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Oh Etsy, Etsy Etsy, what have you done? Well, to begin with, this: you introduced “People Search,” a new tool that makes your users (and their complete purchase histories) searchable by their real names, without giving anyone any real heads up that you were doing so. Uh oh.More »
Research in Motion thought the iPhone would bomb, basically, because it’s not a BlackBerry.
A Reuters report (PDF) on RIM’s prospects quotes an anonymous former employee as saying that RIM was convinced the iPhone was “so badly flawed from day one.” They thought “users wanted great battery life, great security, great mail handling, minimal network use, and a great keyboard experience.” It turns out, a great user experience beats all those things.
Even more damning, as far back as 2005 RIM executives tried to talk Founder Mike Lazaridis into making some sort of web-enabled smartphone with a larger screen, i.e. something like an iPhone, or at least the smartphones that came after it and copied what made it so successful. He refused to do that, however, to focus on what he thought was essential, and are BlackBerry’s key strengths: keyboards and email.
He failed to see that email on phones was just a precursor to full web and computing capabilities.
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You’re on Facebook. So is the guy sitting next to you on the bus. Your brothers, best mates, old classmates, demented neighbors, former coworkers, your grandma – they’re all on Facebook. The social networking behemoth now boasts over 500 million (active) members (that’s 1 in every 13 people on earth) and everything from your Mountain Dew Code Red to your sneakers has a fan page). Facebook is becoming an integral (and at times, claustrophobic) part of how we access the Internet.More »
Now that Apple’s iPad 2 has launched, the company’s next big product to finish up is the iPhone 5 — or whatever Apple will call its next iPhone, expected to launch this summer.
While the new iPhone will feature updated hardware and may have a new design, we’re just as interested in Apple’s software improvements.
That’s increasingly where the smartphone business is headed, and while Apple’s software is still ahead of the competition in general, there are some areas where rivals Google and Microsoft are doing better than Apple.
While the iPhone hardware is certainly sexy, it’s software that really makes it an iPhone. So what does Apple have planned for the next major version of its iOS software for iPhones and iPads?
We asked a dozen iOS developers what they wanted from iOS 5, and their responses included: A better alerts and notifications system; more background processing features — so the New York Times app could download news articles while you’re sleeping, for example; and potentially “widgets” to customize your iPhone’s unlock or home screens.
We’d also love to see a much better camera app, and maybe a better photo management app, more like iPhoto for Mac OS X. The iPhone camera is becoming very important, and while third-party developers like Instagram have done some really cool things with it, it makes sense for Apple to improve the built-in camera software, too.
We expect some of the usual updates — faster, more memory, new chip, maybe some new hardware features — and a new design for the iPhone 5.
While the iPhone 4 is still an attractive phone, and is still selling, it will be a year old this June. That’s a long time in the smartphone industry, where new phones are constantly coming out. So we don’t expect another iPhone 3GS-like “update” from Apple ever again, where it keeps the same phone case design from one year to the next but only upgrades the guts.
This supposed leaked image could be it — sure looks like the iPad 2 — or could be a fake. But either way, we expect a new design.
The critics have shut up about Apple’s iPhone 4 design, and “Antennagate” didn’t seem to have any effect on sales. So we wouldn’t be surprised to see the iPhone 4 stick around as Apple’s cheaper iPhone model. But we expect at least some moderate updates this year to the high-end model.
The iPhone 5’s hardware and software is important, but “cloud” services on the back end are becoming increasingly important for smartphones, and Apple could stand to make some improvements there.
For example: How about letting you sync your phone over wi-fi instead of having to plug in a USB cable? How about being able to access your iTunes music library from anywhere? How about being able to grab some of your iPhoto pictures from the road?
How about sharing photos with other iPhone users without having to email them?
Some or all of these features could potentially be built into a new “MobileMe” service, which Apple could potentially make cheaper or even free. Some may have to wait to be built into the next version of Mac OS X, which is expected to ship this year.
But this is an area where Google is doing more interesting things than Apple, so it’s time to wake up.
It’s easy to forget just how big some countries are. For example, China:
China is now the world’s second-biggest economy, but some of its provinces by themselves would rank fairly high in the global league. Our map shows the nearest equivalent country. For example, Guangdong’s GDP (at market exchange rates) is almost as big as Indonesia’s; the output of both Jiangsu and Shandong exceeds Switzerland’s.
Select among GDP, GDP per person, population, and exports. There’s a similar interactive for the United States.
[The Economist via Strange Maps | Thanks, Elise]