Facebook Testing VIP App With Some Celebs

Facebook Testing VIP App With Some Celebs

101 million of Facebook's 128 million daily U.S. users are on mobile devices

101 million of Facebook’s 128 million daily U.S. users are on mobile devices

Twitter kills TweetDeck, announces it on Posterous, which they're also killing

Twitter kills TweetDeck, announces it on Posterous, which they’re also killing

NYPD subpoenas call logs of stolen cell phones

NYPD subpoenas call logs of stolen cell phones

Philly is lost-phone central

Philly is lost-phone central

Over 50% of Android phones still run Gingerbread

Over 50% of Android phones still run Gingerbread

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

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

Sloppy SSL implementation begets Android app vulnerabilities

Sloppy SSL implementation begets Android app vulnerabilities

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

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

Apple Is Heavily Promoting Alternative Map Apps In The App Store

Virgin Mobile USA's inadequate response to a good-faith vulnerability disclosure

Virgin Mobile USA’s inadequate response to a good-faith vulnerability disclosure

The New Feedly Mobile

The New Feedly Mobile

Apathy and ecstasy for the iPhone 5

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.

Apple's Comfortable Middle

Hamish McKenzie, writing at PandoDaily :

With two product launches in a row that show Apple is merely keeping pace with innovation rather than leading it, the world’s most valuable company will start to seem mortal.

I disagree.

For the record, I’m usually on board with Mr. McKenzie’s analyses, and I think he’s right that the iPhone 5 doesn’t restore the staggering lead Apple once had in smartphone innovation. I just don’t agree that there is any probable circumstance in which the iPhone 5 marks the beginning of the end of Apple’s dominance. I want him to be right, but I believe it will take action on the part of Apple’s competitors, rather than mere inaction from Cupertino, to catalyze that descent from the pinnacle.

I want to see something truly threaten Apple’s dominance: it would be good for consumers and even good for Apple, potentially motivating just the sort of next-generation innovation everyone wishes we saw with the iPhone 5. But Android is peddled in an ever-changing array of hardware of wildly varying quality, its interface often marred by manufacturer “improvements” and carrier-mandated bloatware, with no cohesive or remotely predictable software upgrade schedule.

Yes, it’s customizable, “open” (depending on how you define the term), and a provider of competitive pressure. In fact, Android, the OS, in its pristine Jelly Bean state on glorious hardware, is functional and gorgeous. But Android, the experience and, for lack of a better word, the brand, is truly a mess.

Then, there is the iPhone.

Apple tried for years to make things people loved. They succeeded. Now they are in the business of making improvements on the things they make that people love. And they’re succeeding there, too.

Whether or not they revolutionize TV next, and whether or not they drastically refresh iOS in the next couple of years, I think they’re still comfortably in the middle of their dominance, and at the top of their game.

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

Say Hello to Samsung’s Fanboy Factory - The Mobilers Program

Cloud startup aims to make “dumb” cell phones smart

Cloud startup aims to make “dumb” cell phones smart

Flipboard, Condé Nast, and the Mobile Advertising Problem (Updated)

Howard Mittman, VP and publisher at Condé Nast property Wired Magazine, told Ad Age's Nat Ives:

I’m interested in ways to bring advertisers in front of our community. When Flipboard becomes that, I would love to reengage and reinvigorate our product. Until then, we have to wait and see and not allow intermediaries to build their own platforms without direct monetizable benefit back to us.

This is somewhere between a rock and a hard place. People who consume solely through Flipboard — a group I suspect is growing all the time — might not bother clicking through. The friction meant to induce users to view Wired.com might end up dramatically cutting the number of folks reading Wired’s content. I don’t know what the right answer is, but I don’t think it’s “teaser” sentences.

The ad experience on mobile is already dismal for the user — I only interact with mobile ads by accident. There must be a better way. I know Wired and other content creators need viable revenue streams, and that traditionally the primary stream has been advertising.

But the web, particularly the mobile web, doesn’t even allow for the glossy full-pagers that magazines do. Those full-pagers can be compelling, and what’s more, they can be blended with the magazine itself.

A glossy full-page ad about the newest gaming laptop would be well-received in an issue focusing on gaming hardware, consoles, and next-generation systems. The same connection is much harder to make on mobile, where space is as precious to the publisher selling the ads as it is to the reader teaching himself how to visually avoid them. Flipboard is so popular because it involves us in the content consumption beyond merely staring at a screen. It’s subtle, but that flip is oddly engaging.

If the platform won’t accomodate your advertising, it’s time for your advertising to accomodate the platform. A headline and a single teaser sentence make for bad user experience: either find a way to participate in full, or get out altogether. Half-measures suggest a lack of innovation and a willingness to make user experience secondary to revenue, when user experience is what brings (and keeps) the eyeballs that bring (and keep) the advertising dollars.

Why can’t an advertisement be “Flipboard-ized?” Why not include in Wired's Flipboard stream an article entitled “Ad: Alienware M18x Moves Gaming Laptops into the 21st Century,” accompanied by stunning images of the inner workings and outer design of the machine? This offers the same “unified experience” of which a full-page print magazine ad is capable, but maintains the user experience that makes Flipboard so popular.

Updated 8:30pm: Alexia Tsotsis briefly interviewed Flipboard CEO Mike McCue about the New York Times’ integration into Flipboard. All digital subscribers to the Times can access the newspaper’s full array of online content via Flipboard. More interesting is the fact that the paper’s Flipboard content will also include advertisements described by McCue as “full page, print style advertising.” I respectfully request some credit for at least independently coming up with the model used by the Flipboard/NYT partnership (I somehow missed Tsotsis’ headline while writing this post), but I’m happy to see someone is at least trying it out.

Something like this seems to be working for Facebook on mobile, according a story by Josh Constine at TechCrunch. Facebook’s formidable data farm social network struggled to find a viable advertising solution to massive uptake in mobile use, and they appear to be on to something.

Maybe organic inline advertising isn’t the solution for every mobile advertising problem, but it’s an example of the fact that this problem is solvable. My Flipboard/Wired suggestion probably has weaknesses, but let’s have that conversation. Let’s argue about how the interests of publishers, users, and adverstisers, for all of their apparent conflict, often converge on great value propositions: content and ads that are well-built, well-tailored, and complimentary to one another, rather than shoe-horned next to one another in a way that damages the user experience and decreases all forms of value for everyone.

No Pressure

Analyst Brian Marshall, to SFGate’s Jun Yang:

As the markets get more saturated, the pressure will be much stronger to add more screen sizes.

"Today, the answer is no," he said. "Down the road, the answer is yes," he said.

No way.

The only source of pressure on Apple to do anything is the company’s own design language and direction. If they ever made iPhones with larger screens, it would be for their own reasons, like maybe the retina display deserves a slightly larger screen on which to show off its awesomeness.

But there’s already the iPad for that.

It won’t ever be to reach “lower-cost segments” like another analyst told Yang, because Apple’s strategy for that is to slice the price of older iPhone models to the bone whenever a new one comes out. There’s your lower-cost segment. They’ve been doing it for some time now, with narry a > 3.5 inch screen in sight.


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