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This is fantastic
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From my post on aiaio:
In partnering with HTC, a company that produces cell phones for every US carrier and two different operating systems, Google ceded control of the overall experience. Never mind that the handset is slim and fairly attractive. It’s also generic, and apparently imperfect. When David Pogue pushes your phone’s home button, you really don’t want it to fail.
There’s a huge difference between designing and engineering a device, as Apple did with the iPhone and Palm with the Pre, and a company having a device “built to its specifications”. Google was telling HTC, “We want our phone to do this,” and HTC was putting the requisite componentry in place. This tends to minimize holistic product definition and by its very nature waters down the innovation. In contrast, Palm and Apple (and Motorola and Nokia, for that matter) manage the entire process, and their software is designed to complement the hardware, maximizing user experience. Google, a company that is strictly virtual, doesn’t know how to do this.
Apple completely reengineered the UI of mobile telephony with the iPhone. Visual voice mail. Screen-based keyboard. Multi-touch interface. The list goes on and on. Google, in contrast, is very “me too” at this point in its phone development cycle. It will be interesting to see if Google follows the Microsoft model and finds nirvana in its third or fourth release.
I keep coming back to Brad Graham’s passing—three times since I first found out yesterday—and I keep getting a pit in my chest thinking about it.
I know Brad for one lone, random reason: he had a weblog in the 1990s, and so did I. Back then the blogosphere (a term Brad coined, by the way) was small enough that people could track it on a single webpage. Early bloggers were united by spirit: we were exploring a new medium, and we were very comfortably aligned with one another, despite our diverse interests.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how my connections to the old-school crowd are not as strong as they could—should—have been, mostly because I never got around to dining with my crowd at SXSW. I know lots of people from the early days, and they know me, but I see my old friend Anil Dash refer to these same people as his best friends and I realize I missed a moment.
Brad, though? Brad was your friend. Instantly and permanently. Smiles, embraces, forever remembered and fondly recalled. After our first meeting in New York, I became part of his hug-shaped social circle, and would regularly receive invites to meet him for a drink when he found himself in my city. This is how he treated everyone, and why my community is mourning him especially deeply.
Brad embodied the power of social media, long before it had such a name. Consider: brought together by technology and little else (check out the text in that first-meeting link) I became a longtime friend of a man a thousand miles away. His death is giving me recurrent waves of sadness, even though I hadn’t seen him in several years. And I’m sharing my emotions with hundreds of people around the country, some of whom knew him well and others who never even met him in person.
Leave it to Brad Graham to remind us how powerful and touching this medium can be. We’ll miss you, Brad. I know I already do.
This is FreshDirect’s SMART & SIMPLE MOROCCAN CHICKEN W/ HERBED COUSCOUS.
The instructions read, “Place in microwave and heat on high for 3 minutes in 1,000-watt or higher microwave.” So I did, in my 1,000-watt GE Profile microwave. Three minutes later, this is what resulted.
The last step on the FD package–“Enjoy!”–is looking mighty difficult.
This is what the package looked like beforehand:
From my post on aiaio:
[The Apple] tablet’s pixels per inch will be impressively high, like the 160 ppi of the iPhone. Most Mac desktop and laptop displays hover around 110 ppi. An 11″ screen at 160 ppi will provide almost the same amount of pixel real estate as a 13.3″ MacBook screen does now. This will help minimize people’s perception that they’re giving up detail for size.
Apple wants an iPhone in your pocket, an iSlate (or whatever) on your coffee table, and an iMac on your desk, with laptops positioned for students and the mobile workforce. It’s ambitious. And more than a little smart.
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R.I.P. Brad Graham, one of the earliest bloggers and among the first people I met in the blogosphere, back before there was such a thing.
My new iPhone is much faster. Every function performs better, from finding wifi to launching apps.
The iPhone 3GS feels noticeably lighter than the first-gen phone, despite their officially weighing the same in grams.
According to my wife, people calling my phone can now hear me clearly, as opposed to my old one, which had developed awful reception and sound quality. On my end calls are less crunchy but not entirely different.
The warmer white point makes everything look irresponsibly yellow. I feel like my phone is jaundiced.
The ringer/vibrate button is in higher relief than on the old phone, and every time I put it in my pocket, the ringer turns back on. I hope my soon-to-arrive case will mitigate this effect. (Also: the AT&T Wireless store charged me $10 more than the manufacturer’s website pricing for the aforementioned case. Rude.)
I am now keeping up with the joneses… until July, when the iPhone 3GT or whatever makes me instantly out of date.
For the fifth year in a row I’m chronicling in this space the cities where I spent time in the past year. Per Jason Kottke’s rules only overnights are listed; repeat visits are denoted with an asterisk. I’ve also put a dagger next to cities that I’ve visited in years past–to date, I only starred cities where I stayed twice in the same year.
New York, NY *† (home base)
Miami Beach, FL †
Puerto Moreles, Mexico
Livingston, NJ *†
New City, NY *†
Arlington, VA *
Boston, MA
Gloucester, MA
Madison, WI *
Hawley, PA
Edgartown, MA †
West Tisbury, MA
Milwaukee, WI
Chicago, IL †
Palm Beach Gardens, FL †
Interestingly, despite many trips to Massachusetts, I don’t recall having specifically stayed overnight in Gloucester or Boston before this year. And the rest of those daggers suggest I’m quite the creature of habit.
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Great data points on air travel to quell nervous nellies. "Over the past decade, according to BTS, there have been 99,320,309 commercial airline departures that either originated or landed within the United States. … These departures flew a collective 69,415,786,000 miles. … This distance is equivalent to 1,459,664 trips around the diameter of the Earth, 24,218 round trips to the Moon, or two round trips to Neptune. … There have been 7,015,630,000 passenger enplanements over the past decade."
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Fantastic (via waxy.org)