Given that Apple are suing Samsung where ever they can to stop sales of Samsung Android based phones and tablets, it would seem incredibly weird to find out that Samsung is the sole supplier of the A5 CPU (an implementation of the ARM A9 CPU) that’s used in both the iPhone4S and the iPad2, wouldn’t it?
Gizmodo: Siri is Apple’s Broken Promise
You would think from Apple’s TV ads for the Siri feature on the iPhone4S that Siri is technology from the future. The reality is though it doesn’t actually work as well as they show in the ads. And most of the time it doesn’t work at all since the processing of the voice recognition occurs server-side and apparently Apple have been having issues keeping the service up and/or available and you get a response something like: ‘I’m sorry, this service is unavailable right now. Please try again later’.
This article in Gizmodo gives the dirty low-down. It’s an interesting step forward, but in reality it’s just not ready for prime time yet.
Consumer Reports rate many Android phones better than the iPhone 4S
Whether you put much weight in the reviews in Consumer Reports or not, the fact that they operate independently of any company whose products they review and that they don’t accept any products they review as gifts (they buy every product they review) in order to maintain impartiality, plus the fact that they have over 7 million subscribers, when they rate one product over another it’s kind of a big deal.
Consumer Reports doesn’t ‘recommend’ the iPhone 4 due to it’s signal strength issues inherent in unfortunate design where it’s signal is killed by holding the phone in your hand. Small problem. The new iPhone 4S however they do recommend.
Here’s the kicker though, and one that may be an eye opener for some who are blinded by Apple’s great marketing – they rate a wide range of Android phones carried by AT&T, Sprint and Verizon, all HIGHER than the iPhone 4S. Yes, you read that right. Consumer Reports in their impartial and objective reviews recommend a number of Android phones with higher ratings than the iPhone 4S. Android phones rated high than the iPhone 4S include:
- Samsung Galaxy S II
- Samsung Galaxy Infuse 4G
- LG Thrill 4G
- Galaxy S II Epic 4G Touch
- Motorola Photon 4G
- Samsung Epic 4G
- HTC Evo 3D
- Motorola’s Droid Bionic
- HTC Thunderbolt
- LG Revolution
- Samsung Droid Charge
… that’s a lot of phones to choose from that in their impartial review are better than the iPhone 4S.
Adobe announces intent to ditch mobile version of Flash
Given the recent fuss over mobile devices that do (Android) or don’t (iOS) support Flash, it seems an odd card to play for Adobe to announce that they’re no longer going to develop Flash player for mobile devices.
Personally, I don’t see this as a big deal. Sure it was nice to have the ability to play Flash video or some Flash-based games on my Android phone, but it certainly wasn’t ever a deciding factor that I have to have an Android phone because it supports Flash. In a way this is good move for the industry, since getting Flash off of a growing platform removes one more barrier from widespread adoption of HTML5. The interesting thing is whether this is just the first step for Adobe, and that ultimately they’re going to abandon Flash on the desktop too in the near future? As HTML5 adoption and usage increases, the relevancy of Flash will surely decrease. Maybe Adobe is coming to terms with this at this point, and this is just their first step to ramping down their overall support for Flash?