Tag Archives: android

March 9, 2012

Hollywood, it’s time to get with the times!

By Dave M.

Feature smart phoneAm I the only one watching scripted television shows that show actors answering their iPhones or Android phones with the home screens showing? Or with the iPhone screen glowing in the actor’s ear? Not to mention the phone “beeping” when they answer it or hang up?

Smart phones don’t “beep” when you answer them! I suppose you could modify the sounds a jailbroken iPhone makes when answering the phone to beep, but who would want to?

It’s like watching those older action shows where the car’s tires are squealing on “wet” pavement or worse sandy, gravel or dirt roads!

Why are these mistakes still being made and why do the bug the crap out of me?!

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , , , , | posted in Rant

March 8, 2012

“The new iPad”

By Dave M.

Ipad logoFirst off, I am not going to over detail by detail about The new iPad. Every other Apple blog on the planet has done so ad nauseam. I don’t need to add to that noise.

I really just wanted to address a couple of things about the new things Apple announced today.

#1: The name. “The new iPad”? Really? So the product line is:

  • iPad                  (First gen)
  • iPad 2               (Second gen)
  • The new iPad  (Third gen)

The new ipad

#2: Resolutionary. Again, really? Marketers… So sad.

#3: We can finally delete photos in the Photo Stream! What was Apple thinking when they released Photo Stream and didn’t allow users to delete photos in the stream. Now if they would allow us to configure our device not to send screen shots to the Photo Stream…

OK, what ever guys. Almost all the new software for the iPad will not work on my first gen iPad. iPhoto for iPad should work on my iPad. I have pictures on my iPad, I want to be able to edit photos with my iPad. Why can’t I use iPhoto for iPad on my first gen?! I don’t care in the least that I can’t take pictures with my iPad!

Adobe has a new Photoshop app for the iPad that I can’t install on my iPad for the same stupid reason. I don’t have a camera on my device! I don’t freaking care!

Sure, I know, Apple wants me to update my iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, AppleTV and Mac’s every year. There are plenty of Apple fanboys that will indeed update their toys every year. However, there are plenty of us users that consider a two year old computer to still be current! My Mac Pro is over 5 years old now and still runs just fine, can play pretty much all the games that are released for the computer.

I use that analogy, yet the new Mountain Lion OS coming out this summer will not work on my Mac Pro.

A lot of tech journalists say that Google’s Android platform is fragmented. I posit that Apple’s iOS devices are pretty fragmented. I have 3 iPhones here in the house. A first gen that is nothing more than a first gen iPod touch. An iPhone 3G that can’t even use the MLB.com At Bat ’12! It only works on iOS 5.01 or greater.

I wonder what the numbers are for iPhones and iPads that are still working in the wild. I have to assume that there are many folks that still have first gen iPad’s like myself. The difference between the original iPad and the iPad 2 was just not that much difference.

Sheesh, alright, that’s enough.

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , , , , , , , , | posted in Apple

March 6, 2012

Android Measuring Stick: the iOS Stick

By Dave M.

Apple iOS LogoNine days ago, I posted some info I found on how Android was fairing over each of it’s versions.

Today, pxldot posted a second article showing graphs of how iOS fairs over time and compares the two.

The graph that fascinated me the most  was one showing Version share by weeks after release. As Android barely gets to 70%, iOS gets to over 90%. More importantly, iOS 5 is at 75% now and Ice Cream Sandwich is nowhere to be seen. In fact, Honeycomb and ICS are both not even shown on the graph.

Version 20Share 20by 20Weeks 20After 20Launch 20with 20Android

In fact, Chris Sauve posts:

Even more astounding is that 15 weeks after launch iOS 4 was at 70% and iOS 5 was at 60% while Ice Cream Sandwich got to just 1% share at the same age.

So ICS is not forgotten in that graph.

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , , , | posted in Apple, iOS, Opinion

February 26, 2012

Android Measuring Stick

By Dave M.

Android logo font

pxldot has a great article on how Android is fairing and just how fragmented the OS is as new versions of the OS are distributed.

The problem of Android fragmentation is partially caused by the cell carriers (AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile and Sprint) having control over when new OS’s get distributed. It also has a lot to do with cell manufacturers being allowed to alter the base Android OS putting their own spin on it before it goes onto their devices. The latter being a big factor in slowing down the distribution of new OS’s to users.

The article shows one very interesting graph of the percentage of handsets that have the most recent version of Android:

Preview SS001

It’s interesting to me because the percentage never exceeds 55%! So currently, about 53% of all Android handsets out there are running Gingerbread/Honeycomb (I wonder what the percentage is for each of those OS’s?) and maybe 1% to 2% are on Ice Cream Sandwich. That leaves about 45% for all the other OS’s.

In attempting to find some fragmentation info on iOS, I mostly found article discussing which OS’s app crash more frequently. Really?

I did find one site showing iOS distribution based on web impressions:

4lTUT

I’m disappointed that I couldn’t find more info on iOS fragmentation. I know it exists and I would love to see the number of users per iPhone and OS version.

Let’s face it, there have been 5 iPhones since 2007. iPhone, iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S. 2 versions of the iPhone have been discontinued (Original and 3G). 3 versions of iOS are used by those 5 phones. iOS version 3.1.3 for the original iPhone, 4.2.1 for the 3G and 5.0.1 for the 3GS, 4 and 4S.

If someone reading this has seen some decent stats on iOS distribution, I would love to know where to find it.

2 comments   |  tags: , , | posted in Opinion

January 27, 2012

Kindle Fire doing just fine…

By Dave M.

Kindle Fire

Gamasutra just wrote up a post showing a very interesting graph about the Kindle Fire. The image below shows before the Kindle Fire came out on the left and after on the right.

It’s pretty astounding how much changed in just 2 months! Samsung had a huge lead in Android tablet application session in November. Then after the new year, they lost just under half of that to the Kindle Fire. Now the Kindle Fire actually has more Application Sessions than Galaxy Tab by .1%. Granted, that’s not much of a lead, but it’s still early days here.

Amazon’s price point for the Kindle Fire is pretty much making it the tablet to own this year. I can’t wait to see what this graph looks like in just a couple more months.

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , , , , | posted in News

January 11, 2010

Rogue Android Smartphone App Created

By Dave M.

Drew Android logo.jpg

With all the whining about Apple’s review policy in the AppStore, its a little comforting to read about fraudulent applications getting into the Android Marketplace:

12.22.09 Rogue Android Smartphone app created
We recently learned that a fraudster developed a rogue Android Smartphone app. It creates a shell of mobile banking apps that tries to gain access to a consumer’s financial information.

Droid09 launched this phishing attack from the Android Marketplace and it’s since been removed. It’s called phishing because scammers go fishing for information about you or your financial account that may be used for identity theft.

Please note that this attack didn’t target First Tech accounts. Accessing your First Tech account from your phone’s web browser is completely secure.

If you did download the Droid09 app, please remove it from your phone and take it to your mobile provider to ensure it’s completely removed.

As a reminder, we don’t currently have an app for the Android phone.

It’s interesting that Google doesn’t seem to have much to say about the incident. If I were an Android user, I would want to hear from Google about the issue to know that they are doing all that they can to prevent future occurrences of similar incidents.

I know I have been one of the many voices complaining about the review process in the AppStore. However, I am well aware that the main purpose of that review process is to prevent just such occurrences as the one that Android is dealing with now.

With more than 100,000 apps in the AppStore, we have yet to see any malicious applications appear. Sure, there have been some apps that AT&T didn’t like (tethering and video streaming) and some that were just rude (the Baby Shaker app comes to mind), but overall, the applications we have had were very safe to use.

Its a shame that Apple was proven correct by this incident. I would have liked to see an open marketplace for mobile applications. However, now that mobile apps are taking off in popularity, they are going to be attracting all kinds of unsavory developers and open marketplaces are going to be very dangerous places to be purchasing/downloading mobile applications.

1 comment   |  tags: , , , , , | posted in General, News

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