Linkbait 30

After a long silence. Some entries are from end of last year.

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• In order to accomodate the huge increase of mobile data traffic the iPhone caused, US carriers had to significantly upgrade their networks. That eventually involves making changes in the physical towers themselves, and that requires sending people up into those towers. Turns out the death toll among those people is pretty high. Point is: these people are not carrier employees but subcontractor employees, which removes responsibility from the carriers (or, indeed, the consumer).
• David Storey introduces the new viewport units — and they’re going to be massively important.
• Tobie Langel gives a useful overview of the state of affairs in manifest files.
• Mobile Frameworks Comparison Chart. As it says. 11 platforms instead of the customary 3 or 4.
• Brad Frost gives some practical advice on which devices you should buy for your test lab.
• Boris Smus talks about physical units, why we need them, and why we’re not going to get them for the moment.
• Remy Sharp studies fixed positioning on iOS and finds that it sucks.
• Tim Kadlec tests media queries and asset downloading. You want to prevent asset downloading until the media query is executed, but most browsers don’t do that. Turns out you have to set display: none on the parent of the element you want to prevent asset downloading on, or use background images.
• A good look at the Amazon Kindle browser.
• A look at Chrome for Android.
• Turns out Yahoo Japan released a browser to compete with Android. No technical details, unfortunately, and I’m guessing it’s a skin over Android WebKit, but the struggle here is for the search engine referral market, and not for rendering.
• Firt takes a look at pseudo-browsers on iOS. Importing your own rendering engine is not allowed, so your choices are to either use Apple’s or to offload rendering to a server, like Opera Mini does.
• The iPhone 3GS will become a low-cost device that will allow Apple to enter the low-end market, too. How? By dropping its price every year. Fortunately I predicted this particular move back in October, or I’d have to act surprised now.
• Google has acquired Motorola, but it could decide to sell off the hardware parts. But to whom? This article suggests Huawei might be interested.
• Why hasn’t Windows Phone taken off? Charlie Kindel thinks it’s because Microsoft put the consumer first, and operators and device vendors don’t like that because they want to be put first.
  Of course Apple also puts the consumer first, but Apple builds its own hardware and has a direct link to the consumer through Apple Stores.
• Baidu releases its own reports on the state of the mobile internet. Most of it is in Chinese PDFs, unfortunately. Only the summary is accessible to Google Translate.
• Michael Mace talks about RIM and how it’s becoming more and more two-facedP:

  they're saying they want to preserve both their business user base in North America and their youth messaging base in the rest of the world. That's sensible from a revenue preservation standpoint, but it means that RIM will continue to be serving two masters with very different needs. [...] It will be very difficult to create products that please both North America and the rest of the world, [...] Features that please its North American core are not likely to also please the international market, and price points that would be acceptable in North America will likely be too high for the rest of the world. The danger is that RIM will be like an army fighting on two fronts, with its forces below critical mass on both sides.

  Problem is: on the service level, where BlackBerry has some good offerings such as Ping and secure email, it runs into exactly the same problem. A choice is required. My gut feeling says to go with the youth messaging, but I’m not a specialist and know nothing about the financial side of things.
• Former BlackBerry co-CEO Basillie planned to open up BlackBerry’s IM network, Ping, to operators, who could release apps for other OSs. The other co-CEO Lazaridis was against it, and before anything could be done both of them stepped down. Still, the idea is interesting, and I feel BlackBerry should move more toward services, since that’s going to be the next money-maker.
• The first Tizen prototype phone was handed out at the Tizen conference in SF in early May. Here’s a good look at it. Includes long video.
• Interesting look at a key difference between iOS (and Windows Phone) on the one hand, and Android on the other: UI rendering. On Android it’s handled normally; on iOS it has absolute priority.

  If you put your finger on the screen of an iPhone or iPad and move it around when it’s halfway through loading a complex web page like Facebook, all rendering stops instantaneously. The website will literally never load until your finger is removed, and this all boils down to the fact that the “UI thread is intercepting all events and rendering the UI at real-time priority.”

• Sony gives a good overview of what it takes to send out a new Android version to consumers. It’s not easy.
• But Android is going to die anyway. Not that it’ll disappear, but it’ll fragment so hard you won’t be able to find the splinters.
• And here’s a graphic representation of this splintering.
• Among the many things you can do with a mobile phone, herding cows is not the one one would expect.
• HTTP status codes ... with cats!
• In which it is proven that Facebook is responsible for the Greek debt crisis.
• What’s the difference between JavaScript and Java? One is a toy.
• Footage of the world’s first mobile phone — from 1922! Incidentally, it was invented by a woman, and it’s used not for phone calls but for services! Very, very forward-looking.
• And, in case you hadn’t seen them yet, here are the proceedings of the 3rd Annual Nigerian EMail Conference.
• And what do you do when you hear the Nokia ringtone during your violin recital? This.
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