Photoshop is a name that carries a lot of weight in the design community and for good reason: it’s one of the most bloated feature-rich image editing applications out there. Now imagine having a touch version of the vaunted Adobe staple in the palm of your hands.

All you have to do is buy a tablet that no one else is.

That’s right, creative professionals: until “early 2012″, the only place you can get your hands on Photoshop Touch is on an Android tablet running Honeycomb 3.1 or later. Nevermind that’s there’s about 1,000 apps on the iPad that are at least as capable as whatever Adobe is offering: from a business perspective, what the fuck could Adobe possibly be thinking? When they boned Mac users in the 80s, 90s and…well… now by shitting all over their Creative Suite release schedule, at least they could say they were chasing market share. The iPad has 3/4s of the tablet market. Is this some kind of pathetic tantrum they’re trying to throw?

There’s a saying that resentment is like taking poison and waiting for the other person to die. If you want to hang around in the long term, you’d do well to remember who needs who, Adobe.

When Microsoft decided to model its shartphone OS after its tiled Zune HD interface, most rational people saw the FAILboat pulling into the dock for its inevitable, if not humorous capsizing. But I begrudgingly have to hand it to Redmond: instead of laughably knocking off iOS, they are trying something different, dare I say innovative? Besides, if the Zune and XBox – OK the entire Entertainment and Devices division of Microsoft – have taught us anything, its that the company will set fire to small country GNPs before it abandons a product.

Because Microsoft decided to wait 5 years to seriously re-enter the smartphone market, they’re still catching up to some features that have been on other platforms forever. Take video calling. The iPhone, of course, has FaceTime and I’m sure Android has 5 or 6 shitty apps that rat on your location to remote Chinese servers while simultaneously sending your credit card information to Russia. But Windows Phone has been lagging – until now. Meet Tango, a video calling app not to be confused with Mango, which is the version of the Windows Phone OS you need to run the app.Maybe there is only one way to represent switching cameras, like some sort of Platonic iconography. Or maybe shitty developers lazily knock off prior art instead of making – hell, at least improving – on original work. One of those two.

There was a time at the turn of the century when Consumer Reports was a valuable resource for those looking to make an objective purchasing decision. They did research and compared products based on standardized criteria (as opposed to the “I know 3 friends who say” criteria some analysts use in their reviews). As the consumer product landscape moved from “mostly mechanical” to the “mostly silicon”, the publication spiraled into Flowers for Algernon-esque sudden-onset retardation when it came to tech, with larger and larger swaths of the reviews resembling a 4th grade production of Macbeth.

One of the more recent topics on which CR was staking its faltering reputation was Antennagate, the condition under which an iPhone 4′s antenna could be attenuated by contorting your hand around the aluminum band that frames the device. When the blogosphere finally thought they found a criticism to hang on the newly-released iPhone, Steve Jobs himself dismissed the issue pretty comprehensive during a press conference held around the issue. Once he pointed out – correctly – that several major smartphone offerings suffered from the same contrived signal loss, the bloggers and tech press were left to find something else about which to foment. But Consumer Reports would not relent. After disqualifying the 4 from its vaunted “recommended” devices, even though it was the highest rated smartphone tested, it maintained its condemnation even as the device was released on Verizon with improvements to the antenna. When CR refused to recommend its highest-rated smartphone, despite universal praise for the device and everyone else’s willingness to admit Antennagate wasn’t that big of a deal, the publication’s official Luddite status was confirmed.

So even though no one gives a shit about what Consumer Reports has to say about smartphones, that hasn’t stopped them from weighing in on the iPhone 4S. And guess what? They no longer have an issue with the iPhone’s antennae! But alas, despite cleaning the clocks of all Android shartphones 6 months ago, several of the latest crop are now ranked higher because of their pocket-busting screens and battery/wallet busting 4G.

"These are for you, CR. This one here is going up your narrow fucking biased ass. And this bad boy over here is in your fucking eye."

You guys don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about. Why don’t you leave technology for the myriad publications that understand it and go back to rating coffee makers?

I swear I just notice these things in passing. This time, I was checking out The Verge’s video review of the Motorola’s Droid 3. When they were talking about the camera, some icons that looked very familiar popped up.

For reference:

I’m sure the degree to which Android cuts and pastes from iOS is several times more egregious than what my corner-of-eye observations yield. This isn’t “great artists steal”, assholes. This is petty theft of an icon. How uninspired must your shartphone OS be that you can’t even design your own icons? It certainly isn’t without precedent, which makes it all the more pathetic.