iphone & ipad prototypes.

At least one good thing has come out of the Apple vs. Samsung trial: we get to see all the cool stuff that eventually morphed into the iPhone and the iPad. Check out the prototypes provides by The Verge here:

• iPhone prototypes gallery
• iPad prototypes gallery

Amazing, huh? Considering that Apple might have chosen any of those not-so-great (and that's euphemism) prototypes and just released it without the extra years of development. They didn't. They waited for the best thing to be ready. And that's what this trial is all about. Greatness vs Money. Apple vs Samsung.

phelps got 19 olympic medals. best olympian ever.

The Wall Street Journal published a pretty nice article about Michael Phelps today.

why.

Well, Michael Phelps' name was written into the Olympic history four years ago, when he won 8 gold medals at one Olympics in Beijing. This year, he became the most decorated Olympian in history by winning his 19th medal yesterday.

why it matters.

Since swimming is my sport, it is expected of me to consider Michael Phelps to be the best athlete of all time. He really is. Many of my friends argue that it's much easier to win that many medals in swimming than in, I don't know, track and field. They say that it's all just swimming. But the difference between 400 IM and 1500 free is as huge as the difference between 110 hurdles and the long jump. Michael swam the maximum number of races that any swimmer is allowed to (8) - and he won all of them (+ broke the world record in 7 of them).

try it.

If an athlete ran in the following races: 100, 200, 400, 800, 4x100 and 4x400, you can already win 6 gold medals. Find two more and you can make history, too.

I'm not saying it's easy, I'm just saying that it's possible in other sports too, not just in swimming. The problem is, nobody like Michael has ever appeared in other sport.

apple vs. samsung in trial.

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's new web mail: outlook.com

Microsoft launched a preview of its new web mail interface today. I tried it out myself, because I was curious. Here are my thoughts.

new domain

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.

fast interface

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).

contacts, Skype

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).

preview

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.

the internet. the news. the hoax.

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.

Who was the first one?

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.

Source of the source.

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.

Credibility?

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.