turnings

The Mythical Gphone:

Did we get a Google phone? No.

What we got instead was a press release, a conference call, some self-indulgent videos, and a memo from Andy Rubin, the putative designer of the mythical phone (and hero of an adoring profile in The New York Times over the weekend), confirming what the naysayers have been saying all along: Google is not and will not be in the business of building phones.

What it’s offering — and trying to sell to the people who actually build the phones — is an operating system and some tools for writing cellphone applications. It’s a worthy enterprise and I wish them well. What it is not — as they are the first to say — is a Gphone.

[Roight. Vapor s'all. Shameless vapor.]
Source: FORTUNE: Apple 2.0

IronRuby on Silverlight at RubyConf: This is one of the first (to my knowledge) examples of a code-first Silverlight 1.1 application. Most Silverlight applications that generate UIs do so by creating a XAML string that they feed to the XAML parser. When you have a language as beautiful as Ruby, it’s a shame to be creating trees via strings. [Nice!]
Source: Less is better

Om Malik on Google’s Mobile Phone Platform Announcement: But jiminy, watch this “INtroducing Android” video from Google on YouTube — could it be any more vague? So far this seems like the most Microsoftian thing Google has ever announced.[Seriously.]
Source: Daring Fireball

NBC vs. Apple: SNL’s iPhone Sketch: Either way, you must sit through a 15-second TV-style commercial before you get to the clip — a chilling vision of what the Internet would look like if it had been invented by the folks who run broadcast television. [Yeah... I know ads are big business, but no one is interested in interruption based ads anymore, if they ever were. The entrenched thinking that is forcing ads into the process (again) is wrong. The question is not "how can we shove ads down their throats, we love ads" it's "how can we make money from this now that the 'network' is not relevant." An example old school ads that work are product placement. Work defined as, I may or may not care what phone, car, cereal, shoes, etc. folks in the movie are wearing, but I may, so especially in an online download, make sure that metadata is there, and feel free to track the click, and make some money from it.]
Source: FORTUNE: Apple 2.0