I find it humorous HTC is calling this normal-sized phone their One Mini.
It reminds me of how American fast food joints and movie theaters call enormous soft drink cups small.
I guess when you have more and more people inhaling huge cups of Coca Cola and getting obese in America, the HTC One Mini is a small phone.
Cap Watkins smartly observes iOS 7 is unpolished by design.
Matt Mullenweg’s 2010 post on this topic keeps getting better with age:
Many entrepreneurs idolize Steve Jobs. He’s such a perfectionist, they say. Nothing leaves the doors of 1 Infinite Loop in Cupertino without a polish and finish that makes geeks everywhere drool. No compromise!
I like Apple for the opposite reason: they’re not afraid of getting a rudimentary 1.0 out into the world.
Most of the noise you see right now surrounding iOS 7 is in reaction to veneer, to styling, not to design. If you watch the demo videos of iOS 7 on Apple’s site, you’ll see there’s been fundamental human interface changes to the operating system beyond the Helvetica 45 light and semi-transparent panels.
I haven’t even brought up the most obvious point: Most people complaining about iOS 7 haven’t even used it yet.
Don’t knock it ’til you try it.
Mike Rundle says iOS 7 Went Too Far In The Other Direction
People weren’t happy with the over-indulgent skeuomorphism in iOS and and now people still aren’t happy.
I’m with John Gruber that the skeuomorphic training wheels needed to come off, iOS 7 looks beautiful.
If you create anything—music, art, writing, computers, whatever—listen to criticism (if you want, good criticism does exist), but trust your gut and do what you think is best.
Like Andy Warhol says:
Don’t think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it’s good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art.
Remember, Rolling Stone magazine trashed Led Zeppelin’s first album when it came out.
Screw what people think.
Newt Gingrich is having problems with calling these crazy contraptions “smartphones” (via The Verge):
To call this a “cell phone” or a “handheld computer” fails to capture the change that has taken place. It is a change in kind, not just a change in scale, and just as drivers of the earliest cars called them “horseless carriages”, our language has not caught up.
So having failed for several days to come up with an adequate term for the device we call a “cell phone,” we want to open the discussion up to you. Let us know in the comments what you think we should name it, and we’ll feature the best ones in a future newsletter.
Hey dumbass, the automobile was indeed called the horseless carriage first, but what do we call those crazy vehicles with tires and steering wheels now? I believe the word is “car” and that’s short for “carriage”. And that spot in front of the steering wheel you put your Newt Gingrich bobble head figure? That flat area? I believe that’s called the “dashboard” because back in the horse carriage days, horses would “dash” and kick mud and shit up on the people in the carriage, so a board was required to shield people.
The point is, there’s a lot of things that should be keeping Newt up at night, but renaming the smartphone should not be one of them.
I can think of a whole bunch of more pressing issues he should be tackling.
So Samsung is releasing a mini version of it’s S4 phone even though the everyone in the tech press seems convinced Apple has to release an enormous version of the iPhone.
If things are going so well for the regular S4, why the need for a mini version?
I refuse to use the godawful word phablet. Shit, I just did.
Microsoft can’t seem to make much of a dent in the mobile market (more like a ding, not to be confused with a Bing):
Microsoft has reportedly developed an Android application with the sole purpose of stealing users away from Google. According to a report from CITE World, the company will be releasing the “Switch to Windows Phone” application on Android to help users change platforms. The application is able to “find identical or replacement applications” for Windows Phone 8 to replace a user’s old Android apps, thus making the transition far more bearable.
How awesomely ironic would it be if Microsoft started a ‘switch’ ad campaign like PC-underdog Apple did in the 2000’s?
I can dream, can’t I?
I’m not sure what’s inside Apple’s insanely great data centers, but apparently not my synced Safari tabs (some of ’em), nor sequential transcripts of my Messages.
Yes, it still seems Google is getting better at design faster than Apple is getting better at web services.
How to make the internet swallow the universe:
LG will reportedly build a smartwatch to compete with Apple, Samsung and Google
Damn. Google is in. Samsung is in. Now LG is in on building a new “smartwatch”.
Fuck it, I’m in too. I’m building a smartwatch. I love making business decisions on baseless speculation.
(Funny, this reminds me of grade school, when you find out in the hall that the teacher is giving a pop quiz, so you scramble to learn the material before get in the classroom.)
Google is shutting down Reader. A lot of people are upset about this. I’ll admit I’m a little bummed about it too. I read my Google Reader feeds via the awesome Reeder application multiple times every day.
But here’s the thing—all of us bitching about Google Reader shutting down are all people who work in the world of technology. Regular people have no idea what RSS feeds are.
If nerds like me can’t live to a world without Reader then I should think about changing professions.
Get over it. Adapt or die.
Dante D’Orazio at The Verge reports Twitter now supports line breaks on the web. That’s insane. I’m truly blown away by what you can do with computers these days. Fucking line breaks. Who would have thought.
Now if they can only figure out how to allow for tweets longer than 140 characters.
Craig Mundie on Microsoft’s (new) perspective on hardware quality:
“We said, ‘oh the OEMs, that’s their design, they deal with it.’ We got huge diversity out of that at all possible price points, but it became hard to guarantee a uniform quality of experience that the end user had,” he explained. Pointing to the initial touchscreens in Microsoft’s first-generation phones, there were clearly devices with better hardware than others. “If you were in front of a bad one then people said that was a piece of crap; it didn’t work a damn.”
Right. Quality of hardware matters. No shit, Mundie.
The reason Microsoft didn’t give a damn about hardware quality in the 80’s, 90’s and 00’s is because they were only trying to license Windows to businesses and businesses don’t mind if they’re giving their employees crappy PCs and laptops. For businesses, it’s all about the bottom line. Forget how important the quality is or how people will appreciate it more and it will last longer.
Sounds like Microsoft’s (and Bill Gates’s) original mantra might be changing. It used to be, “A computer on every desk and in every home.” It was all about quantity, not quality.
Now Microsoft is trying to sell to human beings with opinions and, surprisingly, it turns out a lot of people like to buy quality hardware.
