Battlng OSes on a ‘Smart Pad”?

Doesn’t Sound Smart to Me
[Via Daring Fireball]

Donald Melanson for Engadget:

The latest addition was revealed in Australia by Toshiba’s Mark Whittard, who showed off a prototype of a so-called “Smart Pad” tablet but unfortunately revealed few details about it. He did say that it would have both HDMI and USB connectivity, however, and that it could run either Android or Windows 7 — Toshiba apparently hasn’t decided which, though. There’s no indication of a price either, but Whittard says Toshiba is looking to launch it “before October.”

So it’s launching in three months and they don’t know what the OS is yet?

[More]

Maybe it will dual boot, while it shows off 1080p movies and mixes martinis for everyone. And has a battery time measured in minutes.

That is the key number to look for in any slate-like device. How long does it last on one charge. If I plan on working for a few hours, every computing device I use requires me to know where a plug is and my charger.

Not the iPad. I actually only charge it up every couple of says. I can sit down and use it in meetings, etc. without having to play musical chairs with the plug.

I can sit down in a coffee shop, where all the plugs are in use, and get some work done while I am waiting for a plug to open up. And I can outlast everything else while I do that.

So, do not tell me what OS the thing will have or all the output connections. What is the battery life under real life circumstances?

When will we expect Motorola to call a press conference to deal with this? Will there be a recall?

by jnyemb

Screengate: Motorola Droid X users complain of defective screens, severe banding (with video)
[Via MacDailyNews]

“A number of early Droid X adopters are documenting serious graphical or possibly electrical problems with the handset’s giant screen,” Sean Hollister reports for Engadget.

“While we don’t know how widespread the issue might be quite yet, symptoms include rapid flickering and vertical banding over all or part of the 4.3-inch LCD,” Hollister reports.

[More]

Luckily, they are sold out so perhaps this problem can be fixed soon. But having an unusable screen seems to be much worse than seeing some attenuation of a cell phone signal.

Isn’t instant news on YouTube wonderful for quality control? I guess if this blows up for Motorola that is a good thing. It means people actually care about the Droid X.

A good day for Apple

Apple demolishes Street, posts new Mac unit sales record; shares jump in after-hours trading
[Via MacDailyNews]

Apple today reported earnings of…

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Wow. 3.5 million Macs. 3.3 million iPads. 8.4 million iPhones. iPod sales down somewhat but still sold 9.4 million. Over $4 billion in cash generated in one quarter.

Nice to see some good news. I wonder what other new stuff they have coming out. I’d expect the iPad to be ‘refreshed’ to include cameras so that it can use Facetime with iOS4. Probably in the Fall-Winter timeframe.

They asked Jobs to wear a suit?

‘I’m Going to Go Call Ralph and Yell at Him.’
[Via Daring Fireball]

Fascinating piece by Fred Vogelstein for Wired magazine on the Apple-AT&T relationship:

In a bid to avert the looming problem, a team headed by senior vice president Kris Rinne met with Apple to ask for help. Of course AT&T was planning to upgrade its network to handle the increased demand, Rinne’s team told Apple executives, but that was going to take years. In the meantime, would Apple take measures to help throttle back the traffic? Perhaps Apple could restrict its YouTube app to run only over Wi-Fi. Maybe the iPhone could feature a smaller, lower-resolution videostream or cut off YouTube videos after one minute. Rinne, who had already met with Apple’s iPhone team at least half a dozen times, fully expected the company to play along. After all, manufacturers agreed to such restrictions all the time. It didn’t make sense to build phones and offer features that carriers couldn’t support.

But in meetings with Apple engineers and marketers over the subsequent year, Rinne and other AT&T executives discovered that Apple wasn’t playing by traditional wireless rules. It wasn’t interested in cooperating, especially if it meant hobbling what had quickly become its marquee product. For Apple, the idea of restricting the iPhone was akin to asking Steve Jobs to ditch the black turtleneck. “They tried to have that conversation with us a number of times,” says someone from Apple who was in the meetings. “We consistently said ‘No, we are not going to mess up the consumer experience on the iPhone to make your network tenable.’ They’d always end up saying, ‘We’re going to have to escalate this to senior AT&T executives,’ and we always said, ‘Fine, we’ll escalate it to Steve and see who wins.’ I think history has demonstrated how that turned out.”

And:

They have even fought about wardrobe: When an AT&T representative suggested to one of Jobs’ deputies that the Apple CEO wear a suit to meet with AT&T’s board of directors, he was told, “We’re Apple. We don’t wear suits. We don’t even own suits.”

[More]

How out of touch can you be to suggest Jobs change out of his trademark turtleneck and jeans? This whole story demonstrates the total difference in world views between American telcos and Apple.

I would imagine that Verizon would be having similar problems. The telcos have always gotten their way as they hobble wireless in America, compared to many other countries.