The round table changes again this week, Kroc Camen is joined by Tess Flynn and David Adams–sorry, no Thom this time. We discuss the mobility of personal computation machines once more with the fresh topics in the news this week. Google’s Nexus One phone, Palm’s developer announcements, some Microsoft / HP thing that happened or something, and the sound of inevitability: the Newton Apple Tablet.
Here’s how the audio file breaks down:
| 0:00:30 | Intro |
|---|---|
| 0:06:07 | “Google” |
| 0:19:59 | “Palm” |
| 0:35:13 | “Apple” |
| 0:56:40 | Meta |
| 0:58:52 | (Total Time) |
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The intro / intermission and outro music is a Commodore 64 remix “Turrican 2 – The Final Fight†by Daree Rock.
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– Google want to set the standard for what a good Android phone is (quality, design, features, software)
– They want to use their very powerful brand to make fairly unkown producers like HTC or maybe some chinese manufacturers a instant hit with consumers (the Nexus One is just a HTC phone sold by Google)
– they want to have control over software updates ( so that things like the Samsung Galaxy that seems stuck at Android 1.5 wont happen)
– they want to make the carriers just dumb pipes in the long run, Google is in this for the long run and carriers being dumb pipes is very good for Google.
– they want hype and free marketing (like everyone else really)
I think Google wants to provide a store where consumers can buy a variety of good supported Android phones and where you have good price transparency and different carriers to choose from and take way a lot of the worry that comes from the massive amount of different Android phones (see paradox of choice) This will migitate the problems we see in the Windows world with the varying quality.
I guess Chrome OS computers could be sold similarly.
No Thom, no quality. Bring him back soon.
I beg to differ. A podcast without Thom is nice. His constant complaining about the iPhone AppStore and praising of BeOS regardless of topic is sometimes tiresome.
Agreed. Very refreshing to not have him on the show.
a transcription of the podcast would be fantastic for us non-english speakers.
I’m sorry, we simply cannot offer a transcription ourselves. None of the staff have the time to do this difficult, unpleasant and pretty thankless job. Like a fish out of water, the podcast medium does not transcribe well anyway as it is casual banter and not like formal writing. It would be a mess to read.
It would be nice if one day OSnews is able to grow large enough to support separate language branches of the site but at this time with the tiny amount of volunteer staff we just can’t reach out and fill the language need.
You know, this request seems to circulate every few episodes and the response is always the same: Are you volunteering to do this transcription? Transcription is hardly an easy job and it can’t be automated, believe me I know as I’ve done it several times. It’s tedious and time-consuming work, and that’s when I was being paid to do it. On average, I’ve found that every hour of conversation takes two to transcribe if you want it done properly. You can do it faster if you rely on a shorthand, but then you have to make sure you replace all your shorthand afterwards so the rest of the world can understand it, which means going through it to make sure you’ve gotten it all. Search and replace by itself doesn’t help if you accidentally mistyped one or more of your shorthand strings, and believe me it happens. I’d never expect anyone to do transcription for free. If someone does volunteer that’s great, but I’d never ask or expect that from anyone without some kind of compensation for their time if nothing else.
I’d do it for $20/hr. Of course my writing would be in English also. Plus, I work ~very~ slow, don’t guarantee the results, type sloppy, require full payment up front, and offer no refunds.
🙂
All I can say is if the Apple tablet is even half as groundbreaking as the Newton was, then it will change the world (now that the world is ready and the tech has caught up to the dream).
(Still a Newton fan, after all these years)
Took them off the bookshelf last night. Wish I had an Old G3 – or older to hook it up\sync it with …
It was something that I was thinking about. Core Data and Apple’s great circle. There is something quintessential about what it was back then -=- Yes Apple Was and is Pricey. Let that be your only complaint.
you don’t need one. you can still use ncx:
http://homepage.mac.com/simonbell/connection/
with an serial adapter, ethernet or wlan.
edit – and nsync: http://www.thenowhereman.com/hacks/newton/
or http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/11436/escale
Edited 2010-01-12 01:01 UTC
Quite true. I briefly owned a MessagePad 100 when I was in high school (borrowed might be a better term. It was my Dad’s). I was impressed with the little gizmo despite it’s horrible text recognition limited capabilities. The lack of networking even then, before the age of Wifi, was painful.
I had an Ethernet card and modem for my MP2000. and I was a whiz with the handwriting recognition.
Nexus One was already reported to experience issues with 3G connectivity – T-Mobile and Google’s forums are full. HTC as well. The more Google tries to infiltrate every technology aspect, the more errors we shall see.
I was very surprised to hear the bad the treatment that Palm got. There was missing information (mentioning only a part of what was shown), and lots of misinformation.
For instance, on the developer front. Saying that Palm is struggling to get significant developers, and then “there is a big difference between 300 and 3000 apps”. Was it uninformed or dishonest to imply that there were only 300 apps for webOS?
No doubt, Palm is way behind Apple & Android, but then with a dev kit out only since July, they aren’t doing that bad either, both in numbers (> 1100, which is past the middle between 300 & 3000 in enlightened circles [3x 300 < 1000 <= 3000 / 3]) and quality. In 12 days, the number grew by 10%, from 1000 on Jan 1. That’s what you call no traction? At 10% every 12 days, they’ll be at 3000 in May… which they won’t, I realize that, but that’s still a platform gaining great momentum, no matter how you slice it.
For quality, I find that a very large number of apps are equivalent to their Android versions (check out http://projectappetite.com/ to convince yourself. Using them myself on both, I seldom find any significant difference), with a number of cool 3D games from top developers, like Need for Speed by Electronic Arts, available right away on webOS, but not on Android, I wonder why…
Have you tried webOS apps lately?
I was amused by the claim that Palm “needs it’s Droid”, implying, a much more potent device than the Pre was desperately needed. FYI, the Pre has the exact same CPU than the Droid, though with a smaller screen, but with the same amount of RAM (2x for Pre Plus). The Droid’s screen is its only advantage once you ignore the form factor (a matter of taste). But mind you, it was available 5 months earlier.
Criticism of the dev tools fell flat as well: while indeed some C++/Java/Objective C developers can feel uncomfortable with HTML/CSS/JavaScript, they are outnumbered by the number of HTML/CSS/JavaScript capable developers, who are happy to prove that you often don’t need anything else to build perfectly good apps. Many developers find that much simpler indeed, and that Engadget has iPhone, webOS and Backberry versions of their app, but no Android support yet might be a proof of that. The arrogant C++ developer (like me) should no longer look at web developers with contempt: It takes serious skills to build modern websites, like Google Maps or gmail and the like, nothing to sneeze at. And if you, the “real” developer, think web tools are just toys, be sure you are yourself not in need a serious retraining…
Palm knew that they needed more for advanced 3D games though, and by giving a full fledged and already proven 3D dev kit (by the 1st class games available immediately), they showed they were aware of where they were and knew what they needed to do.
Little or no mention of tethering on Verizon, Flash 10.1 (the real thing, not Droid’s), video recording/editing/posting and you complete a podcast in serious lack of research before entering a conversation between obviously, uninformed parties happy to share their opinions nevertheless.
Very, very disappointing from OS News.
Excellent comment, thank you
Bingo—got it in one. It’s called being casual. The podcast is just a discussion between friends. What we do get wrong off of the top of our heads we are hoping the attentive listeners will correct us, just as they would were they there on the show.
Doing it this way works well for discussion and personality, instead of the show feeling like reading the news at 10.
Ok, fair enough, I can understand the idea of casual and can certainly live with inaccuracies, in particular during live discussions. This can work well, even very well *if* someone in the mix can actually step in, defend an opposite view and a healthy debate can ensue.
But the tone was ranging from definitive to mocking, with no one correct any of the cliches accumulated. It turned into an unwarranted execution. Maybe was the mix of speakers to homogeneous?
I long thought of OSNews that way: the place to find news about OSes & platforms overseen by the general media for various reasons.
The debaters seemed all acquired to Apple & Android, infatuated with their iPhone or their Droid, disregarding that neither of these platforms has shown much innovation recently (live wallpapers? what a live changer!). Don’t get me wrong, as a geek, I love my G1 that I keep using alongside my Pre, but there is not much groundbreaking in it in terms of UI, and the ideas it brought often raise more questions.
For instance, that activities chain, allowing me to go back to my previous activity, killing apps as memory is needed seemed great at first. Then in practice, I noticed that I do want and need to jump back and forth, go from podcast to web to email to podcast and back to web, while listening to that podcast. I never know what’s running, except when my podcast stops while I’m browsing the web, not to mention the apps being constantly launched for some unpredictable reasons in the background, often making my device crawl while I use it for something else. This concept was probably good 5 years ago, when memory was so expensive & limited, like my G1’s. But now that smartphone have as much memory than some netbooks, this is no longer a necessary compromise.
webOS on the other hands has been able to come out of the grave a year ago, and delivered since, past the iPhone level in terms of UI. The cards metaphor is a game changer for multitasking (and 3D games can be carded during a game), while synergy makes me take out my Pre even when I’m in front of my computer or have my G1 in hand and I need to find info about someone: what else -computer included- lets me access my friends details from Google/Facebook/LinkedIn in a single place?
It seems to me that while Palm certainly has to catch up with Apple & Android on many front (apps, UI speed, some features), Apple & Android have to catch up with Palm in many other areas, UI in particular, where Apple made virtually no progress since the introduction of the iPhone (if you exclude copy & paste, I guess…).
So casual discussion, ok, but maybe the entire staff has been missing quite a bit on the mobile front, despite talking almost only about mobile phone during that podcast. I still am disappointed about the missed debate opportunity, the narrow opinions and the lack of wider view of the mobile world.
I will bring up your points in the next podcast. We can only do the best that we can do with what’s on the home page to discuss. That means that I have to often wear hats that I’m not good at wearing. I know relatively little about the mobile platforms and I’m having to talk about it regardless—some shows we’re going to be on the ball and some shows we are not, depending on how well versed the speakers are on the topic. If we had to discuss web-development then I’d be able to talk the hind legs off of a donkey.
We would like to have more informed opinions on the show to correct us, but it’s difficult getting people to come forward to be on the show. Simply put—we’re trying to do the best we can with no resources and three/four regulars. We can’t be spot on all the time with those limitations. Thom is writing 90% of the news here, and I’m producing the podcast. We need to be better informed by you–the readers–via the comments and articles you write.