Linkbait 17

This week’s.

• Horace Dediu points out that with HTC paying Microsoft $5 per Android phone to avoid patent stuff, Microsoft makes five times more money from Android than from Windows Phone.
• The Next Web has an interesting thought about what Apple ought to do with their billions sitting around in their bank account: buy an operator. Wouldn’t be a bad idea.
• Businessweek takes a long look at Stephen Elop’s tenure as Nokia CEO. All in all the article is moderately positive.
• Tomi Ahonen disagrees strongly: he feels Elop is marching Nokia to its doom.
• And Tomi congratulates Apple with becoming the biggest smartphone seller on the planet in Q2.
• Some new information concerning Nokia’s Windows Phones: the VP in charge declines to name a solid deadline, but hints that they’re coming this year. They’d bloody well do; if we have to wait until 2012 Nokia is even deader than dead.
• Dennis Bournique keeps track of the new Opera and Bolt releases.
• Charles Stross complains about the worthlessness of Pages on the iPhone. I agree: the whole iWorks suite is decidedly flaky; far worse than MS Office. I’m starting to have doubts about Apple’s ability to create good consumer-facing software (as opposed to good operating systems).
  I mean, iTunes is a disaster in downloadable form, too, isn’t it? When I first started up my then-new MacBook Air, iTunes automatically started up, too, even though I didn’t ask for it, and subsequently crahed. So much for bloody iTunes. And in the future it won’t be necessary any more for iPhone updates. Apple couldn’t get it right, so they ditched it. Wise decision.
  But maybe Apple will redeem itself with the new stuff they announced on Monday.
• WURFL becomes a company. Dennis Bournique interviews the WURFL guys.
• An English schoolboy invents a very simple burglary alarm: if the doorbell is sounded (which burglars often do to check if anybody’s home), a connection is made to your mobile phone from the intercom, and you can answer as if you’re at home. The system even inserts some white noise to make the intercom sound flaky.
• A good, solid look at Windows Phone 7’s user interface, and how it’s better than the iPhone’s in some respects. Also interesting is the whole story about the WP7 Hubs: seems Apple has copied them for iOS5 and has made sure they’ll work properly; something that WP7 doesn’t quite manage.
• CNN takes a look at reports comparing the iOS and Android app stores; and possible errors in those reports.
• Reasons why Android users consume more data than iPhone users.
• Michael Mace discusses Windows 8, and why it’s the beginning of the end for Microsoft: it maintains backward compatibility with older Windows systems. That’s pretty much unavoidable for Microsoft, but it’s also a serious problem for Windows 8.
• Vision Mobile takes a good long look at the Web and how it’s going to change mobile. As far as I’m concerned they stress the copying of app store economics too much: I think the opposite is going to happen, and app economics will start to resemble web economics instead of vice versa.
  Vision Mobile points out correctly that the operators are in the best position to capitalise on the changing mobile ecosystem, but warns they have to move at “software speeds.” To which I say “Hah!” Sounds good in theory; won’t ever happen in practice.
• Andy Budd muses over the web vs. native debate, and comes to the conclusion that both have their advantages and disadvantages. However, and this is something I’ve been thinking about, too, he feels that the default should be responsive design, i.e. the Web. Take the Web as the default, and only switch to native if there are good reasons to do so.
• A brief analysis of the Sony password debacle. Executive summary: Sony stored over 1 million passwords in plaintext. This is not the most optimal way of ensuring security.
  But individual users tend to choose easy password and/or use the same password for several services, which doesn’t help either. Still, this proves the password system has broken down, and not that the users are doing it all wrong.
• Review of the new, WebKit-based NetFront Life browser. I’m currently studying it, too.
• A useful overview of web development improvements in Safari 5 for iOS. position: fixed (see this video for behaviour under zooming conditions), overflow: auto with a one-finger scroll instead of a two-finger one; date and time <input>s, a vertical range, Web Workers, and ECMA5 stuff.
• iMessage means the death of SMS as an operator cash cow. That’s true, but Apple is way behind RIM here, who already has a thriving IM ecosystem and is porting it to iOS and Android. Personally I do not think that iMessage by itself will cause the death of SMS — how am I going to communicate with my non-iPhone-using friends? But as part of a trend it’s of course true.
• Have a tip for next week?

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