A glowing profile of Facebook’s business to date by Kurt Eichenwald:1 The Google concept of demand fulfillment—someone searches for a pink shirt and is shown an ad for a pink shirt—had an important place in Internet marketing, the pitch went. But Facebook was about generating demand by showing users content that they might not have […]
April 2013
Anand Lal Shimpi Loves the HTC One
From his unofficial review: I’ve been playing around with a retail HTC One and felt compelled to share my thoughts on the device. It’s rare that I’m so moved by a device to chime in outside of the official review, but the One is a definite exception… The One is without a doubt the best […]
The Vanishing Uninformed, Charted
Last night I wrote: In the United States, where an iPhone 4 is free,1 customers who have the option of an iPhone choose it in overwhelming numbers (over 80% on AT&T and over 60% on Verizon). It’s increasingly clear that Android market share in the US was a direct result of iPhone carrier restrictions; those […]
Battery Life is the Only Spec the Matters
Kyle Wagner: Battery isn’t some one-off feature. You don’t fritter entire train rides away worried that your phone doesn’t have diamond-cut chamfered edges, or which widgets you should have on your home screen. (Or if you do, that is very sad and you should stop.) Your night has never been ruined because your apps load […]
Comparing Smartphone, Tablet and PC Graphics
Anandtech: At the end of the day I’d say it’s safe to assume the current crop of high-end ultra mobile devices can deliver GPU performance similar to that of mid to high-end GPUs from 2006. The caveat there is that we have to be talking about performance in workloads that don’t have the same memory […]
Is Blink Bad News for Apple?
Fun aside, I think this post by Krzysztof Kowalczyk gets a lot right: For Google the viability of the web is life or death situation and as such they’ll pour as much resources as necessary to make Blink work. In contrast, Apple is rumored to be pulling engineers from other projects and making them work […]
The Vanishing Uninformed and the Facebook Phone
Dan Frommer has a suggestion as to who is going to buy the Facebook phone: Facebook unveiled its long-awaited mobile phone platform today. It is, as assumed, a Facebook “layer” on top of Google Android. I haven’t had a chance to use it yet, or even take a detailed look at the presentation. But I […]
The Facebook Home Hands-On
The Verge has a 15-minute hands-on with the Facebook Home. It’s well worth the time. I must say, I’m impressed. The level of care and attention to detail is immediately apparent; it’s far more fluid and “fun” than anything I’ve ever seen from Android. Still skeptical though. Mobile is tough; more soon.
Blink
Rather burying Mozilla’s announcement (a coincidence, I’m sure), is the news on Blink: WebKit is a lightweight yet powerful rendering engine that emerged out of KHTML in 2001. Its flexibility, performance and thoughtful design made it the obvious choice for Chromium’s rendering engine back when we started. Thanks to the hard work by all in […]
Servo
The Mozilla blog (emphasis mine): We’ve recently begun collaborating with Samsung on an advanced technology Web browser engine called Servo. Servo is an attempt to rebuild the Web browser from the ground up on modern hardware, rethinking old assumptions along the way. This means addressing the causes of security vulnerabilities while designing a platform that […]