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First looks at the Google Nexus 7

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Mine came in late last week, thanks to the help of a good friend. Been playing with it all weekend, here are the first thoughts;

1. It’s slightly faster than the Galaxy Nexus on Jelly Bean, but when you have lots of widgets on your home screen or try to do multiple actions at one time, the lag is no joke. So much for Jelly Bean’s Project Butter (edit: It’s pretty fast generally, you can’t see any legginess in the interface so long you don’t push it)

2. It’s supposed to be a tablet, but in reality it’s really a giant Android phone, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Certain apps with tablet interfaces don’t work very well on the small screen, especially due to the crazily short width of the tablet in portrait mode, so apps work way better in “phone mode” (you can choose).

3. It’s pretty light, and I’ll love to bring it everywhere I go, until the iPad Mini (definitely coming out, thanks sources) debuts of course.

4. Build quality is a bit shoddy, I can hear the screen moving every time I touched a certain spot on the screen.

5. Every single bad point about the Android OS remains, such as the ability to do work on it due to the lack of proper apps, fugly app interfaces, irritating country-based restrictions on what you can or cannot buy from them, which means in Singapore you generally get NO CONTENT to buy. No books no music no movies no nothing.

Conclusion: This is just a first look, but I doubt my opinions about it will change. The Nexus 7 is a toy. A toy you can bring along on overseas trips together with your MacBook Air because it’s so small and portable, to watch videos that you torrent off the net because Cathay’s In-Flight Entertainment is a joke. And there’s really nothing bad about it being a toy. I love toys. It’s just not an iPad, and will never be in the next 5 years or so.

Sparrow Mail sells out to Google, scams its loyal users

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Today, Sparrow, arguably the best third party mail client on OS X and iOS (there aren’t many really) right now, sent its paid users this email;

This is great news for everyone in the company (big cash out), but for most of their loyal users, this not just a clear act of betrayal (who could blame them? Google probably threw hordes of cash at them for the sale “Not enough money? How about another million for kicks?”), but also kind of scammish.

Just less than a month ago, they heavily discounted both their iPhone app and OS X app one after the other, while around the same time promising new features such as an iPad version and push notifications in the future, on both their site and their twitter account. Both the promise of new features and the deep discounts lured lots of new users into running a third party mail client instead of the usual Mail.app.

It’s quite impossible this sale happened within a day or two, so Sparrow should have already known that they will be cashing out in late July, so looking back, those deep discounts were not to simply lure new users, they are really more of a “closing down sale”, an opportunity for Sparrow to maximise profits before the sale.

Which would have been fine should they have communicated this to their users, but they specifically misled their new users into parting with their cash for the apps, thinking that new features are coming in the next few months. This is the worst kind of sell-out any OS X developer could have ever done.

Seriously, Sparrow? Damn you.

P.S. Boing Boing has a video up about how to deal with this acquisition and prepare for all the upcoming innovations from the sell-out.

Google Nexus S unboxing

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Okay well I did the unboxing days ago, but so what? This phone is Google’s iPhone. It is exactly what Google will and did make if there are no manufacturer’s input involved in the whole dumb Android ecosystem. Google’s finest, you may say. It is therefore the perfect target for attacks on all the bad points of Android, which in this phone cannot be blamed on manufacturers’ software mods, there isn’t any.

Nevertheless it’s a pretty nice phone. Software is fast, much faster than the crappy XT720 in my family. The phone is really light, probably as a result of being made from really cheap-arse plastic. The curved glass on the screen is a total gimmick. The thing just made it a lot more difficult to make proper screen protectors for it, since many won’t stick properly due to the curving of the glass. And I’ve heard, the curving of the glass is exactly why the glass is NOT Gorilla Glass, despite the Galaxy S having those, due to the simple fact that the costs for curved Gorilla Glass, if it’s even possible, will be much higher. And the reason why girls and fashionable guys will never be spotted using this phone? There are simply no decent accessories for it. Have been trying for weeks and still haven’t come across a half decent case for the phone. Anyone with a source for decent cases let me know in the comments? Thanks.

Will eventually do an in-depth write-up on the phone, but right now the well-known Android faults are very obvious – nonsensical lack of decent battery life, lousy browsers, etc, as well as some of the pros of the OS, like the ability to have the HTC weather/clock-lookalike widget on my phone.

Read the rest of the article for the other unboxing pics.

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On the whole Google Chrome dropping H.264 support to start another format war fiasco

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I wanted to write something myself but this article seems to sum it up pretty well.

Google, H.264 and Video on the Web

Fact to remember – Chrome is an insignificant browser in terms of market share, Safari and Internet Explorer have way bigger market share on mobile and desktop. However, if Google pulls H.264 support from Youtube, this means you can no longer watch Youtube videos on your current iOS AND ANDROID devices (at least not without sacrificing a crazy amount of battery life. Android devices probably won’t even last an hour with its poor battery life management).

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