Twitter is not trying to answer the question of who would or would not stay and pay. They are trying to find a business model that will support those who cannot pay so even more of them will sign up.
That’s it in a nut. Shawn’s take on the recent changes that are shaking up Twitter is, as usual, spot on. Just further proof that if you haven’t signed up for a membership yet, you’re really doing yourself a disservice.
Cloud Drive is the name Amazon is giving to its media storage space on their servers. They give you 5 GB of storage for free and allow you to access the media from any computer. Cloud Player is the name of yes, the actual player. And it comes in two flavors: a player for the web, and one for Android devices. You’ll note an absence of an iOS player…
Finally it is Amazon who makes the first move. After the myriad of rumors, topped-up by the Benjamin Corollary, we finally have a legitimate cloud-music solution, and it is not by Apple.
The exclusion of iOS compatibility (for now) is not really significant, in my opinion. If it proves to be a profitable service, Amazon will want to drive some music purchases away from iTunes, and for that they need to reach the millions of iOS users out there. There’s already a workaround to play the songs through Mobile Safari, and 10 bucks say an iOS version of the Cloud Player app will be announced shortly.
For those of you who have access to Spotify, remember that this is a service in which you actually own your music, and don’t just pay for access to it. It’s easy to overlook that difference, but it is an important one.
Admittedly, I’ve been giggling over the iPad 2 like a little girl since I got it on Friday, which hasn’t left me much time to write a decent post, or compile the hottest stories of the past two days. That is not to say that there weren’t any stories, on the contrary: some of them were pretty good, and a couple were simply hilarious.
The problem with being a little late is that most of these stories have already been reported in many fine places all over the Web, so instead of sounding like broken record, I’m just going to point you towards them and let you see for yourself.
All right, let’s do this!
First, there was an Epic Color review in the App Store. Just read it all the way through, it is worth it. Via @gruber.
Also, The Macalope went nuts over Katherine Hayes and her dislike for tablets in general, and the iPad 2 in particular. Via Daring Fireball.
TechCrunch reported that iOS 5 will be delayed, possibly until Fall, and probably in the September iPod event. They claim that the iPhone 5 will debut in June as expected, but no iOS5 goodness just yet.
Marco Arment broke down the numbers of Instapaper usage across devices and iOS versions. Turns out pretty much everyone is running on new hardware, and at least iOS 4.
A 14-year-old (!) named J-P Teti absolutely nailed why the iPad is massively misunderstood by its competitors. Turns out there are more regular people than geeks out there. Via Minimal Mac.
To stay with the youth theme, there was another teenager, this time a 15-year-old (I know, it seems way too old after the last story) who explained the Average Selling Price (ASP) of RIM’s Blackberry devices. RIM hasn’t reported these numbers since last quarter and, surprise surprise, everything indicates that’s because the numbers are going down. In a hurry. RIM is in trouble. Via @asymco.
Finally, Mashable reported that Google is not ready to release Honeycomb’s source code just yet. This flies right in the face of the “open” philosophy that Google likes to brag about. Looks like it’s not so easy to maintain a platform when everyone is free to tinker with it. They say it will be released eventually, just like Adobe says Flash is going to run smoothly on mobile devices, like, tomorrow. Call me a cynic, but it seems to me that tomorrow never actually becomes today.
And that was pretty much it over the weekend. I will leave you with a note regarding my first impressions of the iPad 2:
You know how it is when you have a brand new device: you just can’t stop playing with it, installing apps, configuring it, arranging it so that it is exactly right. Well, after a weekend of Geek Abuse ™, the iPad 2 managed to get through to Sunday night and still have an impressive 15% battery life remaining. I had to plug it occasionally in order to sync it, but never for more than 5 minutes at a time.
That’s big.
Now have a good one! Cheers!
As of today, I’m the proud owner of a 32 GB, WiFi-only white iPad 2. If you don’t get it on Day One, it doesn’t count ;)
I have to admit that this is not the first time I’ve done something like this: I waited more than 6 hours in line to get my iPhone 3G, the first one that was sold in Spain, on July 11th 2008, Day One. I still use it as my one and only phone.
I didn’t get the original iPad when it was released here, but after this year, I have realized that this is a revolution I want to be a part of.
And this time I only had to wait for 30 minutes… Great :)
Now let’s get this party started!
The app will feature two major changes when the next update ships: you won’t be able to use the app if nobody is nearby, and Color will be changing the distance required for somebody to be considered nearby.
The App Store description has this wonderful message right on the first line:
WARNING: DON’T USE COLOR ALONE.
At first, I thought it was a joke. But it looks like they were dead serious.
I must say, @color is great to whip out at a party if you want to feel like a real-life version of a New Yorker joke.
The resemblance is so remarkable that it’s hard to believe it’s only a coincidence. Something tells me it’s not great for your app to be compared to a New Yorker joke right after its debut, but hey, what do I know.
Or the 131 (and counting) people who left one-star reviews on the App Store. That’s 67% of all the reviews. But it’s surely because they just don’t get it.
This thing looks like a turd to me. Now, maybe I’m the idiot and the joke’s on me and Color is going to be a huge hit. But my figurative money says that the investors who funded these guys just flushed $41 million in literal money down the toilet.
Brutally harsh critique by Gruber of the new iPhone app that has managed to grab everyone’s attention today. On paper, it looks to me like there could be a great idea hiding there somewhere, but I trust John’s instinct. They must have done a number of things awfully wrong to get him pissed off that bad.
The world is moving so fast these days that the man who says it can’t be done is generally interrupted by someone doing it.
Harry Emerson Fosdick (1878 - 1969)
Great service. You only need to authenticate with your Instagram account, and Boom! You get a nice web gallery with all of your Instagram pictures.
I had been looking for something like this for a while. Granted, it’s only a matter of time until Instagram launches an official gallery service, but in the meantime, this solution works rather nicely.
Via @rands.