By far the most enlightening articles I’ve come across on the  matter are two recent reviews of the Galaxy Nexus on TechCrunch:

• Pro-Android blogger Jason Kincaid decides in favour of the Galaxy Nexus: There And Back Again: A Lengthy Weighing Of The Galaxy Nexus And iPhone 4S
• Pro-iPhone blogger and tech writing heavyweight MG Siegler decides in favour of the iPhone 4S: An iPhone Lover’s Take On The Galaxy Nexus

Although the two authors reach two different conclusions, the unsurprising consensus is that the iPhone has a superior user interface. But it’s intangible. It’s the attention to detail, the little things. And it’s hard to describe. So, Siegler comes up with an analogy:

I imagine it’s probably hard for a Mercedes owner to describe to a Honda owner how attention to detail makes their driving experience better when both machines get them from point A to point B.

Superblogger and Mac enthusiast John Gruber concurs and adds that:

You either see [the iPhone's UI superiority] or you don’t. If you don’t, that’s cool, enjoy your Nexus.

Joshua Topolsky however, who writes for the tech blog Verge, does not concur. He writes a response to Siegler’s piece titled “Horseshit“, where he contends that only elitist capitalist pigs use Mercedes analogies when discussing mobile phones. MS Siegler responds here.

This is all very entertaining, but where does it leave us? Galaxy Nexus or iPhone? Marx or Engels?

I’m leaning towards the Nexus. To stick with the automobile analogies, I’m going for the somewhat clunky Batmobile rather than the super smooth Mercedes. Maybe because the Batmobile is better integrated with the various Google services, because it plays nicer with 3rd party apps (even if they always look uglier) or because Google strike me as being less evil than Apple – albeit, only slightly so.

I can see that the iPhone has a superior UI – I get it. But I’m still probably going for the Nexus.

iPhone advantages over Android:

• Integration with the desktop
• User experience
• Default apps

Android advantages over iPhone:

• Integration with the cloud
• Flexibility and freedom to choose
• Development environment

Not so sure about:

• Pseudo vs. true multitasking

What I thought might matter but doesn’t:

• Apple’s App Store vs. the Android Market

The iPhone works better with the desktop than Android while Android feels more like an extension of the cloud than the iPhone does. Essentially, Android is missing iTunes while the iPhone is missing Android’s integration with Google’s various online services (calendar, maps, mail). In my opinion, this is the major reason behind Google’s recent overhaul of GMail’s contacts. After switching to Android I started using GMail’s contacts a lot more – almost by default.

The iPhone still has a better overall feel to the user interface. Android’s scrolling is choppy compared to the iPhone’s and the default apps that ship with the iPhone (iPod, contacts, notes) are more accessible. Android however is more flexible than the iPhone when it comes to customizing it and making it your own – especially because of the widgets.

Android seems like a more powerful operating system, with true multitasking and a better notification interface. It feels more like a small, powerful computer. How this effects battery life though, I don’t know. The open source Linux-Java stack also means that the Android development environment is more appealing. Also, because Android is open source it wouldn’t surprise me if they overtake Apple regarding speed and functionality of the operating system, if only because it’s bound to have more developers working on it.

Finally, I was pleasantly surprised by the selection of Android applications available. I thought I might miss some iPhone apps but it seems that everything I used regularly on the iPhone is available on Android as well.

Overall, the jury is still out. The fact that there’s such strong competition in developing smartphone operating systems and handsets will bring benefits for the consumer. Next time I upgrade, I still don’t know whether I’d go iPhone or Android – although I’m leaning ever so slightly towards Android.

Hilarity ensued. Users started arriving at the ReadWriteWeb blog and commenting on it in their hundreds, complaining about “Facebook’s new look” and that they couldn’t  log in. Because of Google, they were confusing Facebook with a blog featuring Facebook log-ins. Among the comments were:

“I HATE THE NEW FACEBOOK PAGE , IN FACT I HAVE STARTED TO VISIT IT LESS, BECAUSE IT IS A HASSLE”

The blog post now carries a health warning:

Dear visitors from Google. This site is not Facebook.

The Lifehacker blog had a post recently, called “Top Google Searches Show We’re Clueless About The Address Bar” highlighting a list Google published about top search terms in Australia, showing that adding “.com” to most of the search terms would have taken users directly to the site they were searching for.

What a fascinating insight into how mainstream users navigate the web: Via Google.

Skype has more than 400 million registered users. It has a  de-facto monopoly on VOIP. So why aren’t there donzens of desktop and web applications being built on top of the Skype technology? Why hasn’t Skype become a platform?

As a platform, Skype could solidify its hold on the market and it could make more money on SkypeIn, i.e. charging Skype users for calls to landlines. If it’s technically feasible, it seems obvious.

One answer might be that when eBay bought Skype, the underlying technology wasn’t included (which makes you wonder what eBay was smoking when they signed the $4 billion deal). Is that why the desktop client has been moving forward without any sign of development on the underlying technology?

Time to time I help my friends with system configuration and other “wtf? it worked yesterday!” kind of issues.

Ah yes, good old “wtf? it worked yesterday!”.

The post is an interesting “who-dunnit” for techies and system admins.

Oleg’s post reminded me of a joke: “Q: What are the three secrets to French cooking? A: Butter, butter and butter.”

Oleg’s secret to scalability however, is: Cache, cache and cache.

Five panelists from five companies representing five different operating systems with five sets of competing interests – and one goal: Dominate the mobile market.

The result for the end-user?

Ewen Macleod, from The Mobile Industry Review summed it up nicely at the bloggers’ panel talk:

All this “isn’t the future of mobile great” talk – let’s take a reality check: It’s an absolutely shit experience. The mobile industry right now? Piece of shit.

People are frustrated with the fragmentation of the mobile industry. Multiple operators, operating systems and handset manufacturers, none of them cooperating properly, make starting or running a business that is based on mobile applications a royal pain.

So what is the future of mobile? How can this be fixed? Dare Obasanjo put it nicely in a recent post:

Which makes more sense, that every Web site in the world should create duplicate versions of their pages for mobile phones and regular browsers or that software + hardware would eventually evolve to the point where I can run a full fledged browser on the device in my pocket?

Just as it did for the personal computer, the web will bring the fragmented mobile phone markets together. The mobile web is dead, long live the web!

during the Olympics, the iPlayer accounted for nearly 20 percent of the total broadband traffic in the UK, and at present has garnered about 10 percent of the total UK broadband audience

Forget about Joost or Hulu (which isn’t even supported in the UK yet), all the action is over at good old Auntie Beeb’s place.

The interesting part however, is in the article title. Animoto’s technology is very resource hungry because the service is based on video. That means lots of expensive hardware.

Instead of investing in servers, they decided to outsource to the cloud:

We made the decision that we would re-implement the entire stack on Amazon Web Services in lieu of just using a regular hosting provider. That was a tough decision. We had to delay our launch by three months.

This paid off. When the Facebook app brought them all the new users:

the number of servers required to create these Animoto videos scaled from 50 to 5,000 in [a week]. [With] our own serving room [or a] hosting provider, it’s impossible to have 50 physical servers and grow it to 5,000 servers in that period of time. It’s insane. …

But with Amazon’s webservices:

the only real asset we have in our office, and the biggest thing we bought recently, was a fancy espresso machine.

This does mean that when Amazon has problems, so does Animoto.

Nonetheless, thanks to Amazon, the only hardware infrastructure a startup needs to support 700,000 users is one espresso machine.

The Google Chrome press release comic book, by Scott McCloud, looks like a space opera at times. Example: The screenshot on the right shows project manager Brian Rokowski as lead tenor and Chrome as … a dove.

Nicholas Carr, who has a formidable command of buzzwords, calls it “the first cloud browser” and John Resig, javascript guru and lead developer of jQuery, is excited about it’s implications for web development. Wired magazine also has an excellent article on the inside story of Chrome.

Yesterday I was asked, “how long will it take Chrome to beat Firefox in adoption?“. Whether it was by design or accident the Firefox team created not only a browser, but a platform. This makes them fairly well entrenched.

Most early adopters that use Firefox are hooked on one extension or another. For web developers, this is especially true. If Chrome is to gain traction, developers will have to have an incentive write software for it as a platform.

It wouldn’t surprise me at all if we see a Chrome developer challenge, similar to the Android challenge, where developers are offerd cash rewards for the best applications developed for a platform.