Opera Mini for iOS gets an update. (Joseph Keller/iMore)
Whatever happened to the Facebook Phone? (Mike Isaac/NYTimes)
Apple ends development of Aperture. (Matthew Panzarino/TechCrunch)
Want to try Android L? Emulate it. (Kevin C. Tofel/GigaOm)
“OK Google” voice control comes to all Android phones. (Kif Leswing/GigaOm)
Larry Page and Sundar Pichai talk Google I/O news. (Farhad Manjoo/New York Times)
Where were Glass and Google+? (Matthew Panzarino/TechCrunch)
Hands on with the Moto 360 smartwatch. (Pete Pachal/Mashable)
More smart-home stuff to come from Apple? (Mark Gurman/9to5Mac)
Fly app lets you shoot video with four iPhones at once. (Ellis Hamburger/The Verge)
How the Supreme Court got the Aereo case wrong. (Mark McKenna/Slate)
One of many giant Androids towering over the human attendees at Google I/O at San Francisco’s Moscone Center
If you’re looking for a good straightforward recap of the news which Google made during its I/O keynote on Wednesday morning, stop reading this post. Instead, head over to Mat Honan’s fine summary over at Wired. And then, if you’re still interested in the topic, come back here for my initial musings.
Jeff Bezos brandishes the Fire Phone at Amazon’s media event in Seattle on June 18, 2014
Week before last, Jeff Bezos sent journalists who had been invited to the company’s media event a copy of his favorite childhood book: Leonard Kessler’s Mr. Pine’s Purple House. Mr. Pine painted his home purple so it would stand out from his neighbors’ houses; Bezos included a note alluding to the world “being a better place when things are a bit different.”
As expected, the news at the media event was the launch of Amazon’s first smartphone, the Fire Phone. In multiple ways, it is indeed a purple house–a phone which strives to carve off a distinct niche for itself rather than match what Apple and makers of Android phones are doing.
Piper Jaffray recently conducted a survey about consumer sentiments towards wearable devices–including the “Apple iWatch” which, it now seems certain, will be released later this year. As Fortune’s Philip Elmer-DeWitt reports, 36 percent of respondents would pay between $100 and $200 for the iWatch, 14 percent would pay $350, and 14 percent wouldn’t buy one at any price. DeWitt says that those numbers prompted the author of Piper Jaffray’s study to estimate that Apple could sell between five and ten million iWatches in the device’s first year on the market.
Can we just say it? Research of this type doesn’t tell us anything worth knowing about Apple’s device and how well it might sell, because the survey respondents who said they would or wouldn’t buying it were expressing opinions based on insufficient information.
Even if you’re paying really close attention to rumors about Apple’s wearables–such as these ones and these ones–you know very little about the device, in part because rumors can be false, and in part because scuttlebutt about specs tells you virtually nothing about what the experience of using an iWatch might be like. And the respondents to Piper Jaffray’s survey presumably aren’t maniacally refreshing MacRumors and AppleInsider to stay on top of the latest news.
Even after a company announces a product, gut instincts about it don’t tell you all that much. Especially when the company in question is Apple, which has a better track record of redefining categories than any of its competitors, in ways that can be difficult to understand at first. Recall, if you will, the reception that the iPhone got after Steve Jobs unveiled it in January of 2007: It wasn’t the least bit difficult to find people who thought it would flop.
In a rational world, 100 percent of the people who Piper Jaffray asked about their iWatch-buying intentions would have answered “How the hell should I know at this point?” They didn’t. So it’s incumbent on us to remember that none of us know enough about Apple’s wearable to form opinions about it–including whether we want one.
FAA to Amazon: no drone delivery. (David Kravets/Ars Technica)
Sundar Pichai, Google’s Chrome/Android honcho. (Brad Stone/Businessweek)
So far, Google’s Nest Labs home automation arm makes two smart, web-enabled devices: the Nest thermostat and Nest Protect smoke/CO detector. The count will go to three when the company finalizes its agreement to acquire the startup behind the Dropcam security camera.
Those products, of course, are outnumbered by vast and growing quantities of smart-home hardware and software created by other companies. And from now on, some of the most interesting things which Nest’s devices do may be actions they perform in concert with third-party gear.
Tim Cook is doing a smart job of prepping Apple for its next big thing. (Dan Frommer/Quartz)
Felix Dennis, founder of MacUser and many other computer magazines–and an amazing character–has died. (David Hepworth/The Guardian)
Surface Pro 3 teardown. (iFixit)
Quirky spins off Wink, an OS for the smart home. (Steve Lohr, NYTimes)
Previewing Google’s IO conference, which starts on Wednesday. (Darrell Etherington/TechCrunch)
300,000 systems are still vulnerable to the Heartbleed vulnerability. (Robert Graham/Errata Security)
Starting shortly, Microsoft is upgrading the storage plans it offers for OneDrive, the online storage service formerly known as SkyDrive. You’ll get 15GB of space for free, which the company says is enough for 75 percent of users to store all the files on their PC in the cloud. (Until now, freeloaders have received a base allotment of 7GB.) Paid OneDrive tiers will offer 100GB for $1.99 a month or 200GB for $3.99 a month, a 70 percent reduction from previous pricing.
All of this is nice, but hardly surprising: It’s unquestionably a response to the similar moves which Google made with Google Drive back in March.
But Microsoft has another piece of OneDrive news which is at least a trifle startling–and which nobody else can quite match. The company is radically increasing the amount of storage it bundles with the consumer-oriented versions of Office 365, the subscription-based version of the Office productivity suite.
Surface Pro 3 manual alludes to Surface Mini. (Brad Linder/Lilliputing)
More rumors about the iWatch. (Eva Dou & Lorraine Luk/WSJ)
Google spills more Android Wear beans. (Lauren Goode/Re/code)
Amazon is using DRM to hold Hachette hostage. (Cory Doctorow/The Guardian)
