I'm not yet convinced it's selling well. Amazon announced a million Kindle sales per week, just before Christmas, but they didn't break it down into types of Kindle. It may be the eInk Kindles that are selling well.
Funnily enough, no it doesn't. Only part of Android is open source, the rest is closed source and needs to be licensed from Google. And if the manufacturer doesn't license the closed source parts, they can't call it Android as Android is a trademark of Google.
Kindle Fire doesn't license those parts, and thus doesn't have the full Android functionality, can't call it's software Android, and doesn't have access to the Android Marketplace.
I'm not really a power user, I want a smartphone to be able to do several things. One, I want it to sync easily with my Gmail and Google Calendar. Android? Check. iPhone? Can do it, I guess, but not nearly as easily.
What's not as easy? Add an account on an iPhone and you are offered the choice of iCloud, MS Exchange, GMail, Yahoo!, Aol, Hotmail and MobileMe. Choose GMail, put in your name, email address and password, and you're done. Gmail and Google Calendar.
I find the Android home screen to be a mess. I never found "Desk Accessories" to be a good idea on a desktop computer, and it's even less so on the small screen of a phone. Every widget you add means you lose space for a few apps. So you need to have many more pages of home screens to hold it all. And that then means that the info isn't available at a glance at all, you have to swipe to get to the widget you want. It's no easier to swipe to a weather widget than to launch a weather app by hitting an app icon.
Or if you squeeze all the widgets on the first screen, then you need to swipe to get to where you can launch apps. Yes, there's are balances that can be made, but the point is that you're not getting widgets for free. You're losing a lot of space from the app launcher to do it. More of a problem on a phone than a tablet thought I guess.
For sure it's good to be able to see the time at a glance, but all cellphones give you that, even the iPhone.
But then there are things on iOS that you don't get on Android. Like iCloud. This is the mother of all syncs. If you have a Tablet an iPhone and/or a Mac, then you get the same data and documents on all of them, wirelessly. To the extent that if I have a word processor document open on my iPad and Mac at the same time, anything I change in one open document will be reflected in the other open document within a couple of seconds. Imagine, when you leave the office or home, it doesn't matter whether you take your laptop, tablet or phone, you have all the same up to date data on all of them. Even if you didn't get around to saving the document on the Mac.
That is a far bigger convenience than desk accessories/widgets.
Android is to mobile phones what the Windows PC is to computers. Except Microsoft is better at supplying updates.
It's the commodity - large amount of choice, from many vendors, and thus biggest market share. But most of it poor quality,and full of accident complexity.
Different market. Android got market share through making cheaper phones. And more or less everyone in the developed world feels they need a mobile phone. With operator subsidies you could get a "free" Android a long time before you could get a "free" iPhone.
Tablets are typically without operator subsidy, so one has to pay the true price up front. And they are not seen as an essential purchase. People on a budget can just not buy a tablet, rather than buying a cheap one. Android competitors are finding they can build tablets of a quality to match the iPad at a cheaper price point. The cheaper Android tablets are getting terrible reviews.
Isn't that a good thing though? With iPad you get very little choice as to what you want, everyone's iPad is the same excepting how much space it's got and whether it has 3G.
You say that as if choice is good and consistency is bad. Actually they are both good and both bad, depending.
Typically a limited number of choices is good. And a lot of choice is bad. Say 6 choices is good, sixty choices is bad. ref The Paradox of Choice.
Consistency is good, in that it gives developers better foundations on which to build, and for the user it means less compatibility problems. But complete consistency removes opportunities to do something different.
So ideally it's good to have one big consistent platform, and then small number of alternative choices.
It seems to me like Microsoft isn't exactly losing anything by bowing out.
It's not so much CES that's on the way out as Microsoft that's on the way out as far as a consumers are concerned. Microsoft didn't decide to "bow out", in fact CES decided to not invite them to do the keynote for 2013. After all it's been a long time since they were amongst the most influential consumer technology companies.
I think you have a good point there. Samsung gets a lot of business from Apple as a supplier of flash chips. And yet at the same time they are ripping off Apple's device designs. Apple must be quite keen to ditch them as a supplier as soon as is possible.
It is a computer, not a hammer. Since when do we declare that a computer is "not intended" to do something in software?
Well at least since console manufacturers started selling consoles at no-profit or even a loss, in order to make profit on game licenses. And the DMCA provides them with legal backing for that model.
Amazon is using the same model. They are supplying a no-profit tablet in order to make money on media consumed.
If you want a truly open device, you should expect to pay more money for it.
The presentation of pre-detected structures may be considered novel; yet given such a preponderance of prior-art, this alone may not satisfy non-obviousness.
I don't know about the wording of the patents, looming through again will send me to sleep. But certainly the difference in implementation is more than that. The IBM Simon looks like you can highlight any sequence of digits and punctuation, and if you choose to pass it to the dialler it'll just try and dial it. Regardless if it fits a format of a real phone number. Apple's implementation knows the formats of phone numbers around the world, and only offers this functionality for valid phone number formats. Don't do that, and the UI will be linking every number as a phone number.
On some phones they are features... these are phones where the entire fuctionality has been implemented with a single monolithic program.
On an iPhone they are apps. They are launched from an app loader, and technically work exactly the same way as installable apps do. What you're talking about is the difference between built-in apps and third party apps, not apps and features.
They're also apps on Android, Symbian, WinPhone, PalmOS etc. But they are not apps on Nokia Series 40 for example.
Apple seems destined to become the number mega patent troll as their range of fad products die off.
Apple - beleaguered company with fad products dying off since 1976. Somehow managing to make it from a garage to the biggest market cap in the world in the process.
Multitasking of third party apps is fairly new (18 months) but keeping system services going whilst other apps run is older than that. For example you could always start playing a song in iPod app and switch to another app, with the song still playing.
I'm not sure when multitasking a phone call with a different app was implemented on iPhone, but it doesn't actually matter. The significant date was the filing of Apple's patent. And that was Jan 2008.
I'd be keen to put money on it. If we knew each other in meatspace I'd be happy to take your money.
Heck I'd also take you money on the question of whether Google's Siri copy will also be able to refer to you by name. Of course it will.
Given the choice would a man choose a PA that knows his name, or one that doesn't know his name? He would of course go for the one that knows his name.
Knowing that people have names, and using the name of the person it's talking is a basic fundamental of AI. You couldn't pass the Turing test without it.
But even if you decided that was too "cute" and didn't implement it, it's not going to help you much. The English language is full of ambiguous cases. The right thing to do is to learn or make additional rules depending on context to correct the cases where the AI gets it wrong. And as I say, when Google's Siri copy comes out, Apple will be far further ahead in that process than Google are.
Sure, but how many people continue to use it after the first day or two when they realise they look like a tool talking to their phone?
Yeah right, no one ever talks into their phone...! I think you may have lost sight of the primary purpose of a phone. People are now quite happy walking down the road talking in to a phone. It makes little difference whether the person at the other end is a person or a machine.
The only time you would really want to use it is when you are driving
Yeah, and hardly anyone does that...
but IMHO you should be concentrating on the road rather than trying to dictate a text message.
Well your opinion isn't the law. I think a big use case is exactly that. "Tell my wife I'm going to be late home." isn't going to tax the mind of many drivers.
Otherwise I prefer to have some widgets on my home screens that display useful information like today's weather and any appointments I have.
Which accounts for a microscopic proportion of the things you can ask Siri for, so I wonder why you even raise it. All it does is suggest you are someone who's arguing for Android, not arguing against a voice assistant.
And that's why Siri has a "beta" label. English is ambiguous, and where it gets the wrong side of an ambiguity, it needs extra rules or more training to correct that. These things are spotted and Apple will fix them.
By the time Google are ready, Siri will be much better than it is now. And you can expect all the mistakes Google's "Majel" to then be the object of scorn, with side by side examples showing Majel getting it wrong, and the then more mature Siri getting it right.
Even if Apple do better presentation (remains to be seen..), do you think their AI and search guys are anywhere near Google's in terms of knowledge and experience?
They don't have to be experts in search. Once Siri has decided its not a command that can be satisfied with built in services it's passed on to one of the other search engines, such as Google.
What Siri is good at is accuracy in converting speech to text, and working out whether that text can be satisfied with one of the built in services. It's good at the variety of ways you can phrase these commands such that you don't have to learn a computer specific vocabulary of command words and phrases.
Both these things are made better with more data of people using the service. Generic search experience won't help much here.
Slashdot Mirror
It almost conforms to our earth bound geometry! I expect the discrepancy is due to a rift in the space/time continuum.
The average Android phone owner has no idea what phone he has or what version of Android is running on it.
The average Android phone owner has no idea what day of the week it is. ...unless there's a widget for it.
I'm not yet convinced it's selling well. Amazon announced a million Kindle sales per week, just before Christmas, but they didn't break it down into types of Kindle. It may be the eInk Kindles that are selling well.
Funnily enough, no it doesn't. Only part of Android is open source, the rest is closed source and needs to be licensed from Google. And if the manufacturer doesn't license the closed source parts, they can't call it Android as Android is a trademark of Google.
Kindle Fire doesn't license those parts, and thus doesn't have the full Android functionality, can't call it's software Android, and doesn't have access to the Android Marketplace.
It's related to Android, but it isn't Android.
LUL! What? I could get a free iPhone from the very first day iPhone was being offered.
Other than stealing it, no you couldn't.
I'm not really a power user, I want a smartphone to be able to do several things. One, I want it to sync easily with my Gmail and Google Calendar. Android? Check. iPhone? Can do it, I guess, but not nearly as easily.
What's not as easy? Add an account on an iPhone and you are offered the choice of iCloud, MS Exchange, GMail, Yahoo!, Aol, Hotmail and MobileMe. Choose GMail, put in your name, email address and password, and you're done. Gmail and Google Calendar.
I find the Android home screen to be a mess. I never found "Desk Accessories" to be a good idea on a desktop computer, and it's even less so on the small screen of a phone. Every widget you add means you lose space for a few apps. So you need to have many more pages of home screens to hold it all. And that then means that the info isn't available at a glance at all, you have to swipe to get to the widget you want. It's no easier to swipe to a weather widget than to launch a weather app by hitting an app icon.
Or if you squeeze all the widgets on the first screen, then you need to swipe to get to where you can launch apps. Yes, there's are balances that can be made, but the point is that you're not getting widgets for free. You're losing a lot of space from the app launcher to do it. More of a problem on a phone than a tablet thought I guess.
For sure it's good to be able to see the time at a glance, but all cellphones give you that, even the iPhone.
But then there are things on iOS that you don't get on Android. Like iCloud. This is the mother of all syncs. If you have a Tablet an iPhone and/or a Mac, then you get the same data and documents on all of them, wirelessly. To the extent that if I have a word processor document open on my iPad and Mac at the same time, anything I change in one open document will be reflected in the other open document within a couple of seconds. Imagine, when you leave the office or home, it doesn't matter whether you take your laptop, tablet or phone, you have all the same up to date data on all of them. Even if you didn't get around to saving the document on the Mac.
That is a far bigger convenience than desk accessories/widgets.
Android is to mobile phones what the Windows PC is to computers. Except Microsoft is better at supplying updates.
It's the commodity - large amount of choice, from many vendors, and thus biggest market share. But most of it poor quality,and full of accident complexity.
As you say, the cheap-skates paradise.
Different market. Android got market share through making cheaper phones. And more or less everyone in the developed world feels they need a mobile phone. With operator subsidies you could get a "free" Android a long time before you could get a "free" iPhone.
Tablets are typically without operator subsidy, so one has to pay the true price up front. And they are not seen as an essential purchase. People on a budget can just not buy a tablet, rather than buying a cheap one. Android competitors are finding they can build tablets of a quality to match the iPad at a cheaper price point. The cheaper Android tablets are getting terrible reviews.
Isn't that a good thing though? With iPad you get very little choice as to what you want, everyone's iPad is the same excepting how much space it's got and whether it has 3G.
You say that as if choice is good and consistency is bad. Actually they are both good and both bad, depending.
Typically a limited number of choices is good. And a lot of choice is bad. Say 6 choices is good, sixty choices is bad. ref The Paradox of Choice.
Consistency is good, in that it gives developers better foundations on which to build, and for the user it means less compatibility problems. But complete consistency removes opportunities to do something different.
So ideally it's good to have one big consistent platform, and then small number of alternative choices.
"a working implementation" is not equal to the same thing.
It seems to me like Microsoft isn't exactly losing anything by bowing out.
It's not so much CES that's on the way out as Microsoft that's on the way out as far as a consumers are concerned. Microsoft didn't decide to "bow out", in fact CES decided to not invite them to do the keynote for 2013. After all it's been a long time since they were amongst the most influential consumer technology companies.
http://parislemon.com/post/14590185649/fuck-me-no-fuck-you
http://gigaom.com/2011/12/21/mystery-who-killed-the-microsoft-ces-keynote/
It might be tempting to draw a parellel, however it's a false one.
Apple decided to stop being a part of the MacWorld convention. Both Keynote and Stand.
Microsoft on the other hand were not invited to do another Keynote for 2013, and withdrew their plans to have a stand in response. to that.
Apple jumped, Microsoft were pushed.
http://parislemon.com/post/14590185649/fuck-me-no-fuck-you
http://gigaom.com/2011/12/21/mystery-who-killed-the-microsoft-ces-keynote/
I think you have a good point there. Samsung gets a lot of business from Apple as a supplier of flash chips. And yet at the same time they are ripping off Apple's device designs. Apple must be quite keen to ditch them as a supplier as soon as is possible.
That's why it says "Designed by Apple in California" on Apple products.
It is a computer, not a hammer. Since when do we declare that a computer is "not intended" to do something in software?
Well at least since console manufacturers started selling consoles at no-profit or even a loss, in order to make profit on game licenses. And the DMCA provides them with legal backing for that model.
Amazon is using the same model. They are supplying a no-profit tablet in order to make money on media consumed.
If you want a truly open device, you should expect to pay more money for it.
The presentation of pre-detected structures may be considered novel; yet given such a preponderance of prior-art, this alone may not satisfy non-obviousness.
I don't know about the wording of the patents, looming through again will send me to sleep. But certainly the difference in implementation is more than that. The IBM Simon looks like you can highlight any sequence of digits and punctuation, and if you choose to pass it to the dialler it'll just try and dial it. Regardless if it fits a format of a real phone number. Apple's implementation knows the formats of phone numbers around the world, and only offers this functionality for valid phone number formats. Don't do that, and the UI will be linking every number as a phone number.
On some phones they are features... these are phones where the entire fuctionality has been implemented with a single monolithic program.
On an iPhone they are apps. They are launched from an app loader, and technically work exactly the same way as installable apps do. What you're talking about is the difference between built-in apps and third party apps, not apps and features.
They're also apps on Android, Symbian, WinPhone, PalmOS etc. But they are not apps on Nokia Series 40 for example.
Apple seems destined to become the number mega patent troll as their range of fad products die off.
Apple - beleaguered company with fad products dying off since 1976. Somehow managing to make it from a garage to the biggest market cap in the world in the process.
The patent describes the method in excruciating detail. What were YOU reading?
Multitasking of third party apps is fairly new (18 months) but keeping system services going whilst other apps run is older than that. For example you could always start playing a song in iPod app and switch to another app, with the song still playing.
I'm not sure when multitasking a phone call with a different app was implemented on iPhone, but it doesn't actually matter. The significant date was the filing of Apple's patent. And that was Jan 2008.
I'd be keen to put money on it. If we knew each other in meatspace I'd be happy to take your money.
Heck I'd also take you money on the question of whether Google's Siri copy will also be able to refer to you by name. Of course it will.
Given the choice would a man choose a PA that knows his name, or one that doesn't know his name? He would of course go for the one that knows his name.
Knowing that people have names, and using the name of the person it's talking is a basic fundamental of AI. You couldn't pass the Turing test without it.
But even if you decided that was too "cute" and didn't implement it, it's not going to help you much. The English language is full of ambiguous cases. The right thing to do is to learn or make additional rules depending on context to correct the cases where the AI gets it wrong. And as I say, when Google's Siri copy comes out, Apple will be far further ahead in that process than Google are.
Sure, but how many people continue to use it after the first day or two when they realise they look like a tool talking to their phone?
Yeah right, no one ever talks into their phone...! I think you may have lost sight of the primary purpose of a phone. People are now quite happy walking down the road talking in to a phone. It makes little difference whether the person at the other end is a person or a machine.
The only time you would really want to use it is when you are driving
Yeah, and hardly anyone does that...
but IMHO you should be concentrating on the road rather than trying to dictate a text message.
Well your opinion isn't the law. I think a big use case is exactly that. "Tell my wife I'm going to be late home." isn't going to tax the mind of many drivers.
Otherwise I prefer to have some widgets on my home screens that display useful information like today's weather and any appointments I have.
Which accounts for a microscopic proportion of the things you can ask Siri for, so I wonder why you even raise it. All it does is suggest you are someone who's arguing for Android, not arguing against a voice assistant.
And the "Siri isn't released yet" argument: I call shenanigans. If I can get it on my phone without signing an NDA, It's been released.
One thing Google DID innovate with is the long-term "beta" labels on products that have clearly been released.
And that's why Siri has a "beta" label. English is ambiguous, and where it gets the wrong side of an ambiguity, it needs extra rules or more training to correct that. These things are spotted and Apple will fix them.
By the time Google are ready, Siri will be much better than it is now. And you can expect all the mistakes Google's "Majel" to then be the object of scorn, with side by side examples showing Majel getting it wrong, and the then more mature Siri getting it right.
Even if Apple do better presentation (remains to be seen..), do you think their AI and search guys are anywhere near Google's in terms of knowledge and experience?
They don't have to be experts in search. Once Siri has decided its not a command that can be satisfied with built in services it's passed on to one of the other search engines, such as Google.
What Siri is good at is accuracy in converting speech to text, and working out whether that text can be satisfied with one of the built in services. It's good at the variety of ways you can phrase these commands such that you don't have to learn a computer specific vocabulary of command words and phrases.
Both these things are made better with more data of people using the service. Generic search experience won't help much here.