I innocently thought about what has been changed this time when I was prompted with an updated iTunes-EULA, and shortly afterwards I found out on MacStories.

This honestly deserves a “finally”.

He recommended “to negotiate a license”, and with GPL code, there’s no negotiation: there’s a license, and you can take it or you can leave it. If Google had chosen, or decided to choose in the future, the GPL avenue, it would lose the control it currently has over Android. Its proprietary extensions (the Android Market, GMail, Google Talk, Google Maps, Google+ etc. clients) would have to be made available under the GPL as well, due to its “copyleft” (i.e., viral) nature. Not only would the GPL deprive Google of its ability to withhold those goodies from all those who refuse to accept its licensing terms designed to strengthen Google’s dominant market position in search and other advertising-financed online services but its device maker partners would also be unhappy[.]

He also links to trial exhibits brought forth by Oracle, focusing on email conversations that Lindholm has taken part in.
Some items of note:

“CLDC Licensing discussions with Sun – Intent”, written 7/28/05 (Trial Exhibit 3, pg 2/5; PDF page 2) (emphasis mine):

Google desires to create an internally developed Java Virtual Machine for use in its handset operating system (Project Android). As part of its wireless strategy, Google wishes to release the entire project, including the JVM, as Open Source to promote adoption of Google services on handsets by carriers and OEMs.

Tim Lindholm, “One last thought on Sun”, mail sent 10/13/2005 (Trial Exhibit 9, pg 1/1; PDF page 6) (emphasis mine):

One thing to keep in mind is that, if we ignore some of the more immediate pain points, Google’s vision for the device eco- system is not very different from Alan’s: one-stop shop for device stack, a powerful embedded platform, one implementation to reduce fragmentation, carrier control of the device L&F and branding, highly integrated apps, and a highly usable phonetop.

“Monetization Proposal – Middleware & Stack additions” (Trial Exhibit 11, pg 3/7; PDF page 10):

Built-in network quality monitoring: There exists an opportunity to build Network Monitoring into the stack. This proposed functionality is a error reporting and logging facility specifically tailored to network events such as dropped calls, tower broadcast routing issues, power management/signal strength reports, etc. Assuming this technology is built into the platform, its adoption creates an opportunity to sell data-mining tools and services to wireless carriers who wish to improve their network performance. [...] Security and Virus protection: One important consideration we must address is that oftrust and security. Wireless carriers, consumers and the industry as a whole will expect a certain degree o f robustness and security to be built into the platform. We think history has shown that security is a fundamental function of a modern platform, and it would be unwise to leave it as an afterthought. Although the platform architecture includes forethought into various security features, the core platform does not include an implementation. This is a perfect opportunity for Sun to leverage its expertise to sell a secure implementation of our platform.

“Monetization Proposal – Carrier & Ecosystem Services” (Trial Exhibit 11, pg 6/7; PDF page 13)

Point of sale and customer self provisioning: The handset platform will be highly customizable providing the opportunity for tailored configuration down to specific demographics (i.e. 18-28 year old males). An ability to push specific handset configurations (ring-tones, wallpaper, applications, etc) to these specific demographic groups at the point of sale or through a simple self provisioning interface is viewed as a killer-application by the carriers. This capability is much easier to achieve with the adoption of a standardized platform such as the one we are developing. Google would be happy to see Sun enable such capabilities. Virus protection and management: As handsets platforms become more feature rich and open the carriers are increasingly concerned about viruses. While there may be some basic support for virus management in the initial open handset platform, this is an area open for significant value add. There is an opportunity for improved clients in the handset as well as monitoring and alarming services in the network.

Tim Lindholm, “Re: Anything useful in yesterdays Sun meetin? -eom”, mail sent 10/26/2005 (Trial Exhibit 125, pg 1-2/2; PDF page 17-18) (emphasis mine):

Although this has the makings of one or another staredown, I ithink we also ought to keep thinking about what “open source” as a label means to us, and its value, versus no-name, function-driven solutions that preserve source access and no cost. I still think we need to come to grips with the conundrum of the “almost open source” license, with the rider, as it *will* be reviled by the open source priests and will see most of its marketing value lost or muddied. I have lived this problem, and don’t want to see it underestimated. If we don’t show strong efforts toward avoiding fragmentation we are also going to have much more trouble with Sun. So perhaps the key exercise probably remains trying to find an enforceable license that requires compatibility but otherwise does not impose cost or onerous conditions on distribution and use –that seems more important than OS blessing, and gives us a rhetorical position that the industry outside the OS zealots has grudgingly accepted from Sun.

Tim Lindholm, “Comments on collab/license agreement”, original mail sent on 4/4/2006, quoted in auto-attachment in mail from 4/5/2006 (Trial Exhibit 213, pg 1/2; PDF page 20)

The fact that the definition of Commercial Stack includes the words “subsetted and/or supersetted” is significant in that these are special words for Sun, some of the key things that they have historically resisted going open to prevent. The presence of these words is another indication, more meaningful to Sun than us, that they understand the same thing we do by openness.

Same mail (Trial Exhibit 213, pg 2/2; PDF page 21):

I’m not sure what 13.1 means when it talks about using commercially reasonable efforts to ensure that “appropriate” mobile client apps that are part of the Project Plan interoperate with Sun’s backend products. That had better allow us to easily carve out things that inherently talk t o Google’s proprietary back ends only. There is no way we can agree to make Google clients of Google services work with Sun back ends that the clients will never be deployed against. I hope Sun doesn’t see this as a foot in the door for getting its back ends into Google.

Tim Lindholm, “Android notes”, mail sent 7/15/2005 (Trial Exhibit 318, pg 1/1; PDF page 26) (emphasis mine):

Android at 8 people now, said to have G[oogle] reqs for 50 more! They gave up on cameras when the VCs concluded the market was too small to bother with ($40-50M?). Were then moving into their current model when G[oogle] came along. Want to do open source golden stack for wireless and similar devices. [...] Needs to be able to project Google services better than current platforms do. Android previously been client-focused, but now can be more E2E integrated. [...] Google’s goal in this would be to create more mobile page views, from more compelling content, which will create more ad views. It’s making a bigger, tastier pie. [...] Agree that G’s alignment is with carriers, not OEMs. [...] Consider OSS to be a key part of their business model, to differentiate them from (what?).

Dave Sobota, “Re: Open Source Java”, original sent on 2/19/2009, quoted in auto-attachment in mail from Bob Lee to Tim Lindholm on 2/20/2009 (Trial Exhibit 326, pg 2-3/3; PDF page 30-31)

Brett [Slatkin]‘s thoughts: [...] Proposal: – Google buys the rights to Java from Sun (patents, copyrights, etc) -Create an open foundation to own all of the IP -We have Sun open-source not just OpenJDK but all of the tests that go with it (for container compliance, etc) – We re-release the code with an even more open license than Sun had before > Good for Google: – Our Java lawsuits go away [...] - Hedge our bets on HTML5 by supporting JavaFX, which will complete directly with Microsoft Silverlight and Adobe Flash/Flex/Air – We can better drive Java standards towards “open web” goals [...] Alternatives could be bad: - IBM or Oracle buys rights to Java, further locks down the platform or entangles it in more Patents/IP – Microsoft Silverlight and/or Adobe Flash/Air become the preferred way to build complex applications on the web (this is *almost* already true)

Jeremy Manson, “Re: Open Source Java”, original sent on 2/19/2009, quoted in auto-attachment in mail from Bob Lee to Tim Lindholm on 2/20/2009 (Trial Exhibit 326, pg 2/3; PDF page 30)

One of the major benefits you haven’t mentioned is that Google already has a substantial amount riding on its own use of Java: ads, billing and application frontends all depend on it. Even though we now have a small team to support the JDK internally, we still depend enormously on Sun for support. Java is one of the only major pieces of Google’s infrastructure whose continued function is so bound up with a single company, and given that that company is Sun, perhaps this is not a good thing. The upshot of this is that this may be a strategically wise move for our own internal security, as well.

Tim Lindholm, “Re: Fwd: Java is free :)”, mail sent 11/13/2006 (Trial Exhibit 330, pg 1; PDF page 32):

Yeah. I’ve learned to bite my tongue on such stuff. Poor beleaguered Microsoft, always the victim. Although it’s likely true that if Java had been open at the time, they would have stolen it outright with no recourse from Sun, and thus there would be no distinct C# and .NET. Of course, if they had just done C# and .NET at the time, rather than trying to steal Java, they might well have won. It’s just in their nature to try to coopt and corrupt, and they seem to do so in spite of themselves.

These mails are being used by Oracle in a lawsuit, but they’re interesting not only in that particular context. They give insight into a companys decisions and motives, unfiltered and without PR-filters being applied, and we hardly get such these days – not only concerning Google, but any company.

In 30 years from now will our kids look back and read iPad and iPhone reviews with the same sense of antiquity and novelty that I felt as I read Fallow’s piece?

I’m looking forward to finding it out.

Excellence is the sum of 100 or 1,000 of these little details. We care deeply about making something that’s excellent from an engineering standpoint [...] .

In other words, for every dollar in revenue generated from Apple’s iOS App Store, the Amazon Appstore for Android brings in 89 cents per active user, while Google Play earns 23 cents for software available at all three storefronts.

Sounds like a pretty good opportunity to make some money, doesn’t it? Well, here’s the catch:

The applications included in the comparison make most of their money from in-app purchases, which was the revenue type compared in the analysis

When I first read the headline, I was wondering how this analysis fit into Amazon’s “Bring your apps, we’ll set the price”-policy and whether there was still a lot of money in their app store even if they controlled your price points. Turns out that’s not what this study is showing.

So, if you’re on Android the rule of thumb seems to be: if you monetize your app through In-App-Sales, you can’t miss out on Amazon’s storefront. If you make your money through the money-up-front sales, choosing whether you’re on their app store or not should be one of your most carefully thought about business decisions.

Why did we use UDIDs? We used them only for our push notification services in order to be able to match up a given device to its push notification settings. This allowed us to restore push notifications settings after Tweetbot was deleted and re-installed. With this new change in place this is no longer possible, if you delete and re-install Tweetbot you’ll have to setup your push notification settings again.

These use cases are one of the things I’ve been most excited about ever since first hearing about the iCloud-APIs. While there are a lot of cases that can’t be solved easily with iCloud – users not having it turned on or multiple users on one device, for example – and would require an alternative work-around-solution, I don’t see a reason to not use iCloud to save user settings and just fall back to another way of managing things; I guess the situations where a developer couldn’t use iCloud are far less frequent and not the standard use case. This is less about syncing settings between multiple devices and more about an easy way of backing up settings server-side: ever since I first deleted and reinstalled an app on my first iPhone I longed for a way be able to delete apps without worrying about losing all the data I’ve created within (as iOS reminds you off whenever you hit that little “x”). Want to remove that game to save some space, but be able to pick up where you left in 3 weeks? Want to have your Shazam-history on your new device without having to fully restore from a backup (think migrating some data from your iPhone to your new iPad?) iCloud might just make it possible to do so.

Apps should no longer be silos that tie your data to the device (or backup of that device) it has first been created on. Especially now that more and more people not only have one phone, but an iPad (or more) as well and former-iOS-only apps coming to the Mac due to the Mac App Store, storing information locally is really breaking the user experience and immersion.

He noted that he had been previously been able to contact a staff member at Apple when there had been an issue with one of his apps on the firm’s iOS platform – but said in this instance it had proved impossible to reach a Google representative.

Open.

My guess: Google’s accounting software had problems with this years leap day. I tried to confirm this theory by downloading, looking through and compiling the source code, but for some strange reason I wasn’t able to find it.

Sure, there have been some rough times — and the last six months have been dreary — but to tinge this farewell post with an overwhelming sense of sadness or anger wouldn’t do justice to wealth of experience, memories, and friends I’ve racked up during my time here. And besides, my Professional Blogger instincts are telling me I should save up my criticisms toward the AOL regime for a future post.

I never really cared much for him or his writing, mainly because I thought many (though not all) of his arguments against Apple were bad or simply wrong. Maybe it was due to him stumbling into this line of work, as he recounts, but he always seemed a lot more agitated, a lot less reasoned than MG Siegler when the two had their regular short discussions.

I guess the that’s why this is interesting to me, as I always come back to the question of how long Siegler will remain with AOL (and why he hasn’t left already).

(Also funny: Erick Schonfeld’s farewell to Kincaid on Techcrunch. I first saw only the headline and photograph in the site’s header-bar-latest-news-overview-thingy, and hadn’t I known that he had only left TC, I would’ve thought it was an obituary.)

I’m very excited to show you just a quick look at some of the improvements we’re working on. Many of our users spend a lot of time collecting and organizing the figure preset & settings to just the way they like it When upgrading getting all this stuff to the new version of Photoshop can be some work. We’re working on an option to automatically migrate your settings from your current version to the new version. this includes all your preset workspaces preferences and settings you also have the option to export all of this information for easy sharing between computers or between coworkers, friends or students.

I’m often in awe and thinking about starting to use Photoshop when I see some of the great stuff that their engineers are doing, such as all the Content Aware-features recently or when a colleague showed me his stitched-together panoramic photos and told me that Photoshop does these automatically with one click. But then I watch videos such as this and remember why I don’t pay 849 Euros or more: Because Adobe is one of those companies that’s on the frontier of engineering, but doesn’t have it’s ducks in a row in the UX department. I mean, even with a product as complex as Photoshop, how hard can it be to code a simple migration, yet alone the even simpler exporting features for things like presets or user settings? Even if it is hard – all the incredible sophisticated work they do with Photoshop et al shows that they’ve got some pretty talented people; if a small software shop can do exporting and migration of the application’s own settings (not even someone else’s which one doesn’t have control of, but their own!), why not Adobe?

Only one answer comes to mind: Adobe cares more about pushing the state of the art than a better User Experience. If they can chose between adding or inventing new features and making the existing features more accessible, they’ll chose the former. There’s nothing wrong with such policies, they are just policies I don’t want to experience the effects of. It’s like with cameras: You can spend a couple of thousand bucks on it, but it only matters if you’re using it for your full-time gig. If you’re not, you’re just fine using a $29 product; the results will look the same because they depend more on your own skills, and will likely only look worse on the more expensive stuff because you have to spend more time on learning how to use it.

It looks like this is becoming more and more of an universal rule of thumb for me: “If you have to ask, stay the hell away.” It’s the same with Android vs iOS, Linux vs Mac OS, Photoshop vs Pixelmator, $5000 DSLR vs $800 DSLR: If you have to ask someone about the difference, go with the easy, user-friendly and supposedly “more limited” option. If you’re one of the few people that can and will take the time to learn how to use it, be able to master it and then also profit from it, then you’ve already looked up the facts and can make the decision on your own. There is no in-between; there may be lazy professionals that don’t want to do any research at all, but they won’t be professionals for long, nor will they ever be the best at what they do (but of course it’s okay to not do all of your research on your own); there may be wannabe-professionals that think they have what it takes and can truly use that stuff, but sooner or later they’ll just find out that they don’t.

So, I guess, if you have to ask how you export or transport over to a new installation your Photoshop Presets et al, stay the hell away from it. If you’re a professional you might not know about the difficulties of doing this particular task, but you won’t be surprised if it’s hard or impossible to do because Adobe hasn’t shown you the best UX, anyways. But you’ll still keep using Photoshop because it’s the best tool out there, it let’s you do things you couldn’t do as well with something else, and though it’s priced astronomically high, it will pay for itself because of what it let’s you do. If you’re surprised about it, you’re not a professional because you haven’t done your research, you’re not working enough hours in Photoshop to have a feel for it, and you obviously don’t make a living with it. Drop it, get something for a fraction of the price, it will let you do the same things you can do with Photoshop, perhaps even faster.

All that to say: If it takes you more than 20 years (or 8+years, still, if counting from the first CS-release) to include such a basic feature that personally, I’d expect from every software I install, yet alone pay that much for, it shows that you’re an edge case and consumers shouldn’t care about you. Keep courting the professionals, but at least don’t make yourself look ridiculous by making such an easy feature request being realized sound like you’ve reinvented the wheel.

(Oh, and two more reasons why I loathe Adobe: They’re promoting 50% off of Lightroom 3 which will soon be updated without mentioning that it will be “outdated” in a couple of weeks (on the Austrian site, that is). But then again, professionals already know about it and can accept the offer – the only one’s being “tricked” are the idiots that think they need to use such software, but don’t do research. Can’t really blame Adobe for profiting off of stupid people, can we! What bothers me more is that it’s incredibly hard to get a price point for their products. On the product’s page itself they only show you the starting price – which is for the upgrade versions, of course – and don’t even give you a simple link to the store; one has to manually enter the store (and in the process chose one of the multiple, including private use, education, …), go to the product again and get the price from there. I guess this shows who they’re aiming at, again – it kind of reminds me of those service providers that don’t put prices on their web sites, but require you to inquire per mail to get an estimate…)

CNET yesterday reported that Verizon has announced a “hard requirement” that all future smartphones released on the carrier support 4G LTE technology for faster data speeds. That requirement has naturally led to speculation that the carrier has all but confirmed that the iPhone 5 will support LTE, which had already been widely assumed and rumored.

Fortunately, I haven’t seem much of that alleged rumors. I guess there is a lot of idiotic writing to be done about how this is reality or modern technology biting Apple in the ass, Apple being on the losing side, blablabla.

Let’s just have a quick look at that quote (emphasis mine):

From now on, nearly every smartphone, wireless hot spot, tablet, and Netbook that Verizon offers will come with LTE guns a-blazing. Yes, Virginia, that includes Windows Phone and BlackBerry devices, too. There will be the occasional exception, however. For instance, phones on Verizon’s push-to-talk network are 3G-only for now, and will remain that way until further notice.

Nearly every. Explicit mention of Windows Phone and Blackberry, but notably not iOS. Exceptions acknowledged – and excuse me stating the obvious, but if there is one company that gets exceptions from carriers, we all know it’s Apple. And that for instance means that exceptions are not limited to PTT-devices.

Stupid rumors are one thing, but everything being used for speculations despite coming with obvious tells that it is not warranted is something even worse.

All of the Republican contenders insist they are optimists, but they don’t seem to realize that there is no better way to convey optimism than with a smile. Humor suggests that no matter how dark things are, you have the sensibility to laugh, to see a bit of sun around the corner.

What seems like the end of the road may just be a cul de sac. It feels like rejection. It feels like failure. But maybe it isn’t.

What a great piece. So great.

Everyone has their bullshit. You can simply decide whose you’re willing to tolerate.

I think one of the reasons why I’ll rather put up with Apple than with, say, Google’s bullshit is that it seems to be directed more at people that analyze and/or invest in companies, not customers.

I used to attempt to defend myself against accusations of being a fanboy, but I just don’t care anymore. It’s impossible to express a useful opinion to any significantly sized audience without inadvertently angering someone enough to hurl irrational insults at you.

It used to be that I simply loved him for bringing me Instapaper, but ever since he started publishing on his blog more frequently, I also enjoy his writing a lot.

It’s that time of year, dear readers, when every blogger, in order to have something to write about during the slow week after Christmas, looks back and reflects on the year just ending. Most people are talking about what a crummy year it was, and it was, if you were, you know, unemployed, or illegally detained, or swapped out for spare parts. But for Dick-heads, the year was pretty OK.

I’m really not fanatical about living in Austria, but even I have to admit that is has some perks. Relatively early access – especially given it’s size – to technology, at least in some cases (iPhone, no less) is right up there (with cheap, fast Internet and phone plans).

Sometimes the next thing does less, and is better for it — not in every way, but overall. If we never let go of old technology, we’d be buried in complexity and crushed by outdated crap.

The first sentence is what technology pundits that try to talk down Apple’s success and (or because they) don’t understand it don’t get. The second sentence is pure gold – it’s everything I’ve ever wanted to say in regards to Flash (and others) in the most compact way of saying it. As clear and concise as Apple products.

Since web browsing is booming on mobile devices, web developers must build in non-Flash equivalents to any Flash functionality. iOS’ popularity has made this effectively true for years, but now the most die-hard holdouts have no hope to cling to: widespread Flash support on mobile devices will definitely never happen now, so it’s irresponsible and against nearly every site owner’s best interests to make any Flash-only functionality today.

It may sound ridiculous, but when I read about the end of Flash on Mobile this morning (in Instapaper, of course) I felt incredibly relieved, as if a weight that has been on my (or rather, our collective) shoulders for years had finally been lifted. I applaud Adobe for taking this step; it was clear that Flash was the past and better be left there for many, but not all. Now that it’s officially being ended, even those that supported it just for the sake of supporting something that might hinder Apple will eventually realize that the future looks different. And that includes Adobe itself, which just regained a lot of the respect and sympathy they’ve lost over the past few years by trying to fight against windmills even after they’ve been told that it’s not in their best interest.

Miller had, admittedly, created a proof-of-concept application to demonstrate his security exploit, and even gotten Apple to approve it for distribution in Apple’s App Store by hiding it inside a fake stock ticker program, a trick that Apple wrote violated the developer agreement that forbid him to “hide, misrepresent or obscure” any part of his app. But the researcher for the security consultancy Accuvant argues that he was only trying to demonstrate a serious security issue with a harmless demo, and that revoking his developer rights is “heavy-handed” and counterproductive. “I’m mad,” he says. “I report bugs to them all the time. Being part of the developer program helps me do that. They’re hurting themselves, and making my life harder.”

The problem, I think, is not that he demonstrated the issue; I think it’s not even that he demonstrated that one could slip it by the App Store review team. In my opinion Miller’s mistake was not taking the App down himself after he had demonstrated the exploit and caught it on video (at least the news reports didn’t indicate that to me). It would have still been against the rules, but there would have been no harm to Apple other than possibly bad publicity, and more importantly to no one other than Apple; Miller might have still been kicked from the developer program, but I would have understood his anger and disappointment in that case. But he simply left the App for everyone to download – again, from what I understood from the news reports – and therefore put customers in potential harm (especially since the App was free). And at that point it doesn’t matter that he’s a security researcher and maybe more trustworthy than “no-name-developers” – if Apple made some members of the ecosystem more equal than others, everything would start to crumble. While I don’t think anyone, including Apple, thinks of Miller as someone abusing that situation to harm users, that doesn’t mean he should be treated special. Not only would the line that has to be drawn begin to become fuzzy, not only would it become only a matter of time that Apple misjudges and gave someone special treatment that didn’t deserve it; it would also – and probably more importantly – require the users to think about the Apps they download and who creates them, and that’s the one thing Apple doesn’t want and need. And it’s not only about potentially putting customers in harms way. In Miller’s demonstration video he deploys a payload that changes the App’s behavior: On start, the App immediately quits again and instead sends the user to a website or YouTube-video. That in itself is enough to erode an inexperienced user’s trust and faith in the ecosystem; they become confused and wary of again installing an App – any App – because they don’t understand what’s going on and feel like they’re out of control.

So in all, it’s acceptable that Apple kicked Miller. They shouldn’t do it because he discovered and showed off a vulnerability, and had he done only that, I’d criticize Apple. However, by leaving it on the App Store, Miller didn’t act responsibly, and bringing forward the defense of “Apple should be thankful! I’m doing heir work for them”, he honestly seems a bit childish to me. Like a fed up child that can’t see why its parents won’t let them eat candy for breakfast. And while I’m certainly not a security researcher, I also don’t think it’s common practice in that field either. There’s simply no reason why the App should be available on the App Store; no one can benefit from that course of action, but a lot of people and systems are being compromised. Remember: there is no insight to be gained by downloading the App; for one, there is no way to really understand the inner workings (only releasing the source code, not just an already compiled version thereof would provide one), and since this whole proof of concept is based in part on code that runs on Millers server not even other researchers (the only group of people that might have a reason other than pure curiosity to download the App) could gain any insight.

Also:

Miller chalks up the difference to Apple’s new management. “I miss Steve Jobs,” he says. “He never kicked me out of anything.”

I guess we’re starting to see the first cases of “It’s because Steve’s gone” being used as an explanation for everything “wrong” that happens at Apple, no matter how ridiculous it may sound.

There certainly are more touching, more impressive or simply better Steve Jobs remembrances out there, but most of them are written; Colbert’s are the best that on TV, and in fact the best that I could imagine in the medium of television. They are honest while avoiding stereotypical eulogy-material, instead staying true to Colbert’s (fictional) character.

I approached this experiment with a lot of questions, the primary of which was quite simple: why do people use Android? I had my own preconceived answers — they dislike Apple or couldn’t get an iPhone for one reason or another — but I dove in with an open mind regardless. After over four months of Android 2.3 on a Nexus S, I’m left mostly answerless. [...] To be frank, I still don’t know who Android is for.

He also offers a great analogy about the UX of the two OS’s:

iOS feels like a manual transmission being operated by a seasoned driver. Android is a dumb teenager constantly dropping the clutch, and seemingly getting more and more frustrated as time goes on.

I keep saying that I’m fine with people using Android, as long as they don’t try to convince other people to use it – if one doesn’t already know about it, the differences between Andriod and iOS and the advantages of the former, than one’s not in the group of people that actually benefits from those advantages. That is to say, only people that enjoy tinkering with and reading about their gadgets benefit from Android more than from iOS. Or as Ryan puts it:

I know there are people who simply choose to use it, and I accept that. I don’t really care. But I just can’t wrap my head around any of the arguments that come up in support of it.

So can’t any customer that isn’t tech-savvy and interested in the technology behind those devices enough to read up on them before going into a shop to actually buy one of them.

This wrap-up is an excellent read, and while a lot of Android-fans might not agree with everything in it, it’s about as objective as one can get. I envy Ryan for his experience, and while I’m not going to go Android-only for any amount of time, I’m still hoping that some day, some manufacturer will step up and offer an an Android-equivalent of the iPod touch that is actually somewhat easy to get and not crap spec-wise, plus has the Market Place so that I can further back my thoughts of Android with actual experiences.

Apple® today announced it has sold over four million of its new iPhone® 4S, just three days after its launch on October 14. [...] “iPhone 4S is off to a great start with more than four million sold in its first weekend—the most ever for a phone and more than double the iPhone 4 launch during its first three days,” said Philip Schiller.

 Paul Thurrot on October 10:

Apple’s iPhone 4S, which was launched last week to mostly negative reviews, is an opening for Windows Phone 7.5, Lees says, pointing to data from IDC and Gartner suggesting that Microsoft’s mobile OS will surpass the iPhone by 2015.

Ina Fried, AllThingsD, on October 7:

 Initial reaction to the iPhone 4S was somewhat muted, given its similarity to the iPhone 4.

Reuters, on October 5:

Rival smartphone makers could exploit a rare letdown by Apple in the launch of its new iPhone 4S model, which failed to wow fans, and grab a bigger share of the most lucrative part of the phone market. [...] The lukewarm reception given for the new phone also hit shares in Apple’s suppliers.

Assuming an average sales price of more than $500 — a safe assumption — Apple pulled in $2 billion in iPhone revenue because of this. That doesn’t include accessories, app sales, iCloud upgrades, etc. Assuming a $650 ASP and some app sales, Apple could have pushed $3 billion.

That’s 6% of Google’s, 3% of Microsoft’s, and 2% of Apple’s yearly revenues in three days.

While there are way to many people out there that would use this as an example of how the world is going down, technology is bad, Apple is evil – in short, how it is a bad thing that there are kids that miss out on growing up with physical copies of books or magazines – this is a wonderful, concise example of how Steve Jobs changed our world.

There are people that know it right now, and there are people that don’t think of him as an important historical figure yet; but in 20 years, I don’t think anyone of the latter will be left. It’s then that the first generation that grew up with the results of Jobs’ work from the second they were born – whose first birthday was captured on an iPhone, who had their bedtime stories red to them from an iPad, who watched movies on that long car trip on an iOS device, who take a 500g-tablet instead of a 5kg-backpack to school – is standing on their on feet. And just like today’s 60-year-olds wonder about the proficiency my generation has with computers because we got to learn how to use them in our early childhood, we will wonder about how the world has changed in ways we could neither foresee nor keep up with.

This coming generation will be the first unencumbered by legacy computing idioms, open to whatever we hand them, ready to take it places we can’t think of because we’re stuck with our workflows. It is then that Apple’s groundbreaking changes in direction will truly flourish: Those kids won’t scuff at a device that doesn’t offer them an USB port to plug their flash drives into – rather they’ll laugh about the old ways that seem so impractical to them.

It is then that everyone will acknowledge Steve Jobs’ legacy. There will be grim people that wish for an alternate history, one in which someone else laid out the tracks, one in which Apple did not get turned around and made into what it is today; there will be people that disagree with Jobs’ vision and Apple’s work, and there will not be a consensus on whether the company is good or evil, right or wrong, totalitarian or libertarian, empowering or limiting people in their choices. But no matter whether one likes it or not, with that generation having gone through their teens there will not be any doubt about how profoundly Jobs’s work has changed society.

There are only three fonts: normal (Droid Sans), serif (Droid Serif), and monospace (Droid Sans Mono). While there may be additional fonts buried in WebKit somewhere, they appear to be inaccessible to developers outside of WebKit. :-(

“Choice”. “Open”.

(Also gotta love that comment beneath: “Gotta appreciate the simplicity of options.” Every day, mate.)