Josh Topolsky Reviews the Nokia Lumia 900

post from Daring Fireball on 03 April 2012 11:03:46 PM. © Daring Fireball

He loves the hardware build quality and found battery life to be good, even with LTE, but:

Let me just put this bluntly: I think it’s time to stop givingWindows Phone a pass. I think it’s time to stop talking about howbeautifully designed it is, and what a departure it’s been forMicrosoft, and how hard the company is working to add features. Iam very aware of the hard work and dedication Microsoft has putinto this platform, but at the end of the day, Windows Phone isjust not as competitive with iOS and Android as it should beright now.
Before you cry foul, keep in mind that I went into this reviewwanting to fall madly in love with this phone. But like a bookwith a beautiful jacket and a plot full of holes, I found myselfwanting more. A lot more.

I’ve been trying a Lumia 800 on and off for a few months, and I couldn’t say it better myself — especially regarding third-party app design and performance, and the quality of IE compared to Mobile Safari and Chrome for Android. It’s like Topolsky took the words right out of my mouth.

(As for the hardware, I haven’t tried the 900, but I strongly suspect I’d prefer the 800. The physically-bigger 900 seems like the worst of both worlds: a 4.3-inch display that’s too big to traverse corner-to-corner with your thumb while holding the phone one-handed, but with the same exact 800 × 480 pixel count as all other Windows Phone devices to date. At least with cutting-edge big-ass Android phones, you get more pixels, up to 1280 × 720. The 900 offers two advantages over the 800 — LTE and a front-facing camera. I think I’d rather have the smaller form factor and superior battery life of the 800, if I were in the market for a Windows Phone.)

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Read The Full Article:
http://www.theverge.com/2012/4/3/2921472/lumia-900-review

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Compare

post from Daring Fireball on 03 April 2012 10:03:09 PM. © Daring Fireball

Same scene, same filter (Amaro), taken side-by-side with Instagram using an iPhone 4S and Galaxy Nexus. (I think the difference is attributable mostly, if not entirely, to the iPhone 4S’s superior camera. The Galaxy S II has a better camera than the Nexus, but I don’t have one of those to test.)

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Read The Full Article:
https://twitter.com/gruber/status/187349393492549634

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[Sponsor] Trending for iPhone

post from Daring Fireball on 03 April 2012 07:03:18 PM. © Daring Fireball

Take your social news aggregator, blend it with a slick stock app and you’ve got Trending for iPhone. It gives you a beautiful stock watch-list, sorted by trending stocks. Each stock is a channel for news, just swipe through story tiles aggregated from the web and social sites. Share stories and even graphs directly to your Twitter or Facebook page. It even tracks your holdings — a truly better alternative to iPhone Stocks. Now available for free for your iPhone.

Read The Full Article:
http://tapfolio.com/trending/?id=df

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Papermill

post from Daring Fireball on 03 April 2012 07:03:18 PM. © Daring Fireball

Speaking of Instapaper and Android apps, developer Ryan Bateman has written a fascinating postmortem on Papermill, a well-designed Instapaper client for Android. He covers everything from the development to its financial results:

I think this unhappy end-scenario — of applications that eithercompromise on quality or have not had the necessary time investedin their design — is as a result of Android users not beingwilling to pay for an app whose focus is quality and whose pricereflects this. Instead, these users opt for a free but lessrefined experience. This has led to a race to the bottom, withindependent developers creating applications are de-facto freeinstead and relying on ads for profit. The quality of the designand user-experience are subsequently not a factor in theircreation, as there is both no great impetus to provide it nor anyexpectation from the user that it will be forthcoming.

I must gently disagree with the following parenthetical, however:

While ?cheaper smartphones? is an entirely valid core market totarget (and one that is actually Android’s strength — while devicemanufacturers will always be creating mid-range Android handsetsand can edge into the high-end market, Apple is highly unlikely tocreate anything but a high-end smartphone), the resulting userexpectations, and subsequent race to-the-bottom app development,is reflected in the current general quality of Android apps.

Apple may never release a new non-high-end phone, but they do have mid-range and low-end smartphone models: the iPhone 4 and 3GS. The brilliance of Apple’s move-last-year’s-model-one-slot-down-the-totem-pole pattern is that even their low-end model is a former high-end model, just two years removed. Apple gets to hit lower retail price points while avoiding additional fragmentation for developers. And a consumer who buys a new free-with-contract iPhone 3GS today gets a phone that is of significantly higher build quality than the free-with-contract Android phones I’ve seen.

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Read The Full Article:
http://www.papermill.me/firstweeks/

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John Moltzs Very Nice Web Site

post from Daring Fireball on 03 April 2012 07:03:18 PM. © Daring Fireball

New from the inimitable creator of the late, great CARS. Do yourself a favor and subscribe to the RSS feed now; that way you’ll know when I steal links from him, like I just did a few minutes ago.

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Read The Full Article:
http://verynicewebsite.net/

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New Olympics iPhone app has everything

post from prMac on 03 April 2012 06:42:00 PM. © prMac

Lion Arch Dev Co. has released LDN 2012 Premium 1.0 for iOS devices. Whether you're going to the Summer Games in London this summer or watching from the comfort of your home, you're going to want to get this app. This is your all-in-one app to keep you up to date with everything going on at the Summer Games. LDN 2012 has everything you need to know about all of the sporting events, as well as up to the minute news updates. There are over 30 sporting venues that are hosting this summer's games.

Read The Full Article:
http://prmac.com/release-id-40533.htm

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With PDF Expert 4 the iPad becomes the prefect
mobile device for PDFs

post from prMac on 03 April 2012 06:05:00 PM. © prMac

Today Readdle releases PDF Expert 4, a new version of the leading iPad application for reading, annotating and signing PDF documents, as well as filling in PDF forms. PDF Expert 4 comes with stunning PDF rendering and hi-resolution graphics that look great on the new iPad Retina display. At the same time, PDF Expert 4 is the first application for the iPad that can read interactive PDF documents with embedded audio and video content.

Read The Full Article:
http://prmac.com/release-id-40673.htm

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Úll

Looks like a great conference in Dublin later this month “iOS / OSX / mobile web developers and designers.” Sounds like tickets are selling fast.

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Read The Full Article:
http://www.ull.ie/

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Privacy Is Not an Option

Nick Bradbury:

Software developers need to look at privacy the same way we’velearned to look at security: it’s not an add-on or a feature thatcustomers have to turn on, it’s something built-in that shouldn’tbe turned off.

The difference, though, is that with security, the biggest problem is a lack of attention from developers. With privacy, the biggest problem is purposeful obfuscation by developers looking to profit by having users think their information is more private than it actually is.

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Read The Full Article:
http://nick.typepad.com/blog/2012/03/privacy-is-not-an-option.html

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