Month: April 2011

From Asymco:

Microsoft already has lost its position as leader in personal technology. The end actually came in about 2000. Once Windows became “good enough” and did not crash so much, they have had a hard time finding something to improve.

This isn’t altogether true in an absolute sense, but compare the leap from Windows 2000 to Windows 7 with where Apple has taken Mac OS X in the same time (just look at Lion). This is where Apple’s deep integration with hardware makes really *useful* innovation possible.

Footnote: see where Microsoft has taken Office in this same period, where it hasn’t needed to depend on hardware integration.

Interviewed today by Business Standard:

100 million Internet users in India

16 hours a week spent on the Internet (on average)

Online advertising spend is now more than Rs. 1000 crore per year (4% of overall advertising)

Of 35 million SMEs in India, just 1.8 million have at least 1 PC

An Infoworld experiment with Flash on Android:

The UI turns into a tug-of-war between the browser and the Flash Player, where each touch produces varying effects, seemingly at random. Depending on where your finger happens to land — and maybe on your timing — one touch might be interpreted as a command for the browser and the next might activate controls in a Flash movie, while the next might do nothing. Adobe simply has not done enough to accommodate touch-based interfaces.

The conclusion?

If you were hoping the Flash player would enable a whole new world of content, you will be disappointed. Flash sites on Android devices are utterly hit or miss. And if you’re deploying Flex applications for your business to be accessed on mobile devices, my advice is to switch to HTML immediately.

Turns out there’s a chasm between “supports” and “works”.

Walt Mossberg reviews the Samsung Series 9 ultra-thin laptop:

The comparison with the MacBook Air, also a halo-type laptop, is inescapable. Unlike most Windows laptops, but like the Apple, the new Samsung has a large touch pad with no buttons—the entire pad is a button.

Also features a sealed battery, no wired-Ethernet port and no DVD drive. Also thinner than the Macbook Air at the thicker edge (the hinge). So far so good.

Then again, it’s more expensive. $350 more for the mainstream version and $200 more for the upcoming 11-inch version. Of course, that’s because it has better hardware: a new processor, newer USB, more RAM, brighter screen.

And here’s the kicker:

But better specs don’t always translate into a better experience. For instance, in my tests, I found that the Mac was typically ready to work a couple of seconds faster than the Samsung and that, while the Samsung booted up and rebooted very quickly for a Windows PC, the Mac started and restarted in about half the time.

But the biggest difference, in my experience, was battery life. Both companies claim their competing laptops can get up to seven hours of use between charges. But my tests suggest that Samsung falls well short of that claim, while Apple meets or exceeds it.

Throwing money at a problem is just the half of it.