Yesterday, I attended GigaOM’s RoadMap conference in San Francisco and got to check out Tesla’s upcoming Model S sedan. It’s an electric car. That’s neat. But the thing that got me excited was the fact that it sports a built-in 17″ touch screen right where you’d expect to see conventional gauges and knobs. More thoughts and photos over at CNET.
Yesterday, after writing about Android fragmentation, I ran into a friend at a conference. He began ranting about a particular type of fragmentation: The way wireless carriers muck up Google’s operating system with junkware, promotional stuff, pointless tweaks, and general bloat that makes the operating system less usable. He got pretty worked up about it. I agreed it was a problem.
I wondered why no company has taken up the challenge of building…well, the iPhone of Android phones. Something that’s elegant, approachable, uncluttered, and respectful of the consumer’s intelligence. Any bundled services would need to be beautifully integrated rather than just shoveled onto the phone indiscriminately, as the apps on Android handsets often are.
And then it hit me: Why not Amazon?
Apple has released iOS 5.0.1, its first update to iOS 5. It fixes a few things–most notably the bug(s) that left some users finding their batteries draining at an unnaturally rapid clip. See the screen shot above for other issues it addresses.
I haven’t installed it yet, since the battery glitch didn’t seem to affect my devices (and, last time I checked, I wasn’t Australian.) But I’m intrigued by the fact that it’s the first iOS update that most folks will get that’s installable over-the-air, with no need to download it to a computer first. (Until iOS 5 came along, over-the-air updates were a nifty feature that Android users had and iOS ones didn’t.) If you’ve snagged the update–either wirelessly or with a computer as middleman–let us know how it went.
Apparently not all game publishers soaked in the lessons from Sony’s Playstation Network hack last April. Valve, which runs the popular Steam PC game service, said one of its databases was compromised over the weekend. The database contained user names, hashed and salted passwords, purchase information, e-mail addresses, billing addresses and encrypted credit card information.
“We do not have evidence that encrypted credit card numbers or personally identifying information were taken by the intruders, or that the protection on credit card numbers or passwords was cracked. We are still investigating,” Valve’s co-founder and managing director, Gabe Newell, said in a statement.
Still, Newell told Steam users to watch their credit card statements and activity closely.
The breach stems from an intrusion into Valve’s Steam forums. After investigating, Valve discovered that the hack went beyond the Steam forums, but there’s still no evidence of compromised information beyond a handful of forum accounts.
“We do not know of any compromised Steam accounts, so we are not planning to force a change of Steam account passwords (which are separate from forum passwords). However, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to change that as well, especially if it is the same as your Steam forum account password,” Newell said.
So, it’s a security blunder on Valve’s part, and now everyone who’s used Steam should probably change their passwords to be on the safe side. Frustrating? Sure, but at least Newell has the humility to do something that took Sony a long time to accomplish: he apologized. “I am truly sorry this happened,” Newell’s statement concludes, “and I apologize for the inconvenience.”
My Technologizer column on TIME.com this week is about the ongoing problem of Android fragmentation–and in particular the fact that even very cool Android handsets get the newest version of the operating system only months after it’s available on other phones, or sometimes not at all.
At least I think that this is a problem. And when I write about it–which I often have–it comes from the heart. I own a Verizon Fascinate phone, and would love to use Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich on it. But I’m not even sure if the Fascinate, which was released just fourteen months ago, will ever get the year-old Gingerbread update, let alone ICS.
Whenever I mention the words “Android” and “fragmentation” in the same post, however, I hear from people who think I’m…well, hallucinating. They say either that Android fragmentation isn’t a big deal, or that it’s good.
If it’s a cheap tablet you’re after, Barnes & Noble and Amazon want your business. Amazon’s $199 Kindle Fire and Barnes & Noble’s $249 Nook Tablet both look promising on paper—the former with its suite of Amazon services, and latter with its superior specs and more diverse streaming video offerings—but chances are, you’ve only got room for one tablet on your holiday wish list.
As is often the case with gadgets, finding the best 7-inch tablet is a matter of figuring out your personal needs. Below, I’ll divvy up the strengths of the Nook Tablet and Kindle Fire so you can figure out what’s most important.
Wait, in the United Kingdom, Siri is a guy?
Polaroid news! PCWorld’s Robert S. Anthony reports on the new Z340, a new digital camera from Polaroid that, more than any of its previous digicams, hearkens back to its instant-photography glory days. It not only spits out prints, but can make them look like classic Polaroids, complete with the off-center white border.
Dan Frommer of SplatF weighs in on the death of mobile Flash–and thinks that Adobe is in okay shape overall:
Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen isn’t a magician, but he’s proving that he’s not a dummy. Today, Adobe — in theory — has a plan. And now it’s time to deliver.
Commenter Ridd make a good point about Flash over at this story by Erica Ogg on why mobile Flash failed:
The real reason why Adobe is dropping Flash mobile support is not iPhone. It is Windows 8.
Microsoft made it very clear that they won’t allow Flash to run in Windows 8 Metro browser and they are pushing HTML5 as a platform. You do not need a crystal ball to see that without Windows’ (which runs on 95% of PCs worldwide) support, Flash is dead. It will be supported for legacy reasons for a while, but it has no future.
Windows 8 isn’t a mobile operating system–it’s an OS that aims to run well on both mobile devices and garden-variety, traditional computers. If its browser doesn’t support Flash–or any plug-in, how much longer will Flash in any form live on?
