Monthly Archive:: September 2013

Inside the Fall of Blackberry

In the News 46 Comments
So how did Blackberry become a bit player in the smartphone market it invented? Canada's Globe and Mail offers an extensive look in their article Inside the Fall of Blackberry.

According to one insider quoted in the article, the problem wasn't that the staff stopped listening to customers. It was that they never listened to them. The company simply believed that they knew better what their customers needed.

Apple has wildly succeeded by being "out front" of expressed customer needs. But few tech companies hit paydirt when following this hubristic concept. Just look at the "innovative" user interfaces customers haven't asked for and have resisted over the past few years.
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Ads are coming to Android’s Gmail application

Google 85 Comments

So there you have it - ads are very likely going to be part of Gmail soon. After all, it seems almost silly to not monetize a core app with an absolutely massive install base - between 500 million and a billion. I just hope these ads won't be overly intrusive, and from the looks of things, the Gmail team is approaching the situation with care.

Ads on my Android Gmail application? Seriously, Google?

Alternatives?

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Steam controller

Games 75 Comments

We set out with a singular goal: bring the Steam experience, in its entirety, into the living-room. We knew how to build the user interface, we knew how to build a machine, and even an operating system. But that still left input - our biggest missing link. We realized early on that our goals required a new kind of input technology - one that could bridge the gap from the desk to the living room without compromises. So we spent a year experimenting with new approaches to input and we now believe we've arrived at something worth sharing and testing with you.

Where Microsoft and Sony show zero innovation with the Xbox One and the PS4, Valve is the one pushing limits. Their controller is quite, quite unique, and has a whole different approach than what we've seen before - instead of two inaccurate joysticks, it has two super-precise touchpads with advanced haptic feedback and the ability for both absolute and relative positioning. Go read the description - a summary won't do it justice. And, as always: hackable. Yes, even the controller is open and hackable. Wow.

They're on the right track here. If I were Microsoft or Sony, I'd start getting worried.

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An homage to the Nokia N9, 2 years on

Wireless 18 Comments

Still, the Nokia N9 and its MeeGo Harmattan software platform remain unmatched in various aspects of user interface and user experience. Even though MeeGo Harmattan has essentially remained stagnant and frozen in time for 2 whole years, it still represents a benchmark in some ways for what a smartphone user interface should be.

Virtually every N9 owner I've ever talked to loves the N9 unconditionally. It could have been the Eve of Nokia's resurrection. Instead, it became the symbol of its demise.

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European Galaxy Note 3 region-locked

Wireless 38 Comments

I really thought the days of region-locking were dying with the DVD, but it seems I was wrong - Samsung has decided to revive the odious practice with its Galaxy Note 3 smartphone.

Yes, if you buy an unlocked Note 3 in Europe and travel to, say, the U.S., you will not be able to use a local SIM card. In other words, you will be forced to buy your carrier's outrageous roaming fees or go Wi-Fi-only.

The worst part is that this is not a joke.

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The BSD family, pt. 1: FreeBSD 9.1

FreeBSD 50 Comments

I've been a big fan of FreeBSD since I first acquired 4.4 on 4 CDs. By that point, I had already spent a lot of time in Linux, but I was always put off by its instability and inconsistency. Once I had FreeBSD installed, it felt like a dream. Everything worked the way it was supposed to, and the consistency of its design meant even older documentation would be mostly applicable without having to figure out how my system was different. There is a reason why in the early days of the Internet, a huge portion of servers ran FreeBSD.

But, that was a while ago. Since then, Linux has matured greatly and has garnered a lot of momentum, becoming the dominant Unix platform. FreeBSD certainly hasn't stood still, however. The FreeBSD team has kept current with hardware support, new features, and a modern, performant design.

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Valve announces ‘Steam Machines’

Games 49 Comments

Entertainment is not a one-size-fits-all world. We want you to be able to choose the hardware that makes sense for you, so we are working with multiple partners to bring a variety of Steam gaming machines to market during 2014, all of them running SteamOS.

Where Sony and Microsoft follow the iOS model for consoles, Valve is aiming for the Android model, including Valve's own line of 'Nexus' devices. As Valves notes, no restrictions - you can change the hardware, software, and install any operating system you want. The right approach, obviously.

The cooperation between Valve and NVIDIA is quite close, as NVIDIA details on its blog:

Engineers from Valve and NVIDIA have spent a lot of time collaborating on a common goal for SteamOS: to deliver an open-platform gaming experience with superior performance and uncompromising visuals directly on the big screen.

NVIDIA engineers embedded at Valve collaborated on improving driver performance for OpenGL; optimizing performance on NVIDIA GPUs; and helping to port Valve's award-winning content library to SteamOS; and tuning SteamOS to lower latency, or lag, between the controller and onscreen action.

This is going to be big. After being defeated in mobile, it seems Microsoft is facing another frontal assault on another one of its strongholds: gaming, whether it be Windows or Xbox.

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iPhone 5C, 5S first weekend sales in perspective

Apple 73 Comments

I've been thinking a bit more about those iPhone 5C/5S weekend sales figures, and while it is certainly impressive, if you compare it to the iPhone 5's first weekend sales figures, it's actually quite a step backwards for Apple. The issue here - something many sites and even Apple itself doesn't want to focus on - is that the iPhone 5C/5S is available to a lot more people than the iPhone 5 was.

The iPhone 5 was available to 720 million people at launch, and sold 5 million units. This is a penetration of 0.69%. The iPhone 5C and 5S, however, are available to 2078 million people, and sold 9 million units, which constitutes a penetration of 0.43%. So, Apple has two new models to advertise and lure consumers with instead of one, and has a huge additional market (China) to address, yet it failed to capitalise on either of these two factors.

What this shows is that while the sales figure is still pretty darn impressive, it's not nearly as groundbreaking if you put it in perspective. Looking at it this way, the so-called record breaking 9 million figure can easily be explained away by Apple almost tripling its launch weekend audience, instead of an increasing popularity of the iPhone.

The only reason I'm writing this is to illustrate how numbers are entirely arbitrary, and it's easy to make silly comparisons and claim an arbitrary victory - or, change perspective a bit and claim arbitrary defeat, as I've done here.

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Ixonos shows off its Android multi-window tech

Wireless 12 Comments

Mobile devices are designed primarily as a modal experience. You use one app at a time, but can switch between them quickly. Multi-window interfaces and floating apps have been implemented a few times as an alternative, but most of these solutions are a bit clunky. Ixonos has released a new video demo of its multi-window technology, and it looks much better. If only we knew where to get it.

This is very awesome, and essentially very similar to Metro snapping - except with traditional windowing abilities, something Metro should have as well. They won't say who they are developing this for, but I wouldn't be surprised to eventually see Android applications running in a similar fashion on ChromeOS.

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FaceTime quality degraded due to patent lawsuit?

  Submitted by Radio Apple 15 Comments
I missed this one:

The 2012 patent trial that grabbed the most headlines was Apple's $1 billion win (since reduced) against Samsung. But Apple also suffered a major patent setback of its own last year when a patent-holding company called VirnetX won a $368 million verdict against the tech giant.

The consequences of Apple's loss are now starting to become clear. This month, testimony in a court hearing showed that not only is Apple facing royalty payments that could cost it many millions more, but it has already made changes to one of its premiere products, FaceTime - changes that reportedly have degraded the service's quality.

While I won't shed a tear for Apple losing a patent lawsuit, this does illustrate once more why the system is broken.

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Nvidia seeks peace with Linux

  Submitted by ddc_ 3D 43 Comments

Few companies have been the target of as much criticism in the Linux community as Nvidia. Linus Torvalds himself last year called Nvidia the "single worst company" Linux developers have ever worked with, giving the company his middle finger in a public talk.

Nvidia is now trying to get on Linux developers' good side. Yesterday, Nvidia's Andy Ritger e-mailed developers of Nouveau, an open source driver for Nvidia cards that is built by reverse engineering Nvidia's proprietary drivers. Ritger wrote that "NVIDIA is releasing public documentation on certain aspects of our GPUs, with the intent to address areas that impact the out-of-the-box usability of NVIDIA GPUs with Nouveau. We intend to provide more documentation over time, and guidance in additional areas as we are able."

It wouldn't surprise me if this is related to the SteamOS announcement.

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Just how inept was Nokia’s board?

Wireless 104 Comments

Finland is boiling with rage this weekend over the $25 M bonus payment the CEO Stephen Elop is set to receive as he leaves Nokia after his two-year tenure. Questions are now being raised by the oddest aspect of the bonus: the board of Nokia seems to have given Elop a $25 M incentive to sell the handset unit cheaply to Microsoft way back in in 2010. This effectively means that the board hired a man who was given a giant carrot to drive down Nokia's overall valuation and phone volumes while preparing a sale to Microsoft. What could possibly be a reason to structure Elop's original contract in this manner? Did the board in fact end up promising Elop more compensation in case he sells the phone division than if he runs it with modest success?

Vindication. We were right all along.

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Valve announces Linux-based SteamOS, major devs on board

Games 98 Comments

As we've been working on bringing Steam to the living room, we've come to the conclusion that the environment best suited to delivering value to customers is an operating system built around Steam itself. SteamOS combines the rock-solid architecture of Linux with a gaming experience built for the big screen. It will be available soon as a free stand-alone operating system for living room machines.

Valve goes beyond just building a Linux distribution and grafting Steam on top of it. They are actually working very closely with hardware manufacturers and game developers, which has already resulted in graphics performance improvements. They are also working on reducing input latency as well as audio performance. In other words, they are very serious about upending Windows as the default PC gaming operating system.

In SteamOS, we have achieved significant performance increases in graphics processing, and we're now targeting audio performance and reductions in input latency at the operating system level. Game developers are already taking advantage of these gains as they target SteamOS for their new releases.

Valve also unveiled that it's working with the major game developers so that triple-A titles will be natively available on SteamOS. As for your existing Windows games - SteamOS will support game streaming from your existing PC so you can play them on your SteamOS machine in the living room (or anywhere else, of course). 'Hundreds of great games' are already available natively on Linux through Steam, too.

This is just the first in a series of three announcements, and it stands to reason that the second one will be a dedicated SteamOS machine from Valve. The third announcement? Well. It's got a three in it, so Half-Life 3 is pretty much confirmed.

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Microsoft unveils next-generation Surface tablets

Windows 27 Comments

While on stage, Microsoft Vice President of Surface Panos Panay explained how the teams have worked hard in making the next generation of Surface tablets cooler, lighter, quieter, more efficient and have longer lasting power reactors. The Surface Pro 2 was up first and is all about power, with new covers and better components to further improve the user experience. If you're after the premium Surface experience, this will be the correct choice.

The Surface 2 is lighter, has a faster CPU and now sports a 1080 display with ClearType. Powering Windows RT 8.1, the Surface 2 brings new exciting features to the table, without bumping the price above the competition.

Specification bumps all around, and thinner, lighter, and changes borne from customer feedback, such as the adjustable kickstand. I like the full HD display on the Surface 2 (the ARM version of Surface), and the Haswell improvements to power and battery life on the Surface Pro 2 are substantial.

Still, as a Surface RT owner, the hardware has never been the issue. My Surface RT is a very enjoyable piece of hardware to hold - well-built, sturdy, solid, and very well designed. Specification-wise, it packs more than enough power, too. Sadly, Surface was let down by software; Windows RT and the Metro interface are simply not of decent enough quality, and the applications for it are even worse - slow, jittery animations, crash-prone, rarely updated. All the hallmarks of side projects; things developers may work on when they're not working on Android or iOS applications.

Windows 8.1 seems to have fixed little of those issues (although Surface RT owners are still waiting for the final release), and with Microsoft's notoriously slow development pace, I hardly see that change any time soon.

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BlackBerry cuts 4500 jobs, exits consumer market

Wireless 39 Comments

So, BlackBerry has just announced it's exciting the consumer market, focussing on the enterprise instead. Worse yet, it's cutting 4500 jobs, half its workforce, which is a statistic for us, but a disaster for those involved.

The company sold just 3.7 million smartphones in the second quarter, most of which ran the older BlackBerry 7 operating system instead of the new BlackBerry 10. This means the Z10 and Q10 have been unmitigated flops. Hardly surprising though - even random people such as myself knew BB10 was going to be a hard, if not impossible, sell.

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FreeBSD 10’s new technologies and features

FreeBSD 24 Comments

There has been a lot of maturing technologies in FreeBSD 10, with many new features which make this release, I think, the most exciting one in years. A lot of development has gone into virtualisation support. Virtualisation with FreeBSD Jails has been available for a long time, but not so much "full virtualisation".

Let's have a look at the some of the most talked about, most requested and most interesting features that have found their way into or are planned for 10.0, but may not make the deadline.

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Apple chiefs discuss strategy, market share

Apple 27 Comments

Great interview with Apple's executives.

When Apple got into the mobile business, it was Nokia’s world. The Finnish company was considered something of a miracle worker. "I'm old enough to remember when Nokia had margins of 25 percent, and there was absolutely no way they were going to be dislodged from their leadership position," says Kuittinen of research firm Alekstra. Says Cook, "I think is a reminder to everyone in business that you have to keep innovating and that to not innovate is to die."

Quite true. If a fingerprint scanner and a 64bit ARM chip are innovation, time will tell, but for now, Apple is surely still atop of its game. The amazing load of iOS 7 application updates and the rapid adoption of Apple's latest is testament to that.

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