The Blue-Green Divide

I forwarded this WSJ article to
a thread with only iPhone users.

The political extremes live in red and blue echo-chambers, but to the under-30 crowd the more meaningful divide is blue vs green and has nothing to do with politics.

Apple got creative in its protection of iMessage’s exclusivity. It didn’t ban the exchange of traditional text messages with Android users but instead branded those messages with a different color; when an Android user is part of a group chat, the iPhone users see green bubbles rather than blue. It also withheld certain features.

There is no dot-dot-dot icon to demonstrate that a non-iPhone user is typing, for example, and an iMessage heart or thumbs-up annotation has long conveyed to Android users as text instead of images.

This pic of a Thanksgiving turkey went
to a mixed Android/iPhone group.

Apple later took other steps that enhanced the popularity of its messaging service with teens. It added popular features such as animated cartoon-like faces that create mirrors of a user’s face, to compete with messaging services from social media companies... customers were particularly fond of replacing words with emojis and screen effects such as animated balloons and confetti.

Avid teen users said in interviews with The Wall Street Journal that they also liked how they could create group chats with other Apple users that add and subtract participants without having to start a new chain.

Since your humble blogger very rarely uses emojis and never plays iMessage games, the blue-green divide seems like a contretemps in a teapot. The great MLK said something like you should never judge a man by the color of his bubble but by its content, and if not, he should have said it.

Taking on the Attributes of Their Owners

(NY Daily News photo)

Are we talking about the phones or their owners?

Headline - New vulnerability can put Android phones into permanent vegetative state [bold added]:

Researchers have developed an attack that puts more than 50 percent of Android phones into the digital equivalent of a persistent vegetative state in which they're almost completely unresponsive and are unable to perform most functions, including making or receiving calls.

Snarky comments are too obvious and too easy.....but irresistible.

Good News: Unnecessary Law Rejected

California legislators have killed a proposed "kill-switch" law, which would have required cellphone vendors to install software that "would render a phone inoperable if stolen." There are already a number of free apps that will do the trick---I use one of the oldest, Find My iPhone, that allows the owner to lock and/or erase his stolen iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

Frankly, I'm opposed to another law that presumes that government knows what's best for consumers. Let selection of such an app be voluntary, not mandatory; there's always the risk that the kill-switch could be triggered accidentally by the user or her kid, for instance. In an industry notable for rapid change, it would be foolish to pass a law that would likely stifle innovation. [Digression: how does this stifling happen? Often by prescribing a method to solve a problem---for example, everyone is required to wear a seat belt while riding or driving. The real objective is passenger safety, and out-of-the-box inventors are constrained by the seatbelt requirement.]

Besides, lockdown software solutions protect against the misuse of a phone after it's been stolen, not against the loss of the hardware itself.

American ingenuity has come up with a way to safeguard not only the phone but the person of the owner. Spraytect produces a pepper-spray system ($39.99) for the iPhone and Yellow Jacket makes a stun gun ($149.99) case. A kill switch won't be needed if you have either one of those.

[Note: illustrative flash video below won't play on iPhones or iPads]:

Business: the Unforgivable Sin

Apple's stock seems to have bottomed, perhaps temporarily, at $525.62 on November 15th. Since then it's risen 11%. Knowledge of the Maps debacle (Apple discontinued Google Maps on September 19th) has not dampened enthusiasm for Apple's products:

In the past 12 weeks, Apple’s mobile operating system has grown to now make up 48.1 percent of the U.S. smartphone market, just ahead of [Google's] Android at 46.7 percent.

Despite the fact that customers have shrugged off the Maps problem, Apple's management hasn't been as forgiving:

Apple Inc. pushed out an executive responsible for its mapping service about two weeks ago, according to people briefed on the matter, as the company tries to recover from the map service's rocky debut.

The vice president, Richard Williamson, had been a senior leader with Apple's iOS mobile software team. During his tenure, he oversaw a variety of services, including at one point Apple's voice-activated assistant Siri.

Mr. Williamson's boss, iPhone software chief Scott Forstall, was pushed out of Apple in October, also on the heels of the maps imbroglio.

Both Scott Forstall and Richard Williamson have been heavily involved in some of Apple's most important successes over the past ten years. Nevertheless, in the top echelons of business, like in sports and entertainment, the key question is "what have you done for me lately?" Both are gone because they committed the one unforgivable sin--no, not failure, but embarrassing their employer. © 2012 Stephen Yuen

Looking Over the Dover

The quacking gets my attention in the morning. The dover eye me warily.

I, er, duck behind the car so as not to scare them off.  I wish the iPhone 4 had higher resolution for this snapshot.  The two-year contract has already expired; hurry up with the iPhone 5, Tim, lest you lose a customer to Android (yeah, right).

The ducks don't care about pixels. They're waiting for me to toss them a piece of my breakfast muffin, but the City says not to feed them.

The ducks lose interest. They turn their tails, quack, then waddle away. Yes, go to the neighbors and be-fowl their yard.  Wildlife is beautiful, but only at a distance.

A Feature, Not a Bug

Photo from Forbes

Google continues to improve its mobile operating system at breathtaking speed. Android 4.0 will be installed on the Galaxy Nexus and will use facial recognition as one of the methods to lock/unlock the phone.

However, Google warns users this isn't necessarily the safest method for locking a phone. Case in point: I was able to unlock the phone by holding a photo of my face [bold added] up to its lock screen.

Stranger-thieves are unlikely to have pictures of the phone's owner, but parents and other relatives who don't want to steal the phone but merely peruse its contents may consider such easily bypassable security a feature, not a bug.

Joining the Don't-Be-Evil Empire

iPhone 3G (left), Nexus One (right)

I’m entering the Google ecosystem during the next few weeks.  The catalyst: someone gave me an unencumbered Nexus One, Google’s  Android phone released last January.  Your humble (cheapskate) servant can’t resist the opportunity to use a “free” $529 piece of equipment;  before I follow the herd of Apple customers into the iPhone 4 corral, I’ve moved my AT&T simcard from the two-year-old iPhone 3G to the Nexus.

To give Google a fair shake I’m using its other offerings such as the calendar and contact list. I’m also trying out other applications, such as Voice and Docs, that can be accessed from non-Android equipment as well as PC’s and Mac’s.  (Blogger, on which this blog is written, is owned by Google.)

I have the sneaking suspicion that fewer problems will arise on Android phones as the Google products evolve. If consumers find products like Google Maps and Google Earth to be indispensable, and the products work better on Android, it doesn’t bode well for the iPhone, Blackberry, and competing smartphones.  There’s a parallel with Microsoft’s demolition of Lotus 1-2-3, WordPerfect, and Netscape by Excel, Word, and Internet Explorer, respectively, but there Microsoft was leveraging its operating system dominance into applications, while Google is trying to do the reverse.  However, Google is operating in a more competitive landscape that the Microsoft of yester-year.

The bigger worry is that Google will violate customers’ privacy by exploiting its trove of user data for commercial reasons.   As the WSJ wrote about yesterday, the explosive growth of Facebook and social-networking sites, where exhibitionism more than circumspection seems to be the norm (yes, I’m a FB member), will probably make Google step over a line it had hesitated to cross. As Google and certain politicians are finding out, it’s easy to see and condemn “evil” in others, not so easy when you have to make tough decisions about which principles are more important because you can’t abide by all of them.

© 2010 Stephen Yuen

I like Google's Chrome Browser