Software News – netfordownload.com

THE G1 PHONE – GOOGLE’S ANDROID DEBUT

Google has a phone? You better believe it. The Manifest Destiny of Google continues to expand.

The HTC Dream, the first phone featuring Google’s Android operating system, will be sold in the U.S. starting in October. The G1 phone is only available to T-Mobile, priced at $179 with a two-year contract. However, this will be the first of many phones to come with Google’s Android operating system. We suggest you wait.

(more…)

Fixing Microsoft: A How-To Guide

The company is losing ground to Google. It’s time to pay attention to issues of privacy, security — and simplifying things for PC users

Other than another profitable quarter, Microsoft (MSFT) has little to celebrate these days. The company is falling sadly behind, serving fewer ads, video clips, search results, or personal Web pages than rival Google (GOOG). Microsoft’s $300 million ad campaign humanized Bill Gates but left consumers wondering, Where’s the beef? The company can’t even seem to buy up competitors [Yahoo! (YHOO), anyone?].

(more…)

The iPhone App Store: Backlash to the Backlash

We’ve pretty steadily followed the conventional wisdom regarding comparisons between Apple’s extremely closed iPhone app store, especially when compared to Google’s promised mostly open Android app store. This is an important topic, as the app stores are wonderful start-up terrain. We’ve criticized Apple’s heavy-handed and capricious stewardship, while praising Google’s decision to open up the store, exercising minimal prior restraint on prospective applications. (The T-Mobile G1, the first phone to run Android, comes out October 22.)

But fairness dictates that we present the alternate viewpoint, which has recently been articulated on TechCrunch and on our sister site Slate.

The TechCrunch post, by Dan Kimerling, is less a theoretical defense of Apple’s policies and more an instruction to developers to quit whining. “When you create the platform, you set the rules,” Kimerling writes. “If Apple wants to restrict iPhone applications to those that do not compete with features built into the iPhone, well, they can go right ahead and do so.” Well, yes, but no one’s really arguing otherwise. Few say Apple can’t do what it’s doing; they say it shouldn’t.

Kimerling is more persuasive when he points out that Apple can afford to do what it wants with its app store because developers, eyeing the 14 million (and rapidly increasing) iPhones and the iPhone’s superior platform and storage space, will continue to develop for the iPhone because the opportunity is too great to worry too much about Apple’s strict patrolling of its app store. This is a useful, realistic corrective to the notion that Apple’s behavior genuinely endangers the iPhone’s dominance, at least in the short-term. Still, it is the luxury of pundits to tell the world what it’s doing wrong, and Kimerling fails to persuade that pundits shouldn’t continue to tell Apple to loosen its app store.

(more…)