Salon.com > smartphones

Google invades the iPhone

Fri, 04 Jan 2013 18:43:00 +0000

Like many thousands of other iPhone users, I waited until the release of the new Google Maps app before upgrading my operating system to iOS6. This is how we express our independence today -- declining to upgrade!

But then I diddled around, distracted by the holidays. I didn't actually install Google Maps until I was reminded to by a Business Insider article elucidating Google's "worm strategy" of "attacking Apple from the inside out." Google's apps for the iPhone are so good that they are increasingly preferable to Apple's own apps for its own hardware.

I went whole hog. I installed Google Maps, Google Chrome, YouTube and Google's new Gmail app. I even threw in Google+ for good measure, though I have yet to make much use of Google's attempt to dislodge Facebook. I exiled Apple Maps, Safari, and Apple's Mail app to a folder labeled "Seething." (My own little joke, because Apple execs were reportedly "seething" at the rapturous response the world showered on the new Google Maps app.)

Can your iPhone help you lose weight?

Fri, 04 Jan 2013 12:45:00 +0000

Graydon Carter, the editor in chief of Vanity Fair, weighed in this month on the "Quantified Self" movement. The Quantified Selfers, he tells us, with a hefty serving of snoot, are a "younger growing demographic" of people "who like to record and share every aspect of their lives no matter how inconsequential."

Where past generations had film cameras, scrapbooks, notebooks, and that part of the brain which stores memories, we now have a smartphone app for every conceivable recording need. The thing is, all that time you spend logging and then curating the quotidian aspects of your daily life is time taken away from actually doing things.

There is just so much to unpack in Carter's dismissal, one hardly knows where to begin. There's the dig at current generations, who presumably lack the part of the brain that stores memories. There's the implicit certainty that curating one's life isn't actually doing anything, suggesting that in spending your time logging data you deprive yourself of some greater chance at capturing life's essence. And then there's the sweeping arrogance of the phrase "no matter how inconsequential."

The year everything went mobile

Mon, 31 Dec 2012 12:30:00 +0000

Packing for Christmas vacation, I contemplated my laptop, a MacBook Pro that weighs down my briefcase like a lead brick. Why bother? I wasn’t planning to work over the holidays, and my iPhone could easily handle all my routine Internet needs. It just didn't make sense to lug the old thing around. As the truth sank in, I felt liberated. For the first time this century, I would leave my laptop behind.

A simple story, maybe, but in that personal shift you can hear the echo of 2012's biggest technological transformation. Call it the year of the great untethering: In 2012 "mobile" triumphed. We've seen this paradigm shift rolling down the pike for a long time. Now it's here. The decline of the PC is no longer subject to debate.

And that's a big deal. The changing sales figures for desktops and laptops versus tablets and smartphones signify more than just an interesting tech business trend. This is a story about the reconfiguration of society around the small screen, a development that has implications for the media, entertainment, and advertising industries; for our privacy and our economy; for business and politics. If you're not figuring out how to play in what the tech industry likes to call the "smart connected device space" then you have already lost. And if you are not paying attention to what these devices will do to us as well as for us, then you are criminally negligent. Society is changing fast as we get more mobile. Can we keep up?

“The Tinkerers”: How corporations kill creativity

Sun, 30 Dec 2012 19:50:00 +0000

A few years ago I engaged my then two-month-old smartphone, a BlackBerry of some sort or another, in a very nontechnical road test: I sat on it. I only noticed the damage when one afternoon I reached to check my email. The small screen, usually jittering and scrolling with plenty of new messages, was suddenly a disconcerting Technicolor swirl with a huge black spot in the middle.

I drove in a mild panic to the nearest Verizon Wireless store and met with a sales representative. After asking for my vitals, he typed for a few seconds and waited. Then he typed, then he waited. Then he sighed.

“You can get a new phone,” he said. “At retail price.”

“How much is that?” I asked.

“Four hundred fifty dollars.”

Could I get my current BlackBerry fixed? The rep shook his head sadly. “They don’t let us repair the phones in the store anymore,” he said.

I felt his pain. Having grown up tinkering with Radio Shack electronic kits, I used to love taking things apart—radios, tape players, anything I could get my hands on.

But in the last twenty-five years or so, the number of household devices we can easily tinker with has dwindled.

Android surge shakes Apple

Thu, 27 Dec 2012 16:27:00 +0000

Android phones are taking a bite out of Apple.

As Apple stock continues it’s a long steep slide, investors and market watchers are speculating about whether the Cupertino, Calif.-based company can regain the mojo that made it a market favorite. But a report in today’s Financial Times (subscription required) suggests that the Android platform, now installed on three out of four smartphones sold worldwide, is exercising a gravitational pull on app developers.

Google’s Android has long lagged behind Apple in the number of available apps and the number of apps sold, but the balance appears to be shifting. “Android is the platform of growth,” Misha Lyalin, CEO of Zeptolab, which puts out the popular game “Cut the Rope” told the paper.

The article quotes one techie who personifies the platform rift:

Who has the best smartphone?

Fri, 14 Dec 2012 12:45:00 +0000

"Aesthetically pleasing" is very subjective.

I was deep into the fifth page of the reader comments of the first installment of Ars Technica's excellent "The State of Smartphones in 2012," when I encountered this observation, which is simultaneously the most illuminating and worthless Internet comment of all time. It was a response to the declaration by Ars Technica's Andrew Cunningham that the "Live Tiles" user interface in the brand-spanking-new Windows Phone 8 operating system was more "aesthetically striking" than the icons of Apple's iOS or the widgets of Google's Android.

(With Live Tiles, the restless smartphone user can expand or shrink the on-screen real estate devoted to a particular app or function, providing a level of configurability alien to the straitlaced universe that iPhone lovers, in particular, are accustomed to. Remember this, for future reference: Windows: freedom! Apple: tyranny!)

A new low for Nokia

Fri, 07 Dec 2012 18:50:00 +0000

I can still remember the Nokia coat hangers. Twelve years ago, during a visit to the company's Helsinki headquarters, I marveled at their sleek and stylish design. Angled bars of steel, hanging in serried rows in the vast coat racks on the building's first floor, they were modernist, functional, beautiful. To see them was to crave them, a feeling very much in keeping with how Nokia's phones were lusted after by the whole world in the year 2000. The pride of Finland paid attention to every detail. In a country where winters were long and hard, every building I visited in Helsinki had a prominent coat rack. Nokia's was, without question, the best.

Those coat hangers of yore were brought to mind by the news this week that Nokia is trying to sell its headquarters. The plan is to save cash by leasing the building back as a tenant. It's not the kind of news that bumps up the stock price. Ozymandias has got nothing on Nokia. Twelve years ago, the company utterly dominated the global market for cellphones. It was hiring employees at a rate of 1,000 a month. In an article I wrote about Finland and open-source software that spring, I described Nokia as "an aggressive, fast-growing, fully global company that makes Microsoft look like an old fuddy-duddy."