This article titled “Boot up: white iPhone explained. RIM’s profit warning, Notion Ink reviewed and more” was written by Charles Arthur, for guardian.co.uk on Friday 29th April 2011 13.00 Asia/Calcutta

A burst of 12 links for you to chew over, as picked by the Technology team

BlackBerry maker RIM’s shares plunge on profit warning >> Financial Times
“RIM’s stock fell .17, or 11 per cent, to .43 in late trading on Thursday, after earlier closing at .59 on Nasdaq.
“Underscoring its problems, RIM said BlackBerry shipments would be at the lower end of the range of 13.5m-14.5m units it had projected last month and the mix of devices it sells would shift towards cheaper models. ”In a tense call with analysts after the profit warning was announced, Jim Basillie, RIM’s co-chief executive, insisted the company’s current problems were transitory rather than the start of a longer-term decline. “We all wish we could have got the new products out quicker,” he said, “but that just hasn’t happened.” Not a call they’d have wanted to make just as BlackBerry World – the fiesta for developers and clients – is kicking off in Florida.

We thought ’sold out’ sounded better than ‘awaiting delivery’ >> AllThingsD
More tricks to play with sales channels, this time from Asus: “J.P. Morgan’s Mark Moskowitz’s informal survey of Best Buy and Target outletts… found that most hadn’t received any Transformer tablets yet. “All stores we spoke to had not even received the Transformer tablet,” Moskowitz says. “The general read was that supply would not reach most stores until mid-May. As a result, we ask how the Asus tablet can be sold out when it did not arrive in the first place.”

How the iPhone knows where you are >> Macworld
Read this and you will, finally, understand this whole saga.

The unedifying arrogance of PC journalists >> Ian Betteridge
“he reason that Barry [Collins] – and plenty of other tech journalists – call Apple arrogant is mainly because Apple doesn’t jump when the journalists tell them. Apple, in fact, has a very bad reputation amongst tech journalists for being one of the least responsive companies out there. And that reputation is, I can tell you from years of experience, entirely justified.”

Biggest Threat to Apple: Google Chrome OS >> TheStreet
“Starting some time around July or August, Google’s partners Samsung and Acer will launch laptops and perhaps also a desktop or two, based on Chrome OS. I am guessing laptops will start at 9 and “naked” desktops at 9. Given the superb performance of these Chrome OS PCs, with boot-up times (from cold) of less than even Apple’s MacBook Air, some consumers and enterprises will pick Chrome OS PCs over the much more expensive Apple PCs.”
A good example of how price can blind you to why people buy computers. Would someone who buys a ChromeOS computer really have been in the market for an Apple device? Far more likely they’d have been looking at cheap PCs.
Don’t forget either that the first generation of netbooks running Linux had huge returns because people couldn’t make them work: they expected (and later got) Windows. Expect something similar for ChromeOS.

Microsoft net income vs Apple net income from 1980 >> Wolfram|Alpha
Interesting to compare, using the smart statistical search engine. Note how Apple’s profit falls well below zero in 1996-8.

The Great White iPhone: How Apple Spun A Tech Fail Into A PR Win >> Fast Company
Worth it for the illustration alone, but interesting analysis: “It didn’t arrive when the iPhone 4 went on sale in mid-2010 because Apple couldn’t get its hardware working properly–the white coloring, combined with the iPhone 4’s unusual glass frame meant the phone’s proximity sensor and camera unit didn’t function as they needed to. In other words, it was a big technological failure, from one of the world’s biggest companies on one of its market-defining products.”

Apple’s Not Spying on You; You’re Spying for Apple >> Gottabemobile
“Apple asks for diagnostic and usage information about your iPhone, which is fair enough to do. However, I don’t believe tracking tower and hotspot locations counts. That information is external to the device, not part of it. If Apple wanted to collect data on my iPhone’s location, I would consider that a fair part of that agreement. But instead they’re using my iPhone to collect tower and hotspot locations, and that’s not right. I only signed up to give info about my device, not those belonging to other people. ”The lack of transparency on that point is a serious problem, far more legitimate than the paranoia circulating. To be clear, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with reporting tower and hotspot locations back to Apple. I just think this falls outside the range of “diagnostic and usage information about your iPhone”. It’s about property that belongs to others. Therefore, it requires separate, specific permission, as well as a detailed explanation of the risk involved.

With iPhone’s secrets, Apple loses track of reality >> ZDNet UK
Rupert Goodwins: “Steve Jobs normally talks to the press about as often as the Earth gets visited by Halley’s Comet. And, like the comet, it’s usually a portent of doom.  ”There have been three sightings in living memory: the iPhone 4’s Antennagate, the as-yet-unexplained rant against Android and tablets in last October’s earnings call, and yesterday’s response to the discovery of iOS 4’s unexpectedly good memory for location. Let’s call it Trackergate. ”Leaving aside the Android rant — perhaps Eric Schmidt ran over the family cat — the two other responses show strong similarities, and make a fascinating insight into how a company reacts when it’s backed into a corner and can’t ignore the flack.”
Suffice it to say, Goodwins ain’t buying it.

Notion Ink Adam review >> Engadget
“Notion Ink truly did come up with a number of fantastic ideas for the Adam tablet. They do show. But so little of their light shines through the muck of buggy software and touchy hardware that we’re afraid even the best of them will be completely dismissed and ignored… ”Features like USB host functionality, a desktop-class web browser, a sunlight-readable screen and a multitask-friendly interface aren’t just value-add bullet points that justify a higher price — they’re the difference between a tablet that can augment an existing computer, and one that can replace it altogether and thrust users into a new paradigm. We’re sad to see the Adam couldn’t make it happen, but there’s still an opportunity for other manufacturers to take up the torch.”

Free anti-virus for Mac named Best Anti-Malware solution at SC Awards >> Naked Security
Beating the Windows products. We’ve no idea what the criteria for winning actually were.

First Day PlayBook sales: is 50,000 too big a number? >> AllThingsD
“Jeffries analyst Peter Misek figures RIM sold about 45,000 PlayBooks Tuesday, with pre-orders accounting for about 25,000 of the total. RBC* analyst Mike Abramsky’s first day sales estimate is in the same range, but a bit higher: 50,000, including pre-sales. ”‘The launch appears to have been stronger than the launch of Motorola’s Xoom Tablet, or the Samsung Galaxy Tab, although it’s too early to judge sustainability,’ said RBC analyst Mike Abramsky in a note to clients, adding that, as of Wednesday, checks of 180 stores across 10 cities in the United States and Canada show rising PlayBook stockouts. ”But some analysts I’ve spoken with feel those estimates are overly bullish, given the device’s limited availability. 50,000 sold seems an awfully big number when even the Broadway Staples store in downtown New York City had just 10 PlayBooks on hand at launch and a clerk at the Bay Area Best Buy I called described inventory as ‘a handful.’”

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This article titled “The Technology newsbucket: music tolls, Korean tablet wars, Facebook cash and more” was written by Charles Arthur, for guardian.co.uk on Tuesday 19th October 2010 11.00 Asia/Calcutta

Toll bridge sign in Romania. Photo by Austin Donisan on Flickr. Some rights reserved

A quick burst of 8 links for you to chew over, as picked by the Technology team

Patent Troll Forces Online Music Sellers, Buyers to Pay a Toll >> The Legal Pulse
"Sharing Sound’s patent, and the litigation arising from it, are a sad commentary on the quality of federal patent examination. As one commentator noted, online selling of digital goods was well underway before the Patent Office issued the Sharing Sound patent."

A radical pessimist’s guide to the next 10 years >> The Globe and Mail
Ah. Douglas Coupland, with these 45 predictions and guides to how to live, you make us feel… uneasy.

Tablet war is about to begin in Korea >> CNET Asia Blogs
"Two local giant carriers KT and SKT will introduce their latest flagship tablets, the Apple iPad and Samsung Galaxy Tab, in Korea by mid-October. KT is known as a partner of Apple with distributorship for the iPhone 3GS and 4. SKT is focusing on Samsung’s Galaxy series to match up with KT’s Apple."
It’ll be interesting to see how sales and prices compare.

What’s Wrong with "HTML5? >> Katz Got Your Tongue?
Yehuda Katz, a member of the Ruby on Rails core team, says: "The thing is, the core problem isn’t that the name is too fuzzy. It’s what the name implies. HTML5 sounds like a technology which goes through a beta period and is finally complete. Instead, what the tech press calls "HTML5? is really a continual process of improving the web browsers that people use. And honestly, that’s how I’d like to see the tech press cover us. Not as group of people working towards a singular milestone that will change the web as we know it, but as a group that has gotten our groove back."

Stuxnet >> Schneier on Security
Bruce Schneier offers his alternative theories about what the worm was looking to do, which include: "A message. It’s hard to speculate any further, because we don’t know who the message is for, or its context. Presumably the intended recipient would know. Maybe it’s a "look what we can do" message. Or an "if you don’t listen to us, we’ll do worse next time" message. Again, it’s a very expensive message, but maybe one of the pieces of the message is "we have so many resources that we can burn four or five man-years of effort and four zero-day vulnerabilities just for the fun of it." If that message were for me, I’d be impressed."

Testing Videos on Cellphones — With Flash >> David Pogue
"I didn’t conduct battery tests, but Adobe notes with pride that Flash for Mobile is one of the most popular downloads from the Android Market, and it’s highly rated. Adobe’s engineers estimate that you can get 3 to 3.5 hours of video-watching time before your phone is dead (assuming, of course, that you do nothing else).
"Over all, it’s much better to have Flash than not to have it. O.K., it may accelerate battery drain, and mouse/keyboard games are clumsy, and it doesn’t work on absolutely all sites. Even so, shouldn’t it be available for us to use now and then when we need it?"
Couldn’t you have tested the battery life too, David?

The Facebook Money Machine >> Monday Note
‘This year, Facebook will make about .5bn in advertising revenue. On average, this is about three dollars per registered user, a figure that is significantly higher for the 50% of the social network’s population that logs in at least once a day.’

Can the iPhone Thrive in Apple’s Closed Ecosystem? >> NYTimes.com
Usually when a headline ends in a questionmark, the answer is "No", but this one is cleverly twirled round so that the correct answer is actually yes. As the article acknowledges if you persevere to the end: smartphones are not, and can’t be, commoditised in the same way as PCs.

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