Posts Tagged ‘Apple’
Live from Las Vegas, it’s …
Having worked in radio years and years ago, I had a great time doing this CES interview on Chad Hartman’s show on WCCO/Minneapolis today. We talked tablets, phones, TV and weird tech. You can download it directly here or listen to the podcast on the station’s site.
Fractured Android leaves orphans behind
If tablets are the stars at the 2011 Consumer Electronics Show, then the headliner is Google, whose Android mobile operating system runs most of the devices getting so much attention this week in Las Vegas.
The iPad is still the king, but Apple isn’t here — as usual. This gives Google’s little green robot command of the spotlight almost by default. Nearly every major computer maker already has an Android tablet or is debuting one (or more) at CES; by the end of the year, Android will have grabbed a third of the tablet market to go along with half the smartphone market, analysts Piper-Jaffray projected this week.
But by mid-year, consumers will have to wade through a half-dozen different Android operating systems on tablets. Those on earlier releases will essentially be stranded — Google orphans left to rely on the cleverness of an already-thriving community of hackers who fill in the holes in Android on their own. Meanwhile, developers must weigh whether it’s worth the resources to bring out yet another version of their applications for yet another version of Android.
Imagine that: I was right about Safari 5’s Reader
Download Squad has confirmed that I was more right than even I suspected in yesterday’s post about the Reader function in Safari 5 browser. It doesn’t just mimic Arc90’s Readability bookmarklet — it is Arc90’s Readability bookmarklet.
That means Apple is making big marketing hay out of its adoption of a feature PC users have enjoyed for years. Somehow, Cupertino has made this sound like a revolution in browsing. Well, it may be a revolution for the 10 percent or so of folks who live on Mac technology only. For the rest of the world, the proper reaction is “What took you so long?”
Read Dan Kennedy (@dan_kennedy_nu) for an outline of Reader’s Mac usability and a smart kinda-sorta counterview.
Safari 5: Apple hype in overdrive
(Fun update at the end!)
Besides its speed, which is real and impressive, the big feature everyone seems to be touting in Apple’s new Safari 5 is something called Reader, which strips a page to its simple text. Setting aside the hand-wringing over whether it Presages the Death of Ads (© Every Blogger With a Media Job Inc.), the truly impressive thing about Reader is how Apple has swallowed a simple java bookmarklet, which already works in Chrome, IE, Firefox and as far as I know Netscape 1, and spit it back out to Apple fanboys as some major advance.
People, this is just Arc90’s Readability bookmarklet, or a very convincing ripoff. If you’re reading this in any other flavor of browser, you can enjoy the exact same utility. It’s free, and it’s at http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/.
Screenshots after the jump.
Alex Johnson - Journalist at Large 