Great move by Google. The Data Liberation Front had gotten a bit stale, and it was about time exporting all your emails from Gmail became easier. Good backup tool, too - for, you know, company stuff. Or emails from a girl you like.

Charts like this do great in certain areas of the web, but it's too simplistic. First, it does not take into account that many core aspects of Android are updated through Google Play, such as Chrome, Gmail, Maps, the keyboard, and so on. Whereas iOS needs an entire update to fix a small bug in, say, Maps - Android does not. Many core parts that require an entire OS update for iOS are updated weekly on Android.

Second, it does not mention that even though older iPhone models get the latest version of iOS, some functionality of these latest versions is disabled due to marketing, and in some cases due to hardware constraints (if you were to believe Apple, that is).

Third and foremost, though: I'm betting each and every one of those devices has at least an Android 4.2 or 4.3 release (and some have 4.4 too, like my Find 5) from, for instance, CyanogenMod - and countless other ROM makers. Installing a custom ROM is one of the strengths of Android, and not nearly as hard or difficult as some make it out to be. If your iPhone becomes unsupported or really slow due to iOS7 - you're screwed. You have no other options. If Samsung's TouchWiz crap makes your Galaxy slow, run out and get a quality phone install a custom ROM.

I see this all the time: people ignoring core strengths of Android because they don't understand them or because they don't belong to their interests - "this is just for nerds and geeks, so it's irrelevant!" Take discussions about application on iOS and Android, for instance; those arguing in favour of iOS routinely ignore that Android has access to types of applications iOS users could only dream of. If you leave those out, it's easy to make Android's application offering look weaker. The same happens when looking at Android and updates.

All this doesn't negate the fact that updates are by far Android's weakest link, although not nearly as much of an issue as it used to be during the gingerbread days. Moving more and more parts of Android to Play will eventually all but solve the issue completely.

Aside from the really cool stuff regarding X11, I'm absolutely fascinated by the user interface of this exotic piece of hardware. It's quite utilitarian, but still has an interesting sense of beauty and focus. I'd love to play with this (even though I have no idea what this equipment actually does).

Mark my words: Valve will do for Linux gaming what Android did for Linux mobile. Much crow will be eaten by naysayers in a few years.

On the one hand, this is insanely cool, awesome, and scifi.

On the other hand, with timeframes like this and the big 60 Minutes reveal, it smells like a marketing trick during the holiday shopping season.

Mary Jo Foley has some information on the next wave of big Windows releases - scheduled for Spring 2015. This wave will supposedly bring the three Windowqs branches - Xbox, phone, PCs - more in line with each other.

The first bit seems like a no-brainer and should have been done already, but the second part seems like traditional Microsoft marketing nonsense. "High value activities"? Seriously? Could this be any more vague and meaningless?

With time frames like that it almost seems as if even Microsoft itself doesn't care.

The N1 is available with Oppo's own skinned Android, with CyanogenMod, or with both. Interesting approach that I hope more manufacturers adopt. Too bad the N1 is such an ugly monstrosity - 5.9" (!) with rotatable camera (!) - compared to its beautiful, elegant, understated, and timeless predecessor.

The Genode project has released version 13.11 of their OS framework. This time, the focus lies on exploring new ways for bringing existing protocol stacks to the Genode world. FUSE-based file systems and the Linux TCP/IP stack have become available as user-level libraries, and the improved Qt5 port covers QML. Hardware-wise, the new version extends the support for Exynos-5, Raspberry Pi, and ARM TrustZone.

With the release cycle of version 13.11, the Genode developers took the chance to explore plenty of experimental features across the whole software stack.

Google has asked the CyanogenMod team to remove their installer application from the Google Play Store. All the application did was help users enable ADB on their Android device, so that the desktop side of the installer could take over and load the CM ROM onto the device.

While Google does have somewhat of a point - somewhat, somewhere, hidden deep inside - this is just entirely needless. I'm probably overly paranoid, but what are the chances that Samsung Google's OEM partners applied some pressure? CM is insanely popular, and once you have a taste of proper, crapware, TouchWiz-less Android, you don't want to go back.

It's rare these days, but it happens: a (what I think) is a completely new UI element (or 'widget', in proper parlance).

In my quest for an Android Twitter client that doesn't suck, I stumbled upon Tweedle, a no-frills, properly designed Twitter client for Android that, as far as I can tell after a few days, does not suck. It integrates properly with Android and has an actual Android user interface - unlike other Android Twitter clients, it doesn't shove any non-standard UI crap in my face. Really, the complicated, overdesigned user interfaces many Android developers come up with just to show several snippets of text in a scrollable list (that's all Twitter is, folks) is remarkable. Let's save that rant for another day, however.

What I find most intriguing about Tweedle is that it includes a UI widget I've never seen before. Instead of a regular scrollbar, Tweedle has a vertical line that increases in length as you scroll down in your timeline, and decreases in length as you scroll upwards. If you reach the newest tweet, the bar disappears. It's a different take on the traditional scrollbar, but to me, it feels like a better fit for a timeline than a traditional scrollbar.

If you scroll far enough down, the line will reach all the way to the bottom. If you keep scrolling beyond that point, the line just stays there. A traditional scrollbar, like in, say, Tweetbot 3 for iOS 7, acts differently. Once the scrollblob hits the bottom of the screen, a new set of tweets loads, and the blob erratically jumps upwards, which is just plain weird when you think about it.

The traditional scrollbar - even a proportional one - does its job best when used with finite scrollable areas. Timelines on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and so on, however, are essentially infinite lists, which causes traditional scrollbars to jump around whenever you reach the 'bottom' of your timeline and new content is loaded. The line in Tweedle does not have this issue, but it does introduce a new one - once the line fills up and hits the bottom, but you keep on scrolling - it stops conveying any new information.

Still, I find it a fascinating rethinking of the traditional scrollbar, and I hope to see it in more applications.

Telling numbers. Cheap Lumia's dominate the Windows Phone market, with flagship devices taking a backseat. On top of that, Nokia absolutely owns Windows Phone now - more than 90% of Windows Phone devices currently in use are Nokia's. This means that effectively, Windows Phone is now a Microsoft platform in both software and hardware, which comes as no surprise since HTC and Samsung aren't really feeling it anymore.

Also interesting is that Windows Phone 7 is still quite important - almost 25% of Windows Phone devices run 7.x. This means that if application developers want to focus on the latest and greatest alone, they'll have to forego 25% of the already relatively small Windows Phone userbase.

That's an absolute steal. This is exactly what Valve is betting on: for the same price, an x86 SteamBox will be more powerful than the new consoles. with SteamOS, it has all the convenience of a console, too. With the launch titles for the two new consoles being total and utter garbage, the argument "but SteamOS has no games!" is moot.

I can't wait until CES coming January when Valve will unveil its publishing partners. That's the make-or-break moment. If SteamOS will get all the same major titles as the consoles, why on earth would anyone want a limited, locked-down, proprietary, slower console?

Fantastic article at Ars Technica about the rise and demise of IBM's OS/2. OS/2 is one of those big 'what-ifs' of the technology world, along the lines of 'what if Apple had purchased Be instead of NEXT' or 'what if Nokia had opted for Android' (sorry). Our technology world could've been a lot different had OS/2 won over Windows 3.x/95.

I reviewed OS/2 as it exists today (eComStation) six years ago.

I doubt this has any usefulness whatsoever, but that doesn't make it any less awesome. Great work (via Steven Troughton-Smith).