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Call me a traitor if you want, but I don’t find this hard to believe.

Obviously I love Instagram, and I love iOS. And for all the knocks you can levy against Android, there are a few ideas core to the OS that are good ideas. Inter-process communication and the raw power of the hardware (though it typically goes unutilized) are two things that come to mind.

The Instagram folks are the kind of people who take an immense amount of pride in their app development. It’s safe to say that they aren’t going to be the kinds of people who slap together a hackneyed, crappy port just to increase their exposure. They’ve been perfectly okay to hold out this long on entering the Android ecosystem, and taking the time to create a polished, performant app that is tailored to the platform isn’t going to hurt them in any way; so that’s probably what they did. Instagram for Android shouldn’t be a 1-to-1 port of the iOS app; it should be an app with the same functionality that can interact with the social network that is in place, but it should do these things in a manner that makes sense for Android and leverages all of the benefits of the platform available to it.

I can see how some of the features of Android, if leveraged, could make the Android version of the app “better” than the iPhone version of the app. Obviously, everything I’m saying right now is completely, purely conjecture. We’ll have to wait for them to publish the app before we can start analyzing these claims. The low barrier to entry and design standards that Android as a development platform sets for new developers makes it easy for shitty looking, buggy, cobbled-together apps to overwhelm the Android Market (or I guess it’s called Google Play now). But if more developers were willing to invest the time and energy in to their creations, to be truly proud of what it is that they’re making, I’m sure we’d see an increase in the number of really great Android apps. They’re out there, they’re just few and far between these days. Excited to see what the Instagram guys are able to whip up.

Eschewing the tired motifs that have characterized HTC design over the past year, the 4.3-inch One S looks bold, distinctive, and extremely slim.

I’d love to know where Vlad at The Verge gets his drugs, because they sound awesome and I’ve had a long month.

It looks exactly like every single phone they’ve ever made except skinnier.

Ridiculous.

The Galaxy Note essentially has everything you’d want in a smartphone: a great dual-core processor, a solid camera, a beautiful display and good build quality, and it runs on AT&T’s new 4G LTE network that delivers incredibly fast downloads speeds. Plus the battery seems actually decent so far, which is a triumph for modern smartphones.

Throw all of that right out the window.

The phone is too big. You will look stupid talking on it, people will laugh at you, and you’ll be unhappy if you buy it. I really can’t get around this, unfortunately, because Samsung pushed things way too far this time.

Forget hardware, forget specs, forget Android vs. iOS. The fact of the matter is that Samsung just doesn’t get it anymore.

Okay, so even I have to admit that this is completely awesome.

parislemon:

Based on six analysts with the best track records, Philip Elmer-DeWitt compiles his best guess for the Q1 (Apple’s holiday quarter) numbers Apple will announce tomorrow. These are analysts who typically update their numbers over time and, notably, aren’t necessarily Wall Street analysts (who generally blow at guessing about all things Apple-related).

If he’s close, my prediction from October 18 (the day Apple announced Q4 numbers) that this quarter would not only be Apple’s first $30 billion quarter, but first $40 billion quarter, looks very good. Elmer-DeWitt’s numbers have revenues coming in at a cool $42.76 billion.

Such a number would constitute a massive blow-out. Apple’s previous revenue record is $28.57 billion, hit in Q3 2011. Again, if the numbers hold, Apple could see a quarter almost exactly 50% better than their previous record quarter. That would be insane.

It would also further prove that last quarter’s miss was simply because analysts were lazy and failed to recognize the impact moving the iPhone launch a quarter later would have.  

It’s worth noting that Elmer-DeWitt’s whisper numbers were off last quarter as well. But again, all analysts were off, so it’s no surprise that an average of the best would be off as well. 

DeWitt’s craziest number has to be iPhone sales of 33 million. The previous record was 20.24 million iPhones sold (again, in Q3 2011). It would also be eerily close to the projection of 34 million iPhones sold if you extrapolated out Verizon’s stated numbers. And it would directly speak to the recent NPD and Nielsen numbers that iPhone has closed the gap with Android sales in the U.S. 

Remember. In the iPhone vs. Android world, we’re talking about what is effectively 3 phones (two of them just older versions of the current one), versus an entire gaggle of current-generation phones. Yet the disparity is so very slim.

At least Android is still clopen.

Also, tech writers who think they’re clever in coming up with a “new word”…

Clopen has been a thing in mathematics for a long time.

I used a Honeycomb tablet once, briefly in the form of the original Xoom, and I actually didn’t hate it. My first Android Tablet experience was the Original Galaxy Tab, and the hacked-up 2.x tablet experience was absolutely dreadful.

Honeycomb does in fact have promise for a Tablet, and I can only assume ICS will be even better.

That being said, it’s still Android. And Android is still a bit of a mess. As pretty as the UI is becoming, the UIX still isn’t quite there.

On the quad core SoC:

The Prime is something of a curiosity around these parts in that it’s the first tablet to ship with NVIDIA’s quad-core Tegra 3 SoC. Actually, let’s just call it what it is: the first quad-core tablet, period. We’ve run our usual spate of benchmarks (listed above for your viewing pleasure), and the combined scores are among the highest we’ve yet seen, handily beating the Galaxy Tab 8.9 and 7.0 Plus we recently tested in most cases.

Suffice to say, all the mundane bits — swiping through menus, opening apps — run as briskly as you’d expect on a quad-core slate. The Prime’s display is as responsive as it is gorgeous, and we made ourselves at home quickly — so much so that we found ourselves tapping the screen even when we were plugged into the dock. Make no mistake: the Prime is fast, but we suspect Honeycomb’s 3D animations aren’t the best way to highlight this, given that dual-core Tegra 2 can stomach these flourishes well enough already.

You’d think that means that the OS is finally less janky and stuttery, However:

That said, we were sorry to still see some occasional stutters and hiccups from time to time, instances where the device would hesitate for just a half-second or so before responding. There are three performance modes that are easily selected between in the pop-up settings menu, but even on its highest we couldn’t get it to be a consistently smooth operator. They’re the kind of stops and starts we’ve seen on just about every Android device to date and it’s a bit of a shame that even four whopping cores running at 1.3GHz can’t do away with them.

Even with 4 cores, the OS finds a way to stutter. This blows my mind. A big part of this is that, on some level, Android’s User Interface is not hardware accelerated, meaning that user interface animations aren’t handed off to the graphics unit on the SoC; they’re handled by the regular CPU which sucks at the type of math involved in doing animations. I’m not an Android expert, by any means, but I think that Honeycomb started to introduce a limited amount of hardware accelerated graphics and I believe that ICS has a lot more to offer in that respect. But one of the reasons that iOS has always seemed so silky smooth is that the UI animation frameworks have always been hardware accelerated. And it shows.

This seems like the Android tablet to get, if you’re in to that sort of thing. But then you’d have an Android tablet.

Some back up the envelope math puts the PPI at somewhere around 315. So I guess it’s “retina”. Not too shabby. Though I still have a hard time getting behind the whole large screen thing. I’m a huge fan of the 3.5” iPhone display and a believer in the possible rationale behind it.

Edit/Add: Really? A barometer?

John Gruber weighs in on the new Amazon Kindle devices. Top notch writing, as per usual for a long-form DF article. Buried inside, though, is perhaps the single most refined, cogent, and well-articulated description of what Apple (and potentially Amazon) got right and what everyone else is doing wrong in the “tablet space”:

Amazon built an alternative to the iPad, rather than a direct competitor. It’s a different market segment. As Steve Jobs explained back in 2010 at the introduction of the original iPad, there’s unexplored territory between smartphones and laptops.

Read the rest. It’s the stuff.

Whether or not Oracle actually HAS a case, they strategy they are adopting seems destined for failure.

At least, I hope it is. Ugh.

We’re not naive; technology is a tough and ever-changing industry and we work very hard to stay focused on our own business and make better products. But in this instance we thought it was important to speak out and make it clear that we’re determined to preserve Android as a competitive choice for consumers, by stopping those who are trying to strangle it.

Well, then, maybe you should have taken that god damn auction a little more seriously

Jim Dalrymple over at The Loop:

Whatever. Good luck with that.

This is the exact opposite of a good solution.