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Up above here you have the graphic heading around the Internet today made by Michael DeGusta at the Understatement.com.  While some of it is unfair/sloppy –  He says the Nexus One was hanging back because it didn’t have Android 2.2 when it was announced, but that was a beta period before the final version was released – that’s like saying no iPhones had iOS 5 for 4 months back when iOS 5 was announced in June, Also the Samsung behold isn’t the most expensive Android phone offered ever on T-Mobile – the point is still valid

Overall it does serve to demonstrate the major problem with the Android ecosystem.  The motivations of the carriers and manufacturers are short term gains and keeping customers by locking them into proprietary overlays.  As DeGusta says: expand full story

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUGheQ7OT8I]

Android devices seem to be getting bigger and bigger which is good if you like huge mobile devices and even bigger tablets.  But to be “take everywhere”, devices need to get smaller.

Think the size of an iPod nano that many have taken to wearing on their wrists like a watch.

WIMM is building a platform based on devices this size.  They are squeezing Android onto super-small devices with 160×160 screens with Bluetooth and Wifi tagging along.  The devices can be worn as watches, on a belt or bag strap or even on the neck.   Not only will these thigs be able to play media, they’ll also be able to pull feeds from RSS, Twitter and Social media Sites.  They’ll also make great universal remotes for not only entertainment centers but anything else you can think of.

I like this idea a lot but the devil is in the details and execution is paramount.

Full release below: expand full story

Google’s photo software is about to get upgraded…

Stanford professor and iPhone Camera app developer Marc Levoy is going to Google for two years according to his Stanford bio page:

I will be on part-time leave of absence from June 2011 through June 2013, to pursue a project at Google. 

This stint at Google won’t be his first.  He co-designed the Google book scanner and launched Google’s Street View project.

Levoy’s current interests include light fields, optical microscopy, and computational photography – meaning computational imaging techniques that extend the capabilities of digital photography. Levoy’s recent research focuses on camera applications.

My research has recently focused on making cameras programmable. One concrete outcome of this project is our Frankencamera architecture, published in this SIGGRAPH 2010 paper. To help me understand the challenges of building photographic applications for a mobile platform, I tried writing a cell phone app myself. The result is SynthCam. By capturing, tracking, aligning, and blending a sequence of video frames, the app makes the near-pinhole aperture on an iPhone camera act like the large aperture of a single-lens-reflex (SLR) camera. This includes the SLR’s shallow depth of field and resistance to noise in low light. The app is available for $0.99 in the iTunes app store. I don’t expect to get rich from this app, but I learned a lot by writing it, and yes – seeing it appear in the app store was a thrill. Here are a few of my favorite reviews of the app: MIT Technology Review, WiReD.

What’s Levoy going to be working on at Google?

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The Galaxy Tab 10.1 gets a lot of flack for arriving in its newly svelte body late to the tablet game with a 3.1 update.  But it is undoubtedly the best Honeycomb tablet out there.  Immediately, it was my favorite tablet to use, even with its buggy 3.0 software at Google I/O.  With the much improved 3.1 update, The Tab is now a complete system that will only get better.

Rather than do a review, I’m going to answer a bigger question: Why get a Galaxy Tab instead of an iPad 2.  And I’m not going to give reasons like “You are a geek and love the Google ecosystem”.  Here we go:

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Fortune has a great Android article up from the magazine today called 100 million Android fans can’t be wrong.  It is good to see the Android news going mainstream.

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