YellingMelon

Who are you? Mitt chuffing Romney?

I’m so delighted at the lack of GIFs I nearly posted a moronic GIF expressing my joy.

Just imagine a dude doing a silly dance or something. And then imagine laughing at it like a child laughing at the word “bum”, you jerry-rigged transportation devices for pointless self-replicating DNA molecules.

Likewise, it’s been a good discussion.

The strength and influence of the carriers, particularly the American ones I understand, is a problem. Apple has been able to fight them, and Android hasn’t. That’s great for Apple and Android isn’t in such a strong position there, but it’s not a problem Google created.

I believe greyed out wifi or 3G icons mean the phone couldn’t reach google’s servers. For me it normally means my phone has wifi signal but my crappy old router is not connecting to the internet and needs restarting. Never get it on 3G, if I did I would assume it meant it was actually a problem with lost packets or something on the carrier’s end.

I know the iPhone camera is one of the best. I’m not that big on taking photos so it’s not my highest priority. And since the 4.0.4 update I find the GNex camera perfectly fine (it seems to have vastly reduced the problem of blur). It’s acceptable, if not top-end. Again it’s good that there is a choice for people with different priorities.

I’m not a “creative”, but I’m not a barista either – I’m a nerd studying programming. On the desktop I use linux, with a fall-back windows 7 partition that gets used very rarely. I’ll need a desktop for a quite a while yet I imagine: I’m not sure if tablets will ever be the best way to code. And anyway, generally I want to sit down to work without distractions, so the benefits of device portability are limited. A linux box does the job great. A Mac would seem like an unnecessary expense.

The real clincher for me, apart from finding the iPhone’s screen too small for my liking, is that the Nexus lets me run any app I like on my phone. It’s not just being able to set defaults apps for basic things like browser, dialler, photos. If a friend writes an app, I can download and run it without anybody else’s say so. I don’t need to jailbreak or root. No approval process, no fees. Just download the .apk and tap it. And if I want to experiment writing my own app for my own phone, I’m glad there’s a major player in the market that allows that. It’s probably not a mass-market selling point, but it is an important point of principle for me. I don’t just want a device where I can do those things, I want a device whose creators decided I should be able to do those things.

Unfortunately that general attitude of openness has been seized upon by OEMs and carriers for their own ends. This is a big problem for Android in my view, and unfortunately most consumers don’t have the time or inclination to figure out who has made good modifications and who, on balance, has made bad ones (clue: most people make bad ones). But as long as there’s a good Nexus to buy, I’m happy for now.

The other important thing to allow proper competition is open standards. The biggest contributor to the releasing of the Windows stranglehold was the web – an open platform that you could use the same way no matter what platform you were using. Microsoft knew it and tried to wrest control of it (embrace and extend). Thankfully they failed. This is another concern I have about iOS: FaceTime and iMessage. Ultimately people will want solutions that they can use with everyone they know. That means either everyone they know has to jump aboard the Apple ecosystem, or they don’t use those platform-specific apps. This is exactly the kind of network effect that Microsoft used so ruthlessly for so long. Proprietary file formats killed choice. I think in this way at least the existence of a strong competitor in Android actually makes new entrants into the market more possible. While there are two strong competitors in the market, no-one can close off their ecosystems entirely.

I recognize some of the effects you speak about with the GNex screen, although they don’t really bother me too much. Topolsky also strongly recommended the phone despite these issues. (I was lying awake in the night a couple of days ago and restarted my phone – the white Google logo hovering in the darkness looked pretty damn impressive to me!)

Totally agree with you on the long years of Microsoft hurt, but to me that just shows the negative effects of monopoly, which, as I have pointed out, is exactly what patents grant their owners.

Before Android came along, Apple seemed to me to be in danger of emulating Microsoft, rather than being the antidote to it. Yes, they had a great, innovative product, but the incentive to continue innovating only persists until a monopoly is established. After that, it’s sit back and reap the rewards. And Apple’s jealous control of its ecosystem did not bode well for openness and competition in an iOS-dominated future. At least Microsoft didn’t dictate what programs you could run (bundling is a slightly different issue).

Android manufacturers don’t make the massive profits of Apple precisely because it’s a competitive market. That is the natural order of things when you have to compete: margins are squeezed, profits go down, the consumer gets a better deal. An economist would tell you that long-term, high profits are the sign of a monopoly or a cartel. In ideal competitive markets they don’t exist.

The HTC One X looks to be a great phone. I wouldn’t buy it, because I value the particular benefits of having a Google-supported Nexus device, but I certainly think it deserves to do very well against the S3. However, this is precisely the phone that has been delayed at US ports due to a patent dispute. Kind of emphasises my point.

Sure, it would be nice to see other, innovative entrants into the market. I guess network effects and early-mover advantage make that less and less likely. All is not lost though. Firstly, anyone can fork android – just look at Amazon. Facebook may be up to something. I wouldn’t underestimate the deep pockets of Microsoft either. No, things could get very interesting. As long as intellectual property doesn’t stifle the competition.

Perhaps cola has become so ingrained in western culture that we think of it as a traditional drink, like orange juice or lemonaid. It’s not, it’s a totally weird and artificial invention. I doubt it was invented twice independently.

You suggest Apple operates in a vacuum, where it has no need to strive to stay one step ahead of the competition. I think it’s patently obvious that the fiercer the competition, the harder they have to strive to keep their privileged spot on top of the heap. And although we can’t rerun history, lets admit that there’s a chance the iOS notification drawer might not exist without android. But it’s not just the features in iOS inspired by android: it’s pretty likely that somewhere in Steve Jobs’ brain, part of his drive to make successive iPhone iterations the best product he could was “let’s really give Samsung and Google something to think about”.

I do think Samsung sometimes copies Apple unnecessarily in a way that makes them look a bit pathetic – it’s like they don’t even really understand Apple’s success so they copy the unimportant stuff too – the metallic rim, the icons, the packaging. But lets not shed any tears for Apple, the most profitable business in the world. They are a corporation, a legal entity that must maximise profit, not a human being. And if, when they release a phone, its features will have been copied by competitors within a year, well then that means they’ve got to make their next phone that bit more attractive.

Where Samsung ARE different in their physical design is to spend less money on it – cheaper lighter materials and a derivative design aren’t loved by everyone, but it’s certainly not been an unsuccessful strategy so far. Products like that exist in every consumer tech market, and there is usually a demand for them.

And I for one am grateful for the opportunity to own a slate phone with a slick operating system and a 4.6" 720p display. I’m also grateful that apps are cheaper and my contract was cheaper (not sure about the US, but in the UK the iPhone is definitely near the top of the scale in terms of price). My main point is people forget IP law should exist to make consumers’ lives better, not to make corporations profits higher. And the term “intellectual property” is just a metaphor.

I don’t know why this moral outrage has been manufactured about copying in the last few years. Using emotive words like “thievery” totally misses the point. As a consumer, I don’t care who copies who, I care about who sells the best products at the best price. Pepsi and Coke seem similar enough to cause me to believe some copying went on somewhere. Similarly the MegaDrive and the Snes. Gilette and Wilkinson’s Sword. Who copied who is irrelevant to me.

People talk about intellectual property as if it were a real, concrete thing. It’s not. It’s an artificial legal construct invented relatively recently. We agree to grant and enforce a temporary monopoly for a new invention in exchange for clear publication its details, and in the hope that this will offer an incentive for people to innovate. Monopolies are bad for consumers, so it’s only worth doing if the extra innovation it encourages more than balances that out.

If Samsung copies Apple, and that causes Apple to innovate more, then that is a good thing. If Samsung copies Apple, and that causes Apple to throw up their hands and quit the smartphone business, then that is a bad thing. My guess is at the moment that consumers, including Apple fans, should be very pleased that Android came along, and that Samsung is such a serious competitor. And if you thing the iPhone would be any better for Samsung not being in the business – well you’re just wrong. It would be worse and it would be more expensive. But on the plus side Apple would be able to make even more money. Oh hang on, that isn’t a plus side unless you’re an Apple shareholder.

And no-one gets to own the idea of glass cubes. Even if it does make Samsung look a bit pathetic.

Why don’t you just marry Samsung?

No I’ve not seen it, but let’s just say that, having bought a Galaxy Nexus last year, I am not kicking myself. The physical design looks to be of similar quality or worse, the spec bump is evolutionary, the screen is still pentile and I expect (based purely on past experience) that the software experience will be a step backwards. And I fancy my chances of getting Jelly Bean sooner.

Congratulations :-) I’m just advising that you don’t let good luck fool you into thinking you are “good at this”. It’s is still a game of chance.

If you’re worried sell your stock. Amateur trading is just a game of chance anyway. If it were possible to predict the future value of shares better than a random number generator, someone with more at stake and with more time to invest would have predicted it before you and the share price would already have adjusted.
Sure you might know people who have made money. You also know smart people who have lost money, but they’re often less vocal about it. It’s a game of chance.

Not objectively, it’s personal preference. I’m just a cuddly person.

I would argue that with appropriate indentation, which I failed to do above, cuddling is equally readable once you get used to it and has the advantage of making control statements more obviously linked to the blocks of code they control.

Less vertical white space also means the empty lines deliberately inserted by the programmer to segment the code have more visual impact. And also in some situations being able to fit more lines of code on a screen makes the overall structure of a particular piece of code clearer.

Must… resist…

My car is an incredibly integral part of my life. I got my ignition coil replaced yesterday. I don’t really know what that is.
If I could wave a magic wand and acquire the skills of an expert car mechanic would I do it? Yes. Is it worth the time and effort to learn those skills? Debatable. I can tell you now the balance of my other priorities and my inner laziness mean I’m not going to bother.

I agree schools should introduce kids to coding and programming. But not every adult needs to be able to do it.

Probably just trolling Nilay.

As you say the line is blurry. But starting with HTML is learning to format text initially and then slowly approaching programming from the far side of that blurry line. It’s one approach, and it’s something I dabbled in too. But that kind of graphic/visual design isn’t my strong point, so building websites wasn’t a route with enough early hits of excitement to keep me interested and learning.

Luckily I also had the benefit of having first played around with BASIC on an old Acorn machine my school had when I was about 11. Which is why I suggest Python (or Ruby), which are modern programming languages with easy learning curves that adults or kids can get started on, and they don’t have to progress through web design first to discover if they’re into programming. Java is important, but possibly not a great place to start – especially for kids:

class HelloWorld {
public static void main(String[] args) {
System.out.println(“Hello World”);
}
}

The streaming video thing seems to illustrate the ill-defined nature of the experiment: what exactly is so interesting about giving up TCP/IP anyway? If it’s the same content being displayed in the same context but via a different medium, what are we learning? Mobile phone networks route calls through a packet-switched network – why is that permitted when live television over the internet isn’t? And if that then why not skype, email etc.
I guess there doesn’t need to be a totally rational framework behind it to make it interesting – I’m just not sure the question he is asking is very well-defined.

I don’t disagree. Apple have captured a significant proportion of the high end, less price-sensitive part of the market with a single phone. I understand they make a bit of money. I think they’ll be OK for now!

Then the suggestions obviously weren’t for you, sorry. I was talking more generally about whether everyone should learn programming. I admit I meant to make these points somewhere and scrolled down to find the first vaguely relevant place I could put it. I’ve just read a couple of articles recently where a journalist decides to learn some “programming”, and then proceeds to talk mostly about HTML tags and stylesheets. Once you get to modern web apps the line perhaps gets fuzzier.

I’m sure my definition of a programming language could be improved upon. But evaluating functions and querying a database are still processes (in the broadest sense of the word) performed by a computer, the fact that you don’t specify the procedure just makes it a bit higher level. That’s still very different from a mark-up language.

The way I read it, Q1 2012 market share figures are Apple 22.9%, Android 56%, which is significantly (10 percentage points) more than double. That is admittedly is snapshot of a single quarter, but looking at the graph Android activations seem to have been double or more Apple sales for the past three quarters.

I’m sure the figures are a bit rough and ready, but Android activation stats are roughly comparable to Apple sales stats, since they both indicate new devices in use (and the vast majority of the Android devices have presumably been purchased as such). It’s certainly not the case, as DeeeNYC suggested, that Apple and Android sales are within a few percentage points, and with their dominant position in Android and their Bada sales it’s certainly conceivable that Samsung sells more smartphones than Apple, for what that’s worth.

Personally I’m not much interested in the sales figures pissing contest, but I’d just seen the Guardian article earlier today so thought I might as well correct DeeeNYC’s mistake.

Yeah, people seem to be conflating or confusing markup languages (like HTML) with programming languages (like C, Java, Python). I guess writing HTML could be called “coding”, but it’s not “programming”.

Good questions. It seems to be that Apple got an injunction that allowed HTC some time to design around the patent. The deadline expired and customs started blocking imports of HTC phones, despite the fact that HTC has designed around the patent. Perhaps customs just want to confirm, perhaps Apple have some argument about some special case in which the patent is still being infringed. Who knows. We await clarification.

Although I wonder if a marketing campaign for “The phone Apple didn’t want you to see” would be a hit or miss.

Probably a miss. But it worked for “What’s the doughboy afraid of?”

A pop-up menu on tapping an email address that has been automatically linkified is not innovation. It’s just the coincidence of two extremely common behaviours.
The problem is having to check and defend your software against existing patents is extremely expensive. Patents offer a huge advantage to large, established players. And the longer you’ve been in the industry the more patents you have. Anything that hinders new entrants entering a market has a negative effect on innovation.
Even if patents are unenforceable, the legal costs of proving that are very high, making it too risky for a start-up to attempt. In some cases they may design around a patent (if they are aware of it), in other cases they may decide the costs and financial risks are not viable. All because of patents that may not even be enforceable.

Oh be quiet.

sources tell us that HTC’s US devices use a customized version of Android that removes the offending “data tapping” feature. That’s confirmed by our own examination of an AT&T One X and Sprint Evo 4G LTE, neither of which exhibit the key behavior excluded from importation into the US