Reuters reports on the just-started trial over the copyrights and licensing fees between the two biggest rivals in the technology industry. It is a great introduction into the trial. What I found disarming, though, is this picture:
Seriously, how is Samsung even supposed to defend its case after the jury sees this? Go, Apple. No reason why you should invest your money into inventing the designs that others will steal, sell & get away with it.
Microsoft launched a preview of its new web mail interface today. I tried it out myself, because I was curious. Here are my thoughts.
If you want to use the new interface and you don't have a hotmail account, you need to register for a @outlook.com email address. Microsoft is following Google's @gmail.com and Apple's @icloud.com/@me.com as a new signature domain. Everyone knows that nowadays your email domain is a part of the first impression you make. Microsoft finally gave their customers a chance to feel fresh and modern again with their @outlook.com suffix.
What I really like about the interface is speed. It's Metro-styled, so it will fit into Windows 8. It seems faster than Apple's iCloud, Yahoo!'s yahoo.com and even Google's Gmail interface. It's very usable on low broadband (which is something that both Apple and Google suck at). It's very simplistic, which is something I feel like a webmail interface should be (sorry Gmail, all those flags, labels and groups make me dizzy).
Even though I didn't play with the contacts too much, it seems capable of everything you need to do. Skype integration is pretty cool, but they're already late to this game since Microsoft should have used Skype better for over a year (they did pay a couple of billion dollars for it).
It's just a preview, so we can be sure Microsoft will try to make it even better in the future. Let's just hope they won't pack it with useless features while trying to improve it.
My call is that is has a bright future. Try it out for yourself.
Speaking of easily and fast spreading news, I took the liberty of putting together a little graph. It shows how this particular piece of information has been traveling around the internet.
From most of the articles, I figured out that iMore.com's was the first one. Then allthingsd.com picked it up. And then all the Apple news servers such as theverge.com, macrumors.com, cultofmac.com and appleinsider.com just copy-pasted it. (Which is kind of pathetic). Feelings aside, this would look like a solid, credible information flow.
The weird part is that even though allthingsd.com used the original iMore.com article as their source, in an edited version of the post, iMore.com sourced back to allthingsd.com. So, it's as convincing of an argument as agreeing with your own opinions.
Even though this particular piece of news is probably true, I can't imagine an easier thing to do than to make up something ridiculous (such as a 4-inch iPhone) and then make sure I send slightly alternated piece of this junk to news-hungry journalists without mentioning my name every week. Or I could just make one up. Then, after a couple of months of hearing a lie, it just becomes a truth and later, a dogma. That could be how we got to those many "sure thing" Apple products that have never seen the surface of the Earth (two Easter Eggs in there), but were supposed to come out years ago.
So again, I might be wrong about the new iPhone. But that doesn't change anything on the fact that these news sites work with such vague information which they sell through ads, that it's actually genius. They make up news, people read it. The crazier news, the more readers they get.
The Verge and other major news sites published a story today saying that the new iPhone is coming soon:
"The rumor cycle this time around for the next iPhone has been a bit unusual — multiple leaks have all depicted the exact same components — but it looks like we'll be seeing what Apple has up its sleeves come Wednesday, September 12th."
We soon shall see whether I was right or not.
I don't have a reason to not believe this story, early September seems logical. We should get both the new iPhone and iOS 6 in that announcement. The last iPhone (4S) was released on October 6th, 2011 along with iOS 5.
If you are interested in science, check out my other blog science by a weirdo…. I started writing that blog last year and discontinued it after a couple of months, but now I'm going back to it. You can find more about artificial intelligence, advanced physics, mathematics etc there. I plan on posting on both these blogs and no worries, I'll add the links to new posts there both on Twitter and here.