You gotta love Bill Amend’s ‘Foxtrot.’ The comic always has a finger on the pulse of the geek/tech community and brings some hilarious commentary about our favorite gadgets. Seriously, I rarely laugh at tech humor as hard as I laugh at Foxtrot. His latest target is the new iPhone 4G and the story behind Gray Powell’s lost prototype.
Would you buy the iPhone 12gv? I know I would.
Source: Foxtrot
There have been a million posts exactly like this one, posts detailing the most minute changes to our daily lives as the result of some new, ubiquitous technology, but I still get the same sense of wonderment when I encounter one myself. My younger sister graduated from undergrad today, replete with your stereotypically boring and overdrawn ceremony.
One thing was different between this and my last graduation – my younger brother’s high school graduation – a few years back. I had an iPhone, and so did my older sister. My younger brother was sporting an iPod Touch. Within a few minutes we had fired up Words With Friends, a Scrabble app that’s playable with one other person over the air. From a few seats away I was able to dish out some domination while tuning out the muffled voice of an underwhelming speaker.
There are plenty of people who would condemn my actions, my lack of interest in my sister’s momentous occasion. For me, though, there wasn’t much to see. My sister was across an auditorium full of a couple thousand kids. I would hear her name exactly once in the course of a two-hour ceremony, see her face just twice by the time it was over. Even she was willing to admit that the keynote speaker was beyond awful. Considering all of that, I don’t think it’s out of the question to seek a little entertainment.
It wasn’t just me, either. Looking around the room I saw a swarm of handheld entertainment screens flickering with the owner’s stimulus of choice. There were students on the floor checking emails, sending pictures back and forth, playing games, hell some of them were making calls.
It comes as no surprise that Google’s experiment in phone sales went poorly. It was so bad that the company will be shutting down its Nexus One storefront. Here’s the word from the official Google blog:
While the global adoption of the Android platform has exceeded our expectations, the web store has not. It’s remained a niche channel for early adopters, but it’s clear that many customers like a hands-on experience before buying a phone, and they also want a wide range of service plans to chose from.
Yeah, no kidding. I’m not sure why no one spoke up and said this at the meetings that must have happened before the phone launched. If anyone at Google thought Verizon or T-Mobile or Sprint or, well, any carrier would actually want to give up control over phone sales and contract pricing they should be beaten about the head with a sock full of Nexus Ones.
The new plan? Sell phones like everyone else.
A pretty serious bug hit Twitter recently that allowed users to “force” others to follow them. By typing “accept [username]” you could gain any follower you wanted. The bug apparently only worked on the web interface – not in any third-party apps – and may only have appeared to give you followers, meaning those people would show up on your list but would not receive streams like a real follower would. I say serious only because you could potentially achieve some very prominent followers, like, say, Barack Obama, through this little exploit.
Twitter is aware of the bug, but the fix is a little ugly in the meantime. It requires rolling back accounts that made use of the exploit to zero followers. That includes sites that were doing any kind of testing. Sites like TechCrunch.
The zero count is only temporary, but it was probably a bit of a shock for Twitter’s heaviest users.
The Apple Store went down today, which almost always means something new is coming. In this case it was international iPad pre-orders.
If you haven’t been keeping up, the iPad launched in the US back in April, and though some countries haven’t had access to it, many of their citizens have been paying top dollar to get an iPad just a month early. Crazy early adopters. Seriously, I’m a geek/nerd/freak all the way and I struggle to understand that logic. But hey, more power to the people making bank off that iPad.
If you reside outside the US you can finally head over and order your new tablet today. Launch is May 28th.
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