Technologizer » Google

Google Goggles That Really Are Goggles

Harry McCracken — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 21:38:17 +0000

Seth Weintraub of 9to5Google reports that Google is working on smart eyeglasses with a built-in heads up display that knows where you are and shows relevant Google info:

The heads up display (HUD) is only for one eye and on the side. It is not transparent nor does it have dual 3D configurations, as previously speculated.

One really cool bit: The navigation system currently used is a head tilting-to scroll and click. We are told it is very quick to learn and once the user is adept at navigation, it becomes second nature and almost indistinguishable to outside users.

Google isn’t the only company working on this idea–for instance when I visited NTT Docomo in Tokyo last fall, I tried out a similar prototype which that company had designed in collaboration with Olympus. But I wonder who’ll be the first to ship something that actually works and is useful?

Which Phone OS Crashes More? It’s Not Android

Ed Oswald — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 15:52:25 +0000

The argument that iOS is a much more stable operating system than Android has been repeated on the blogs and even in the comment threads of stories about the two operating systems. There’s a problem, though: the data indicates that is untrue.

Mobile app monitoring company Crittercism released data Friday on crash reports from the period December 1 through December 15, and saying iOS has stability issues is putting it nicely. By a 2-to-1 margin, iOS crashes much more frequently than Android, according to Crittercism’s report. The biggest offender is iOS 5.0.1, accounting for 28.64 percent of all crashes.

By comparison, the most crash-prone Android operating system is 2.3.3, accounting for 3.86 percent of reports. That’s a huge difference and is sure to get the Apple blogosphere in an uproar over the survey’s methodology.

Yes, the firm’s work did have a disproportionate number of iOS devices in the test (162 million to 52 million for Android). However, to blunt that criticism, Crittercism split the data into quartiles, and looked at the crashes as a percentage of app launches.

The story is the same. In the top quartile, iOS apps crashed .51 percent of the time versus .15 percent for Android; in the second quartile 1.47 percent to .73 percent; and in the bottom quartile 3.66 percent to 2.97 percent. The data favors Android once again.

What’s causing the instability in iOS? It’s a good question without an easy answer. Apple’s walled garden approach in the App Store could leave a disproportionate number of users with outdated and buggy apps. Developers must wait to get updates approved by Apple just like the first time they submitted their apps; Android developers can choose to allow for auto-updating without any need for the Android market.

Even Apple’s iAd is at fault: Crittercism received reports that the Cupertino, Calif. company’s advertising platform at times does not play nice with developers’ ads, causing instability.

One caveat: Crittercism’s data period is early enough that Ice Cream Sandwich crash data may not be accurately reflected. The firm says it expects the percentages of crashes on the newest version to increase significantly in future data sets.

Either way, the data puts to bed a misconception over the stability of Android, and raises new questions about iOS. Does Android have better quality developers, then? You might be able to argue yes.

[Hat tip: Forbes]

The Curse of “Don’t Be Evil”

Harry McCracken — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 21:01:26 +0000

So it’s official: By merging its various privacy policies into one master policy that permits it to intermingle the things it knows about you, Google has become evil. Or at least that’s the stance of Gizmodo’s Mat Honan, who isn’t alonein his furor:

Honan’s declaration of evil is a riff on Google’s famous unofficial motto, “Don’t be evil,” which was apparently proposed by staffers Paul Buchheit and Amit Patel at a 2001 meeting. Google continues to saying that not being evil is one of its core principles to this day. So the fact that Honan and others are saying that the company has finally crossed an ethical line into evilhood is a unique, sad moment in Google history.

Except…

People have been accusing Google of being evil–or at least wondering whether it has become so–for almost as long as Google has been claiming that it isn’t evil. I can’t lay my hands on any examples from 2001 or 2002, but it became a hot topic in 2003 and has never let up.

Consider these pieces of evidence (one for each year!).

Josh McHugh in Wired, January 2003:

Andrew Orlowski, The Register, April 2004:

Preston Gralla on Windows DevCenter, August 2005:

Adam Penenberg in Mother Jones, October 2006:

Mike Masnick on Techdirt, April 2007:

Saul Hansell on NYTimes.com, November 2008:

Edward Cone on CIO Insight, October 2009:

Adam Green on the The Huffington Post, August 2010:

Robert X. Cringely, InfoWorld, August 2011:

At first, back when Google was largely uncontroversial, “Don’t be evil” seemed like it was a marketing masterstroke. If Google said it wasn’t evil, people assumed, it wasn’t evil.

Overall, though, I think it’s been an albatross for the company. By being holier-than-thou, it practically demanded that the world hold it to a higher standard. Maybe a standard that it’s impossible for a large public company to maintain. (If it were Yahoo making these privacy changes, nobody would care.)

Now Google can’t ever backpedal on its promise. Whether it’s tweaking its privacy policies in ways that might bolster advertising, or promoting Google+ in Google search results, it’s going to be on the defensive forever.

No, Google isn’t evil. But it is at least as prone to human frailties as any other entity. And thinking that it would be a good idea to declare itself as more moral than other companies is Exhibit A.

What if Google Helped Eliminate the iPhone 4S and iCloud From the Market?

Harry McCracken — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 21:12:34 +0000

Wow. FOSS Patents’ Florian Mueller, the go-to blogger for analysis of the mobile patent wars, says that Google has given Motorola Mobility, which it’s in the process of acquiring, permission to seek an injunction preventing Apple from selling the iPhone 4S and iCloud. Steve Jobs told biographer Walter Isaacson he was willing to go “thermonuclear” on Android; the longer these lawsuits last and the nastier they get, the more the whole thing does start to feel like warfare.

A Look at Ice Cream Sandwich for Tablets

Harry McCracken — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 17:43:04 +0000

I’m still hoping that Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich will help make Android tablets interesting to consumers in a way that Honeycomb-based Android tablets have not been. I haven’t tried one for myself yet. But JR Raphael of Computerworld has an Asus Transformer Prime with ICS–and he’s put together a nice walkthrough of the interface.

Life is Not a Picnik: Google Closes Its Cool Photo-Editing Service

Harry McCracken — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 00:22:44 +0000

Okay, it looks like Google really is serious about its oft-stated plans to focus on fewer services and do them better. (Also known as “more wood behind fewer arrows.”) It’s announced that it’s shuttering even more offerings, and one of them is Picnik, the excellent online photo editor which it bought in 2010.

The closure isn’t abrupt or catastrophic. Google is giving Picnik users plenty of warning–the service isn’t going away until April 19th–and they’ll be able to download their photos. But unlike some of Google’s shutdowns, closing Picnik isn’t a tacit acknowledgment that a service never found an audience. (I never heard of Google’s Gmail Message Continuity and Social Graph API until the company said they were going away.) Picnik is popular, and it’s good, and the world will be a sadder place place without it–at least for folks who already know and love it.

Why is it going away? That’s not entirely clear. Google’s blog post says it’s so “the Picnik team can continue creating photo-editing magic across Google products. ” But when you go to Picnik, you get a message that “Picnik is moving its easy yet powerful photo editing tools to Google+,” which is a slightly different message. In either case, though, it sounds like Google thinks that photo editing is less of a destination, which is what Picnik was, and more of a feature.

It’s also worth noting that Picnik was Flash-based. This is just guesswork on my part, but it likely hastened the service’s demise. It certainly made it harder to integrate its features with other Google services, and probably even reduced Google’s enthusiasm for pointing to Picnik from elsewhere on Google

If Picnik had lived, it would surely have required a rewrite to become a pure HTML5 service, which would have been a major undertaking. I imagine that Google is busily working on improving its HTML5 graphics tools, and decided it wasn’t worth it to try and roll them into an all-new version of Picnik.

In fact, it’s pretty clear that Google circa 2012 is generally less interested in managing a bunch of destinations, and more interested in beefing up Google+. It wants to give you every possible incentive to join and use its social network. In the future, I imagine, many new Google things that would have been independent services in the past will instead be launched as Google+ additions.

Side note: When I tried to visit Picnik on my iPad just now, I got the following message. You might want to update it, Google.

Google’s Risky Gambit

Harry McCracken — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 22:17:37 +0000

My latest TIME.com Technologizer column: Why Google’s new search/social mashup, Search, Plus Your World, is so unsatisfying. At least to me.

Phineas J. Whoopee, You’re Like Google

Harry McCracken — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 07:57:59 +0000

TIME’s James Poniewozik makes a point that seems obvious, how that I think of it: Tennessee Tuxedo, the semi-educational 1960s TV cartoon starring Don Adams as a penguin, featured elements that are uncannily reminiscent of Google and the iPad.

The Slippery Slope of Android Differentiation

Ed Oswald — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 18:34:45 +0000

I know I’ve been piling on Android as of late, but I just can’t ignore comments from Motorola CEO Sanjay Jha. Speaking to the Verge at CES on Wednesday, Jha says that phone makers will continue to skin Google’s operating system with their own interfaces, making the possibility of a purer Android experience seem more remote than ever.

Motorola “has to make money” he says, and ”the vast majority of the changes we make to the OS are to meet the requirements that carriers have”. Wait, haven’t we heard this before? On Monday, I wrote that Google no longer has any control over Android, ceding most of it to carriers and it seems, the manufacturer as well.

The problem is that there are just too many Android phones. That makes phones from different manufacturers awfully similar, which makes it hard for any one model to sell well based on sheer distinctiveness. So carriers layer their own user interface tweaks over Android in an attempt to be different.

This strategy isn’t so smart, though. Adding a new layer of customizations to Android only exaggerates the fragmentation of the ecosystem. Yes I understand that most of these tweaks are relatively minor. However with “Android differentiation” accelerating, its only a matter of time before carriers and manufacturers insist on more extreme changes.

Imagine the situation then: You have to worry about the quirks not only from device to device, but from carrier to carrier and platform to platform. That’s a recipe for disaster. Look at some current Android-powered devices like the Nook Tablet — its custom UI is incompatible with some Android apps. That’s just a taste of what could happen with phones.

My BetaNews colleague Joe Wilcox is fond of arguing that Android fragmentation doesn’t matter. I disagree with his premise almost completely, and don’t think he’s taking manufacturer differentiation into account. It’s also an opinion I think is only shared by those with a predisposition for Android, and a dislike for Apple or other stricter platforms.

There’s really a simple solution to this, and it’s for carriers to get off the hamster wheel of device production. Produce far fewer devices, and focus on what’s inside. Differentiate on features and specs, not by throwing a skin on Android itself. I’m willing to bet the side benefit of this will be better phones and far less junk.

Yes, Android fans, its’ wonderful you have such a large selection to choose from. But in the end manufacturers are more interesting in churning out phones for every possible user rather than focus on making a smaller selection of devices that are really, really good. In the end, that’s why not a single Android device has been able to outsell the iPhone 4S, 4, or even the 3GS.

Less is more, my friends.

Which is It, Google? Is Android Open or Not?

Ed Oswald — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 10:28:19 +0000

Lately, it’s not often that I agree with MG Siegler. If you’ve read my work elsewhere, you know I’ve taken issue with some of his coverage of Apple.

But his post explaining his distaste for Android is probably the most cogent argument so far why the platform is falling so far short of its potential.

Android was built on a foundation of good intentions. The platform was supposed to usher in a new mobile era where the power was given to the user to make their device their own. No walled gardens, no censorship, no limits. Supporters of the platform heralded its “openness,” deriding Apple and others for their top-town controlled approach.

It sounded too good to be true, and it pretty much was. Carriers balked at giving up that control and quickly Android became just as tightly controlled as iOS or any other mobile platform. And this is directly a result of Google’s business decisions in the company’s quest for Android market domination.

Siegler points out Google’s deal with Verizon in 2009 for Android, which really was the beginning of the end. Let’s just refresh everybody’s memory here on Verizon’s own strategies. This is the same wireless company that up until a few years ago replaced phone manufacturers’ own operating systems with its own really lousy (and buggy) user interface, which often meant the same phone on another network acted completely differently — and was less functional — on Verizon. The most “open” mobile platform joined forces with one of the most closed mobile providers in the world.

What did you think would happen? Of course something had to give, and it ended up being Android users’ freedom. I found it comical how many of my Android-loving friend’s tunes changed around this time. The same ones who had been arguing until they were blue in the face how much better Android was because of its openness were now telling me that the platform was never open to begin with!

How can you equate those two positions? You can’t. Google folded on Android because it didn’t have the gravitas to stand up to the carriers.

Since then, Google has shrunk into the background, allowing the carriers to set the ground rules rather than sticking to its guns on behalf of users, many of who came to Android because of its so-called openness. These days, the platform is a shell of what it once was — a lot of promise, but often not living up to the hype.

You can’t have openness when it’s convenient: you’re either open or you’re not. Android these days is far from it. I’m willing to bet most users don’t even know how much is locked down in the operating system just because they don’t know any better. That’s pretty sad.

I know many readers here on Technologizer do: I’ve read some of your comments on here, many complaining of the various carriers shutting you out of a particular feature, or being slow as molasses in delivering an update.

Siegler is right in saying Apple has held a consistent position in dictating terms, which has in turn resulted in a uniform experience no matter what carrier you’re on. There is not one feature of your iPhone that is locked down, Apple will have none of that.

Google does need to stop talking out of both sides of its mouth. Either it should open up Android as intended, or end the marketing gimmick of “openness.”