Henrik Carlsson's Blog

All things me.

Rapid sales on Amazon’s new eReaders/tablets, because they’re good or because they’re cheap?

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According to SplatF Amazon’s new Kindle Fire is their best-selling electronics device, even though it’s only available for pre-order. However, what surprises me is this:

The new $79 Kindle is no. 2, and various Kindle models actually make up the top 12 gadgets on Amazon right now.

The Kindle is available in three versions, the color-display tablet called ”Kindle Fire”, the touch screen eReader ”Kindle Touch” and the no-touch but cheap ”Kindle”. The $79 model that Dan Frommer mentions is the one that’s basically the same old Kindle as before, i.e. just a cheap eReader without touch and likely with crappy controls.

Based on this I guess that a lot of Kindle customers are very price-sensitive, so it’s likely that even the Fire will compete on price rather then features.

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The iPhone 5 will be announced on October 4?

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According to AllThingsD:

Tuesday, Oct. 4.

That’s the day Apple is currently expected to hold its next big media event, according to sources close to the situation, where the tech giant will unveil the next iteration of its popular iPhone.

AllThingsD also states that Apples new CEO Tim Cook will be the one leading the keynote speech at this, and all future, Apple events. I think that is not necessarily correct. Cook will likely lead this one to show everyone that he really is the new man in charge. However in the future someone else might be better qualified to do the keynotes. To paraphrase John Gruber, Steve Jobs didn’t do the keynotes because he was the CEO. He just happened to be both the CEO and a really great keynote speaker.

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More facts on usage of iOS vs Android

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Here’s another report of iOS vs Android use. According to Mobile Marketing Watch iOS represents two thirds of the mobile traffic that hits Google Search.

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”The perils of possession without utilization”

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Horace Dediu makes a chart of ”Possession vs. Utilization for Android and iPhone”.

This data seems to support the hypothesis that Android users are disproportionately less willing to spend money (note that the data does not say that users don’t have money, but simply that they are not spending it).

Which is why my current idea for a smartphone app will be realized as an iOS app, not an Android one. (Click through to the original post to se the actual charts.)

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New 5by5 podcast – The Web Ahead

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The great 5by5 podcast network has recently launched a new show called ”The Web Ahead. It is

A weekly podcast about changing technologies and the future of the web, discussing HTML5, mobile, responsive design, iOS, Android, and more. Hosted by Jen Simmons.

The first episode was published last week and featured Peter Lubbers who told us a great deal of information about web storage/local storage/web databases etc. and I thought it was awesome. This weeks episode is a long talk with Ethan Marcotte about ”Responsive Web Design”.

I highly recommend you all to start subscribing to this (and all other great 5by5 shows).

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The real openness of Google+

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In the spirit of ”give credit where credit is due” and as a follow up to this mornings rant about Google+ and what’s not opened about is, here is some praise to Google for what is in fact open.

According to the SitePoint podcast #120 Google+ has a feature called ”Data liberation” (or something like) that allows you to export everything on your profile in more or less open formats. That’s seriously awesome!

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Replies and comments

ddDrumr – a drum machine in your browser

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Last weekend Daladevelop – in this case Mikael, Emil and I – spent 24 geeky hours in a house in Bjursås. The goal of every Daladevelop is to make program something great. Hitherto it has resulted in for example the WP Plugin Boilerplate and ”Pizzasugen”. This time it resulted in ddDrumr, a browser based drum machine prototype.

Since it’s awesome, I’ll advice you to try it! (You’ll need a really modern browser for it to work well.)

(Or, fork it on github,)

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Hotmail works with Exchange

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I just learned that a Hotmail account can be accessed via Microsoft Exchange and thereby getting a more IMAP-like functionality. To me, this makes Hotmail very useful as an iPhone Mail account.

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Instagram’s great success

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In just nine months, the photo-sharing startup hit 150 million pix and more than 7 million users who upload about 1.3 million photos daily (15 per second).

[…]

It took Flickr, one of the world’s largest photo-sharing sites, close to 2.5 years to reach 150 million photos, which could be uploaded from any computer and shot on any camera. But it took San Francisco-based startup Instagram roughly just nine months to hit that same milestone–with just one mobile app, available on just one device maker’s OS (Apple’s).

The interview and article is from FastCompany.com. The interview is good but I think the comparison between Instagram and Flickr that’s made by the author is unnecessary and incorrect.

Instagram has grown faster than flickr, that’s true, but I don’t think the comparison is very good. To me flickr is clearly a service aimed at photographers, amateurs and professionals alike. The users main focus is to show photos as art. Instagram is much more of a ”traditional” social network, but with images instead of text.

Just to clarify, I love Instagram and use it as a way of telling people I know about what I’m up to. I also love Flickr.

(Extra bonus irony-points to the article for using a picture from Flickr for illustration. Tough, I don’t think irony was what they were aiming for.)

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Patent trolls scare developers away from US app stores

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This is so sad in every possible way. Patent trolls are really the lowest of humans. (Longer post about software patents likely to come soon.)

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