Droid Bionic with 4G

Josh Topolsky reviews the Droid Bionic:

…this is the first phone to come preloaded with Google Talk video chat, which was great when I could get it to work (it still seems a bit buggy).

Even though the Bionic has a larger battery than every other LTE device on Verizon, I don’t see most people getting through a full day without a recharge or a spare battery, especially if you’re making lots of calls.

As far as auto-focus lenses on phones go, this seems to be one of the slower models.

You know you can expect some significant software tweaks. That’s certainly true for the Bionic, where you’ll find a mishmash of previous Moto customizations atop Android 2.3.4

To simply place an icon on your homescreen, you must open your application launcher and then long press on the app you want. This brings up a contextual menu asking if you’d like to place the icon on your homescreen or add it to a group. If you choose homescreen, it places the icon in the first available position on your page — meaning you have to long press again to move it into the location you want. 

Elsewhere in the OS, there are graphical inconsistencies that make the Bionic’s interface feel thrown together.

Let me just say that any money spent on any of the Webtop devices is essentially money wasted. The quasi-PC interface which Motorola provides (based on Ubuntu and little more than the Firefox browser) is largely useless. The browser itself is sluggish and there are no other applications aside from a window into your phone on-screen.

This is not the killer handset that I think a lot of people were expecting it to be…

Sounds like a winner.

Responding to Google’s Acquisition of Motorola

It has been fun to read some of the articles about Google’s buyout of Motorola. It is a very interesting story indeed. First thing yesterday, Dan Lyons (of Fake Steve Jobs fame) posted an articles, suck on it applesoft, which immediately prompted MG Siegler and John Gruber to respond with “Defending Android” and Balls. 

I am very much siding with Siegler and Gruber as they actually presented facts and not a hastily written piece based on seemingly nothing other than Dan’s dislike for Microsoft and Apple.

From my article yesterday you can see that I believe that Google is in trouble. This is Larry’s first big move as Google’s CEO and while I think this partially fixes Google’s patent problems they didn’t come out much better in the end. They now have an unprofitable 3rd rate Android handset maker and 20,000 more employees to manage along with a 12.5 billion dollar price tag, which as Gruber explains is over 2 years worth of profit for Google.

So now what? That is the question everyone is trying to answer. Will Google now make better hardware for their Nexus phones? Will they actually create a Google TV that someone other than a 40 year old living in their parents basement would actually use? Will they use Motorola’s patents to “defend” Android by going offensive (I know, they said they wouldn’t do this but…) after Microsoft and Apple?

I’m not sure, but from a business point of view, this deal solved one problem and creates many others for Google. They just became a much more complicated company and that in and of itself creates problems. I wish Google good luck but I won’t be surprised to see this blow up in Larry’s face.

Update: Horace Dediu agrees with me.

Flash® 10.1 available for Android 2.2

I linked to a video by PocketNow.com demoing the Flash beta that can be installed on Android. Granted this is still beta software but so far it doesn’t even look worth installing. After watching the comparison video for a couple minutes I think Steve Jobs and Apple are still correct - Flash just isn’t suited for mobile devices - except (maybe) web based Flash games- which anything worth playing has a native version anyhow.

Flash is:

• a memory hog (the device had to be rebooted)
• slow and clunky (watch the scrolling or ad animations). The world’s fastest browser becomes one of the world’s slowest.
• unusable/unwieldy. I loved to see how he started an embedded Youtube video but couldn’t get it to stop and had to navigate away because the button was just too small to hit.
• full of bugs. One page rendered was just all over the place due to the Flash plugin.
• full of ads. seriously, I have flash blocked on my desktop for a reason. I don’t need my mobile device crawling just so I get a slow animation of some corporate logo.

Oh, but you can watch web video embedded in the browser. If you are willing to trade fast and quick with slow and unwieldy just to watch a stupid cat playing a piano or have dozens of ads cluttering up the page then go for it.

Just for the record, it has been three years since the original iPhone launched and even if Apple really wanted Flash® on the device (which they don’t) we still don’t have a usable mobile version three years after the fact. Adobe® really missed the boat. Now that the mobile web is where most growth and profitability lie I don’t see Flash as relevant in a few years time. Goodbye proprietary browser plugins. And good riddance.