The launch of ultrabooks and Microsoft’s Windows 8 OS will serve as growth drivers for the notebook industry in 2012, according to Simon Lin, chairman of Taiwan-based notebook ODM Wistron.
This sounds similar to pior lofty expectations by tablet integrators. The ultrabook category leader is the Apple MacBook Air. By the time other ultrabooks hit the market in 2012, Apple will be in its third generation. That sounds similar too.
Dana Wollman, Engadget:
We’ve been around the block and reviewed enough laptops over the years to know that even among reflective displays, the AS5830′s 15.6-inch (1366 x 768) panel is particularly shiny. Have a gander at the gallery above and decide for yourselves, but in our humble opinion, the screen looks cheaper than what you’d find on other systems. As you might expect, that glare translates to uneven viewing angles. On the one hand, we were pleasantly surprised at how much we could see when watching from way off on the side. And yet, if you push the lid forward even slightly, the screen becomes too washed out to really enjoy it. This was true whether we rested the laptop on a table or on our legs. Suffice it to say, fiddling with the display until you stumble on the right angle gets old fast.
The Acer Timeline X AS5830TG-6402 sports a 15.6-inch TN LCD with an anemic 1366×768 pixel format. You see this on a 11.6-inch MacBook Air. I would think 1440×900 would be the absolute minimum, with 1680×1050 more like it.
Then there is the viewing angle problem. Most notebook product managers incorrectly assume vertical viewing angles are not very important. Well, it is: we human beings tend to change our sitting positions when working or playing. Sometimes we shift to the left or right and other times up or down. This particular TN LCD seems to have problems when we go up or down.
Kevin J. O’Brien, The New York Times:
The euro zone crisis has mobile users hanging on to their phones a little longer.
With fewer consumers buying, the Continent’s big mobile retailers have been keeping inventories low, which has brought the first-ever quarterly decline in cellphone shipments in Western Europe, said Gartner, the research firm.
According to Gartner cell phone shipments in Western Europe dropped 0.5% Q/Q to 43.57 million in Q2’11. Mobile retailer inventories have dropped from four to six weeks worth down to three to four.
There might be a Nokia effect taking place. Horace Dediu:
Two years ago Nokia sold 30% of its smartphones in Western Europe. Today it sells 15% in that market. Its unit shipments went from 5 million to about half that and its market share went from 55% to 11%. Its rank in the market went from first to fifth.
Imagine you’ve been using a Nokia phone for years. Now all of the sudden Nokia is falling off the cliff. What to do? It seems a lot are deciding to do nothing, for the time being.
Before the end of the year Nokia plans to release a smartphone running Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 mobile OS. Initial acceptance of WP7 smartphones has been lukewarm in the U.S. What could Nokia do better than existing HTC and Samsung built versions?
Absolutely brilliant.
webOS chief Stephen DeWitt in a phone interview with Ina Fried:
At the end of the day, webOs is going to be a popular platform on a variety of connected devices.
And which day would that be? Apotheker was clear that webOS hardware by HP would be shutdown. Yet:
Pre3 is being launched in very selective areas. We’re not broadly launching Pre3.
Why is the Pre3 being launched at all? Is it perfect? US$99 unlocked?
Lenovo CEO Yuanquing Yang, via AllThingsD:
We will be one of the strongest of the players in this area.
Yang is referring to the tablet area.
Apple only covers the top tier. With a $500 price you cannot go to the small cities, townships, low salary class, low income class. … Apple is very strong, but when IBM created the PC market there was just IBM; if you look at the PC industry now it is very diversified. I believe that will happen in tablets as well.
So Lenovo will build really affordable tablets, way cheaper than US$500, and target low-income folks, who really need and want tablets. And by strongest, I’m guessing Yang intends to win with the largest market share based on unit shipments. That reminds of HP and Dell: both companies think unit market share is the most important performance metric. It certainly is important, but sustainable businesses are built on profit.
Ah, my favorite FTP app: Cyberduck. Free, functional, easy on the eyes. Tonight, I’ll be tossing it into the Trash. Why? It’s a long story.
On August 8, I decided to go Google-free. That meant finding a way to replace Gmail, Google Reader, Google the search engine, FeedBurner, Analytics, Docs, etc. You can read more about it in Google, Adéu. The gist: I don’t trust Google anymore.
For Gmail I thought it would be easy. Just use Mail. The only problem was that I had deleted Mail a while back. I deleted Mail because it was big, and pooped files all over the drive. Space was precious because I went from a 500GB HDD to a 50GB SSD. So I thought, “Heck, I’ll just use Gmail using a browser.” That’s what I did, merrily, for a good long while and with less clutter on my Mac. But Google prompted me to change. And now I had to reinstall Mail.
Well that was going to be a problem. You see, Mail comes on a DVD. I had pulled out the Superdrive thinking I wouldn’t need it. I blame Apple for making me think I didn’t need an optical drive anymore. Read Silent, Cool, Green MacBook Pro if you want to find out why I really did that.
After reinstalling the Superdrive, I slid in the DVD, and installed Mail. Then Snow Leopard hissed at me saying that Mail was incompatible. Incompatible. How could that be? I googled and googled but couldn’t find an answer. The alternatives weren’t that appealing either. Sparrow looked nice but to get rid of the ads it was going to cost me US$10. I didn’t want to spend even more for MailMate ($40) or Postbox ($30). I’ve used Thunderbird and I didn’t like how it looked. Eudora looked ugly too. If I was going to spend $30 or more on an email client I might as well get a brand new operating system with a brand new Mail. So that’s what I did. Yes, I know, in “I’m not playing that game.” I wrote that I didn’t need Lion. Well, I needed Lion now and it was a better deal than almost anything else.
I quite like Lion. Surfing with Safari without scroll bars is wonderful. Two-finger scrolling is taking a while to get used to, but I think I’m getting the hang of it. I try to think of it this way: I’m moving an actual page with my two fingers. So if I want to see what’s down there, I push the page up with my fingers, like a real page.
Lion also kept all of my previous settings intact so there was very little to customize. I got rid of the wallpapers, some modem files, screensavers, etc., but no major customizations. I don’t use LaunchPad or any of the fancy multitouch gestures. Oh, there is one: three-finger up, for Mission Control. It’s pretty convenient. The only major behavioral change is the reversed scrolling.
Now, back to Cyberduck. I wanted to FTP something: PHP Markdown. At first I didn’t get Markdown: what it was good for, why John Gruber develop it. Then I went to Dingus to check it out. Bingo! With Markdown, writing posts with a non-WYSIWYG text editor becomes a lot easier. You can actually read what you write and the coding is more intuitive and efficient. Here’s what John Gruber has to say about Markdown:
Markdown is a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers. Markdown allows you to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format, then convert it to structurally valid XHTML (or HTML).
I’m writing this post in Markdown after a few minutes of fiddling. The learning curve isn’t as steep as I thought it’d be. With PHP Markdown installed as a plugin, I type in Markdown using MarsEdit and WordPress parses it into HTML. How nice is that! (Update: I’ve decided to use the free and excellent TextWrangler and parse Markdown locally. I still get to write posts more naturally, but get away from depending on a WordPress plugin. Also having the smallest number of plugins does help with CPU cycle usages and the overall speed of DisplayBlog.)
But there was just one problem. Cyberducky needed a Java runtime. And as you may or may not know Lion doesn’t come with Java. Did I want to install a huge Java runtime package just to run a tiny FTP app? Nope. Did I want to spend $34 on Transmit, what many consider the best FTP client on the Mac? Too expensive. I mean an entire operating system is $30. $4 more than that for a FTP client sounds ridiculously expensive to me. At the end, I decided to run Terminal and see if I remembered the stuff I played around 20 years ago. Fortunately I did.
Long story short, Cyberduck is gone. Because of Google.
Google Inc. and Motorola Mobility Holdings, Inc. today announced that they have entered into a definitive agreement under which Google will acquire Motorola Mobility for $40.00 per share in cash, or a total of about $12.5 billion, a premium of 63% to the closing price of Motorola Mobility shares on Friday, August 12, 2011. The transaction was unanimously approved by the boards of directors of both companies.
This acquisition will not change our commitment to run Android as an open platform. Motorola will remain a licensee of Android and Android will remain open. We will run Motorola as a separate business. Many hardware partners have contributed to Android’s success and we look forward to continuing to work with all of them to deliver outstanding user experiences.
In the conference call with financial analysts today, at the 5:50 point, Larry Page:
Motorola also has a strong patent portfolio, which will help protect Android from anti-competitive threats from Microsoft, Apple, and other companies.
I believe patent acquisition is the reason why Google is buying Motorola Mobility, who has 17,000+ patents issued worldwide with 7500+ pending. The anti-competitive threat now becomes Google itself. During the conference call Andy Rubin shared the top five Android licensees were all enthusiastic about the news. What BS.
Google has bought itself a catch-22. It seems Google, in order to protect its Android platform from patent lawsuits, has opened a Pandora’s Box: the biggest Android licensees are probably not happy at all. HTC, Samsung, et al. will be increasingly suspicious of Google especially if Motorola comes out with successful Android smartphones in the future.
The lesson (and warning) was that a licensor that is also a licensee makes other licensees uncomfortable. The supplier is also a competitor. This is classic channel conflict and never ends well.
What I see as a potential long-term outcome is most if not all major Android licensees will abandon the platform forcing Google to vertically integrate and enter into the business of manufacturing Android smartphones with Motorola Mobility.
Update: Quotes from Android partners:
Samsung Mobile Communications Division, President, J.K. Shin:
We welcome today’s news, which demonstrates Google’s deep commitment to defending Android, its partners, and the ecosystem.
Sony Ericsson, President & CEO, Bert Nordberg:
I welcome Google‘s commitment to defending Android and its partners.
HTC, CEO, Peter Chou:
We welcome the news of today‘s acquisition, which demonstrates that Google is deeply committed to defending Android, its partners, and the entire ecosystem.
LG Electronics Mobile Communications Company, President & CEO, Jong-Seok Park:
We welcome Google‘s commitment to defending Android and its partners.
They all sound like androids.
Peter Bregman, on the iPad 2:
It didn’t take long for me to encounter the dark side of this revolutionary device: it’s too good.
It’s too easy. Too accessible. Both too fast and too long-lasting. Certainly there are some kinks, but nothing monumental. For the most part, it does everything I could want. Which, as it turns out, is a problem.
His brother Anthony, who is currently producing a movie titled My Idiot Brother:
That’s not a problem with the iPad. It’s a problem with you. Just don’t use it as much.
At least Bregman realizes that he can’t live with an iPad precisely because it’s too good. He exhibits a lack of self-control in using the iPad, but also shows self-control by having returned it. My friend SooSang, after using his first iPhone, the 3G, for a month:
I don’t know if I own it or it owns me.
Myriam Joire, Engadget:
A bevy of sensors rounds things off (light, proximity, orientation, accelerometer, magnetometer and gyroscope), along with the same gorgeous 4.3-inch qHD (960×540 pixel) TFT panel that we first saw on the Droid X2. While Motorola cheats a bit by using a PenTile display, it matters little in practice — the screen is bright even in direct sunlight, with beautiful colors, ink-like blacks and wide viewing angles.
In one of Engadget’s closeup photos of the Motorola Photon 4G you can clearly see the pixelation around the Google search window edges and the Launcher icon dialogue balloon. More evidence of the not-so-gorgeousness can be found by looking closely at the icons on the top bar: ZZZ 4G, the battery indicator, etc. You’ll see a lot of zaggies around the edges. To me, these things matter. It matters to Lukas Mathis, too.
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