T-Mobile: After KIN, Sidekick lives on life support
Microsoft's debut of the KIN yesterday has tech pundits talking about Microsoft's mobile strategy, about the future of Windows Phone, and about the state of the "dumbphone" in general. It's a compelling product. And because KIN comes from Sharp and Danger's parent company Microsoft, the KIN drew a lot of comparisons to the Sidekick straight away. Yesterday, I called KIN the "Sidekick of the 2010s," Ars Technica called it "Sidekick's next of KIN," and Wired said Microsoft wants to "update the Sidekick's M.O. for a new decade."
But does this mean the T-Mobile Sidekick is finished?
Does Apple demand too much to be cool?
Today, Apple upgraded MacBook Pros across the line -- 13.3, 15.4 and 17 inch -- but I'm not weeping with excitement. Could new MacBook Pros be any less inspiring? The hardware improvements are marginal, "Me-too" upgrades against Windows 7 laptops. New MacBook Pros, like older models, are perceived premium brand at premium pricing delivering maximum margins for Apple. It's the price people pay to be cool.
About once a year I stir up this price-vs-value debate, mainly because of entry-model display resolution, system memory and harddrive capacity, for which MacBook Pros are arguably deficient compared to Windows laptops. Apple's iLife suite is one of the Mac's main benefits, but the `09 version launched in January 2009. The digital media suite isn't even keeping feature pace with third-party apps for iPad, iPhone or iPod touch. The point: I expect more from Apple? Shouldn't you, given what Mac laptops cost?
After buying its own client, Twitter toys with sending ads to clients
In the history of anything whatsoever, timing is rarely, if ever, coincidental. More often these days, however, the strategy behind it looks confusing. Just days before it's scheduled to hold its developers conference in San Francisco (tomorrow and Thursday), Twitter revealed that it is in the process of either acquiring or building applications that will compete directly with the Twitter clients these developers will be taught how to build.
On Friday, Twitter revealed it was in the midst of purchasing Tweetie, believed to be the most popular Twitter client for Apple's iPhone. That product will become "Twitter for iPhone." That same day, the service released a Twitter client for BlackBerry; and it's that second event that let developers know, as Arlo Guthrie once put it, that there's a movement.
Apple's MacBook Pro family gets a straightforward, hypeless upgrade
Since Apple is now a self-proclaimed "mobile device company," its trusty line of notebook computers received an update today with none of the commotion that the iPad and iPhone recently earned. Still, Apple's entire 2010 line of MacBook Pro notebooks has been updated with new CPUs and graphics processors, and a longer promised battery life. It may be small, but it is by no means insignificant.
The big news about Apple's notebook refresh last year was its overall drop in price. Cupertino got rid of the MacBook Pro's ExpressCard slot and removable battery, but offered a two-hour bump in battery life for several hundred dollars less than previous models. It was advertised as Apple's "most affordable lineup ever."
Opera Mini arrives on iPhone at last
Way back in 2008, Opera Software's CEO Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner said the company's popular Opera Mini mobile browser was ported to the iPhone, but it could not be released because it competed with the iPhone's built-in Safari browser.
Then, last February, Opera Software actually started showing off its version the popular browser for iPhone OS as a run-up to its submission to Apple for App store review in March.
Psst...Wanna buy a used Palm?
As rumors swirl around the latest chapter in Palm Inc.'s checkered journey from mobile darling to also-ran, I'll resist the urge to place bets on which company or companies will be making an acquisition play. It almost doesn't matter who buys Palm at this point. What matters is what that buyer does with Palm afterward, and how any acquisition would affect that company's existing mobile strategy.
For quite some time, it's been obvious to everyone but Palm that it would eventually need a white knight. Palm seems to have finally clued in, as Bloomberg is now reporting that the mobile device vendor has engaged Goldman Sachs and Qatalyst Partners to find a buyer.
Microsoft's next of KIN isn't iPhone
Today's KIN phone launch should not be compared to iPhone. Anyone doing so should be whacked aside the head. Microsoft isn't trying to directly compete with Apple's smartphone but cater to a specific customer segment -- Millennials and younger Gen Ys who use technology to socialize with friends or follow celebrities. Microsoft describes KIN as "an experience for the social generation."
KIN "knits together a tight community of kindred spirits...who broadcast their lives all the time," said Robbie Bach, president of Microsoft's Entertainment and Devices division. Bach introduced KIN during an event early afternoon East Coast time. So there would be no confusion, he made the distinction of Windows Phone 7 being "everything on the phone." It's more multipurpose. By comparison, KIN is customized for social media consumers and pulls data from cloud services. "We're going to crank social up to 11," Bach said.
Microsoft unveils KIN, the Sidekick for the 2010s
Microsoft today debuted a whole new Windows Phone experience developed in conjunction with Sharp called KIN.
Billed not as a smartphone, but as a "social phone," KIN is like the Sidekick/hiptop concept updated to fit a lifestyle based around constant social media use, which is made up of four components:
Mono's de Icaza: Novell MonoTouch to forge ahead on iPhone OS despite 3.3.1
An amendment to the terms of Apple's iPhone OS Developers' Agreement, called Section 3.3.1, uncovered last week, would expressly prohibit developers from building apps for iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad that were not created exclusively for that platform, using Apple's tools, and linking to no other APIs except Apple's. That "clarification" threatens the existence of cross-platform support for the iPhone platform, not only from Adobe Flash (whose apps can be devised to run on iPhone), and Oracle Java (same story), but also from development tools whose apps don't have to be jerry-rigged to run on iPhone.
Those include Unity3D, the 3D gaming platform originally for Mac OS that dropped Java in 2008 for Novell's Mono; and MonoTouch, Novell's extension of its .NET Framework-compatible platform for iPhone OS. In a notice on MonoTouch's home page, the development team expressed optimism that Apple would find MonoTouch to be in compliance with the company's new terms.
Adobe's Creative Suite 5 packs in tons of new features
Adobe today celebrated the global launch of Creative Suite 5 (CS5), the first new version of the company's suite of digital art, design, and development tools in nearly two years.
Creative Suite 5 includes 15 of Adobe's products: Photoshop CS5, Illustrator CS5, InDesign CS5, Acrobat 9 Pro, Flash Catalyst CS5, Flash Professional CS5, Flash Builder 4, Dreamweaver CS5, Fireworks CS5, Contribute CS5, Adobe Premiere Pro CS5, After Effects CS5, Soundbooth CS5, Adobe OnLocation CS5, Adobe Bridge CS5, Adobe Device Central CS5, and Adobe Dynamic Link.
Crossing swords over cross-platform: Apple vs. Adobe Flash, C#, and Mono
It should come as no surprise to anyone that Apple is not a cross-platform tools company, nor a supporter of cross-platform technologies that would threaten to nullify Apple's baked-in advantages -- only during the years Steve Jobs was not in charge had the company even considered opening up its platforms. So the strategy behind the company's reinforcement of its iPhone OS 4.0 licensing terms, first discovered by Daring Fireball blogger John Gruber last Thursday, is both obvious and unchanged: to direct the course of iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad development traffic directly, exclusively, and entirely through Apple's channel.
States the newly added paragraph: "3.3.1 -- Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs. Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs (e.g., Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited)."
The big change coming to Safari 5: Kernel-level multi-processing
Apple has been challenging Google on many fronts this week -- first with its mobile platform, then with its advertising platform. Earlier today, its developers launched the first volley in the battle's third front, releasing the first public code for the next WebKit rendering and processing kernel that will likely drive the Safari 5 browser.
With Google Chrome using a reworked form of WebKit, the Apple team did something that perhaps any other free and open source developer would be publicly stoned for doing, but which Apple might just have the savvy to get away with: It openly one-upped another developer's open contribution.
Two Linux-based text editors reveal a market for Notepad work-alikes
Download gedit text editor for Linux from Fileforum now.
Text editors are becoming more essential in today's Web-based computing world. Gone are the days when users need hard-copy versions of their documents. Also gone are the days when documents need to be gussied up with fancy fonts and fanciful page formatting.
Don't tell spammers that you're on vacation
Microsoft has made the right decision to temporarily turn off Hotmail's vacation (e.g., out-of-office) reply feature. Flip the switch off permanently, I say.
"In our fight against spam, we sometimes have to make hard choices, and we had to make one this week. We discovered that spammers were using Hotmail's automatic vacation reply feature to send spam from their Hotmail accounts," Krish Vitaldevara, Windows Live Hotmail lead program manager, blogged late yesterday. I missed the post because of Apple's iPhone OS 4 launch (I blogged "Apple shows developers the money" and "Clash of the titans: Apple, Google battle for the mobile Web"). I spotted the announcement first at LiveSide about an hour ago.
The true cost of iAd
Despite all the buzz this week that the upcoming major update to the iPhone/iPod touch/iPad operating system was all about multitasking and APIs, the real story was iAd. Although multitasking-deprived Apple fans haven't been holding their breath for almost three years waiting for an advertising framework, the new mobile ad network is infinitely more significant to the future of the platform than the ability to run more than one app at a time.
In many respects, iAd is nothing short of a full frontal assault on Google. While Google's model for generating ad revenue from activity-linked behaviors has rewritten the rules of advertising over much of the past decade, the path for the mobile market has not been as linear. Desktops and laptops have more than enough bandwidth and screen real estate to easily accommodate subtle text-based ads (or not-so-subtle dancing-cow banners) without significantly disrupting the end user experience. Indeed, many users can become so engaged in a given service -- search, mail, productivity, mapping, whatever -- that they virtually ignore the presence of ad-containing boxes toward the edge of the screen. Even if they're aware of them, the delivery paradigm on a traditional desktop, evolved in recent years to a ruthless level of efficiency, is largely responsible for Google's meteoric corporate rise.
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