Constant & Endless

Joe Ross on design, law, and technology

NYPD subpoenas call logs of stolen cell phones ↗

November 28th, 2012 · Shared by Joe Ross

Joseph Goldstein, writing for the Times:

Mr. Sussmann suggested that the Police Department could limit its subpoenas to phone calls beginning on the hour, not the day, of the theft, and ending as soon as the victim has transferred the number to a new phone.

Mr. Sussman is exactly right. I suspect the intent here on the part of NYPD is an admirable one: we have data available that can help us track thieves, so let’s use it.

But it’s not hard to limit the information requested to only the information that could possibly be of use in finding the suspect.

Samsung shipped a stunning 57M smartphones in Q3 — twice as many as Apple ↗

October 26th, 2012 · Shared by Joe Ross

How many Samsung devices are on the latest version of their respective operating systems?

Many consumers don’t know or care that they’re buying an outdated version of Android, but that ignorance will not last forever. Samsung needs to solve the fragmentation problem if they expect this kind of success to be long-term.

Sloppy SSL implementation begets Android app vulnerabilities ↗

October 22nd, 2012 · Shared by Joe Ross

Dan Goodin at Ars Technica explains how researchers found that 8% of apps in a 13,500-app sample were susceptible to man-in-the-middle attacks. Hopefully developers will revisit their SSL implementations or, better yet, Google will update future versions of the Android SDK to disallow some of the poor coding decisions that cause these vulnerabilities.

Verizon Activated 3.1 Million iPhones In Q3 2012, But Only 651K Were iPhone 5s ↗

October 18th, 2012 · Shared by Joe Ross

MG Siegler, commenting on the TechCrunch post by Chris Velazco, linked above:

In other words, the iPhone 5 was on sale for just nine days before the quarter ended. And it was supply-constrained the whole time.

Mr. Siegler and Mr. Velazco pointed out the nine-day sales window the iPhone 5 had before these quarterly numbers were announced, but neither came right out and said what I find to be the most impressive expression of it:

Verizon activated over 72,000 iPhone 5s per day during the nine days ending the quarter.

Tim Cook’s Maps mea culpa

September 28th 2012 · By Joe Ross · 

Apple CEO Tim Cook:

While we’re improving Maps, you can try alternatives by downloading map apps from the App Store like Bing, MapQuest and Waze, or use Google or Nokia maps by going to their websites and creating an icon on your home screen to their web app.

This surprised me at first. It didn’t surprise me that Cook would suggest users find a better experience elsewhere while Apple gets Maps to where they probably wanted it pre-launch anyway.

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The New Feedly Mobile ↗

September 18th, 2012 · Shared by Joe Ross

Anti-disclosure: This post raves about the new Feedly. They didn’t pay me, I don’t know them, and all I get out of writing the below is the satisfaction of pointing fellow Android users to one of the best-designed apps in the Play Store.

I love both Pulse and Flipboard and I can’t think of many ways I would improve them. They’re elegant and functional, which are really important descriptors in my mind when it comes to app design. But they feel best to me on a tablet. Both use interface paradigms (buzz word!) that just feel (again, to me) a little overwrought on most mobile phone displays.

I uninstalled them this morning after trying out the new update to Feedly.

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Apathy and ecstasy for the iPhone 5

September 16th 2012 · By Joe Ross · 

Mat Honan, writing at Wired’s Gadget Lab blog:

It is an amazing triumph of technology that gets better and better, year after year, and yet somehow is every bit as exciting as a 25 mph drive through a sensible neighborhood at a reasonable time of day.

I am still waiting for Verizon to push Jelly Bean to my Galaxy Nexus. Meanwhile, the damn thing throws a force-close dialogue every couple of hours, stutters whenever I try to switch between apps, and occasionally reboots itself just for fun.

My fiancée has had an iPhone 4 for a little over a year, so I’ve had a lot of time to sit on the couch late at night and compare the two phones (like the unashamed geek one has to be to do such things…). The verdict is clear, quick, and simple: go Android for customization and Gmail (a far bigger point in Android’s favor than non-Gmail users might imagine…) but go iPhone for stability and app availability.

That has been the state of things for some time, and it’s no different with the introduction of the iPhone 5, iOS 6, or Android Jelly Bean.

Maybe it’s because I’m 29 this year, but my desire to customize the hell out of my phone is fading fast, especially at the high cost of stability. I’ll always keep an Android phone or two around for playing with custom ROMs, but I need something more refined for my primary phone.

Also, I’ve found on other Android devices that the four-inch display is my preference. The older iPhone displays were too small, and the Galaxy Nexus, at 4.6 inches, is a bit too large. Some people are complaining that iPhone 5 looks the same, just as the 4S looked the same. But it doesn’t: it has a bigger display and a thinner depth, without sacrificing anything in the spec department. That’s change enough for me.

Honan nailed it: iPhone 5 is great and it’s whatever. But it’s stable, app-rich, uniformly-updated whatever. And unless my first experience with it in a store or from a friend’s unit is surprisingly negative, it’s what I’m getting the next time I need a new phone.

Say Hello to Samsung's Fanboy Factory - The Mobilers Program ↗

September 7th, 2012 · Shared by Joe Ross

Indian mobile tech blogger Clinton Jeff of Unleash the Phones, talking to The Next Web’s Brad McCarty:

We got a call from Samsung India saying ‘You can either be a part of this and wear the uniform, or you’ll have to get your own tickets back home and handle your hotel stay from the moment this call ends…

Samsung released a statement calling the debacle a “misunderstanding” but only apologized to Mr. Jeff in the privately-emailed version of the statement. They said:

I would like to reach out to you and deeply apologize to you for your experience in Berlin at IFA. We put you through undue hardship and we are trying to rectify the situation.

Samsung’s behavior is inexcusable, and even worse for the lack of a public apology.

Cloud startup aims to make “dumb” cell phones smart ↗

August 24th, 2012 · Shared by Joe Ross

Sean Gallagher reports at Ars Technica on biNu, a company developing an asynchronous, server-side smartphone emulator in Java. The system’s low-bandwidth, high-security nature makes it a perfect fit for countries where the next iPhone is out of reach.

Read Gallagher’s article for the details. This is far more exciting to me than the next iPhone. Networked mobile computing technology is still in its infancy when it comes to worldwide availability and adoption. Clever technology like biNu’s may help change that.