Well, well, well, look who decided to show up to the slumber party! HTC took to the twitter with some rather crafty remakes towards the freshly announced Samsung Galaxy S4. “so…how off-Broadway is that production?” Then they hash tag, “#thenextbigflop, NICE! HTC’s president Jason Mackenzie was even quoted saying “I went from laughing to actually feeling embarrassed at some of the acting.” Those are fighting words for sure.

From an outside perspective, both sides have a leg to stand on, I’ll get into that in a much more detailed piece, there is a lot going on here for sure! But I just wanted to give a special shout out to HTC for playing with the big boys!

So Apple marketing exec Phil Schiller decided he’d chime in on Android and Samsung in particular. You don’t know Phil Schiller? He’s the guy nobody talks or cares about at Apple. Forstall was polarizing, Ives is glorified but Schiller? He’s the smuck that takes the credit for the fact third-party developers have basically made the iPhone what it is today.  In short Schiller is quoted as saying "And that extends to the news we are hearing this week that the Samsung Galaxy S4 is being rumored to ship with an OS that is nearly a year old," he said. "Customers will have to wait to get an update." Nobody is reporting this so where’d he get such erroneous information? Clearly its difficult getting good reception inside Apple’s walled garden.

Nobody buys the iPhone for iOS, they buy it because of all the awesome apps developers create for it. Notice nobody ever says anything about missing a built-in iOS feature when considering jumping to another platform? But we hear all the time about Angry Birds, Draw Something, Instagram, etc. He’s in charge of marketing, which by the way, has kept pace with iOS in become quite stale. Having a gigantic marketing budget should allow you to do better. You want to know what really has Schiller’s panties in a bunch? Samsung’s marketing is trouncing Apple’s. Nobody talks about Apple’s commercials anymore. They do with Samsung and Samsung is only increasing the boldness and tempo of their marketing. My advice to Schiller would be to STFU and do your job.

Source: Reuters

First Rubin, then Reader, and now no more sanctioned Android ad blocking. Getting dizzy here. Page, cut the shit. Schmidt, whup his ass.

arstechnica.com/2013/03/google-evicts-ad-blocking-software-from-google-play-store

Amazon announced the price cut on Kindle Fire HD, http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=176060&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=1795817&highlight=, now would it really kill majority of Android tablets like Jason Perlow on ZDNet thinks http://www.zdnet.com/why-amazon-kindle-fire-hd-will-burn-googles-android-tablet-strategy-7000012566/? What do you think?

Sundar Pichai boss of Chrome OS is taking over reins of Android from Andy Rubin, and Andy stays with Google, but at what level not sure though. Is Google accepting Desktop/Laptop are going to stay for a lot more years and mobility is a dream when you take the total picture of computing that includes everything from Mainframes to devices and there is no Post PC like Steve Jobs said and some of ZDNet bloggers think that this is Post PC era?

zdnet.com/google-looks-to-beat-microsoft-to-the-os-consolidation-punch-7000012564

Now here is something you don’t see everyday, sure we love to boast about the cameras on our smartphones, but techhive took it to another level. They sent out three professional photographers into the world with a smartphone each as their took! An iPhone 5, Lumia 920 and EVO 4G TLE were the devices. The article could have easily been turned into a versus shootout, instead, it showcases the potential of camera phones in general, especially in the hands of a pro. Such a great piece! Make the jump for the entire article and a lot more images.

iOS: Anne Hamersky

Anne Hamersky

The artist: Anne Hamersky shoots stills and video of real people doing real things. Last year she shot the construction of a straw-bale house on Hopi lands, an urban farm build in the South Bronx, and a wetlands restoration project in Passe a l’Outre, Louisiana. Michael Pollan selected her latest book,Farm Together Now(Chronicle, 2010), as his favorite food book of 2011. Anne lives in San Francisco. Follow her on Instagram (@anneham).

The smartphone: iPhone 5, 8-megapixel iSight camera

Twin Peaks Hike

ANNE HAMERSKYTwin Peaks Hike

I ride my bike a lot up Twin Peaks, the big double hills in the center of my city. The spring flowers are running amok up there right now. So it was fun to try out Photo Grid, a collage-making app for iOS. I used the swap function, the flop function, and the rounded-corner selection.

After using the iPhone’s built-in camera app to take pictures for the collage, I opened the collage in Snapseed and followed this path: Tune image > Contrast +14 > Saturation +6.

 

Windows Phone 8: Carly Marin

Carly Marin

The artist: Carly Marin is a graduate of California College of the Arts, where she received her BFA in photography. She is also the owner and operator of Carly Jean Photography, specializing in wedding photography and portraits. Her interest in photography emerged at the age of 10, and she has since dedicated herself entirely to it. Her work combines different elements of journalistic, traditional, and fashion-based photography. When she’s not photographing, you can find her enjoying coffee shops, doing experimental baking, or relaxing at home obsessing over cats! Although Carly uses mainly a digital SLR for her business, she loves using traditional 35mm film cameras for more-personal work. Apart from building up her commercial photography business, she is also working on fine-art personal projects that she hopes to share with the art world.

The smartphone: Nokia Lumia 920, 8.7-megapixel camera with an f/2.0 autofocus Carl Zeiss lens

A Portrait of Kasi

CARLY MARINA Portrait of Kasi

I took this photo at a park in Pleasanton, California, on a styled shoot with one of my favorite models to work with. Kasi recently got her cosmetology license, so we wanted to highlight her amazing hair and makeup skills with this shoot, as well as her unique sense of style. I used the Lumia’s auto settings, with an ISO of 400, the default exposure value and auto white balance, and aspect ratio 16:9.

Android: Michelle Walker

Michelle Walker

The artist: Michelle Walker is a San Francisco-based wedding, travel, portrait, and dog photographer. A formally trained photographer, she prefers a photojournalistic approach to her work—honest, meaningful, and gorgeous. She runs her own photography business, Michelle Walker Photography.

The smartphone: HTC EVO 4G LTE, 8 megapixels

Umbrellas

Ton Sai Bay, Thailand

MICHELLE WALKERUmbrellas: Ton Sai Bay, Thailand

I love the colors in this photograph—they make me remember exactly what it’s like to be on that beach! I took this using the depth-of-field setting in the native Android camera app.  This is a great setting for creating shallow bokeh (from the Japanese word boke, which means “blur” or “haze”) that draws the viewers’ attention to the area of the image in focus.

Well Google Glasses are sold to selected few during Google I/O and it will be heading towards General Availability and it is already banned at one of Seattle’s club, http://mobilitydigest.com/mobilityleaks-google-glass-banned-sent-from-windows-mail/. Now it has some kind of competition already from GlassUp (http://www.glassup.net/) with their Augmented Reality Glasses. They are making their glasses compatible with iPhone, Android and Windows Phone too and are available for pre-order at £299 (will be released sometime in September 2013). If you use prescription glasses, they have you covered you. In addition to this there is a Point of View Glasses, which are equipped with 8MP Camera/1080p HD Camcorder from Pivothead, http://pivothead.com/products from $299 and they have iOS and Android Apps to interact with the videos and photos you have taken from their glasses. It is very interesting to see how many are going to make accidents wearing these glasses and getting distracted and also getting banned from places for wearing these.

I am guessing if anyone adopts it, it may not be threat to iPhone, Android in the Phone segment, and Android Tablets, iPads, and Windows 8 Tablets but definitely a good competition to Chromebooks. They both are browser based OSes and run HTML 5 apps effectively. I see Chromebooks have native integration of Google Services and a 100GB at least cloud and 10 to 12 free sessions of Gogo Inflight Internet. And of course it is from Google, marketing of it is not a big issue. I don’t think Firefox OS will damage Windows Phone or Blackberry. Both WP and Blackberry already have users and Firefox OS adoption may not their already slow adoption. What do you think?

I’ll keep beating this drum. Samsung has become king of advertising and are reaping the benefits. The Galaxy S4 is getting even more attention than its predecessor, the GS3, did from Samsung’s hype machine. Today brings a second teaser video that builds on the first where their super carrier Jeremy tries his best to keep the flagship device under wraps. Remember the world finds out the details and gets our first glimpse of the hardware this Thursday March 14th.

The Facebook phone rumor refuses to go quietly into the night, this has been circling for a year and some change. This time around, the rumored spec are:

• Processor: 1.5 GHz dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon MSM8960
• Operating system: Google Android 4.1.2
• Cellular connectivity: LTE / HSPA
• Other connectivity: 802.11 a/b/g/n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.0
• Display: 4.3-inch HD (1280×720 / 320PPI)
• Memory: 1GB RAM
• Storage: 16GB onboard
• Rear-facing camera: 5MP
• Front-facing camera: 1.6MP

It is said to be a HTC produced phone with a heavy AT&T presence. Is anyone buying this? Does Facebook still have that strong of a grip on social networking to make users devote an enter device to the brand? To tell the truth, I am on both sides of the fence, it would be interesting to see how it actually sells if it is real.