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Saturday, October 8, 2011
A Sad Conclusion--Steve Jobs, founder of Apple Computer, Inc, iPhone, iPad, iPod and i Touch.
Good Bye, Steve Jobs (1955-2011). We will miss you but never forget you....
Every single morning my iPod Touch wakes me up. After being up, I play some music to get me out of sleepy mode and into an aware human mode. I use the device to check all of the social networks like Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, Google +, Linkedin, and my email as well. After writing for a few hours I take a break to workout/exercise. What do I do while working out? Listen to the latest music on my iPod Touch. I use the device envisioned by the man himself on a daily basis. Kinda crazy to think that a little device has a huge impact in our life.
Now realize, I don’t charge my iPod during the day. I use it to it’s full potential and yet by the time evening comes, it’s still kicking. Now think about it for a second, do you think that Steve intended it to be this way? I personally think so. The amount of details and though Apple puts into each and every one of their devices is mind blowing. Their number one goal is simplicity and that’s what we all love. No loops to go through, no pop-up, no unnecessary errors, you just pick it up and it works.
It’s crazy to think of what the future holds. Steve did not care about being rich, he cared about working on what he loved. Here is a sad truth that we have to accept. Unless your rich parents give you money, unless you win the lottery, or unless you find a million dollars on the road, you will have to work throughout your life. We all have dream jobs at mind and always want to get paid for doing cool things. I heard this from my personal friends many times. “He/She is soooo lucky, if I had that job It would be so easy to do.” Yes, I’m sure you could. However that person probably busted their butt to get to where they are today.Hard work is the only way to achieve success. Cheating or taking shortcuts will only bring you down once you achieve that success. I can guarantee you won’t be fully proud of yourself once you reach that status, unless you got there honestly. Guilt is a painful thing we deal with, when we do bad things to achieve greed. The bottom line is that you should learn from Steve that hard work and loving what you do will lead to success. Sometime success will then lead to happiness, and that happiness comes when you have changed somebody’s life for the better.These wisdomatic sayings are not here to create paragraphs, they are here to help you become a better person. Most people don’t realize that Steve came from nothing and achieved everything. Did he lie or do faulty things? Yes, I will not point fingers and list them. That’s just a part of being a human being. Nobody on this planet is perfect, we all have flaws. Jobs corrected his mistakes and kept building a ladder to his dreams.
We dedicate this article and everything included to remember his presence.
What Others are Saying
Here are some statements and reactions regarding his death. The following people are some of the most know in the industry. Check out below what they had to say.
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“Michelle and I are saddened to learn of the passing of Steve Jobs. Steve was among the greatest of American innovators – brave enough to think differently, bold enough to believe he could change the world, and talented enough to do it.
By building one of the planet’s most successful companies from his garage, he exemplified the spirit of American ingenuity. By making computers personal and putting the internet in our pockets, he made the information revolution not only accessible, but intuitive and fun. And by turning his talents to storytelling, he has brought joy to millions of children and grownups alike. Steve was fond of saying that he lived every day like it was his last. Because he did, he transformed our lives, redefined entire industries, and achieved one of the rarest feats in human history: he changed the way each of us sees the world.The world has lost a visionary. And there may be no greater tribute to Steve’s success than the fact that much of the world learned of his passing on a device he invented. Michelle and I send our thoughts and prayers to Steve’s wife Laurene, his family, and all those who loved him.” - Barack Obama
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“I am very, very sad to hear the news about Steve. He was a great man with incredible achievements and amazing brilliance. He always seemed to be able to say in very few words what you actually should have been thinking before you thought it. His focus on the user experience above all else has always been an inspiration to me. He was very kind to reach out to me as I became CEO of Google and spend time offering his advice and knowledge even though he was not at all well. My thoughts and Google’s are with his family and the whole Apple family.” - Larry Page, Google CEO
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“From the earliest days of Google, whenever Larry and I sought inspiration for vision and leadership, we needed to look no farther than Cupertino. Steve, your passion for excellence is felt by anyone who has ever touched an Apple product (including the macbook I am writing this on right now). And I have witnessed it in person the few times we have met. On behalf of all of us at Google and more broadly in technology, you will be missed very much. My condolences to family, friends, and colleagues at Apple.” - Sergey Brin, Google Co-founder
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“I’m truly saddened to learn of Steve Jobs’ death. Melinda and I extend our sincere condolences to his family and friends, and to everyone Steve has touched through his work.
Steve and I first met nearly 30 years ago, and have been colleagues, competitors and friends over the course of more than half our lives. The world rarely sees someone who has had the profound impact Steve has had, the effects of which will be felt for many generations to come.
For those of us lucky enough to get to work with him, it’s been an insanely great honor. I will miss Steve immensely.” - Bill Gates
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“Team,
I have some very sad news to share with all of you. Steve passed away earlier today.
Apple has lost a visionary and creative genius, and the world has lost an amazing human being. Those of us who have been fortunate enough to know and work with Steve have lost a dear friend and an inspiring mentor. Steve leaves behind a company that only he could have built, and his spirit will forever be the foundation of Apple.
We are planning a celebration of Steve’s extraordinary life for Apple employees that will take place soon. If you would like to share your thoughts, memories and condolences in the interim, you can simply email rememberingsteve@apple.com.
No words can adequately express our sadness at Steve’s death or our gratitude for the opportunity to work with him. We will honor his memory by dedicating ourselves to continuing the work he loved so much.” - Tim Cook, Apple CEO [in an email to Apple employees]
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“Steve, thank you for being a mentor and a friend. Thanks for showing that what you build can change the world. I will miss you.” - Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook CEO
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“Once in a rare while, somebody comes along who doesnt just raise the bar, they create an entirely new standard of measurement.” - Dick Costolo, Twitter CEO
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“I want to express my deepest condolences at the passing of Steve Jobs, one of the founders of our industry and a true visionary. My heart goes out to his family, everyone at Apple and everyone who has been touched by his work.” - Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO
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“Steve Jobs was a great friend as well as a trusted advisor. His legacy will extend far beyond the products he created or the businesses he built. It will be the millions of people he inspired, the lives he changed and the culture he defined. Steve was such an ‘original,’ with a thoroughly creative, imaginative mind that defined an era. Despite all he accomplished, it feels like he was just getting started. With his passing the world has lost a rare original, Disney has lost a member of our family, and I have lost a great friend.” - Bob Iger, Disney CEO
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The magic of Steve was that while others simply accepted the status quo, he saw the true potential in everything he touched and never compromised on that vision. He leaves behind an incredible family and a legacy that will continue to speak to people for years to come. - George Lucas
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Today, we lost one of the most influential thinkers, creators and entrepreneurs of all time. Steve Jobs was simply the greatest CEO of his generation. While I am deeply saddened by his passing, I’m reminded of the stunning impact he had in revolutionizing the way people consume media and entertainment. My heart goes out to his family and to everyone who had the opportunity to work beside him in bringing his many visions to life. - News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch
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We are saddened by the passing of Steve Jobs. Steve was an iconic inventor, visionary, and entrepreneur, and we had the privilege to know him as partner and friend. All of us at AT&T offer our thoughts and prayers to Steve’s wife, family, and his Apple family. - AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson
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Tonight, America lost a genius who will be remembered with Edison and Einstein, and whose ideas will shape the world for generations to come. Again and again over the last four decades, Steve Jobs saw the future and brought it to life long before most people could even see the horizon. And Steve’s passionate belief in the power of technology to transform the way we live brought us more than smart phones and iPads: it brought knowledge and power that is reshaping the face of civilization. In New York City’s government, everyone from street construction inspectors to NYPD detectives have harnessed Apple’s products to do their jobs more efficiently and intuitively. Tonight our City – a city that has always had such respect and admiration for creative genius – joins with people around the planet in remembering a great man and keeping Laurene and the rest of the Jobs family in our thoughts and prayers. - NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg
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It’s the ultimate sadness. First of all, it’s a young person who was revered, sometimes feared, but always revered. In a way, it’s kind of prophetic; everyone was hoping he could be on stage yesterday. He was a very special person, and he didn’t get to where he was by having people like him all the time. He got to where he was because he had a vision and a purpose. It’s easy to try and please everyone, but he kept to his principles. - Former Yahoo and Autodesk CEO Carol Bartz___________________________________________________________________________
Today the world lost a visionary leader, the technology industry lost an iconic legend and I lost a friend and fellow founder. The legacy of Steve Jobs will be remembered for generations to come. My thoughts and prayers go out to his family and to the Apple team. - Dell Founder Michael Dell
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He was one of the most remarkable business managers and innovators in american business history. - Warren Buffett
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Steve lived the California Dream every day of his life and he changed the world and inspired all of us.- Arnold Schwarzenegger This post is sponsored by: Dr Mobiles Limited > Free 30 min parking > Free loan phone
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Thursday, October 6, 2011
Sony Ericsson Xperia Ray review
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> Free loan phoneIt's been a busy old year for Sony Ericsson. As it struggles to regain a foothold in the market it was once sucha major player in, it's been firing out more Android-based Xperia smartphones than long-lost relatives on an episode of Jeremy Kyle. And they're not half bad either.
The Xperia Arc has been the flagship of 2011's bunch. Arriving in the spring, it became the skinny poster girl for the Swedish-Japanese hybrid, showing off its amazing screen presence with the help of the Sony Reality Display (the bit that reproduces colour on the screen and makes it look great) but in the Xperia Ray, Sony Ericsson has gone for a smaller model.
You can check out in moving pictures how the phone looks, with our special video review of the Xperia Ray:
Before we go any further, there is one point we have to make clear: this phone is small. And thin. Think smaller and thinner than you expect, then shave a bit more off your dimensions. That's what you get.
The Xperia Arc (we're going to be making lot of comparisons to the Arc in this review) is 125 x 63mm with a depth of 8.7mm. The Ray slices most of that off and comes in at a remarkable 111 x 53mm. It is slightly fatter, by less than a millimetre, clocking in at 9.4mm deep.
It reminds us very much of the original (and, at the time, revolutionary) HTC Touch Diamond from 2008 – a niche handset that only retro phone geeks are likely to recall.
Indeed, compared to the larger handsets we've become used to using, such as the Samsung Galaxy S2, Apple iPhone 4 and HTC Sensation, this really does feel teeny and we couldn't stop picking it up at first.
But it is no slouch. Under that hood, you'll find a not-too-shabby 8MP camera with HD video recording, Android 2.3.3 Gingerbread, HSUPA/HSDPA and 1GHz processor.
The Ray sits comfortably in the hand, and at 100g, you'll barely even notice it's there. Indeed if ever there was a candidate for a 'going out phone' that would slip unobtrusively into a pair of skinny jeans, this is most definitely it.
The rear has a matt finish that's only broken up by the camera lens and flash, plus a speaker near the bottom, crowned by a Sony Ericsson logo.
Around the side, there's little to comment on. The left has only a micro USB socket for charging/syncing, while the left houses a volume rocker.
Up top, you'll find little of interest other than a (thankfully easy to hit) power/sleep button and the 3.5mm socket for headphones of your choice.
The front is fairly minimalistic, made of a large sheet of glass broken up only by an earpiece and a physical Home button. The other two buttons that serve as Back and Options are both touch-sensitive jobs and, unfortunately, not as sensitive as we'd have liked.
Inside, you'll find 1GB of memory – although only 300MB is available to the user – and a slot for swapping microSD cards. You only get a 4GB card in the box compared to the 8GB the Xperia Arc ships with, which seems a little tight. But considering how cheap memory is these days, we'll not hold it against Sony Ericsson too much.
But here's an issue: the memory isn't hot swappable. Seriously, Sony Ericsson – is that too much to ask in the year 2011?
The handset is available in a number of colours, including gold, black, pink and white, catering for all members of fashion crowd, apparently.
The Sony Ericsson Xperia Ray's screen is the same resolution as the Xperia Arc's amazing display, which means 480 x 854 pixels. But it's a lot smaller, at 3.3 inches, compared to the Xperia Arc's 4.2 inches, which means a much higher density.
Don't underestimate this – when you look at the Xperia Ray's display, you will not believe how clear it is. Put it next to an Apple Retina display and you'll notice there isn't much in it.
Colours on the whole look fantastic, although we were disappointed with the quality of our blue sky wallpapers, which looked a lot more washed out than they did on the Samsung Galaxy S2. Plus the clarity is incredible.
We did find that we often had to tap a button or function again because the first go didn't register. We had the same issue with the soft keys. It wasn't a deal breaker, but it was unresponsive enough for us to notice and get slightly frustrated.
We're shallow enough to admit that one thing we love is the animation when you turn the display off. Hit the Standby button and the screen decreases and disappears into a white line in a deliberate echo of the sequence we'd see in days gone by when turning off an old CRT TV set - first seen on the Google Nexus S.
It's a cosmetic addition that adds no functionality. It's a gimmick. And it's pointless. But man, did we love it. And so did all of our friends we showed it to. Small things, small minds.
As with all modern mobile phones, the glass is apparently toughened. We couldn't see any literature that defined it specifically as Gorilla Glass but whatever it is, it's not great.
Not only is the Sony Ericsson Xperia Ray a fingerprint and dust magnet, the screen is also a scratch magnet. In the week that we had it, we noticed scratches appear at the rate of several per day. Don't get us wrong, they weren't huge, and indeed, we had to strain to look for them.
But if you're as OCD as us about keeping your precious looking precious, you won't like it. And putting a screen protector on (providing you can find one that fits exactly) will take away some of the sparkle.
The Sony Ericsson Xperia Ray has just started hitting shelves at a very reasonable £299 SIM-free price. That's £50 cheaper than the Xperia Arc, which is almost identical, save for the size.
If you want to go on contract, it's available free on £25 a month deals (provided you sign 18-24 months of your life away.) On a 12-month contract, you're looking at about £50 for the phone, which is still very reasonable for what you're getting.
Without reinforcing a stereotype, we can't help feeling this is one for either the ladies or the smaller fingered men among us. Those who want a similar Android experience on a larger deviceare likely to plump for a Samsung Galaxy S2, HTC Sensation or, indeed, the Xperia Arc itself
The problem for any Android manufacturer is the same: how do we make our smartphone different? There are dozens of Android handsets on the market in this country, and it's the world's most-used mobile phone operating system. But that's also the problem, because it's reaching saturation point.
HTC has enjoyed phenomenal success with its HTC Sense skin that sits atop the Android platform and has become instantly recognisable through that big flip-style home screen clock widget. Samsung's given us TouchWiz and, in turn, Sony Ericsson brings Timescape to the table.
In essence, the main function of this overlay is a widget that sticks your social media updates on your front page, or wherever else you fancy putting them.
It's versatile in that you can add Twitter and Facebook updates out of the box but also install other extensions to get additional services. (Foursquare, Gmail, Orkut and Picassa are just a few of these – there are dozens on Android market, although curiously we couldn't see a LinkedIn extension.)
You can set it to update your notifications periodically and then swipe through them like a rolodex. SMS/MMS and missed calls can all be handled here too.
But for us, it just wasn't practical for two main reasons.
Firstly, we have a fair amount of Facebook friends but follow hundreds of people on Twitter. If Timescape updates all your Facebook and Twitter info together, you're going to be looking through it all day.
You can decide which services it checks and which it doesn't (so, for example, we selected Facebook only, to make it more manageable) but if you're doing that, what's the point? You may as well just use the individual Facebook and Twitter apps.
You'll probably end up doing that anyway, because that is our second point – Timescape is merely a launcher. If you scroll through and see a friend has, say, posted a link on a Facebook update, when you click it in Timescape, it just launches the Facebook app, which then gives you the link to click on, which then launches the browser. It's the same with photos and so on.
So you then have to exit the Facebook app to go back to the home screen to get back to your feeds and go through the whole rigmarole again. It's bitty and annoying and we'd much rather that Timescape had some kind of inbuilt image and web browser so that you could view all your Facebook and Twitter content in one place.
Luckily, being an Android phone, the Sony Ericsson Xperia Ray enables you to remove Timescape and just customise your screens with better widgets, which we'd advise you do.
Other widgets include a Favourites Quick Dial, which we liked because it had room for 12 people (we're very popular) plus obligatory elements such as quick toggles, Google search, weather and music/gallery controls. It's all effective, but there was nothing in there to jump out at you, and we couldn't help feeling it was all a bit pedestrian.
Sony Ericsson does give you a selection of themes to pick from, although they're all just coloured variations of the same pattern.
You can also reorder apps easily through the app drawer and create folders. It's a small blessing, but something we're glad to see, since many other Android manufacturers omit this for reasons known only to themselves.
The four shortcuts on the main screen dock at the bottom of the display can be easily reassigned whichever way you see fit by long-pressing the icon.
We did install some nice new live wallpapers, but were dismayed to see that the Sony Ericsson Xperia Ray struggled with them. The standard Android ones were there, but when we tried to install the beautiful Flux free live wallpaper (which we've used on several Android handsets), it stuttered and stammered until we'd uninstalled and gone back to the original wallpaper.
This isn't what we'd expect from a 1GHz processor. Not. At. All.
There are five home screens for you to pick from. We couldn't see any way to increase this, which is a shame because you may fill them up quickly, but you can always plump for a free third-party launcher replacement if you like, to solve this.
Luckily, with Android, if you've used a handset with this operating system before, it's pretty similar, albeit with custom icons. And if you haven't used an Android phone then, along with iOS, it's one of the most intuitive systems out there.
What’s missing from the iPhone 4S? Turns out plenty!
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If you're already over the hype and ready to get down to business, check out all of the speculated features that are absent from the iPhone 4S.
Before we can ogle the latest iThing, we need to run down the list of what’s missing. The nature of this particular iPhone event and the frenzied will-they-or-won’t-they anticipation regarding the launch has made it difficult to pin down what hoped-for features are destined for which next-gen handset. Now that the announcements have been made and Apple’s cards are on the table, we break down what’s missing.
The iPhone 5
After listening to what was a fairly thorough lecture about the business side of things in Cupertino, we finally got to the iPhone announcement. And the biggest one is that there is no iPhone 5 just yet. Instead, we’re welcoming the iPhone 4S to the lineup, with a design that’s identical to the iPhone 4. Although there are interior updates (and disappointments) to go over, which we’ll get to. So when will you see an iPhone 5?
A new design
Apple didn’t let us get too excited about any cosmetic changes, right away showing off that very familiar iPhone 4 shape. The iPhone 4S will sport the same Retina display and glass backing as its predecessor. There’s no teardrop shape or 4-inch screen as speculation would have had us thought, but perhaps those features are destined for the iPhone 5. It will, however, be available in white right off the bat.
An LTE/WiMax iPhone
One more rumor than didn’t pan out was the LTE iPhone. Instead, Apple made a show of boasting some much-improved download speeds thanks to HSPA+ support, which should put it on the same level as other so-called “4G” devices, including the Atrix, the Thrill, and the Inspire. But all are a far cry from the speeds available on Verizon LTE 4G. The good news: iPhone 4S will be a “world phone,” meaning it supports both GSM and CDMA networks. Apple also says the iPhone 4S will intelligently determine which antenna to use, which should quell antenna-gate worries.
NFC
There was no mention of NFC technology being embedded in the iPhone 4S, which is something of a surprise as Google Wallet gears up. Again, there’s a distinct possibility that all of these missing features are destined for the iPhone 5.
Facebook integration
There was no mention of Facebook integration, a rumor that took hold more recently. Speculators said that CEO Mark Zuckerberg would possibly even take the stage to show off the long-anticipated Facebook iPad app and talk about the site’s HTML 5 Web-based app store, as well as reveal plans to work with Apple on deep, Twitter-like integration. Turns out that’s either a no-go or something destined for a future announcement.