Dan's New Blog

Don’t worry, she’ll hold together!
(You hear me, baby? Hold  together.)
– Han  Solo, to the Millenium Falcon

Adobe engineers are saying the exact same thing this morning as the final production release of Flash for smartphones has been released. One boo-boo and Steve Jobs will be all over it, saying “I told you so.”

I don’t know if this is bad news or good news, but early-adopters like me are cut out — you need Android 2.2.

Via.

The best of the best of the best:

• John Gruber focuses on the “retina” display (pun intended):

“[Apple is] using a new production process that effectively fuses the LCD and touchscreen — there is no longer any air between the two … The effect is that the pixels appear to be painted on the surface of the phone; instead of looking at pixels under glass, it like looking at pixels on glass. Combined with the incredibly high pixel density, the overall effect is like ‘live print’.”

• MobileCrunch reminds us that iPhone 4 is more than “the extremely high resolution screen, video chat capability with FaceTime, and the sexy new form factor”, and thus obligingly tells us “Everything you need to know about the iPhone 4“.

• Finally, TechCrunch’s Jason Kincaid, a fellow Android user, throws a little smack at Apple fanboys and girls:

“But despite the fact that my phone doesn’t quite match up to the iPhone 4, at no point yesterday did I consider jumping back onto the iPhone bandwagon. My Nexus One doesn’t feel much slower than the iPhone … What’s more, I’ll be surprised if Android devices don’t surpass the iPhone’s hardware capabilities within the next four months or so. We’ll probably be seeing sharper screens, faster processors, and even integrated gyroscopes (another feature launching with the iPhone 4) on the next wave of devices. And from a software perspective, Android actually seems poised to start beating Apple on some fronts, namely its connection with cloud services … In short, more than ever it looks like Android and Apple are in a dead heat. And that’s a great thing for all of us.”

In the last 5 months I’ve covered the launch of the iPad and iPhone 4. I’m getting tired of Apple’s regularly-planned obsolescence cycles. I feel like I’m suffering from Apple Fetish Fatigue. (Or maybe it’s simply that I’m currently rereading Shop Class as Soulcraft. I’m having trouble with perspective here.)

The other big thing announced at Google’s I/O conference — other than Google TV, I mean — was Android 2.2, known as Froyo. (That’s short for “frozen yogurt”, btw. All Android releases are given a dessert code name. Don’t ask why.)

Anyway, Froyo will feature USB tethering, support for Flash — take that, Steve Jobs! — and over-the-air updates/streaming for apps and/or music files. Stuff that the iPhone doesn’t yet do, or do particularly well.

Sounds great. But I’ll never see it with the phone I’ve got now. I’m stuck at Donut. I’m hoping I can get to Eclair before December, when my contract is up and I can upgrade my T-Mobile G1. That’s what I get for being an early-adopter.

Amazon tells me that they’re going to introduce a Kindle app for Android Real Soon Now. That’s great news, but they’re being a bit coy about whether it will actually run on my G1. They say it “supports Droid Incredible, Google Nexus One, HTC MyTouch, Motorola CLIQ, Motorola Droid, and many more Android phones.” The MyTouch isn’t all that much different that the G1, but who knows?

(Thank you, Google, for punishing us early-adopters. That would be, oh, about 2/3 of your Android users. At least I didn’t let Google sucker me into an overpriced phone they won’t support after 5 months.)

OK, rant over.

Anyway, it’ll be interesting to see how the Kindle app will stack up against Google’s browser-based bookstore, Google Editions, which also enjoys Real Soon Now status.

Two months after Apple filed suit against them, HTC is countersuing Apple for infringing on 5 of its patents. War (Apple vs. Google) by proxy!

And I’ll take any victory whenever and wherever I can: Android has more U.S. Web traffic than the iPhone, according to AdMob.

Here’s the good news: the Droid took off faster than the iPhone. What I mean to say is that it took the iPhone 74 days after it hit the streets in June 2007 to reach 1 million units sold. Droid sales over the first 74 days of its life were 1.05 million units. Congrats!

Now about the other thing. Um, the Nexus One appears to be a bust — only 135,000 sold in the first 74 days.

Link via Flurry.

Last August Mr. Macy (Eric Schmidt of Google) and Mr. Gimbel (Apple’s Steve Jobs) had to part ways. It was ostensibly for antitrust reasons — the 2 competing companies had common board members, including Schmidt himself. Today we found out another reason: Apple has filed suit against mobile handset maker HTC (JC Penny?), who just happens to make many of the Android-based phones that Google’s so fond of.

I’m not thinking Macy’s is gonna want to send customers to Gimbels the way they did before.

MobileCrunch reports that Google claims 60,000 Android handsets are shipped each day. That comes out to 5.4 million devices per quarter (vs. 8.7 million iPhones last quarter).

I’m a happy Android user, but I have to admit that my daughter’s iPhone has a better soft keyboard.