Smartphones

Flappy Bird, you’ve met your match - Flappy Phone. Except they are serious, the new Samsung Galaxy S5 has a flap over the immensely hideous USB 3 micro B port. On one hand, this is a “face palm” moment. On the other hand, I applaud them for avoiding the 2 hours of listing gimmick software features that no one cared about like they did at the S4 unveiling. 

Also worth mentioning is the fact that the fingerprint scanner is “quite unreliable and virtually impossible to activate,” but I’m sure no one will notice (*cough).

Looks like Samsung is putting some effort into design cleanliness. Not something they’re exactly known for. The question is whether they’re giving the UI a genuinely fresh overhaul, or are we seeing a friendly face with the same Samsung clutter behind it?

It is worth mentioning that the “Samsung clutter” does enable a lot of niche uses for users, but it certainly doesn’t lend itself to a clean user experience.

Path is a simply wonderful social network. I connect with my close friends and family and we use the app to share more intimate moments that aren’t appropriate for the public or large following of acquaintances. The app is beautifully designed on iOS, it is acceptable on Android, and now has finally launched for Windows.

Path has enjoyed noteworthy success, though is not, and will never be, the next Facebook or Twitter. The fact that it took them this long to launch on the Windows platform goes to show how much Windows is struggling in the smartphone realm. This isn’t to say the platform isn’t good, but it seems too be too little too late.

It is no secret that the NSA is, or is at least capable of, tracking your every move. Many people also realize that advertisers have a lot more access to tracking you than you’d think (or like), but most people do not.

Your phone is constantly connected to cellular towers, scanning for WiFi, and in some cases searching for Bluetooth. To make wireless connections, a handshake of sorts has to take place. This handshake includes some indentifiers to tell the source who you are. This information isn’t your name or email address, but a MAC address is unique enough to pretty easily trace you as an individual.

There is no doubt that privacy is getting more visibility than ever with the NSA leaks of late. A lot of people are opting for more secure services, apps, and hardware. This often comes at a price as these services are harder to engineer and maintain, they’re not usually given away for free. The exception is Kim Dotcom’s MEGA service with 50GB of free ultra secure cloud storage.

AT&T announced sponsored data plans today that allow providers to pay for the data that you use on your mobile device while using their services. Imagine streaming Netflix without it counting toward your 2GB data cap, seems neat right? Well the financial savings represent the most obvious upside, the privacy issue presents the largest down side. Your data and your usage are now bought and paid for by someone else, meaning they own it.

If you’re a Twitter user, you need to be using Tweetbot 3.0. It isn’t just the best Twitter client, which it is by a long shot, it is my favorite iPhone app period. The iPad version is still on 2.0 with the pre-iOS 7 design, and even that is a league above most other Twitter clients. When I did a trial switch to Android, the lack of Tweetbot was among my top complaints, I found myself not wanting to use Twitter anywhere near as much without it.

I’m not saying it’ll never happen (though at this point I don’t see why they would), but this 2014 bigger iPad rumor is laughable. Not happening.

Regarding the larger iPhone… I see this being more of a potential, but the screen resolution situation would be a mess. I think if they do this, they’ll also introduce some API to make apps render with vectored graphics or something.

This graphic to show which smartphones are capable of having which OS on them is eye-opening. I don’t think “average people” (in the tech savviness sense) care about this, which is unfortunate to me.