increasing quality of smartphone video cameras pretty much made it pointless to carry around a dedicated device. Next up: crappy point and shoot cameras.

  • Engadget on Android’s Fragmentation

    Vlad Savov:
    >Where the trouble arises is in the fact that not all Androids are born equal. The quality of user experience on Android fluctuates wildly from device to device, sometimes even within a single phone manufacturer’s product portfolio, resulting in a frustratingly inconsistent landscape for the willing consumer.

    This is a really good post by Savov and he touches on a lot of really important points. The above quotes passage though is the heart of the problem for consumers — it’s like buying a GM car and having nothing but troubles with the car, you will be forever biased against GM cars.

    It’s not the Android is necessarily bad — its that, right now, buying an Android phone is a bit of a crapshoot for the general consumer.

  • Android From an iPhone Switchers View

    Mike Melanson:
    >I opened the Android Market, searched for Flickr and quickly clicked on the app named Flickr that had the Flickr icon. Great. Once the download completed, I tapped on the icon and suddenly a website opened up to a phishing warning. I tried to exit, but it just reopened. Again and again. No matter what combination of buttons I tried, the phone re-entered this unusable state of trying to reload this prohibited website and randomly rebooting.
    >Not in a year and a half has my iPhone done anything similar.
    >Now, I’m not saying this makes the thing unusable. I rebooted the phone, deleted the app and went on with my day, but I can only imagine a less confident mobile user going through this experience

    *Sounds fun.* I mean you need to reboot your phone and forceable remove the app before you can use the phone — yeah that’s the pillar of **not** being unusable. ((Lots of sarcasm here folks.))

  • Array Cameras

    David Zax:
    >A company called Pelican Imaging recently announced it had developed the first prototype “array camera” for mobile devices. Instead of using one lens, Pelican uses an array of multiple lenses; it combines all the data from these multiple viewpoints and then builds a single high-quality image.

    The benefit is a thinner footprint (many speculate the iPod touch gets crappy camera’s because a better one can’t be fit in the device). The down side? I have no clue, but I would guess it will be a while before they match the quality and ‘feel’ of a regular image sensor.

  • Rent Adobe Photoshop

    From the Adobe Press Release:
    >With subscription pricing customers can use flagship products, such as Adobe Photoshop® for as little as US$35 per month, Adobe Design Premium CS5.5 for US$95 per month, Adobe Creative Suite 5.5 Master Collection for US$129 per month.

    No word yet on whether you get a pro-rated refund for every crash.

  • $95 ARM Tablet

    Charbax:
    >World’s cheapest ARM Cortex-A9 Tablet thus far (single core), it is to be sold at $95 FOB Shenzhen, meaning for orders of at least 500 pieces. Add taxes, import, licences, profit margins and the retail price in Europe and USA may be around $149/149€.

    Also it has a mouse input interface, for when you get tired of using your finger.

    *(Extra bonus is how excited the guy in the video is.)*

  • Great Dropbox Wishes

    Three really great things that Dropbox needs — first things first, let’s get the icon [out](http://thebbpodcast.com/2011/04/episode-6-wonderful-people/) of the menubar.

  • “Immersive”

    Mary Jo Foley:
    >“Immersive” is the way that Microsoft is describing the Windows 8 app experience on tablets and slates running the MoSH interface, from what I’ve been told. Inside the company, some Softies use “immersive” and “modern” or “modern client” apps as synonyms. Once a user installs an immersive application, a tile for it will appear on the user’s Windows 8 dashboard.
    >An immersive app is one where the navigational elements of the operating system take a back seat to the application itself.

    I thought we just called this type of app, “good”? Huh, learn something new everyday I guess.

  • What It’s Like to Share an Article From One of These iPad Magazines

    Neven Mrgan highlights the biggest frustrations users have with iPad magazines — well done.

  • Dropbox Endgame

    Jacques Mattheij:
    >What if dropbox would simply replace your local file system. On *all* your digital devices? If the future is ‘always on’ and ‘always connected’ for every device, be it a mobile phone, a desktop computer, laptop, netbook or tablet, then all those devices can synchronize their content using dropbox, without having a local user filesystem at all!

    I could see it, Dropbox is more or less where every single file is stored on my computer — well — the ones that I create.

  • All New Archives

    I have never been happy with a single instance of the archive function on a WordPress blog before — after spending hours trying to get the archive to work the way I wanted it to, I decided to hire a professional. I got in contact with [Pat Dryburgh](http://patdryburgh.com/) and asked him if he would take a stab at it.

    It is now done, and all I can say is wow.

    All you get is the Articles and Quotes (no linked list posts) and you get them in a readable and easy to digest way. Click on the month and a fancy bit of javascript magic happens that shows you all the articles from that month. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do — don’t be shy about [hiring](http://patdryburgh.com/contact/) Pat to help you!

  • B&B Episode 7

    Shawn and I discuss the 5 apps we would choose if we were so limited and other random things. Oh, and Shawn’s rule is that the OS counts as one app and nothing comes pre-installed.

    Thanks to the awesome [Notesy](http://notesy-app.com/) for sponsoring us.

  • Iconia Tab A500

    Mike Isaac:
    >And in what seems to be the beginning of a disturbing trend in tablet debuts, the A500 will support Flash eventually, but won’t ship with it. Motorola’s Xoom, which debuted six weeks ago, also launched without Flash, though a beta release is currently available for Honeycomb in the Android Market.

    Why is the name so terrible? The price is great, just below the iPad, but where are the size specs for thickness — what’s the battery life. Lots of questions on this thing. All Best Buy’s pre-order page says is: “Weighs only 1.7 lbs. and measures just 0.5″ thin”

    No listing of battery life, which is never a good sign.

  • Blind Spots

    Lessien:
    >However, I do believe that companies focused on beating Apple to market with faster processors, greater quantities of applications, and in general more stuff are bound to find themselves side-swiped by a future in which none of that matters.

    Spot on.

  • Why do apps from the same company look worse on Android than on iPhone?

    You are going to see this article make the rounds today and last night. The imagery is telling, indeed the examples that he pulled the iPhone version looks better than its Android counter part. A lot is going to be said about how this tells of better developers on iPhone, or people caring about the iPhone more, or Apple’s development platform being better suited to design… it’s all crap. Sure parts and pieces may be true, and I am no defender of Android, but truthfully stuff looks different on different platforms.

    The same app on Windows looks different than it does on the Mac ((Exception to Safari and iTunes, even though they are a little different, they are very similar.)) developers do this so that the UI matches the native UI. Safari on Windows doesn’t look very much like Windows — this can be both good and bad, but it is the reason things are made like this. Can you imagine how pissed a diehard Android user would be if the Facebook app was a direct port of the iPhone version?

    [Updated: 4.8.11 at 7:09 AM]

    Let me clarify what I am saying here. I am not saying that Android is pretty, or that these apps are ugly. I am simply saying that they are designed this way for a reason. Please also remember there are some hideous iPhone apps out there too and there are some nice looking Android apps. On a whole, yes iPhone apps generally look better, but that doesn’t mean that Android apps *can’t* look better.

    [via Hacker News]

  • Mossberg Reviews a Windows MacBook Air

    This is a very neat looking and sounding machine, the Samsung Series 9 is thinner than the MacBook Air at the thickest point and thicker than the MacBook Air at the thinnest point. It costs a touch more and has a few hours less battery life. It is faster on paper and the screen is much brighter. Windows slows it back down to being slow than the MacBook Air.

    What intrigues me about this machine is that for a first rev ultra-portable is seems to have done very well. The speed tests are based on Windows performance and thus are likely to remain poor. If they get the resolution bumped up to match the 13″ MacBook Air, Samsung has a great option for frequent Windows travelers.

  • BGR on Why the Xoom Is NOT a Flop

    Zach Epstein:

    >So here we have a tablet that’s not even a month and a half old… doing somewhere north of $70 million in sales… in a market that is barely a year old and currently dominated by a single device… and it’s a flop.

    An interesting take, but I still am going to say that this device will be forgotten in 6 months.

    [via @Lessien]

  • Motorola Xoom — An “Exclusive” Tablet

    Peter Cohen:
    >Analysts with Deutsche Bank estimate that Motorola has shipped about 100,000 Xoom tablets since the device went on sale in February.

    Ouch. That $800 price point (w/o contract) sure makes this something only a few would care to buy it seems.