Author: John Herrman

Sure, you could just sit tight and wait until mega ISO camera sensors give all of our cameras flawless night vision, but what if you have a Micro Four Thirds camera right now? Then this lens will do just fine.

Noktor’s HyperPrime 50mm has something I’ve only seen one other time in a consumer lens: an aperture diameter larger than its focal length. In performance terms, this means that the lens lets in twice as much light as an already dead-fast ƒ1.4 lens, letting you crank down your camera’s ISO settings to capture a cleaner picture. In photographic terms, this means that you’ll only be able to focus on a paper-thin plane, giving your photos—assuming you’re focusing on something close by—an extreme depth of field effect.

The lens ships in April for $750, but given the extraordinary aperture size, reasonably high price and relatively unknown manufacturer, and full manual operation—that’s right, no auto focus—it’s probably best for you Micro Four Thirdsers to wait until this thing proves its prowess. [Noktor via DPReview via Wired]

People rarely talk about iPhone app piracy, but when they do, it sounds devastating: 90% piracy rates, $450 million in lost sales, etc. Here’s the truth: App Store piracy isn’t a big deal—and it never will be.

With these shockingly high reports comes the general air that developers are being marauded and pillaged by Viking hordes and that Apple isn’t doing enough to stop it. This resonates! Developers don’t control much about the App Store, so if the entire app protection system has been cracked—which it has—you’d expect the looting to be wholesale; the impact on developers to be immediate and devastating; and the problem to be grave indeed.

And yet the piracy issue seems to be dying. The story behind the lack of a story, it turns out, is that iPhone piracy is nowhere near as serious as many people say it is, and that before long, it may not be a problem at all.

How It Works

It’s tough to talk about iPhone app piracy without tacitly endorsing it. The mere mention of DRM cracking methods and application sources is—or rather, was—enough to send people looking, and presumably, stealing. But look at the piracy subscene today reveals that, like the jailbreak scene it’s a part of, it’s just not the same as it used to be.

Kicking off your career in app theft isn’t too hard, and it’ll only take a few minutes of Googling to get the full instructions. Still, I’ll keep this as abstract as possible. Here’s how you do it:

• Jailbreak your iPhone or iPod
• Open Cydia, the jailbreak equivalent of the App Store, and add a particular download source that isn’t part of the default lineup
• Download two apps: One that lets you crack apps you’ve purchased for the benefit of others; and another that lets you install cracked applications yourself
• Download cracked apps to your heart’s content, from various sources around the internet

At the peak, there were sites that aggregated huge numbers of download links together into an easily browsable website, which meant that once your phone was cracked, you could tap through these websites like you’d browse the App Store—links to the latest apps were plentiful, and you could snag that game you just read about on Gizmodo within a day or so, tops.

The most popular of these sites, called Appulo.us, disappeared just last month, leaving pirates without a centralized resource for apps. Soon, torrent sites and carbon copied link-dumps picked up the slack, at least for people dedicated and savvy enough to find them. So, yeah, piracy is alive, to be sure. But how serious is it?

The Problem

I wanted to find out how bad piracy was, so I went straight to the developers. I started with the types of apps I thought would be least vulnerable, just to set a baseline: Productivity apps. The verdict? Yes! Piracy happens!

“Roughly 10% of our paid app users are coming from piracy.” That’s Guy Goldstein, CEO of PageOnce, the company behind Personal Assistant, a top-selling organizational app. This is pretty stunning, if you think about it. Personal Assistant is available in a fairly full-featured free version, and as useful as it is, it’s not the most glamourous of apps—it’s a utility, not a flashy game. The paid version tracks a little high for a productivity app, at $7, but not matter how you slice it, Personal Assistant isn’t the most obvious target for piracy. Nor, apparently, is it a serious victim: “Although i think piracy is generally bad and negatively effects companies, for us it’s not big issue—our business model is based on purchasing, but also advertising. The more users we have, the better.” Right, so piracy is happening here, but it doesn’t really matter. Let’s move onto the people who you’d really expect to be getting ripped off.

I contacted TomTom, whose navigation apps start above $50. They were cagey. Cagey and brief:

TomTom takes piracy very seriously. Per corporate policy, we do not disclose information about our ongoing efforts to disrupt software theft.

So I moved on to their direct competitor, Navigon, whose MobileNavigator North America app runs $90:

Navigon is well aware of hacked iPhone Apps. As with any other software, it is only a question of time when applications are being hacked and distributed illegally. There’s no security mechanism available to prevent this 100%. Since hacking of additional application functions, which are available through Apple’s In App Purchase mechanism, is more difficult, this helps to better secure Apps from software piracy. Our legal department is watching this very thoroughly and Navigon will fight piracy with all legal means.

Less cagey, and more ragey. But this is an official position—a conversation with a Navigon rep left me with the impression that while they don’t condone piracy, obviously, it wasn’t exactly the Issue of the Day. Ripe targets that they are, nav companies don’t seem to be losing sleep over this. Which leaves the game developers.

What apps are more pirateable than games? They’re shiny, they’re extremely popular, and they’re often expensive. Surely the EAs and Gamelofts of the world are the hardest hit, right?

On record, they basically clammed up. Off the record, though, they were a bit more free. A rep from one of the largest studios—you’ve probably played one of their games if you have an iPhone—told me “It happens, but I don’t think it’s that big of an issue.” I couldn’t coax out any specific stats, but in relation to total sales, piracy figures are “small.”

In fact, it was hard to come by hard piracy figures from any major developers, but one thing is certain: The occasionally reported 50%+ piracy rates are rare among major developers. And overwhelmingly, major devs are underwhelmed by the problem. So, where are all the pirates?

The Jailbreak Factor

Peter Farago, a VP at iPhone analytics firm Flurry—the guys who spotted the iPad in their logs days before it was announced—track roughly one out of every five apps purchased from the App Store, and their software runs deep: Though it doesn’t collect individualized personal data, it can tell if a device running a tracked app is jailbroken or not. In other words, Flurry knows exactly how many of the millions of devices its tracked apps are installed on are jailbroken. Take a guess.

It’s… as low as you might expect. Lower, even.

“Under 10% of the iPhone installed base is jailbroken.”

Just to make this clear, a company that at any given time is tracking five out of the top ten most downloaded apps in the App Store is detecting a jailbreak rate of under 10%. Less than one out of ten, and often significantly less. The figure tends to bottom out at just above 5% after every time Apple issues a software upgrade, slowly creeping back up to previous levels as the Dev Team and the like issue updates to the jailbreak software. Bear in mind, jailbreaking is a prerequisite for app piracy, but not every jailbreaker is running even one pirated app. Start peeling off the people who jailbreak just to enable multitasking or Wi-Fi tethering, or to skin their iPhone, or just to see what all the fuss is about, and “under 10%” starts to looks even slimmer.

Given the state of jailbreaking, I find these numbers easy to believe. Back in 2007, before there was an App Store, jailbreaking was as easy as opening a website in Mobile Safari. Today, it’s a bit more difficult, and depending on which iPhone you have, sometimes impossible. (Sorry, late model 3GSers!) And Farago says it’s always under siege: “There’s a cycle that exists, but basically, it’s this kind of thing that happens—every time there’s an OS swap, it goes away for a while,” dipping by “a few percent” before creeping back up to previous levels.

Now, I don’t want to play down these numbers, because even a tiny percentage of a user base as large as the iPhone’s is enough to throw a developers’ pirated/paid stats out of whack—this can happen, and cases in which pirated downloads exceed paid downloads have been documented—but such stats are misleading. Without even having to speculate about what percentage of pirates would have otherwise purchased the app, they represent a small portion of the app-buying population. In such small numbers, jailbreakers simply can’t screw a developer over, except in those rare cases in which the developer has to pay significant continuing costs to deliver data and services once an app is installed. Even then, Flurry finds that pirated apps are often launched just a handful of times after they’re downloaded.

With the App Store offering most—though not all—of what the jailbreak scene used to provide, cracking your phone, going through the trouble of ducking regular upgrades and enduring the constant fear of rendering your phones permanently useless just isn’t that attractive anymore. To be a pirate right now, you really have to want to be a pirate. This isn’t Napster. This is Usenet. And pirates aren’t potential customers. They’re pirates.

Why Developers Don’t Care

At first I found many developers’ silence on the issue curious. But after talking to a few, and finding out the scale of the problem, it makes sense: An app developer has nothing to gain by taking their fight public—Apple is clearly aware of the issue, and it’s not like you can somehow convince hardcore pirates to start paying for all the dozens of apps they steal, because they were never going to buy them in the first place. To these people they’re literally just free samples, and are most frequently treated as such. Developers do have something to lose, be it investor confidence (a lot of studios are heavily funded by VCs, who probably don’t want to hear about any theft problems), a relationship with Apple (who would most likely prefer that developers discussed app DRM cracking and piracy privately), or the goodwill of the public, who aren’t usually going to feel sympathy for a company anyway.

Most importantly, if developers do have a problem with piracy—say that, like PageOnce, they found themselves prominently featured on one of the more popular pirated app repositories—they can do something about it.

When an app is cracked, that is to say that its DRM has been stripped, and the app has been reduced to an unprotect .IPA file, ready for sideloading through a jailbreak utility. But in the middle of 2009, Apple introduced a system by which app developers could sell services or add-ons from within their apps. This was good way for paid apps to extend their profitability, and the in-app purchases were effectively unpirateable.

Then, in October, Apple changed the rules: In-app purchases were allowed in free applications as well, meaning that developers could provide free trial apps that could be upgraded to full versions by way of in-app purchases. Popular apps could consolidate their free and paid versions into one app, and on the way, make piracy all but impossible. After all, what’s the point in cracking and bootlegging an app anyone can get for free?

Apple even says as much (albeit with no lack of redundancy): “Using In App Purchase in your app can also help combat some of the problems of software piracy by allowing you to verify In App Purchases.”

Ngmoco took their fight against piracy public last year, quoting impressively high unauthorized download figures during new apps’ first days in the app store. Today, nearly their entire product lineup is based on on the in-app upgrade model. And even after the transition, Ngmoco insists that piracy wasn’t the motivating factor in their switch. In an interview with TouchArcade, it was the massively high download rates for free apps, vs paid apps, that lured Ngmoco toward in-app purchases. The elimination of piracy was a pleasant side effect, at best.

The moral of the story for developers? If you think you have a problem with piracy, you probably don’t. If you still think you have a problem with piracy, you can stamp it out. Simple as that.

In-app purchases change the way developers market and sell their apps, and just as much, the way we consume them. Downloading a single app and then purchasing expansions for it is a superficially different procedure than downloading a free trial followed by a full app, or just taking a risk on a full app in the first place. But the way in which your transaction happens is different, too.

When you buy an iPhone app, it can be synced to multiple devices, as long as said devices are authorized on your iPhone account—the cap here if five, but that’s enough to share amongst your family or friends, or to enable an easy transition from an old iPhone to a new one. In-app purchases, however, don’t work the same way, at all. Here’s what Apple says about syncing in-app purchases across devices:

• Consumable products must be purchased each time the user needs that item. For example, one-time services are commonly implemented as consumable products.

• Nonconsumable products are purchased only once by a particular user. Once a nonconsumable product is purchased, it is provided to all devices associated with that user’s iTunes account. Store Kit provides built-in support to restore nonconsumable products on multiple devices.

• Subscriptions share attributes of consumable and nonconsumable products. Like a consumable product, a subscription may be purchased multiple times; this allows you to implement your own renewal mechanism in your application. However, subscriptions must be provided on all devices associated with a user. In App Purchase expects subscriptions to be delivered through an external server that you provide. You must provide the infrastructure to deliver subscriptions to multiple devices.

Problem is, this isn’t how it works right now. In-app goods are sold on a strict per-device basis, because the only user information available to developers is the device identifier, not the account identifier. As it stands, when you buy something by way of an in-app purchase, it applies to your phone only, and not all the registered devices—iPhones and iPod Touches—on your iTunes account. Maybe that’s no big deal now, but when the iPad arrives, this might become a problem.

Pirates… From the FUTURE

App piracy today may not be a massive factor in the App Store economy, but it would be wrong to characterize it as nothing. It does exist, and to a developer who makes money selling apps, even one illegally downloaded app is one too many. Still, looking forward, this issue is clearing up almost completely:

• iPhone app piracy is already low, and isn’t on the rise in any meaningful way
• The latest iPhone 3GS has proven very difficult to jailbreak, and Apple seems to be actively thwarting efforts with each baseband/software release
• In-app purchasing is coming of age, and effectively eliminates piracy

If you want to call the iPhone pirate a species, he would be an endangered one; if you want to call the jailbreak scene a subculture, it would be passé; if you want to call app piracy a problem, it would be more nuisance than crisis.

Apple’s pending extermination of piracy is great news for developers, but for users, it’ll come at a cost. And for want of an example as to why, this post couldn’t come at a better time, with Apple purging “offensive” apps from its official store—increasingly be the only place for iPhone owners to download apps. If Apple wants to be the only provider of apps (and they do!) then they need to be held to a high standard of transparency and consistency, which—trust us—they’re nowhere near meeting.

“Why the hell is Steve staring at that beach ball?” That was the question of the afternoon at NeXT’s 1987 company retreat. “It’s always about beach balls with him,” they muttered derisively, “what’s so interesting about beach balls?”

These, of course, were but the first of millions of much more profane Apple/beach ball related mutterings to come. And that last question, made up as it may be, is a good one: There is nothing interesting about beach balls, rainbow colored, spinning or otherwise. Nothing at all.

Join me in cursing that day. [AllAboutSteveJobs—Thanks, Gonzalo!]

I never owned a Nintendo 64, and that was totally fine. See, I lived within biking distance of a Blockbuster.

Despite its gradual decline on account of downloadable demos and general console popularity (if you don’t have one, one of your friends does), the in-store kiosk is still going strong—walk into any Best Buy or GameStop, and you can play a Wii, a PS3, and an Xbox, or even a PSP and a DS. And just like in the 80s and 90s, the kiosk’s chances of the coveted trifecta of retail demo gaming (switched on, connected to working controllers, and playing a non-demo version of a game without time limits) hover at around 10%.

Anyway, Kombo’s rounded up visual history of some of the most memorable console demo stations, and I defy any of you to make it through without suffering through at least two military grade Circuit City line-battle flashbacks. It’s my turn, you turd. [Kombo]

Flash is coming to Android phones, and for this, some of you are grateful. So when is it due? For some new handsets, the “first half of this year.” But the rest? Probably never.

There are two factors that’ll determine whether or not your phone is ready and able to run Flash, whenever it becomes available. First, you’ll have to worry about software: As far as we know, Adobe is only planning on supporting Android 2.0 and up, meaning that unless you’ve got a Droid or Nexus One, you’re shit out of luck—unless, of course, your phone gets treated to an upgrade.

But even then! Optimized as it may be, at least some older hardware could have issues running Flash smoothly. Answering a question about a specific phone, Antonio Flores, a man posting on Adobe’s support forums who everyone—including a community manager there—seems roundly convinced is a legitimate Adobe employee, says:

No, the HTC Hero will not be supported b/c it does not have the correct Android OS version and its chipset is not powerful enough. We require a device with an ARM v7 (Cortex) processor. Examples include the Qualcomm Snapdragon chipsets and TI OMAP3 series.

That Cortex qualifier could be a killer, too. Even if your G1 was treated to an official Android 2.1 update, there’s a good chance it just doesn’t have the horsepower. For the time being, this could—again!—be a Droid-and-Nexus-only affair. (Update: To be clear, what we’re talking about here is Adobe’s full mobile version of Flash 10.1, not HTC’s version of Flash Lite.)

Speaking of updates, there’s actually a third factor that could screw your phone out of new Flash: The upgrade path. The Palm Pre’s webOS 1.4 update helps prep the platform for Flash, but leaves it up to users to download the plugin as an app. On Android, the distribution system looks like it’ll be even more dependent on automatic, over-the-air delivery, so if Adobe tells your carrier and handset manufacturer that your handset isn’t up to the task, that too could keep you from experiencing the rich and wonderful scope of Ads That Move On The Internet, on your smartphone.

For first and second generation phones, in other words, Flash 10.1 probably isn’t coming to Android at all. Sorry? [Adobe via Andronica via PhoneArena]

Mark Twain and Nikola Tesla: The most powerful of minds, and the best of friends. Here, a captivated Sam Clemens tests Tesla’s inductively powered incandescent lamp. The mad scientist lurks in the background, like, well, a mad scientist.

It’s not terribly surprising that the two men were friends, since they were both revered figures in Gilded Age New York City, but it’s endlessly fascinating to read about how these two men came to be friends—essentially, as mutual fanboys.

There’s also a lesson to modern day science and tech luminaries: spend your famous friend currency wisely. [TheOpenEnd]

The Palm Pre unveiling stands in my memory as one of the most refreshing moments in modern history. Palm had done it—they had created a great phone Nokia would’ve killed for. But today, that’s just not enough.

As Palm teeters on the brink of either ruin or acquisition, let’s take stock of what they did right:

• They abandoned an entrenched but aging platform for something new an innovative, and they didn’t half-ass it: Palm OS was dead, WebOS was here.

• WebOS was actually good. If you discounted the lack of apps at launch, it was arguably more capable than anything else on the market.

• The Pre was totally buyable. It’s one of the few smartphones I’d consider buying, and would also recommend to the rest of my family. And the hardware didn’t suck.

• They got huge buzz, and they earned it.

Sure, their app ecosystem was slow to develop, and their TV ads were underwhelming at their best, and creepy at their worst. But that’s not what really matters, right? Palm accomplished something with the Pre, and we could all see that.

This was the line from Jason’s Pre review that he caught the most flak for, but seriously, fuck that, it was spot on:

I’m bored of the iPhone. The core functionality and design have remained the same for the last two years, and since 3.0 is just more of the same, and-barring some kind of June surprise-that’s another year of the same old icons and swiping and pinching. It’s time for something different.

The Pre’s spell was such that it made everything else feel old. Palm made something different—and it was something we would have paid obscene amounts of money for just a year prior. More than anything, Palm succeeded wildly at reinventing its products, its company and its image, by its own standards and by ours.

The problem is, it’s not 2006 anymore. Those standards don’t apply.

There was a time when it was enough for a company like Palm to release a fantastic phone, and for years, that’s exactly what they focused on. But today, to fight in the smartphone wars is to fight against multi-platform giants. And the rules of engagement have changed: It’s no longer phone vs. phone, or mobile OS vs mobile OS. Today there are apps, and even if a phone maker nails that ecosystem, they have to integrate it into the company’s other stuff: desktops, tablets, the living room, the workplace, the bathroom, the car—not to mention all the music, movies, TV and other media consumption any given human expects to be able to tap into on a new device.

The era of the standalone smartphone company is over. To say it plainly: If you want to make the best smartphone these days, it’s just not enough to make the best handset, or even the best OS. So pour one out for the indie phone makers! I, for one, am sorry to see them go.

UPDATE: Jon Rubinstein has issued a company-wide memo to soothe worried employees. It’s suitably last-stand-y:

To accelerate sales, we initiated Project JumpStart nearly three weeks ago. Since then, nearly two hundred Palm Brand Ambassadors, supplemented by Palm employees from Sunnyvale, have been training Verizon sales reps across the U.S. on our products. Early results from the stores have already shown improvement on product knowledge and sales week over week. You may have also seen a growing number of Palm ads on billboards, bus shelters, buses, and subway stations-all getting the word out about Palm.

As I said before, the root of Palm’s problems are essentially unaddressable, so it’s no shock that he doesn’t lay out a clear, detailed vision for a second (third?) Palm turnaround. But the sight of their CEO so obviously aiming a garden hose at a forest fire can’t be much comfort to Palmers, or investors.

All these wonderful things we’re learning today, from data! First, we find out that Android is a guy thing. Now, we discover that the iPod Touch shares more demographics with glittering vampires than smartphones. iPod Touch: Kid stuff.

The age distribution makes a lot of sense, especially with the direct available comparison of the iPhone: the iPod Touch is a good gift, a plausible purchase, and a good investment for a young person right now. An iPhone with a $70-a-month minimum contract is a tougher sell, either to parents, or to kids mostly supported by their parents.

And these kids don’t just buy different gadgets than adults—they use them differently, too. For example, they looooove apps:
But they’re stingy little bastards, these kids:
Buying an app can be tough without a credit card, so again, this isn’t shocking. But it does poke a little hole in the idea of the iPod Touch as a massive moneymaker for Apple. Hardware sales are tremendous and highly profitable, sure, but once the devices are in users’ soft little baby hands, they don’t keep raking it in like the iPhone does. [AdMob]

From what we’ve heard about the development process of Windows Phone 7, rumors about the OS predated its earliest seeds. How? The secret lies deep underground in Redmond, buried with a little project called Photon.

We were posting about Windows Mobile 7 (and 8!) in great detail back in 2008, and we weren’t the only ones. For months prior and years after, Windows Mobile 7 leaked screenshots were a reliable fixture in tech news. So there was clearly something there.

PocketNow’s got a must-read post on why the world was expecting one thing from Microsoft, and got another. The story starts in 2005:

I… saw Photon two years prior to 2007. Back then, it was pretty much the same as we know Photon to be today. It’s very possible that work began on Photon as early as 2004, which begs the question: how could a company with such vast resources and fantastic human talent take nearly half a decade to roll out a product? The answer could come down to mismanagement or lack of investment. My guess is that Microsoft didn’t truly understand how big the mobile category would grow, and how fast it would happen.

The short answer to the obvious question—how could Microsoft end up where they are today, without a competitive product and with relief nearly a year away?—is that the consumer smartphone explosion and the sudden rise of social media took them completely by surprise. They were almost certainly working on a next-gen platform before the iPhone even launched. They had a plan, and it probably reached years into the future—Photon, a drastic refinement of the classic Windows Mobile platform.

It’s just that this plan was a shortsighted, inductive mess; a frictionless continuation of the strict enterprise-focused philosophy that Windows Mobile and Windows CE had done reasonably well with in the past, and that the iPhone (and its various responders) promptly made boatloads of money completely ignoring. By the time Microsoft realized what it had to do, it was nearly too late. Hence, the Zune Phone.

Photon may be dead, but it can explain a lot. [PocketNow]

Super-spec’d premium phones like the Droid and Nexus One are only part of Google’s long term plan for Android. What we have here is a glimpse of Android’s other future: Free. Android handsets are the new flip-phones! Sort of!

Today’s Motorola Devour launch at Best Buy Mobile brought some extra goodies, including an awkwardly priced Droid, which seems to render its new stablemate kind of unbuyable, and this little surprise: A Droid Eris, which is Verizon’s version of the Sprint Hero, priced for free on contract. Not a single dollar! (Except for the 60 of them you’ll have to pay out for two years, but who’s counting that money, right? Right.)

Point is, budget Android phones are a verifiable thing right now, and even if they’re sometimes loaded with out of date version of Google’s OS or terrible custom interfaces, they are categorically better than virtually any feature phone. And as data plans become more ubiquitous and (dear god please) cheaper, always-connected, internet savvy smartphones will graduate from the massive trend to the status quo.* And Android, without any licensing fees for carriers or handset manufacturers, will play a huge part in this.

*Welcome, everyone, to the least glamorous kind of futurism!

73% of Android users are men, compared to the rest of smartphone platforms, which skew only slightly manward. But really, we should have expected this. (And not in a sexist way!)

The statistic comes from AdMob’s January Mobile Metrics report, which is littered with fascinating little nuggets. Like, did you have any idea 65% of iPod Touch users are younger than 17? (For the iPhone, that’s 13%, and for webOS, just 2%.) Or that free app downloads across all platforms outnumber paid downloads by nearly 10 to 1? Or that Android users are the stingiest, with only 21% of users purchasing apps on a monthly basis, as compared to the iPhone’s 50%? Well now you do! So let’s get back to the lady business.

The first impulse for a lot of people will be to make a dig against Android for being too nerdy to appeal to women—an implicit dig against women for not being nerdy or technical enough to appreciate Android, or something. Though there’s something to be said for Android’s geek-centric rep, that’s not the main issue here.

The Droid, as far as Android phones go, is hugely popular—it’s far and away the platform’s breakaway hit, and represents a large proportion of its mobile web traffic. As such, it could skew any survey like this to the point that Android users stats are almost fully inline with Droid user stats. And the Doird was marketed like this: The iPhone is a toy, and this is lame. Also: The iPhone is a chick, and this is lame.

It’s been obvious for a while that the DROID DUDE HELL YEAH DROID marketing strategy worked. Now we just know who it worked on. [ReadWriteWeb]

When Palm issued a release announcing lowered guidance and sales expectations for this year, Jon Rubinstein didn’t even try to cushion it, admitting, “driving broad consumer adoption of Palm products is taking longer than [he] anticipated.” OK. Now what? UPDATED

The implication of “longer than expected” is that success will come if everyone just waits long enough. But to say something like that in February of 2010, over seven months after the Pre launch, three after the Pixi launch, and weeks after a by all counts anemic launch for their barely differentiated Verizon counterparts is to tacitly admit that there’s a serious problem. If Palm’s current lineup doesn’t have momentum now, it never will—and their investors know it.

For Palm, this leaves two options: either build a new product—something they may not be able or positioned to do—and hope it’s a wild success; or sell out. So who’s buying? BusinessInsider throws the regular suspects on the table—RIM, Nokia, Dell, HP—but they seem chosen because they’d be interesting buyers, not because they’ve shown any real interest. Hey, wouldn’t it be neat if Nokia or BlackBerry absorbed webOS, so they could both have truly modern, user-friendly smartphone operating systems? Yeah it would! Someone should tell them.

This leaves Palm with nothing to do but wait: to die; or to be saved by a hero it hasn’t even glimpsed yet, and that probably doesn’t exist.

UPDATE: Here’s Rubinstein’s memo to Palm employees re: their lowered guidance for the year. It’s far from defeatist, but even further from reassuring:

Team,

This morning we announced preliminary results for our 2010 third quarter. Since the quarter has not yet closed, it is too soon to offer exact numbers, but we stated that we expect to report revenues for Q3 between $300 and $320 million. We also announced that we expect our revenue for this fiscal year to fall below the guidance we gave to Wall Street, which ranged from $1.6 to $1.8 billion. As we mentioned in our press release, our softer than expected performance is due to slower than expected customer adoption of our products, which in turn has prompted our U.S. carrier partners to put additional orders on hold for the time being. On a positive note, we expect to exit the quarter with over $500 million in cash on our balance sheet. We’re scheduled to announce our full financial results in March.

I realize this news is difficult to swallow. We made this announcement today to prevent a surprise for Wall Street when we announce quarterly earnings in March. In the meantime, the entire executive team has been working extremely hard to improve product performance, and have implemented a number of initiatives to increase awareness and drive sales.

Dave Whalen and I just returned from a very successful meeting with Verizon Wireless, where they acknowledged that their execution of our launch was below expectations and recommitted to working with us to improve sales. To accelerate sales, we initiated Project JumpStart nearly three weeks ago. Since then, nearly two hundred Palm Brand Ambassadors, supplemented by Palm employees from Sunnyvale, have been training Verizon sales reps across the U.S. on our products. Early results from the stores have already shown improvement on product knowledge and sales week over week. You may have also seen a growing number of Palm ads on billboards, bus shelters, buses, and subway stations-all getting the word out about Palm.

All of these efforts are examples of how we are working to accelerate adoption and grow distribution of webOS. In the next few weeks, your management will work with you to make sure your priorities are laser-focused, primarily on helping to increase sales, improve product quality and differentiate the Palm product experience.

Our goals are taking longer than expected to achieve, but I am still confident that our talented team has what it takes to get the job done.

We’ll schedule an all-hands meeting after our earnings announcement in March, and I’ll be happy to answer your questions.

Go team!!!

jon

200 brand ambassadors and maybe some local advertising? That’s more worrying than if Rubinstein had said nothing at all. [BusinessInsider]

You can’t talk about the Devour, Motorola’s new slide-out QWERTY Android phone, without talking about the Droid, Motorola’s favored child. And it’s precisely when pitted against the Droid that the Devour stops making sense.

The Price

The Devour runs $150, with a two-year Verizon contract. But not really. (More on that later.)

What It’s Supposed to Be

When the Devour was announced, I called it a “Baby Droid with Motoblur.” That’s not quite right, it turns out. Despite a measurably smaller screen, the Devour is actually a bit larger than the Droid. It’s a hefty, machined aluminum slab of a device that feels sturdy in your hand and a bit fat in your pocket. It’s a continuation of the Droid’s design philosophy, if not its actual design: The Devour obviously copies some stylistic traits, but the Droid’s goldish finish and sharp edged evoke an entirely different past than the Devour’s matte silver, slightly more rounded profile. A child of the 70s speaks the Droid’s retrofuturistic design language; the Devour speaks more to a future-forward 90s sensibility. At any rate, it looks nice.

And it feels nice, too—gone is the Droid’s lifeless slider, replaced with a springy mechanism that just begs to be fiddled with. The tapered sides give you a place to rest your index fingers during typing. Speaking of which, the Devour’s keyboard, with slightly raised, perfectly rounded and neatly spaced keys, is a welcome improvement over the Droid’s. And instead of a trackball or d-pad, the Devour has a small, inset touchpad on its lower-left chin. So far, so good.

Then you turn it on.

This is when it becomes clear what the Devour is meant to be, which, despite the apparent improvements, is something less than a Droid. The smaller screen—3.1 inches to the Droid’s 3.7—pushes fewer pixels, too, at just 320×480 vs 854×480. The camera, which shoots 3MP photos, suffers from poor color and clarity issues to a greater extent than the already mediocre sensor of its predecessor.

And the software! Oh, the software. Here’s how Jason summed up the Motoblur widget philosophy in his original Cliq review:

The four widgets of note are the status widget, the messaging widget, the happenings widget and the news/RSS widget. The news widget is self-explanatory, and really cool that a phone would have a built-in RSS reader right on the home screen, but the others are a little bit trickier. The status widget lets you update your “status” to any of your social networking sites, like Facebook or Twitter. The messages widget consolidates ALL your 1:1 messaging, like emails, SMS, DMs on Twitter or private messages on Facebook. The happenings is a feed of other people’s status updates on your social networks.

Motoblur is as good here as it’s ever been, aided by plenty of tweaks, faster hardware, and a more developed underlying operating system. (This is the first time we’ve seen it laid atop of Android 1.6; the Cliq was a 1.5 handset.) But as Motoblur has inched forward, Android has outpaced it. And unfortunately its stablemate, the Droid, is one of the best exemplars of why you don’t need to mess with Android.


What was so refreshing about the Droid was that its software was essentially untouched—Android 2.0, which was at the time the newest build of the OS, had been left alone to represent Google vision for Android, without interference from Motorola or Verizon. And because Android 2.0 was so good, it took the wind out of the sails of alternative Android interfaces like HTC’s Sense or Motoblur.

Motoblur’s greatest sin isn’t that it can be a bit confusing to navigate at first, or that it feels a bit crowded on a 3.1-inch screen, or that its inbuilt Twitter and Facebook functionality depends too much on sending you to an external browser; it’s that in pursuit of a custom interface and minor, proprietary features—Flash Lite in the browser, DLNA media sharing and proprietary voice command and nav software to compete with Google’s native solutions—Motorola has left Devour users with an out-of-date version of Android. Android is an OS that’s fragmented, and 1.6 is one of the fragments that’s getting left behind. Even some Google apps won’t work on Android 1.6, like Goggles or Google Earth. Of course, an upgrade is possible, but a Blur-adorned Android will always lag a version or three behind vanilla Android, which seems to be assimilating many of its most important features anyway.

The redeeming factor here should be that it’s cheaper than the Droid by about $50, positioned to appeal to people who might otherwise buy a messaging phone, but who don’t want to put down for a Droid. But even at launch, this price positioning doesn’t work.

What It Really Is

if you’re a Verizon customer, holding this next to a messaging feature phone, the choice is pretty clear: go with the smartphone.Thing is, that’s a false dilemma. You have other options.

Before the Devour hits shelves later this week, it will have been undermined by one of its biggest sellers. Best Buy, at launch, will be selling it for $100, alongside the Droid, also priced at $100. The $150/$200 Devour/Droid distinction will remain intact at Verizon stores, but you can probably depend on these lower prices to be an option from here on out.

What you’re getting with the Devour, then, is a downgraded Droid. Sure, the keyboard is a bit better, and the styling may appeal to some people alienated by the Droid’s aggressive lines, but if you’re a Verizon customer, holding these two potential purchases in your hands—which, by the way, have access to the exact same smartphone plans—it’s hard to imagine why you’d opt for the silver one. [Motorola]

Elegant, brushed aluminum design


Better keyboard and slider than the Droid; generally better hardware than the Cliq


Motoblur works reasonably well for social networking hounds, but later versions of Android with dedicated social apps serve just as well


Same street price as the Droid, which is just a better phone.


It’s stuck on Android 1.6, rendering it incompatible with some newer apps—even apps from Google

Apple’s moral App Store crusade has been devastatingly and alarmingly effective, laying waste to over 5000 apps the company arbitrarily deemed objectionable. So, we asked Lux Alptraum, Editor of Fleshbot (NSFW), what’s left? She calmed our nerves. (With porn.)

What Apple’s been doing was widely characterized as a porn purge, but despite names like “Asian Tits” and “Boobs!”, none of these apps were really porn apps, because they didn’t have those three to five human parts that people seem to like so much. But no matter: If you wanted to find suggestive photos of scantily clad ladies or gents in the App Store two weeks ago, it would have been easy. Today, you’re basically out of luck.

Which brings us to Lux. She edits Giz’s sister hot cousin site Fleshbot, she’s an iPhone user, and she knows the iPhone porn landscape better than anyone else.

So!

The Controversy

Apple’s been cracking down on apps deemed “inappropriate” in the iPhone App Store. Before the purge, though, what was even available? Were there many adult iPhone apps worth downloading?

Well, it depends on how you define adult. There was definitely no nudity, but there were porn-related apps—as in, pornstars and sites had apps of their own, which had softcore promo content.

I know Burning Angel, Suicide Girls, Teagan Presley, Sunny Leone, and a bunch of others all had apps and Pink Visual—which is one of the more tech forward companies—had stuff that got shut down too. (I think theirs was the Cutest Girl app—they sent a press release after the crack down speaking out against it.)

There are also—and I don’t know if these were affected by the crackdown—adult dating apps. The main one that comes to mind is GrindR, for gay men, but there’s also PinpointsX (which I think is still in beta).

Ah! The “there is a willing human sex object X feet from you, right now, and he/she looks like this” apps! I think those are safe. Which is funny, because those will actually get you laid.

Ha, yes! But it’s also weird, because those aren’t safe for children either, and could potentially expose them to much worse than a picture of a girl in a bikini. (Not that I want them banned, because I obviously don’t.)

The Alternatives

Anyway, so, apps are basically no help right now, if you’re looking for naked humans. So what are our options?

The entire internet! It’s actually not as dire as it seems at first. Given that mobile Safari is a relatively robust platform, a wide variety of content is pretty easily available on the iPhone. Anything that’s picture based will work just fine.

The main issue comes with Flash—a lot of video sites are Flash-based. However, most sites worth their salt have iPhone compatible versions that deal with that. Because they’re well aware that their consumers have a reason to want mobile porn.

Yeah, that’s the question everyone always has-where are the iPhone-optimized versions of the various “tubes,” or rather, which are the best?

I’m kinda loathe to promote the tubes, just because of the piracy (ed note: fair point! Pirating porn is no different than pirating a studio film, even if it’s easier) but PornHub seems to have the best mobile interface. I was kinda shocked to see that XTube—the most amateur-heavy tube site—has a mobile site that’s just Brazzers mobile. You can’t get Xtube on your iPhone, basically—it just takes you to a pay site, which is bizarre.

Here’s a list of the free stuff to get you started (NSFW!!!):
• Pornhub
• iPhonePornGrid
• Xshare
• Spankwire
Update:
• iFap.to
&bull Tube8

So what about that legit content—the pay sites?

Pink Visual seems to have put the most thought into mobile stuff.
they have ipinkvisualpass.com as their dedicated iPhone site
and I know they’ve done iPhone adult games, like iTouchHer

Here’s a list of the best paid stuff to get you started (NSFW!!!):
•iPinkVisual
• DigitalPlayground
• Brazzers
• Bangbros

Now, most pay sites throw you some preview material, right? So you know what you’re getting into?

Generally, yes. But it’s more limited on the mobile front for obvious reasons.

I ask because I think people generally assume the mobile porn experience isn’t a great one. But in a way, it’s kind of the best one—I mean, your iPhone is with you at all times.

It’s one handed! And super private.

And that! I’m glad you said that one. Thanks, Lux!

:::

So to sum things up, the Great App Purge of The Last Few Days is bizarre and annoying, but the best porn app of all is already installed on every iPhone in existence, and was designed by Apple. Enjoy!

During a Goldman Sachs tech conference today, Apple COO Tim Cook revealed Apple’s secret to success: High standards, and a low tolerance for half-assed proposals. Except, that wasn’t the question.

Tim was responding to a question about complacency and hubris—specifically, how a company that’s been right on so many big issues can avoid it, and stay clearheaded. Said Tim:

Yeah, that is a great question. The executive team of the company spends a lot of time thinking and discussing how to retain and recruit the best talent in the world, because at the end of the day—I know it’s a cliche—but people are our most important asset by far, and it’s people that deliver innovation, which is key to us. And so what else do we do other than that? Well, we are the most focused company that I know of, or have read of, or have any knowledge of. We say no to good ideas every day; we say no to great ideas in order to keep the amount of things we focus on very small in number, so that we can put enormous energy behind the ones we do choose, so that we can deliver the best products in the world. In fact, the table that each of you are sitting at today, you could probably put every product on it that Apple makes, and yet Apple’s revenue last year was over $40bn. I think the only other company that could say that is an oil company.

And that is not from just saying “yes” to the right product which gets a lot of focus—it’s saying no to many products that are good ideas, but just not nearly as good as the other ones. I think that this is so ingrained in our company that this hubris that you talk about, that happens to companies that are successful but then decide that their sole role in life is to get bigger, and they start adding this and that and this and that, I can tell you the management team of Apple would never let that happen. That’s not what we’re about. So, focus on people, and ensuring that it’s a small list of things to work on and putting all of our wood behind those things, that’s the magic behind us.

Question: How do you avoid hubris, Apple?
Answer: WE’RE JUST THAT GOOD. [SAI]

Textbook publisher Macmillan is hip the ways of the internet, see! They’re rolling out a new product/concept/news item called DynamicBooks, which lets instructors change the content of online textbooks, even if they didn’t write them. And why not?

The practicality of the DynamicBooks concept will almost immediately be overshadowed by kneejerk criticism, so let’s just get that out of the way now: Yes, the editing method resembles Wikipedia, and yes, a professor could conceivably replace a passage that conflicts with his research, partially out of genuine belief but more out of spite against the guy who got his work published in A Comparative Gender Theorist’s Guide to Infant Osteopathy instead of said professor, but that’s not what DynamicBooks is for, or what it will be used for. In reality, it represents a ceding of control by a notoriously stodgy and monolithic industry, which an only be a good thing.

Think of it this way: With DynamicBooks, an instructor can order the chapters in the book to fit a practical syllabus; he can supplement the textbook directly, with links and extra material instead of disorganized handouts; he can essentially assemble an entire class worth of material atop the skeleton provided by the textbook, which is what professors do anyway, albeit in a much more complicated, ad-hoc fashion. As long as it’s clear—and this is very important—which parts of the material have been added after the fact, there shouldn’t be anything to worry about.

More to the point, it’s a step toward electronic textbooks, and away from the bizarre economy of print textbooks. DynamicBooks textbooks, which will accessible on an computer, as well as the iPhone (and presumably the iPad) will be much—about 50%—cheaper than print textbooks, which are sold at high prices with the expectation that they’ll later be resold.

MacMillan’s first 100 titles will start “printing” in August, just in time for this year’s crop of freshmen, uniformly equipped either with iPads, or about four months’ worth of Zune-style iPad flop jokes. [NYT]

If Nexus One reviewers could agree on one thing, it was that the phone has a stunning screen. But for those inky blacks and vivid colors, you’re apparently paying a hefty price: I mean, look at that.

DisplayMate ran a battery of comparative tests on the Nexus One’s AMOLED screen, and came away with a damning list of issues:

• The Nexus One only uses 16 bit color, which means that “Red and Blue only have 32 possible intensity levels and Green only has 64 possible intensity levels,” as compared to the iPhone and others, which have at least 256 intensity levels for each color. Result: That horrible banding you see above.

• Android’s sub-pixel rendering is great for icons and text, but terrible for images. Photos are “rendered poorly and inaccurately, with over-saturated colors, bad color and gray-scale accuracy, large color and gray-scale tracking errors, calibration errors, lots of image noise from excessive edge and sharpness processing, and many artifacts.” Result: Blown-out areas in photographs, image noise, and general gaudiness in colorful images.

• The display’s peak white brightness is oddly low. Result: It’s hard to see the screen when used outdoors. (This, for what it’s worth, we already knew.)

There’s a lot more to chew on in DisplayMate’s post, and the effect is actually worse than portrayed in their images, or ours above, since by the time you see them, they’ve been photographed, resaved and redisplayed on another display. And the results aren’t trivial: in the right kind of photograph, there is significant color banding on the Nexus One, where there wouldn’t be on virtually any other smartphone.

But when we came across this story, it took most of us by surprise, because those of us that’d used a Nexus One were utterly convinced of its display’s awesomeness. From our review:

The AMOLED screen is gorgeous, and all the colors pop to the point that it makes both the iPhone 3GS and the Droid look washed out. It’s really, really good.

Here’s the thing: This is still true. HTC and Google likely made a conscious decision to sacrifice color fidelity, outdoor viewability, and maybe even touch accuracy for a screen that, experientially speaking, blows everything else out of the water. And depending on how anal you are, this is probably fine.

The question now facing Nexus One owners is a psychological one: Now that you know about the display’s (or software’s) flaws, will your brain still be able to look past them?

UPDATE: Some commenters are pointing to the fact that DisplayMate’s testing appears to have been done in Android’s gallery app, which may be compressing images and throwing the tests. This could be part of the problem, but our comparison shot, posted at the top of this article, was taken from within Android’s browser, not the gallery app. If this is merely software issue, it runs across at least the gallery and browser apps, which are the apps you’re most likely to view images in. Something‘s wrong here.

UPDATE II: Multiple reports from users are claiming that some third party apps—galleries and browsers—eliminate the image banding seen above. This points to a software issue rather than a hardware issue, which means that Google could conceivably fix some aspects of this display strangeness with a software update. [DisplayMate]

Over at Beyond Binary, Ina Fried’s got a fascinating profile of Omega Timing, the company that’s been managing event timing at the Olympics for over 70 years. Counting seconds now is somehow totally different than it was in 1936.

Take the methods for timing skiers:

Less than a century ago, the timing of downhill skiing required someone at the top and bottom of the run, each with a stopwatch synchronized to the time of day.

Every few skiers, the timer at the top would send down a piece of paper with the start times of the last few skiers and then some math would ensue, eventually resulting in the time of the run being calculated.

Or the above pictured replacement for the classic—and conceptually bizarre, because what the hell, a gun?—starter pistol:

Among the many Winter Olympics firsts at Vancouver is the use of a new all-electronic starter gun that emits a consistent sound and light. Plus, says Omega’s Christophe Berthaud, it’s a whole lot easier to get through airport security.

Or—and this is the most surprising bit—the raw manpower it takes to time the Olympics now, versus the good old days:

At its first Olympics, in Germany in 1936, Omega sent a single technician with 27 stopwatches to the Games. At the 2006 Turin, Italy, Winter Games, Omega sent 208 people—127 timekeepers and 81 data handlers—along with some 220 tons of equipment.

I’m partial to the classic classic method, by which competitors judged their own finishing times, got in fights about who finished first, and settled the dispute like real athletes: On the floor of the coliseum, with improvised weapons, while running from recently imported, still very disoriented exotic animals. Athletes these day! [CNET]

So you’re fed up with Google, and you’ve got a litany of reasons. You don’t even have to explain—I’m just here to help you crawl out from under the shadow of the big G, step by step.

You don’t have to be ready to commit to a full overhaul of your online lifestyle to understand why someone might want to yank their data from Google’s servers, and hand it off to someone else: You’ve got Google’s CEO deafly rehashing fallacious arguments about privacy—”If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place”—and hesitating on a drawback; you’ve got contextual advertising that seems just a little too closely tuned to that sexxxy love letter your girlfriend sent you while you were on that business trip; you’ve got that violently insane ex husband who now knows where you are because of Google’s clumsy Buzz rollout. Most of all, you’ve got reasons, and you’re ready for change.

The decision to close your Google account has to be carefully considered—after all, this is the place that stores your email, your documents, your contacts, your photos, your news, and even your health records. But this level of investment to one service is as good a reason to leave as it is to stay: If looking at your Google Dashboard, which lists all the services you use, and the amount and type of information you store on them, doesn’t make you feel a little uneasy, then hell, what would?

Anyway, I’m not here to make the case for you to drop Google altogether—it’s not something I’m prepared to do, for a start—I’m just here to tell you how to do it. Here’s everything you need to know about life after Google.

Search

It’s easy to forget that there are other search engines in the world, because Google has been so plainly dominant over the last few years. But they’re there, and they’re actually pretty good.

The best alternative to Google, by a long shot, is Microsoft’s Bing. It’s an evolution of the Live search engine, and it’s offers a distinctly different experience than Google: it’s far from minimalist, with a colorful interface, content-tailored results pages, and and emphasis on reducing clicks, rather than reducing clutter. Coming from Google it can be visually jarring, and the fact that the results for common searches are different—if not better or worse—means that at first, you’ll get the feeling that it isn’t working right.

Give it some time and some patience, and you’ll realize that it’s pretty damn good. And even if search isn’t perceived as the biggest threat to your privacy, it’s important to make the switch anyway—after all, it was Google search that was the gateway to all the other Google services, which you’re now trying untangle yourself from.

Honorable Mentions:

• Yahoo
• Wolfram Alpha
• Collecta
• Mahalo

Email

Back when it launched in 2005, Gmail lured users with insane amounts of free storage space: One gigabyte. Impossible. This caught the dominant services of the day completely off guard, and made their free webmail seem utterly ancient.

Today, that one gigabyte has grown to nearly seven, and on the surface not much has changed about ol’ Gmail. Meanwhile, the companies that were blindsided back in 2005 have had plenty of time to catch up to, and in some cases, exceed Google’s offering. Here’s how to make the full switch:

Backing up your Gmail: There are a number of ways to do this, but one stands out as the easiest: The email client method.

1.) Download Thunderbird, a free email client from the same people who make Firefox (Download for Windows, OS X)
2.) Enable IMAP access on your Gmail account, by clicking the Setting link in the top right of your inbox, navigating to the Forwarding and POP/IMAP tab, and selecting the “Enable IMAP” radio button

3.) File > New Mail Account
4.) Enter your name and Gmail address, after which Thunderbird should find your mail settings automatically, and set itself up as an IMAP client: (If this doesn’t happen, consult Google’s guide for a manual setup.
5.) Once the account is set up, open Thunderbird’s Account Settings panel, and navigate to the Synchronization and Storage tab. Make sure “Keep messages for this account on this computer” and “Synchronize all messages regardless of age” are both selected.
6.) Wait for your messages to sync to your computer—this could take hours, especially if you’re near your Gmail storage limit.

What you’ve done here is imported all of your Gmail messages into a local client—Thunderbird—which lets you browse them, search them, or back them up to an external hard drive for posterity. And if you switch to another IMAP-based service, you can import these old messages into your new account simply by dragging them from your Gmail inbox folder in Thunderbird to your new account’s inbox folder.

Contacts are a trickier question, but at the very least you can use Gmail’s contact exporting tool (under your Gmail inbox folder list) to create a CSV file or or VCard, for importing into a client like Thunderbird.

The best alternative service: As long as it’s been since Gmail showed up on the scene, the webmail scene hasn’t seen many exciting new players—Google has a knack of preempting new competition when it moves into a product category. So, for the best remaining alternative is a veritable oldie: Yahoo mail. Consider the facts:

• It’s still free
• It offers unlimited storage
• POP access is available in the free version, and with a little fiddling, so is IMAP access
• Free text messages in certain countries
• The interface doesn’t look like it was designed in 1999, like certain other webmail clients.

The matter of Buzz: Now, when you ditch Gmail, you’ll also be losing Google Buzz, which is a sort of location-aware status update system that nobody has really had the time to get into yet. Don’t worry: Buzz was a response to other services, not a trailblazer, so you’ll be served just fine sticking with Twitter (which lets you update you status with geolocation), FourSquare (which lets you alert your friends as to which particular establishments you visit, and see what other people think of said establishments), and Facebook (for posting media and accepting comments on it). Buzz didn’t have time to become vital, so switching away from it should be easy.

Calendar

Exporting your Google calendars: This one’s easy. Just:

1.) Navigate to your GCal settings page, and click on the Calendars tag.
2.) Export calendars to an ICS file, like so:
3.) That’s it!

The best alternative: Yahoo calendar is fine, but in the spirit of spreading your vital info around, let’s go with Windows Live Calendar. One you’ve created a Live ID—you pretty much need one of these nowadays—you’re automatically given a Live Calendar account. To import your Google Calendars, just do the following:

1.) Open Live Calendar
2.) Click “Subscribe”
3.) Import the ICS file you exported from Gmail, like this:

Photos

Not that many people use Picasa, so this one should be easy. Plus, there are some obviously superior alternatives.

• Flickr doesn’t stop at being a great photo sharing site, it’s also an amazing resource for photographers, both expert and amateur. Storage is limited with a monthly upload cap.
• Photobucket is a simple gallery service, with an emphasis on sharing over archiving. Storage is limited to 1GB.
• Shutterfly is another super-simple service, with unlimited storage (Google doesn’t even offer that for free)
• Facebook shouldn’t be counted out—its photo compression may be aggressive, but it does allow you to upload and tag a virtually unlimited number of photos.

Documents

A lot of people find themselves using Google Docs because it’s just so damn convenient—you receive a document in your Gmail account, and suddenly, hey, it’s in the Google Docs service! That’s how they get you. And interestingly enough, despite Google’s acquisition of Writely and subsequent improvements on in the Docs service, there’s still an objectively superior online document editing service out there.

ZoHo Docs is a full online office suit (among other things) which does virtually everything Google Docs can do, and often more. It offers deep document editing, offline editing (!), and collaborative editing. Document compatibility on ZoHo is absolutely tops, and the formatting and editing options far exceed Google Docs. There’s a text editor, a spreadsheet editor and a presentation editor, to name a few.

Pulling the Plug

So, you’ve migrated what you can, and settled into you new services nicely. Now, it’s time to close your Google account out, once and for all? Are you ready? Are you sure? Ok.

For any grievances you may have about Google’s privacy practices, you have to give them credit for making the process stupidly easy.

1.) From any Google page, click the Settings link in the top right, then Account Settings from the submenu.
2.) Next to “My Products”, click the “Edit” link
3.) From here, choose to delete individual services, or close your Google Account altogether.

4.) Confirm that you want all of your data deleted.
5.) DO IT.

Feels strange, doesn’t it? For anyone with enough spite and motivation to follow this guide, though, I suspect “strange” could be replaced with any number of more gracious adjectives. So, ex-Googlers: Do you feel better now?

We couldn’t cover every last Google service and piece of software, so if you have more tips and alternatives to share, please drop some links in the comments-your feedback is hugely important to our Saturday How To guides. And if you have any topics you’d like to see covered here, please let me know. Happy diversifying, folks!