John Gruber on the slack all the reviewers are giving to iPad’s competitors:

I don’t understand why so many reviewers bend over backwards to grade these things on a curve. If the iPad 2 had the problems and deficiencies the Xoom and PlayBook have, these same reviewers would (rightly) trash it, and declare (again, rightly) that Apple had finally lost its Midas touch.

These aren’t “beta” tablets. They’re bad tablets. It’s that simple. It’s true that their hardware seems closer to iPad-caliber than their software, but improving software is the hardest part of making products like these. By the time RIM releases “a serious software update or three” the entire market will have changed. The truth is, Motorola, Samsung, and now RIM have released would-be iPad competitors that pale compared to the iPad. Just say it.

I’m obviously a fan of car metaphors and they seem to be going around lately in the tech world.
To rephrase Gruber’s response, if the PlayBook was a Ferrari (I’m partial to the 458), it would be a Ferrari that can’t make left turns and doesn’t have adjustable seats. Yes, it’s a Ferrari, and it’s fast and grips the road like a jungle cat, but it’s incomplete. It’s missing important features.
To digress a bit, this is one of the reasons I love BBC series Top Gear (not the crap US version) – they don’t pull punches. If a Bentley handles like shit, they say so. The tech world would be wise to take some notes from Jeremy Clarkson and team*.
* For a great example see Top Gear’s review of Alpha Romeo’s 8C, at around the 3:40 mark is when Clarkson lets the honestly flood gates wide open.

David Pogue breaks down the realities of the new Blackberry PlayBook tablet:

Remember, the primary competition is an iPad — the same price, but much thinner, much bigger screen and a library of 300,000 apps. In that light, does it make sense to buy a fledgling tablet with no built-in e-mail or calendar, no cellular connection, no videochat, Skype, no Notes app, no GPS app, no videochat, no Pandora radio and no Angry Birds?

You should also know that even now, only days before the PlayBook goes on sale April 19, the software is buggy and still undergoing feverish daily revision. And the all-important BlackBerry Bridge feature is still in beta testing. It’s missing important features, like the ability to view e-mail file attachments or click a link in an e-mail.

And:

But — are you sitting down? — at the moment, BlackBerry Bridge is the only way to do e-mail, calendar, address book and BlackBerry Messenger on the PlayBook. The PlayBook does not have e-mail, calendar or address book apps of its own. You read that right. R.I.M. has just shipped a BlackBerry product that cannot do e-mail. It must be skating season in hell. (R.I.M. says that those missing apps will come this summer.)

This reminds of grade school – when you realize your book report is due the day of, and you hastily cobble it together with lightly reworded chunks from the encyclopedia.

Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin’s thoughts on their competition (or lack thereof) with Microsoft (via Network World):

Two decades after Linus Torvalds developed his famous operating system kernel, the battle between Linux and Microsoft is over and Linux has won, says Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin.

With the one glaring exception of the desktop computer, Linux has outpaced Microsoft in nearly every market, including server-side computing and mobile, Zemlin claims.

“I think we just don’t care that much [about Microsoft] anymore,” Zemlin said. “They used to be our big rival, but now it’s kind of like kicking a puppy.”

I would say the puppy analogy isn’t needed. Microsoft has become it’s own analogy. They are becoming less and less relevant in almost every industry they’re still in. He should have said, “Competing with Microsoft is, well, like competing with Microsoft.”
As Aziz Ansari said in his story of the girl who gives a guy a blowjob for a half-hour for sold out concert tickets only to find out they were selling tickets at the door:

There’s no other way to complete that analogy because that’s the shittiest thing that could happen to you.

From Business Insider:

The team of editors that has streamed away from AOL’s Engadget is going to start a tech site for new media startup SB Nation.

Engadget’s former editor in chief Joshua Topolsky announced the move on his blog and in the New York Times tonight.
Topolsky says he’s joining SB Nation because it, “believes in real, independent journalism and the potential for new media to serve as an answer and antidote to big publishing houses and SEO spam — a point we couldn’t be more aligned on.”

It sounds like they really loved having AOL as their daddy at Engadget.

NYTimes: Acer’s Iconia Is the Craziest Laptop of All Time

Sometimes engineers get excited about things without stopping to ask the question: Why? Why is this better? Why would anyone want this?

Such questions, it would appear, were not asked in the labs of Acer. Its latest offering, the Iconia, is one of the most bizarre products to ever make it to production. The Iconia, when closed, looks like a laptop. When opened, however, all is revealed: the Iconia is actually two 14-inch touchscreens joined at a hinge.

I love engineers, they’re completely brilliant, and most of the time also completely impracticable.

Ars Technica: Google frags fragmentation with Fragments API for older Android versions

In a post on the Android developer blog, Google has announced the availability of a new static library for Android developers that provides a more portable implementation of the Fragments API. This will allow third-party Android application developers to take advantage of Fragments without having to sacrifice backwards compatibility with existing Android handsets.

This brings to mind the difference between preventative and corrective healthcare. The United States has been seeing a diabetes epidemic with more and more people being diagnosed with it each year. The reaction to this is just that – to react with corrective treatment. One way to respond to this problem is reducing the amount of corn-based products on the shelves of our super markets so people don’t grow to be so fat, putting them in the high-risk category.
Google’s Android platform is becoming fragmented across the various hardware units it’s being deployed on and they too are reacting. Perhaps a better approach would be to design a more scalable system less prone to fragmentation. As it stands now, Android phones being built by various hardware manufacturers have different screen resolutions, proportions and hardware button configurations.
Apple solved this problem not only by controlling both the software and hardware, but to limit the number of different hardware configurations. All iPhones and iPod Touches feature the same screen proportions (they were all 320×480 pixels prior to the iPhone, which has double the resolution – 640×980 pixels).
We can’t future-proof everything, let alone technology, but a little design thinking can go along way.

NewTeeVee: Adobe Hopes Wallaby Can Vault Apple’s Flash Blockade

Ever since Steve Jobs issued his “Thoughts on Flash” almost a year ago, there’s has been a lot written about the conflict between Adobe’s favorite runtime and Apple’s iOS platform, supported by the powerful new capabilities of HTML5.

It’s starting to look like those arguments won’t matter any more, however, since Adobe appears to be switching its strategy and launching new products that can cope with Apple’s restrictions. The first major example: Wallaby, a system it is launching today to convert basic Flash files — such as animations and banner ads — into code that will work on iOS.

This is a good sign.
Wait, Tom Barclay from Adobe has words about Wallaby:

“There’s still room for improvement, but I think we’ve addressed a very specific use case for banner ads on iOS,” he told me.

Fuck.

PSFK, via, asks: Can The Facebook Like Button Supplant The Hyperlink?
Answer: No.
I’m really tired of hyperbolic headlines.

NYT: Armies of Expensive Lawyers, Replaced by Cheaper Software

When five television studios became entangled in a Justice Department antitrust lawsuit against CBS, the cost was immense. As part of the obscure task of “discovery” — providing documents relevant to a lawsuit — the studios examined six million documents at a cost of more than $2.2 million, much of it to pay for a platoon of lawyers and paralegals who worked for months at high hourly rates.

But that was in 1978. Now, thanks to advances in artificial intelligence, “e-discovery” software can analyze documents in a fraction of the time for a fraction of the cost. In January, for example, Blackstone Discovery of Palo Alto, Calif., helped analyze 1.5 million documents for less than $100,000.

Quick thoughts on the new iPad 2 from Apple.
I was thinking about how they self-proclaimed this the year of iPad 2 and how no other company can do that due to the multi-vendor nature of the Android market.
Google simply provides the operating system, Android, to power all the mobile devices and tablets other hardware vendors make. So while Motorola could try to proclaim this the year of the Xoom, they won’t because they know they can only hope to sell a fraction of the units Apple will sell.
In addition, the names of the products change so often in the Android market, they never stick around long enough to garner a following.
Sure, hardware vendors could proclaim this ‘The Year of Honeycomb’ – but consumers will have no idea what that means. Promoting Honeycomb is calling attention to the software, so any of hardware vendor who builds devices for Honeycomb can make that claim and that’s bad, because LG, Samsung, Motorola and the rest need to differentiate themselves from each other.

This is worth repeating. It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology is not enough. It’s tech married with the liberal arts and the humanities. Nowhere is that more true than in the post-PC products. Our competitors are looking at this like it’s the next PC market. That is not the right approach to this. These are pos-PC devices that need to be easier to use than a PC, more intuitive.

—Steve Jobs, from Apple’s iPad 2 Event, 2 March 2011 (via Engadget)

I’ve noticed more people, whether in blog posts, trade publications or comment threads, being vocal with their frustration that Apple is taking/getting credit for inventing products and technologies. What’s important to understand is many (most?) of Apple’s products and technologies they’ve turned into innovations are bases on the inventions of others.

Last week Apple announced the new MacBook Air, the first refresh in the line since the Air introduction in 2008. Then I find stories like this one at ZDNet pointing out Sony had a wafer thin laptop back in 2004 first.

The author, Brook Crothers, breaks down what separates Apple’s and Sony’s models:

When the Sony Vaio X505 came out, it was about $3,000. And that’s probably where Apple’s new Air breaks the most ground. The ultrasvelte, 2.3-pound Air–which I would argue is the most impressive Apple MacBook design–can be had for $999.

Price is the only ground that matters once something has been innovated upon – that’s what innovation is.

Think of how much information, in the form of radio energy, there is flying through the air, all around us, all over the world, right now and all the time. AM, FM, UHF, WHF, shortwave radio, television, CB radio, walkie-talkies, cell phones, cordless phones, telephone satellites, microwave relays, faxes, pagers, taxi calls, police, sheriff, hospitals, fire departments, telemetry, navigation, radar, the military, government, financial, legal, medical, the media, etc., etc., etc. Trillions and trillions and trillions and trillions of separate little bits of electronic information flying all around the world through the air at all times. Think of that. Now realize this: A hundred years ago there was none. None. Silence.

&#151George Carlin, Brain Droppings

MacNN: Microsoft under pressure to drop Steve Ballmer

Pressure is mounting inside Microsoft to replace its CEO Steve Ballmer after years of lukewarm performance, sources said this morning. Executives are happy with the solid financial performance but are increasingly frustrated that Ballmer has done nothing exciting enough at Microsoft to raise its share price. If he doesn’t act within the next six to nine months, there may be a ‘mutiny’ that forces the executive out, according to Daily Beast insiders.