Thom Holwerda Archive

Exactly five years ago today, Apple officially released its entry into the mobile phone market, the iPhone. Immediately loved by customers the world over, ridiculed by the competition, and, in my book, not particularly innovative feature-wise, it changed the mobile phone industry virtually overnight. Love the iPhone or hate the iPhone, its industry-changing impact is evident.

RIM just announced some pretty disastrous financial results, but in the press release, there's something very telling, and quite worrisome for those of us rooting for the Canadian company: BlackBerry 10 has been delayed until the first quarter of 2013. I don't want to call it at this point, but it ain't looking good.

"Buried somewhat quietly in the noise of Google's spate of announcements today was an interesting fact: the Nexus Q, Google's new media streamer and first self-built consumer hardware, is being manufactured in the United States." Just getting their toes wet, for sure, but it's interesting it's Google making the first attempt to bring back production to the west. I won't comment on whether or not production should move back in the first place, but in all honesty, I expected Apple to be the one to make the first move here.

So yeah, Google totally just won the conference showdown by easily beating both Apple and Microsoft. Not only did Google announce Android 4.1 with some really cool new features, a cheap but non-crippled tablet, and a new Android device called the Nexus Q, but they also opened up pre-orders for Google Glass. So yeah.

"It wasn't quick or easy, but we are extremely proud of this release and what it represents for us as a group. The jump from 2.3.7 to 4.0.4 in many ways was a fresh start for this project, and as much as the code changed, the structure and organization of CM as a whole changed as well. It meant a lot of hard work, and late nights, but also a ton of fun. We are in this for the challenge, and the reward is always the satisfaction received when we release it to the masses as a 'stable' product. This RC1 brings us a step forward toward that payoff." CyanogenMod is an absolutely amazing project, an amazing piece of software. Been running CM9 on my SII for months, virtually without issues. It absolutely baffles me OEMs don't just use this instead of their own Sense or TouchWiz crap. This is so much better it's just not funny anymore.

Benedict Evans: "How do you segment without fragmenting? Apple achieved this pretty easily with the iPod by varying the storage, but that wouldn't be meaningful for the iPhone. The cheap one has to run the apps, but people still have to have a reason to buy the expensive one. What you can do is vary the Apple supplied features, without varying the hardware and API platform that your third-party developers are targeting." Like I said: iOS 6 Starter, iOS6 Home, iOS 6 Professional, and iOS 6 Ultimate. Microsoft got blasted for confusing and arbitrary segmentation - rightfully so - but as usual, Apple gets a free pass when it does the exact same thing. At least Microsoft uses different names and forces OEMs to be clear about what they're shipping. I've said it before: I find calling all these different versions "iOS 6" without modifiers pretty scummy and misleading.

"If you are on Facebook but have never taken a particular shine to Facebook's e-mail capability, Facebook is intent on changing your mind. As of Friday, the company seems to have quietly given or replaced the display e-mail addresses of all of its users with an @facebook.com address, routing any e-mail communiques you would have received back to its own Messages inboxes." Scummy doesn't even begin to describe this.

Gizmodo Australia claims to have a training document which details the rumoured Google Nexus tablet. It's built by Asus, 7", 1280x800, 1.3Ghz Tegra 3 processor, 1GB of RAM, GeForce '12-core' GPU (whatever the heck that means). The 8GB variant will be $199, the 16GB one $299. It looks quite decent, and will run Android 4.1 Jelly Bean. Interestingly, the document also states that going forward, Google will take care of Android updates directly - however, it's not made clear if that's for this device only, or for all Android devices. The "going forward" bit would suggest all devices, but as much as I hope so, it seems unlikely.

The New York Times further fans the flames of the emerging uneasiness between Microsoft and its hardware partners. As the paper reports, Microsoft decided it needed to get into the hardware game (with Surface) after the utter failure of HP's Slate 500 Windows 7 tablet. "Microsoft worked with other hardware partners to devise products that would be competitive with the iPad, but it ran into disagreements over designs and prices. 'Faith had been lost' at Microsoft in its hardware partners, including by Steven Sinofsky, the powerful president of Microsoft's Windows division, according to former Microsoft executive." The biggest news is not Surface itself. It's the changing industry it represents. Microsoft failed to deliver capable smartphone/tablet software, which pissed off OEMs, who, in turn, turned to Android (and webOS for HP) - which in turn pissed off Microsoft, leading to Surface. Had Microsoft gotten its act together sooner, we'd have had far better OEM products.

Two links to Marco Arment within a few days? Well, if you make good points: "Many Windows developers were upset that iOS development had to be done on a Mac, but it didn't hurt Apple: the most important developers for iOS apps were already using Macs. But the success of Windows 8 and Windows Phone in the consumer space requires many of those consumer-product developers, now entrenched in the Apple ecosystem, to care so much about Windows development that they want to use Windows to develop for it. How likely is that?" As usual a bit too Apple-centric (he implies - as explicit as possible while still being implicit - that only iOS developers can create great applications), but his point still stands. Judging by the abysmal quality of Microsoft's own Metro applications (Mail, Video, Music, People, IE10, etc.), even Microsoft doesn't know how to create great Metro applications.

After Fedora, Ubuntu has now also announced how it's going to handle the nonsense called "Secure" Boot. The gist: they'll use the same key as Fedora, but they claim they can't use GRUB2. "In the event that a manufacturer makes a mistake and delivers a locked-down system with a GRUB 2 image signed by the Ubuntu key, we have not been able to find legal guidance that we wouldn't then be required by the terms of the GPLv3 to disclose our private key in order that users can install a modified boot loader. At that point our certificates would of course be revoked and everyone would end up worse off." So, they're going to use the more liberally licensed efilinux loader from Intel. Only the bootloader will be signed; the kernel will not.

"Since my last blog entry I have mostly completed the implementation of the AWT/Java2D port. It is still in need of a lot of testing, but it is stable enough to run a lot of Swing apps out of the box." Pretty cool for Haiku. I wonder what the use is - besides Minecraft - but alas.

I had written an entire article on the debate about whether or not the iPad is a pure consumption device, but realised I could summarise the entire debate into a single sentence: it's the difference between 'suitable' and 'ideal'. You can ride a unicycle from Amsterdam to Paris, but that doesn't mean it's better than just taking the car or the Thalys.

This intrigued me. I decided to see what would happen if you plug a Windows Phone 7.5 device - my HTC HD7 in this case - into a Windows 8 machine (the release preview). The answer? Nothing happens. If you combine Microsoft's prime desktop operating system and prime mobile offering, nothing happens. No dialogs, no sync options, no check for updates, no backups, no audio/video transfer, not even a mount or a dialog to download Zune. They've got only a few months to address this.