11:24 pm “We have fantastic devices and a fantastic ecosystem that we’re building on.” He restates that RIM is about its network and its strength as a cohesive whole. He won’t split anything up.

11:24 pm “If it makes sense strategically and tactically,” he’s open to licensing BB10.

*11:25 pm But his “focus 1” is to develop RIM’s own products. It’s the same focus that “another fruit company” has.*

11:25 pm “You’re successful when you have the biggest value contribution” to your customers.

Thorsten Heins, reinforcing my pet theory that any modern CEO can’t resist comparing their approach to Apple’s, even if they have no idea what that actually means.

(Source: live.theverge.com)

“We’re competing with ourselves,” Lee (Noel Lee, Monster Cable CEO) says of the Beats products he’s trying to outdo. “We can be the Apple of the headphones space, with or without Beats…”

“…He showed off the company’s offerings, which became available for preorder to distributors on Jan. 9. One $200 pair of in-ear headphones bears the name of the ’70s soul act Earth, Wind & Fire. A Miles Davis line has earbuds shaped like trumpets and a volume controller that looks like piston valves. In all, there are eight new lines in 50 different styles. “We hope people will recognize what we’ve done in terms of sound with the Beats products,” Lee says.”

Eight new lines, 50 different styles. Ah yes, that’s the Apple I know and love.

(via Business Week)

…Where it all goes wrong is with the space bar. It sits right above the system’s home key:

I find when I’m really on the move skating, I’m always hitting that home key by mistake rather than the space bar and so exit out of what I’m typing. This never happens with the iPhone or the Droid Charge, because they use “hard” menu buttons that you have to physically depress. You can’t accidentally push them.

A someone who is constantly pressing the dictation button on iPhone instead of the space bar, getting yanked out of an app for an accidental keypress would drive me mental.

(via marketingland.com)

Love that old 1st-gen iPhone. I read in the Steve Jobs bio that he thought that a stainless steel finish (like the back of the iPod line) aged really well over time. That scratches & dings in the material really added to the device’s character, and that covering them up with ugly cases stopped that from happening.

Can’t help but think that the current line of iPhones has no way to age well that I can see; there’s no finish that is really susceptible to aging like the iPod & original iPhone. Even the newer plastic-based 3G/3GS models don’t age particularly well.

(via designmind)

Andrew Munn:

“A laggy UI breaks the core affordance language of a touch screen. The device no longer feels natural. It loses the magic. The user is pulled out of their interaction and must implicitly acknowledge they are using an imperfect computer simulation. I often get “lost” in an iPad, but I cringe when a Xoom stutters between home screens. The 200 million users of Android deserve better.”

A long, but really interesting discussion on why Android is still laggy, and why it won’t be fixed until they do a major overhaul of the entire operating system. Also of note is this quote:

“Beyond the perception issue, lag is a violation of one of Google’s core philosophies. Google believes that things should be fast. That’s a driving philosophy behind Google Search, Gmail, and Chrome. It’s why Google created SPDY to improve on HTTP. It’s why Google builds tools to help websites optimize their site. It’s why Google runs it’s own CDN. It’s why Google Maps is rendered in WebGL. It’s why buffering on Youtube is something most of us remember, but rarely see anymore.”

This is a great point. For a company who crows over optimising search results by mere milliseconds, who introduced displaying search results before you have even finished typing, it seems bizarre that this hasn’t been priority #1 for the Android team.

Google engineers: less face unlock, more dedicated UI rendering thread development.

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