Now you have an idea of the core parts of the OS, but Microsoft’s also done some unique things in terms of touch gestures and applications. The entire UI interaction is centered around gestures from all four sides of the screen. The left side lets you navigate through apps — you’ll see in the video that you can bring in open apps from the left and have them fill the entire screen or you can snap another one next to it and have two apps live side by side. (Note: only tablets with a 1366 x 768 resolution or higher will support the multiple app feature.)
Are there any currently available tablets that can make use of this multiple app feature on Windows 8?
HTC US president Martin Fichter in an Mobile Future Forward conference interview, an excerpt by GeekWire:
[...] I brought my daughter back to college — she’s down in Portland at Reed — and I talked to a few of the kids on her floor. And none of them has an iPhone because they told me: “My dad has an iPhone.” There’s an interesting thing that’s going on in the market. The iPhone becomes a little less cool than it was. They were carrying HTCs. They were carrying Samsungs. They were even carrying some Chinese manufacture’s devices. If you look at a college campus, Mac Book Airs are cool. iPhones are not that cool anymore. We here are using iPhones, but our kids don’t find them that cool anymore.
The qualities of “anecdotal evidence” according to Wikipedia:
Anecdotal evidence, which may itself be true and verifiable, can be used to deduce a conclusion which does not follow from it, usually by generalising from an insufficient amount of evidence.
The few kids who Fichter talked to might have been rebellious in nature (most college students are), more sensitive to cool than others, or had uncool fathers with iPhones. Or all three. This rebellious nature, a heightened sensitivity to cool, and a desire to disassociate with iPhone-toting uncool fathers could definitely be happening in college campuses all over the U.S. Mind blowing.
So here’s something I’d like to know: since Fichter most likely uses a HTC-branded smartphone, what brand of smartphone does his daughter use? Probably not a HTC, if she’s cool.
The funding led by 3M New Ventures will play a key role in enabling Pixel Qi to develop its product offerings into volume consumer markets as well as digital signage and touch applications. The investment, which successfully concludes Pixel Qi’s second (series “B”) investment round, will also allow Pixel Qi to build and to strengthen its engineering and sales capabilities.
The 3Qi display technology by Pixel Qi is impressive: full color inside, full visibility outside, in a single display. The 10.1-inch 1024×600 3Qi LCD is currently in mass production, but as you can see the number of pixels are limited. Netbooks, ultrabooks, and tablets are all moving ahead toward a 1280×800 pixel format. But no matter how many pixels you have on an IPS or Super AMOLED Plus display, you’ll be hard pressed to see any of them outside. Despite the feeble number of pixels, for anyone whose work requires full productivity inside and out a 3Qi equipped gadget is a must. For now there is no gadget; you need to do it yourself. With 3M’s boatload of money maybe we’ll see Pixel Qi’s 3Qi displays in gadgets at a store near you not too far in the future.
HTC chairperson Cher Wang in an interview with China’s The Economic Observer as reported by Engadget:
We have given it thought and we have discussed it internally, but we will not do it on impulse. We can use any OS we want. We are able to make things different from our rivals on the second or third layer of a platform. Our strength lies in understanding an OS, but it does not mean that we have to produce an OS.
Well, not really; HTC can only use OSes that are available to them. And that excludes, in my humble opinion, the two best: iOS and webOS. As far as I can tell HTC uses only Android and Windows Phone 7 on its latest smartphones*.
Companies that claim their core competency in “understanding an OS” are all producing one. Step up to the plate, acquire webOS from HP, and show us what you’ve got. If it’s anything like the HTC EVO 4G then it should be quite exciting.
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* HTC has eight models that use Windows Mobile and one with Brew MP.
If I link to an uncached WordPress site, it will go down.
True. I’ve seen this happen enough times. Not here though.
I use WordPress and it’s cached using W3 Total Cache. The combination has been rock solid even during heavy traffic from Daring Fireball links. Prepare your WordPress site; you never know when Gruber might link to you.
PS: In addition to using a cache plugin, I’ve torn out everything I don’t need. There are no more tags. No more categories. There hasn’t been commenting on DisplayBlog for quite some time but the old ones have been cleared from WordPress database tables. Revisions have been turned off.
And I developed a tiny minimalist theme, the one that’s running now. I was forced to, but I’m glad. I used Thesis, but one day it wasn’t happy with the world and decided not to play nice. I prodded, again and again. Begged even. Thesis just shook its head. Arms crossed. So… I kicked the expensive, heavy, unresponsive theme out into cyberspace.
From a blank, new text file I started to type away. I was bone stock at writing a WordPress theme. After an entire days worth of coding and testing a new theme was created. I affectionately call it Min, for more minimal than minimal. It has a user interface that puts content at the forefront and is 100% text. No transitions. No hover animations. There are no images in the UI. I did this to reduce the time it takes to load the content. And it should work really well at all zoom levels. Hope you like it. And Gruber, DisplayBlog is ready for your awesome wave of traffic. Link here anytime.
Brian Klug and Anand Lai Shimpi, AnandTech:
The only major issue outdoors is something else entirely. I noticed pretty quickly with the Infuse 4G and Droid Charge that outside in my climate’s environment (~100+F outdoor temps, lots of sunlight) that the phones would clamp brightness to about 75% to prevent overheating. This is in part a measure to protect the display panel and of course other internal components. I set out to find out whether SGS2 implements the same thermal restrictions, and it does.
Exactly when you need the Samsung Galaxy S II to put out as much brightness as it can, it goes into self preservation mode and limits brightness to 75% of maximum, about 226 nits*. Who should this brilliance be attributed to?
Another small thing about the SGS2’s SAMOLED+ is that I’ve noticed that high contrast images can be persistent for a few seconds. It isn’t burn-in, but a persistence that stays for a few seconds and can be very visible. For example, leaving the Android keyboard up (which is black, grey, and white) and dragging the shade down, a shadow of the keyboard remains visible until it fades after a few seconds. This persists even on other applications as well, and I can only hope doesn’t become something permanent if left up too long.
The 4.3-inch Super AMOLED Plus always pumps out high contrast images, doesn’t it? And that means you’ll be treated to ghosting whatever you do for a few seconds at a time. That would drive me up the wall. I would categorize this type of behavior as defective.
[...] Where WVGA starts to become a problem is at 4.5″. Scaling up area and increasing the diagonal size by 0.2″ doesn’t sound like a problem, but r^2 is a bitch, and at that size both the Android UI elements and subpixels look absurdly huge. Luckily, the international SGS2’s 4.3″ is completely tolerable with WVGA.
A pixel format of 800×480 on a 4.3-inch display calculates to 217 ppi. At a usage distance of 12 inches those pixels will be viewable. Bump the size up to 4.5 inches and resolution falls to 207 ppi. What is needed in the world of ever larger Android smartphone displays is a jump to 1280×720. Put that pixel format on a 4.5-inch display and the resolution gets to 326 ppi, which coincidentally is exactly the same as the 3.5-inch 960×640 Retina Display.
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* The Motorola Droid X2 has a brightness of 697 nits, the RIM BlackBerry Torch 9800 606 nits, and the Apple iPhone 4 571 nits. Comparatively speaking the Samsung Galaxy S II has terribly low brightness, meaning it would be most difficult to use in direct sunlight.
It’s the Jobs side of the equation that Apple’s rivals — phone, tablet, laptop, whatever — are able to copy. Thus the patents and the lawsuits. Design is copyable. But the Cook side of things — Apple’s economy of scale advantage — cannot be copied by any company with a complex product lineup. How could Dell, for example, possibly copy Apple’s operations when they currently classify “Design & Performance” and “Thin & Powerful” as separate laptop categories?
I don’t see the value in separating and comparing two, of many, Apple advantages over its competition: design to economy of scale. What Gruber fails to consider in this must-read article is the fact that design isn’t limited to external industrial design (ID) or the user interface (UI). Design encompasses ID, certainly, but also manufacturing design as in the aluminum unibody production process, and linked to the internal design of products is the procurement execution and management of those components which in turn are dictated by ID, the manufacturing process, and so on. In the case of the unibody aluminum MacBooks the unique manufacturing design allowed Apple to reduce the number of steps in the manufacturing process, maintain robustness without having to add supporting structure in the chassis, minimize the number of components, simplify the design of the components themselves, resulting in a dramatic reduction in defects and bill of materials. Design in the case of Apple is integrative. Apple itself is the ultimate culmination of integrative design.
ID and UI are indeed copyable. Just look at all of the me-too smartphones and tablets on the market today, but the economy of scale advantage can be copied too. The Cook side of Apple can be copied by simplifying the product lineup. If you are Dell how can you simplify a mind-numbingly complex product lineup? You can’t; not if you lack the design ethos, the integrative design ethos, of someone like Steve Jobs.
This realization sort of snuck up on me. I’ve always been interested in Apple’s products because of their superior design; the business side of the company was never of as much interest. But at this point, it seems clear to me that however superior Apple’s design is, it’s their business and operations strength — the Cook side of the equation — that is furthest ahead of their competition, and the more sustainable advantage. It cannot be copied without going through the same sort of decade-long process that Apple went through.
Again, it might be easy to to start thinking that Apple’s design can in some way be separated from the business side of things. I don’t think you can. The separation is merely theoretical and cannot be done in the case of Apple because the company itself is the result of integrative design, which includes the company’s superior design, business and operations strength, among other things. As long as whoever is in charge realizes Apple is integrative design, the company will continue to have a sustainable advantage over its competition.
Bill Gates may have been the satiric target of the “1984” commercial, but did he ever push his monopoly power as far?
And now we’re into the “getting basic facts wrong” part of the piece. Bill Gates was not the target of the ad; it was IBM. Nobody knew who the heck Microsoft was in 1984.
For the very first time in computing, the user has been put in control of how best to utilize the display portal they have been given — not the manufacturer.
Monitors that pivot?
For a fifth consecutive time, Apple ranks highest among manufacturers of smartphones in customer satisfaction with a score of 795 and performs particularly well in ease of operation, operating system, features and physical design. Motorola (763) and HTC (762) follow Apple in the smartphone rankings.
The iPhone is the only smartphone that garnered five out of five Power Circle Ratings, which represents “Among the Best”. Both Motorola and HTC were given just three or “About Average”.
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