On December 11, 2011 Andy Rubin tweeted:
There are now over 700,000 Android devices activated every day
Horace Dediu crunched the numbers:
So the best we can say right now is that there have been between 224 and 253 million Android devices activated to date. Why Google does not report this data regularly and consistently remains a mystery.
via John Gruber. Amit Runchal on growth:
The last time Rubin talked about Android activations was back in June, when he said that 500,000 devices were being activated daily, and that they were seeing week-to-week activation growth of 4.4%. There’ve been about 25 weeks between the two tweets. Some quick math reveals that week-to-week growth since June hasn’t been anywhere close to the 4.4% Rubin was seeing. It’s now closer to 1.4%.
700,000 daily Android activations sound huge, but the reality is growth is slowing.
LG:
The DM92 series showcases a premium design by employing the slim bezel of LG’s technology- and design-driven CINEMA SCREEN whose aesthetic superiority is accompanied by the lustrous chrome stand. Through the monitor TV’s attractive 27-inch display, users can access files on their PC, play games or simply kick back and watch their favorite TV shows. The DM92 series is also optimized for enjoying exciting 3D content. By incorporating an IPS panel, the DM92 series enables greater depth, consistent color and brightness at wider viewing angles compared with conventional 3D displays.
I wanted to attach a photo of the DM92 Series but the good folks at LG decided it wasn’t all that tacky to tape a picture on the monitor to show its 3D-ness. The picture? A moto racer, with a 3D logo on the helmet. Then there’s, of all things, flowers shown on the opposing display. Thankfully not a taped cutout. And finally there is a pretty girl in a pink-beige one piece. A total visual mishmash and its hurting my eyes.
Getting back to the DM92. The “lustrous chrome stand”. Yes, the thing we look for in a high-end monitor is the stand. And it must be made of expensive-looking material, like chrome. Then there’s the contrast: shiny chrome to the matte aluminum colored chassis. Looks to me the result of a consortium of designers with a dash of opinion sprinkled on by some high-ranking executive who has absolutely no eye for good design.
Not everything is terrible though. The 1-mm bezel thickness on the top and sides are not bad. One millimeter is really thin, but isn’t the goal to somehow get rid of the bezel? It looks to me LG wanted to show off that thin bezel: “Look how thin our bezel is! Take a close look! Isn’t it really thin? Amazing, isn’t it?”
The goal is to visually hide the bezel and with bezels that thin it would have been easy: A cover glass would have done the trick. Optically laminate the cover glass to the brilliant 27-inch IPS LCD underneath and viola! the bezel is now gone. The DM92 Series could have looked so much better…
A dead simple, easy-to-use, eye candy of an app for recording audio on your Mac.
TEDMED: Neuroscientist and professor at Weill Medical College of Cornell University, Shelia Nirenberg shares her discovery of neural cell codes used in the transfer of visual information to the language understood by the brain. Don’t miss the Q&A where she describes the simple procedure. Amazing.
The most prominent part of the Vita hardware is the 5-inch, 960 x 544 Super AMOLED Plus display from Samsung, which takes up most of the front of the unit. It’s absolutely gorgeous, with fantastic color reproduction and deep black levels that often make it hard to tell where the bezel stops and the screen begins. Viewing angles are very good, with the picture remaining clear at extreme positions, though like many other OLED displays it can take on a blueish tint when the system is tilted — you can see what’s happening on screen from nearly 180 degrees, but the color temperature is inaccurate unless you’re looking at it relatively straight on. The screen is glossy, but I found it generally easier to view outside than any PSP model ever was — it still didn’t get great results in direct sunlight, though. With a pixel density of about 220ppi, we’re not talking Retina Display (329ppi) or Galaxy Nexus (316ppi) levels of sharpness here, but at the distance you’re likely to be holding the device, pixels are rarely distinguishable. Even when you can see the pixels, the RGB stripe arrangement makes everything clear and accurate — no PenTile graininess here.
Overall the Samsung-built 5-inch Super AMOLED Plus display looks like a winner. The 960×544 pixel format is weird; it should have been 960×540.
The quote above seemed a bit long, and long-winded, so I wanted to shorten it. That ended up not being possible because I couldn’t figure out his emphasis. Case in point: Fantastic color reproduction, but color temperature is inaccurate. Almost every thought is paired with a pro and a con. At times the cons have little to no relevance and seem manufactured. The entire paragraph is full of these.
Deep black levels are a good thing, but can’t distinguish the screen from the bezel. Great viewing angles, but not-so-good color temperature. Glossy is bad, but better outside than previous PSPs, but overall not so good. Resolution of 220 ppi is not as good as the best, but you normally can’t see the pixels, but if you do it’s not bad at all and not as bad as PenTile.
Tom Simonite, MIT Technology Review:
The phone prototype seen by Technology Review was similar in dimensions to the iPhone 4 but noticeably lighter, probably because the case was made with more plastic and less glass and metal. It was running the version of Google’s operating system shipping with most Android phones today, known as Gingerbread [...].
The phone was powerful and pleasing to use, on a par with the latest iPhone and Android handsets. It could play Blu-Ray-quality video and stream it to a TV if desired; Web browsing was smooth and fast.
Codenamed Medfield the 32-nm system-on-chip (SOC) Atom combines three separate chips into one reducing power consumption to ARM levels. Intel claims Medfield-powered smartphones sport faster browsing, better graphics performance, while consuming less power than the three best that are out there today. 2012 might be the year WinTel-like smartphone and tablet monopolies are forged by Google and Intel.
via The Atlantic. From his book Life Itself:
When I write, I fall into the zone many writers, painters, musicians, athletes, and craftsmen of all sorts seem to share: In doing something I enjoy and am expert at, deliberate thoughts fall aside and it is all just there. I think of the next word no more than the composer thinks of the next note.
One more:
Most people choose to write a blog. I needed to. I didn’t intend for it to drift into autobiography, but in blogging there is a tidal drift that pushes you that way. Getting such quick feedback may be one reason; the Internet encourages first-person writing, and I’ve always written that way. How can a movie review be written in the third person, as if it were an account of the facts? If it isn’t subjective, there’s something false about it.
Anthony Campanella at the premiere of Mission Impossible 4: Ghost Protocol:
Bird, who had been joking with us about our use of an iPhone to record the interview, immediately turned serious and noted that he had many memories, but mostly recalled how Jobs “didn’t settle.”
“He wasn’t about making something that was going to be cool next week, he was about making something that was going to be cool 100 years from now,” said Bird.
Brad Bird directed Mission Impossible 4: Ghost Protocol, Ratatouille, The Incredibles, and more.
via John Gruber. Taylor Hatmaker:
While it’s no flop when it comes to sales figures, the iPhone 4S remains one of 2011′s biggest consumer letdowns.
I had to look up the word ‘letdown’ just to make sure I understood this correctly. Letdown is defined in the built-in New Oxford American Dictionary as: “a disappointment or a feeling of disappointment”. So Hatmaker thinks the iPhone 4S is one of the biggest consumer disappointments of 2011. Hmm…
Maybe this disappointment is of the type when Apple falls short of analyst expectations, "the pulled-out-of-thin-air consensus" expectations. It must be; Hatmaker all but confirms it:
Apple’s newest iteration of the iPhone is certainly nothing to sneeze at — it’s still one of the fastest, best-looking smartphones on the block — but it’s no iPhone 5.
The iPhone 5 that does not exist except in the excessively imaginative minds of Apple experts.
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