Technobabble

Interesting article about someone’s experience with an Android phone – the Samsung Charge: Why My Mom Bought an Android, Returned It, and Got an iPhone . This is an article by someone who loves Android. I think for anyone who doesn’t want to root their phone, the Android experience is hit-or-miss. Between Google and the various carriers, there’s no consistency and eventually that leads to a diluted brand. This comment by JamesKatt sums it up perfectly: The problem with Android is that the hardware manufacturers do not want to be generic phone device makers.  They want to differentiate themselves in order to compete successfully in the smartphone market. However, to differentiate themselves, they have to muck up and lock down the Android OS, install their own version of the user interface, and install crappy apps that you can't remove.  They also encrypt the OS so you cannot modify the system. This is why the experience is so poor for Android phone users - other than the one...

MacWorld has a pretty decent review of the HP Touch Pad . Seems like a pretty decent entry by HP into the tabled market. However I wanted to highlight one piece from the review: The TouchPad’s specs are state of the art, right down to the dual-core Snapdragon processor that powers it. Yet at times I found the TouchPad puzzlingly sluggish. (I had the same complaint when I used the dual-core Motorola Xoom Android tablet , to be fair.) Sometimes I think one of the most important achievements of Apple’s iOS development team is completely overlooked by most reviewers: the fact that on iOS devices, when you move your finger, the on-screen objects under your finger move along with it. No lag, no judder of dropped frames, just a pure illusion that you’re physically manipulating an object. Almost every time I have tried a new Android phone or tablet—and when I tried the TouchPad—I am surprised to find that the interface just isn’t as responsive as Apple’s. This is something I have observed a...