Borg Pays Visit to Charlie Rose, Assures They Come in Peace

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Apr 262012
 

Google researcher Sebastian Thrun, Founder and head of Google X, was a guest on Charlie Rose last night talking about his online University project Udacity, driverless cars and, of course, Project Glass.

Locutus looks quite comfortable in front of the camera

You probably know that Glass is Google’s attempt at immersive reality, featuring a super-discreet pair of boss glasses that allow you to use interact with the world via HUD and let you share your mundane life with your friends in real time. Information that Google will no doubt share with its customers (advertisers) in order to shave off another sliver of your identity for their monetary gain. Glass didn’t get much air time, but Thrun did snap a picture of Rose during the interview and posted it to his Google+ page:

Looks a lot like the pictures I see on Instagram lately...

All kidding aside, it’s kind of cool that Google is blowing all this ad cash on these fanciful visions of the future. As scattershot as their projects appear to me, who am I to accuse the company of Microsofting their capital into the void?

I do think Glass will be “personal” in a way that Android is not. Using an Android device, there’s a lot of things going on behind the scene that are invisible to the people carrying them. When people put on a pair of glasses, I think the idea of potentially having everything they do documented in some way is going to put the creepiness factor front and center. I don’t know if the world is ready for that level of immersion.

I Love Being Right Almost As Much As You Do

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Apr 262012
 

I’m married, so that means I’m never right. It was one of the subliminal vows I took at the altar. Thank God I have a blog.

When Verizon announced their intent to carry the iPhone, I made a prediction about what that would mean for Android. I was pretty aggressive about what the market would look like a year after the announcement, once a substantial number of peoples’ 2-year Verizon contracts expired.

Gave RIM WAY too much credit

Back to my being right, the market share numbers for the first quarter were released and – wouldn’t you know it – the iPhone holds a 59% share. I’d say I should work for Gartner, but I think my being right about things would wreck their curve.

For the Two People Left on Earth Who Think Google Didn’t Copy the iPhone

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Apr 262012
 

No one with any reasonable sense of the smartphone timeline still thinks that Google didn’t pull an about face with the design of their Android handsets when the iPhone was released. There’s ample photo evidence.

As if another nail was needed in that coffin, during yesterday’s testimony at the Oracle v. Google trial, mock-ups for the 2006 vision of the Google Phone were introduced into evidence.

Not an iPhone

Google intended to release a BlackBerry-like device that eschewed a touch interfaced in favor of soft keys. So they were planning to knock off the most popular phone at the time – until a better one was announced in 2007. So what did the first Android shartphone, the HTC Dream/T-Mobile G1, look like?

Nothing like the iPhone

Now the Dream also had a slide-out keyboard and hardware keys, but there’s the handy home screen icon layout and touch interface. Imagine that. Subsequent versions of Android are even more derivative of the iPhone. Although Creepy King Eric Schmidt says ”Most people would agree that Google is a great innovator, and I would also point out that the Android efforts started before the iPhone efforts.”, it’s pretty clear now, even more so than before, that Schmidt is a disingenuous shit. You need only watch 10 seconds of Senate subcommittee testimony to know that anything hanging out of that guy’s mouth hole is bullshit.

So Apple has an additional little something for its back pocket should it decide to ever go after Google itself. Thanks for the bullets, Mountain View. Not that Apple needs them.

MG Siegler Nails the Future of the iPhone-Android Competitive Landscape

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Apr 262012
 

Writing in his parislemon blog:

Probably around late summer every year going forward, iPhone sales will dip ahead of the expected new device and some Android manufacturer will find a way to capitalize, rising the entire ecosystem’s share as a result. But it will always be short-lived. The new iPhone will come along and crush it.

I also said that Verizon was the only thing keeping Android competitive in the U.S. When you looked at markets where the iPhone was on more than one carrier at the time, it was obvious.

People are over Android, and Android’s ecosystem has as much to do with this as the quality of the iPhone’s offerings. Google can’t push its latest operating systems to devices even 6 months old, their market is a malware minefield, and their manufacturers offer undifferentiated hardware and software that only differentiates itself from the next guy by the way it worsens the user experience compared to stock Android.

People are over the gimmicks like HDMI out and Beats(off) Audio. Consumers never gave a shit about “free and open”; when they were stuck on Verizon’s network, they settled for a phone that was pitched as being just like the iPhone. They no longer have to settle for “just like an iPhone.”

Between Oracle and Apple, Android is starting to look a lot like the middle segment of The Human Centipede.

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