Amazon Kindle Fire vs. iPad 2 – Marco.org
Absolutely love this comparison.
Why Android’s UI Is Laggy Compared to iOS and Windows Phone
Original Source: daringfireball.net
Interesting technical look at the design of Android’s graphics and event processing by Andrew Munn, trying to explain why it feels so laggy compared to iOS and Windows Phone:
Android UI will never be completely smooth because of the design constraints I discussed at the beginning:
- UI rendering occurs on the main thread of an app
- UI rendering has normal priority
[…] This is the same reason why Windows Mobile 6.5, Blackberry OS, and Symbian have terrible touch screen performance. Like Android, they were not designed to prioritize UI rendering. Since the iPhone’s release, RIM, Microsoft, and Nokia have abandoned their mobile OS’s and started from scratch. Android is the only mobile OS left that existed pre-iPhone.
I hadn’t really thought about it in those terms before, but I think he’s right. Symbian and the old BlackBerry OS aren’t gone yet, but they’ve been deprecated by Nokia and RIM in favor of OSes designed post-iPhone.
Also funny to see in the comments a few Android fans denying that Android is laggy. “I don’t mind Android’s relative UI lagginess because of X, Y, and Z other things that Android does better than any other mobile OS” is a reasonable stance. “It is a myth that Android has issues with lagginess and UI responsiveness” is not.
The Rise in Android Malware
According to a new study from the Juniper Global Threat Center, malware on Android rose an incredible 472% since July 2011. That’s only a few months.
Android and iOS continue to steal gaming revenue from Nintendo DS, Sony PSP
Why Nintendo doesn’t port some of their games, aka, Super Mario Bros, to iOS is beyond me. Easy money.
Let’s Take This One With a Grain of Salt (Andy Rubin)
LOL! There’s NO WAY Andy Rubin REALLY believes this.
Ina Fried, covering some conference in Asia on some website:
Andy Rubin thinks there is a lot of potential for phones to be more useful companions, but says he is not interested in turning Android devices into personal assistants.
“I don’t believe that your phone should be an assistant,” the Android chief said in an interview on Wednesday just after appearing on stage at AsiaD. “Your phone is a tool for communicating. You shouldn’t be communicating with the phone; you should be communicating with somebody on the other side of the phone.”
What do you expect him to say about Siri, though? “Well, Apple really pulled ahead of us there”? Not going to happen. The truth is, Google has been working on voice-driven stuff for mobile devices for years. The primary interface to their Google for iPhone app is voice. The ante has been raised, and the correct play is for Google to downplay Siri’s relevance until they feel they’re competitive. This is like Steve Jobs dismissing video-playing iPods, claiming that no one wants to watch movies or TV shows on a handheld display, one year before Apple shipped video-playing iPods.
Dell CEO: Android cannot compete with the iPad on tablets, Windows 8 has best shot
Why does anyone care what Michael Dell thinks?
Report: Amazon Kindle Tablet Is The Real Deal, And It Looks Like A PlayBook | paidContent
The interface is all Amazon and Kindle. It’s black, dark blue, and a bunch of orange. The main screen is a carousel that looks like Cover Flow in iTunes which displays all the content you have on the device. This includes books, apps, movies, etc. Below the main carousel is a dock to pin your favorite items in one easy-to-access place. When you turn the device horizontally, the dock disappears below the fold.
Above the dock is the status bar (time, battery, etc) and this doubles as a notification tray. When apps have updates, or when new subscriptions are ready for you to view, they appear here. The top bar shows “YOUR NAME’s Kindle” and then the number of notifications you have in bright orange. It looks quite nice.
Apple's iOS unaffected by malware as Android exploits surge 76%
Android is to Windows, what OSX is to iOS.
United pilots to use iPad for navigation
Even more use for the iPad, Android left further in the dust. iOS needs a REAL competitor.
Why Ben Duchac’s Mom Bought an Android, Returned It, and Got an iPhone
Seeing the basically useless state of the phone on initial boot, I told my mother that I’d take the phone for an hour or so and give it back to her “cleaned up.” I deleted apps. I configured notifications. I set up accounts. None of it was easy, and every step of the way I ran into really bizarre problems. The elegant Google widgets that come with stock Android were stripped out of the phone. The camera app, besides looking like it had been designed in 1995, just wouldn’t rotate when I turned the phone on its side. Apps that worked on my Droid Incredible crashed as soon as I opened them on the Charge. After about an hour of poking and prodding the battery had dropped from 95% to 50%. Completely frustrated, I turned to the internet, where confused users were posting questions with titles like “Should my battery last more than 6 hours?” and “I think my phone is broken…”
Apple iPhones Used More on Airline Wi-Fi
Gogo tells AllThingsD that iPhones make up nearly two-thirds of the mobile devices using itsinflight Wi-Fi service. Android devices make up just 12 percent, trailing even the iPod touch, which accounts for 20 percent of handheld connections.
More Evidence of Low Sales of Android Tablets
Breakdown by Google of Android devices in use by screen size. “Xlarge” is defined as any screen 7 inches or larger. By Google’s count, only 0.9% of activated in-use devices are tablets. Multiply that by the 135 million total Android “devices” that Larry Page announced last week during Google’s quarterly analyst call, and you get 1.21 million tablets. Compare that to the 28.73 million iPads Apple sold through the end of June.
(Thanks to DF reader Thomas Scrace.)
My name is Matt and I am a Product Manager specializing in Mobile at Thomson Reuters. I like my Family. I like Apple. I like Photography. I like Mobile Toys. I like Food. I like Golf. I'm big into all technology with major interests in mobile which fascinates the begeebees out of me. I like a lot of stuff so I thought I'd share along with the occasional light-bulb of insight too. All views expressed are mine alone.
