Ramkumar's Log

iPhone vs. HTC EVO & HTC EVO vs iPhone4

fucking hilarious.

Invincible Apple: 10 Lessons From the Coolest Company Anywhere

Get the picture? Computers should be more like sports cars and kitchen appliances. That’s Apple’s audience: high-end mainstream, the folks who buy — or aspire to buy — Porsches. You don’t connect with those consumers by listening to Silicon Valley. Techies, even after all these years of Apple watching, still get bogged down in specs, speeds, and developer contracts. Magic doesn’t happen in an echo chamber.

Great read. It gives a fascinating glimpse of what goes on behind the scenes at Apple.

Thoughts on iPhone 4 | Kyle Baxter

mnmal:

While Apple’s competitors are building phones, functional but cold, Apple is building something alive. You can see the work that went into every inch of it, the obsession Apple has with coming as close to perfection as they can. This is what I love about them–they never settle, and never accept something as good enough. Nothing is good enough for them, and they work relentlessly in the pursuit of perfection. There is little more admirable than that.

Great points here. What I’ve wanted to say for awhile now. Google felt compelled to take jabs at Apple time and again at Google I/O. Apple never responded (except when they quoted market share figures, but that was still no direct response à-la-Google) simply because they don’t have to. Going down to a feature comparison is a losing proposition. What they do instead is show two people in a video call using sign language and Steve Jobs says “this is why we do what we do”.

In fact, this ties in well with this TED talk that mnmal posted earlier today on the importance of starting from the why. Apple does this, their competitors don’t.

It really is the attention to detail, in everything. To be fair, there are some really good functional phones out there, but as Kyle puts it, these devices are ‘cold’ and fail to excite us. I cannot remember seeing any company mention the hearing impaired when they tout video call features. And why doesn’t anyone else talk about their screen so much? Or spend so much time explaining the phone casing at length? The design is beautiful. Apple obsesses over their products; they want to do the best they can. This speaks to people. It tells them that a phone can be more than the sum of its features.

This is what Steve Jobs said towards the end of the keynote yesterday.

We’re not just a tech company. Apple is more than that. It’s tech and humanity. It’s the hardware and the software working together. It’s not just a great new camera system, it’s the editing too, it’s not just a front-facing camera, it’s that plus 18 months of work on the software side.

There are many more examples to this and I couldn’t agree more.

Google vs Apple: Google Doesn't Need To Win - O'Reilly Radar

Making money selling mobile ads requires that Google keep the smartphone market open, plural, competitive. As long as there are multiple smartphones in the market, content developers will be driven towards open standards like HTML5. Developers will build richer and richer HTML content for the phones—and Google will thrive in its core business, placing ads on HTML pages. Google doesn’t need to “win”; they just need to “not lose”, to keep the game open, and to drive open technologies to the next level where they can compete successfully.

Interesting perspective on the Google vs Apple war. I keep saying Google is a unique position in most businesses they compete in whether it’s Apple or Microsoft, and this is why. Their bottom line doesn’t come from selling phones or licensing software. Or as Mike puts it, they don’t need to ‘win’, just ‘not lose’.

(via Ruiwen’s shared items on Google Reader)

Dan Lyons, on why he's switching to Android

rickwebb:

mikehudack:

fredseibert:

moth:

The most telling thing to me was Google’s tone toward Apple at the event. Instead of pretending to still be an Apple ally, Google today basically threw down the gantlet and admitted that it’s engaged in total war with Apple.

And unlike other Apple rivals, like Adobe, Google execs weren’t huffing and puffing and wringing their hands about Apple’s bad behavior. No, instead, Google was mocking Apple. Making fun of it. Laughing at it.

The Android OS is already outselling iPhone OS in the United States. Now it’s blowing past Apple in terms of the technology it’s delivering. Yes, Apple still has a larger installed base.

I was a little shocked recently when an Apple spokesbot responded to the news of Android’s outselling iPhone OS by reciting the old chestnut about Apple’s having more phones out there. I was shocked because it’s a familiar line, one that I’ve heard countless times in my 20-plus years covering technology. But I’ve only ever heard it from companies that are doomed, and in total denial about it.”

via newsweek.

It’s stunning to me that people think this “more android handsets” means anything. So. What. What does Google make off of Android phone? Anything? I actually don’t know the answer to that, but they sure as heck make a lot less than Apple makes off of an iPhone. They’re only ever going to make any real money off of those Android sets if they can advertise on them. And Apple is doing that on iPhones with iAd.

So: Who makes more when a handset is sold? Apple.

And: Who is most likely to make more money on the ads they serve to their phone? Google? or Apple. Which is better placed to charge a premium? Which already seems to be developing a compelling, premium ad offering? Apple.

Google needs to sell so many more handsets that they make… what? $200 or so (Apple’s extra profits in selling an iphone) more than Apple does, in order to actually make more money off of the mobile space than Apple? It strikes me that in the highly commoditized world of mobile ad serving, Google will be lucky to make a couple bucks per user more than Apple in serving mobile ads, and as of now, they look like they’re falling behind on even that.

So say they make $10 more, per user, off serving ads, on every phone than Apple does. A huge leap of faith on its own. Even then, they’d have to sell something like 20 times more phones than Apple to come close to making more money off of them on mobile.

Or maybe they’re counting on those massive Nexus One sales.

That’s missing the point, isn’t it? Apple has always made more from its products because they control them in their entirety. It’s the reason why they make more off a Mac, than Microsoft does from a PC. But ‘more Android handsets’ (disclaimers) still does mean something because it shows the emergence of a viable alternative platform. Yes, because Android is available to any handset maker and operator, Google has to contend with issues such as fragmentation that Apple doesn’t need to. But Google also wants to ensure that its OS is available everywhere, thus also making it an ever increasingly attractive target for developers. The number of apps on the Android market was already at 30,000 in March, which is a very good number for the relatively young platform. Not to mention they are still making money from all those search queries on the go. We’ll see how iAd does when it comes out, but right now people are still searching on their (i)phones, a lot, which is driving revenue to their main search business.

Lastly, given some of the features that have been unveilved in the past couple of days, Android isn’t just playing catch up to the iPhone anymore. Admittedly, they still are in some areas such as app management, but for the most part, Android is now coming of age and even doing many things better.

Having said this, it’ll be interesting to re-visit the numbers after the next iPhone hardware and OS are out.

Curated computing: what's next for devices in a post-iPad world

Interesting guest opinion piece on Ars Technica. And there’s a new term now - “Curated Computing”.

The iPad ushers in a new era of personal computing that we call “Curated Computing”—a mode of computing where choice is constrained to deliver less complex, more relevant experiences. Let me repeat that, because it’s the essence of the Curated Computing experience: less choice; more relevance.