Tiny ninjas unbox the Nexus One on Google's dime -- Engadget
via engadget.com
Software developer, system administrator and test engineer interested in tech. This blog will mainly contain tech related items that interest me. System Administration items will be posted on my main blog.
Disclaimer: This is a personal weblog. The opinions expressed here represent my own and not those of my employer.
Nexus One may seem like me-too, just like the iSlate will be called tablet take two. But in fact we’re seeing voice replace the keyboard on the phone, which in turn creates a vacuum on the desk/laptop for the iScreen to fill.
How is Apple going to compete against crowd sourced voice recognition by Google (via Goog-411)? If Google can get really good at this, it will be a new way of interfacing with these devices. How will others (Apple, Blackberry, Palm, etc.) be able to compete? The only other company that could possibly have a chance would be microsoft, via there huge data centers...
The advertising revenue keeps Google’s stock high, and that allows the company to do whatever it feels like doing. In 2006, when Google’s stock was worth $132 billion, the company absorbed YouTube for $1.65 billion, almost with a shrug. “They can buy anything they want or lose money on anything they choose to,” Irwin Gotlieb, the chief of GroupM, one of Google’s biggest competitors in the media market, told Auletta. If Microsoft is courting DoubleClick, Google can swoop in and buy DoubleClick for $3.1 billion.
And yet when it comes to building an OS, they come up with that crap they call ChromeOS. Instead of working on a new OS. Or improving an existing one (haiku, syllable, etc.). Do they do the hard work of teaming with vendors to get driver support for new hardware. No, they take Linux and bastardize it and call it ChromeOS.
You see everything you'll do on a Chrome OS computer is based on the good old user/password concept. This SSO (single sign on) key unlocks all your information, which is stored on the cloud. This means you can log into your account from any Google Chrome device. That's the good news. That's also the bad news.
On Chrome, all your personal information is only a login away. And, when I say all your information, I mean all. This isn't just access to a critical file or information about one bank account, it's every file and all the information you keep in those files.
I don't think Chrome would be a bad idea if it were something that was targeted to complement existing PC architectures. Why isn't it? If it's web-based, Chrome OS could and should co-exist with Mac OS, Linux and Windows. It's the idea that Google is promoting Chrome as a PC OS replacement for mobile devices and riding the netbook hype all at the same time that gets me, as does the fact that I need to get a new device to run Chrome OS. That's ridiculous, as are reference design requirements like SSDs instead of hard drives. Worse, trying to merge the PC and phone into some weird new intersection of devices is not what the market wants or has ever looked for. This type of specialized hardware sounds like it's going right into the 'tweener category and we know what happens to those devices. You just have to look how successful netbooks running Linux and Firefox have been to get a sense as to how well this concept is likely to go over with consumers.
This is so sad... all those brains at Google and this is what they come up with!
Just had to get that of my chest.
n spite of some of the reaction to it, I find Google Wave to be surprisingly useful. One thing I don’t really understand, though, is its scrollbars. They behave quite differently from regular scrollbars, and I can’t discern any overwhelming advantages of Google’s implementation. It seems I’m not alone. The unofficial Google Wave manual deems it necessary to explain how the scrollbars work. Google’s own support site for Wave has an entry titled What’s the deal with the scrollbar?, and there’s even a Chrome extension which replaces Google’s scrollbars with native scrollbars.
Yeah, I don't get those scrollbars either!
