David Chin's Tumblelog

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6 Things Terence Dislikes about the Samsung Galaxy S II

  1. Malware.
  2. Difficulties of combining customizations in the same place. Typically customizing Android to adopt something you like in one versions of Android requires you to give up what you like in another version. In contrast to jailbroken iPhone where such limitations do not exist.
  3. Multilanguage support. I can combine any languages in iPhone. Not so with Android where a separate firmware is issued for each region.
  4. Inconsistent UI. The copy and paste of SGS 2 in the browser and that in the other places are designed differently. If you install third party software such as dictionary.com and skyfire you see different design again.
  5. KIES. This is a terrible piece of unreliable software.
  6. Pink patche on photos taken which are very obvious on while background.

Notes

The Real Story of Apple

Great insight by handleym in the comments…


The real Apple story is much more interesting: To quote from a comment I wrote elsewhere:

“iCloud is NOT, contrary to what simpletons think, a DropBox clone, neither is it the big jukebox in the sky. The essence of iCloud is that it is a set of APIs and services that allow a collection of devices to synchronize with each other. Synchronize what? Well, that’s the point — each app synchronizes whatever it makes sense to synchronize.

This is part of a larger vision: the issue is not whether a laptop with a keyboard is better than a tablet, or whether an iPod nano is better than an iPod touch. The issue is that the human body (which isn’t changing any time soon) dictates that a number of different form factors are all optimal for different purposes.

These form factors range from the very small and always present (imagine an iPod nano worn as a watch, using bluetooth so no cables, waterproof, recovering energy from body motion so no recharging necessary) to usually present (phone) to easy to carry everywhere (tablet) to heavier — but a keyboard is so convenient (laptop) to a beautiful large screen (iMac). Why choose between these? Isn’t life better if you have one of all of them, and use the correct tool for the job?

(And spare me the whining about cost. If you are still unaware, in 2011, that the cost of computing falls dramatically every year; and that successful companies aim for where the puck will be in three years time, not where it was three years ago, then your opinion is worthless to anyone.)

But owning so many devices immediately brings about a problem — it’s a hassle to keep all these devices in sync. I have to remember on what device I was reading this article, or watching that movie. And that is the problem iCloud is attempting to solve. Basically: make everything behave like IMAP.

Compare this with Android or any other company, which are still stuck in the 1990s trying to figure out how to make an uber device (phone, tablet, laptop, whatever) that does every job possible — and does them all badly. Android at least have moved beyond MS in that they have this hazy idea that using the internet and cloud servers is a good idea; but they don’t have a unified vision of the problem. So we have a few google hosted services that run on the cloud and we (belatedly, and only about five years late) have a single sign on that works across the google empire; but we do NOT have the deep and rich set of APIs that form iCloud, or the developer accessible storage backing up those APIs.

Sure, these will come in time. I expect a few people at Google got the point as soon as Apple announced iCloud, and started working on their clone. Heck, maybe even MS got the message?

But once again it seems to me perfectly obvious that there was a real VISION here — not just an attempt to sell crap this quarter to make this year’s numbers, but an actual goal that is being aimed at, with a step by step plan for how to get there; and that no-one else in the industry has anything close.”

Notes

The best books on Copy Writing?

Stumbled onto this discussion while searching Google for reviews on Eric Louviere’s Ad Influence ebook at AdInfluence.com

In the meantime, I’m reading through the free ad and copy writing newsletters of Gary Halbert at his archive.

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German Photography Magazine FotoColor finds that sensor-based Shake Reduction is as effective as lens-based IS (image stabilization) / VR (vibration reduction)

Pentax digital SLR owners should be delighted with this conclusion.

FYI, IS is a technology used in Canon IS lenses which mount on Canon digital SLR cameras, while VR is used in Nikon (Nikkor) AF-S lenses which fit Nikon digital SLR cameras.

The benefit with the approach Pentax has taken is that you get shake reduction with ALL lenses, not just a handful of them. 

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Ferran Adria

Watched this amazing Spanish chef featured on Anthony Bourdain’s program “Decoding Ferran Adria” shown over Discovery Channel’s Travel and Living Asia.

Anthony Bourdain has received permission to film in the secret research laboratory of Ferran Adria, the most controversial and imitated chef in the world.

Hopefully, I’ll get to sample Ferran’s creation one day!

Read customer reviews on the program at Amazon.com.

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Wasted half my day reading Lifehacker

This site has so much useful information (for IT and internet geeks like me anyway).

On second thoughts, I shouldn’t have said I wasted my time, not when I learned for the first time ever how powerful Gmail can be when you hack it.

Also, I had no idea that Gmail can be used as a time management and productivity tool - here’s a post on how to use Gmail to implement David Allen’s Getting Things Done productivity system.

And yeah, you can also use Gmail as a free hard drive of sorts with Gspace.