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State of the Smartphones: iPhone up, Android up, RIMM screwedSeptember 1

Ok look. Let’s be honest, right now there’s only two significant players in the smartphone marketplace. iOS/iPhone and Android. They’re the only two with modern technology, marketplace momentum and consumer mindshare. RIMM is coasting but ultimately going to have it’s ass handed to it. Symbian? Is anyone still buying their phone on purpose? WebOS? Ok.. I have a nuanced opinion of that, while it’s currently dead – there’s the outside chance that HP could actually build something good with it. Windows Phone 7? Well… who knows?

So the clear winners here are the iPhone and Android Phone. That’s just not going to change. They’ll battle with each other, in as much as they are competitors but there’s room enough for two. Android winning doesn’t make the iPhone lose and vice versa. The marketplace will bear more than 1 smartphone OS. For years there was Blackberry, PalmOS and Symbian, no? Sure things have changed, but phones are personal devices so room for taste makes room for multiple successful competitors. In near future especially, it simply is not a zero sum game. Anyway, enough with the iPhone and Android words – I’m sure I’ve posted and will continue to post more than enough about them.

Now for the others…

RIMM. Poor RIMM. I’ve been calling them for years – last January I suggested they needed a new OS and was somewhat hopeful that they’d r

IE7 for Windows Phone 7 could massively suck…August 24

…for mobile web developers at least. Saw Steven’s post about IE7 on Windows Phone 7 on WinExtra and read through it and clicked through to the video showing off the new browser and comparing it to the browsers on the iPhone 4 and Nexus One. Obviously hard to say anything conclusive, but the video shows a browser that is clearly in the same ballpark as the two webkit based browser – speedy with all the touch trimmings you’d expect from a smartphone browser.

So yes, that’s good – the browser is the new bellweather for smartphone OS’s. The problem with it isn’t the speed or multitouchiness the problem is that it is based on IE7. The same browser that gives fits to every web developer on the desktop. Sure, IE7 isn’t nearly as bad as IE6, but IE8 is better and IE9 may prove to actually be a browser that isn’t the lesser of evils, rather it may actively be a good standards compliant browser (time will tell on that).

What will IE7 on the smartphone mean? Well, if Windows Phone 7 bombs as Microsoft’s history of product launches suggests it might – well then, it means nothing as everyone will simply ignore it. But on the off chance that Windows Phone lives up to the hype it is receiving and actually becomes a viable player in the spac

The Web is dead? Wired, please.August 17

UPDATE Wed Aug 18 14:09:30 EDT 2010: Technologizer posts a fantastic piece on all the things that are currently dead, according to our fine journalists. Super great, except, well, netbooks really are dead. ;)

Journalists simply can not pass up a chance to declare something dead. It is impossible for them. They love declaring stuff dead. They can’t get enough of it. Seriously. So, Wired has declared the Web dead. Yup, folks, the web is dead. Over. Kaput. Browser wars may as well end – Firefox, Safari, Chrome and IE are fighting each other tooth and nail over a carcass. It’s over babies.

Where is their proof of this? Well, they actually don’t offer any actual evidence that this is the case. Like, they don’t write words to the effect of “we looked at these numbers which show this trend which support our thesis that the web is dead”. No, they talk about how you wake up in the morning and check your email on your iPad. So the web is dead. Nevermind that you go to work, open up your browser and go to gmail like 100 times during the course of your day. (hey, it’s not my fault your job is so boring.)

The one thing they do show at the top of the page is a chart showing the relative perce

iPhone Panorama App Review: See This vs 360 PanoramaAugust 2

Ok, I love panorama apps. My current go to is Autostitch, although I do use Pano and PanoLab on some occasion. After hearing about Sony’s sweep panorama I’ve been breathlessly waiting for something like that to hit the iPhone – I thought my prayers had been answered twice, but dashed hopes – one after the other. First up was Boinx’s slightly annoyingly named You Gotta See This – a let down because it just tiles pictures up collage style on normal to increasingly cheesy backgrounds, it doesn’t join them at all. Then I saw that Occipital had released 360 Panorama which seemed to be just the thing. Sadly, I simply can not get it to provide a good, non-blurry picture. So the search goes on – I’m hoping that the Autostitch guys will come up with something good!

Boinx You Gotta See This

So, this app has all kinds of problems. Let’s start at the beginning. You open it up and your eyes are bombarded with some kind of crazy rainbow, optical illusion, sphere background thing

I don’t get Steve BallmerAugust 1

UPDATE: Oh, I totally forgot, he honestly discounts Android in that piece. “[if we can't compete with] whatever the weird collection of Android machines is going to look like, shame on us.” Riiight, because um, Windows Mobile, or the Zune, or the Kin or whatever random thing Microsoft has been doing shows their leadership in the marketplace. I mean, Microsoft’s efforts in um, anything they do clearly shows their track record at gaining marketshare at an Android like pace. MY GOD.

I don’t get Steve Ballmer. At all. I don’t really understand what he’s actually good at and what arguments anyone has for keeping him on as the CEO of Microsoft. Seriously. What is he good at? It doesn’t seem like he understands technology. When you hear him speak, it sounds like he has no idea what he’s talking about when it comes to the future. This transcript of him at the last Microsoft financial analyst meeting I mean, it barely sounds like he speaks english.

But at least in the timeframe that which anybody does these models, for example, let’s go. Let’s go and we’ll be in market as soon as we can with new devices, whether that’s, you know, really, really soon or just really pretty soon. I’m going to wait until I have the device that I want to hand you and tell you to go use, or a collection of devices. I think that would be the appropriate time