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Previously: Technology Is Not Getting Easier!

Forbes published an article today that provides a nice postscript about new devices becoming more complex and cranky. Do iOS Apps Crash More Than Android Apps? A Data Dive is rich with details but the important lesson is that these simple, reliable devices in our pocket crash all the time. It’s not just you.

The details are interesting and the article is loaded with pie charts that break down crashes on mobile devices in lots of ways. (Conclusions: apps on Apple devices crash slightly more often than Android apps, but data from the end of 2011 might have been skewed by the release of iOS 5, which required a fair amount of rewriting for apps to work reliably. […] continued

Most casual photos are taken with a smartphone now. There is something to be learned from a quick comparison of the process of getting photos from a phone to a computer on an iPhone and an Android phone.

It’s a good way to understand why Apple is the most valuable company in the world.

On the phone:

• Install the latest iOS 5 update.

By default, iCloud is turned on and Photo Stream is turned on. If not, the settings are under iCloud. Set Photo Stream to On.

On your Windows computer:

• Install the latest iTunes update.

[…] continued

A new model of phone has been introduced roughly every day in 2011 but none of them have been very interesting.

Until now. Let’s take a look at three big developments in the phone world.

(Fair warning: I do not have any personal experience with any of these phones. They undoubtedly have quirks and limitations and exciting bits that might flavor your experience. Your mileage may vary; it’s all I can do to keep up with the product launches and press releases.)

Apple iPhone 4S

Apple’s new iPhone 4S is a collection of small changes, not big ones: a great camera, a voice-activated assistant named Siri (which apparently is really marvelous), and some welcome file syncing to make it easier to get photos and music on and off the phone. […] continued

Apple’s brilliant success since Steve Jobs returned in 1997 has made it the largest company in the world by almost any measure, with a market capitalization that exceeds Microsoft and Intel combined. iPhones define the smartphone market, even if they do not completely dominate it now that Android has taken the lead in market share. iPads, however, so completely dominate the tablet market that Amazon opted not to directly compete but instead to seek a different niche that will leave Apple as the undisputed king of the 10′” tablets – for now, at least.

Apple’s lineup of Mac computers and its releases of OS X upgrades are watched by bloggers and the media almost as lovingly as its mobile devices. […] continued

Many people instinctively protect their privacy. In their minds, it’s not anybody else’s business where they shop, who they visit, what they talk about, or what movies they watch.

The divide is getting wider between naturally private people and the rapidly growing number of people who simply do not have that instinct and are living their lives in public with no reluctance and little regret. Facebook is the obvious source of much of the information being made public but it is only one of many ways to put your life online. Between Facebook posts and photos and location-based phone apps and activities tracked by advertisers, almost everyone is able to be followed online to some degree, voluntarily or not. […] continued

You jangle your keys in your pocket next to your Motorola phone and the screen isn’t scratched. You drop your iPhone and the glass doesn’t break. You jab with an icepick over and over at a Thinkpad X1 laptop and for goodness’ sake, I hope you stop to wonder what in the world is wrong with you – but the screen isn’t damaged.

Gorilla Glass is not secret. Corning has been taking out ads for months trying to get you to notice it. It’s one of the important components of the mobile device revolution, hiding in plain sight.

Gorilla Glass is used on smartphones from HTC and Motorola and Samsung, on notebook computers from Acer and Lenovo, on tablets from Dell and Asus – more than 300 million devices worldwide, according to Corning’s official list. […] continued

You can be excused if you haven’t heard of Spotify yet. For months it’s been a hot topic for music junkies who have been impatient for it to debut in the United States. People addicted to tech blogs have been scrounging for invitations since the U.S. service was opened up last week.

If you have any interest in music at all, you should pay attention, because there’s a chance that this will be the service that becomes your primary source of tunes. In fact, if things go the way some industry insiders expect, Spotify will be a colossal success and after you get used to the idea, you’ll consider giving up the very idea of a library of “your” songs. […] continued

Not everything works with everything else.

Your expectations have changed so quickly that you might not have noticed. It wasn’t long ago that most people used a single PC at a single location and were content to leave the data on that computer behind when they left that desk. When you closed Outlook on the office computer, you didn’t expect to open up the same mailbox at home. If you had files to work on at home, you’d burn them to a CD or copy them to a USB drive or email them to your home email address. You might have gotten a notebook if you expected to be mobile but the data on it was still mostly separate from your other computers and devices. […] continued

SUMMARY

Google Tasks is a simple, free way to keep a to do list. If you have a Gmail.com address, you can click here to see a more useful view of the Google Tasks list. You can see your to do list on an iPhone or Android phone by going to gmail.com/tasks with the browser on the phone.

Your to do list is probably on a post-it note or scrap of paper on your desk.

In part that’s because of failures by Microsoft and Apple. Microsoft has always had a “Tasks” section in Outlook but it’s poorly designed out of the box and I rarely see it used. […] continued

The iPad was not the first tablet on the market. Microsoft was one of the first companies to deliver a tablet, with the first prototype demonstrated more than ten years ago. No one cared.

Apple created the demand for the iPad more or less from scratch, leaving Microsoft looking completely helpless. For a while it plaintively complained in interviews, “Hey, there are Windows tablets, too,” but eventually the Microsoft spokespeople lapsed into sullen silence and let Apple run away with the tablet market. Microsoft still shows no sign of a coherent tablet strategy. It periodically claims that it will have a great tablet OS eventually but the promises get more vague and dates are delayed over and over, as if it’s having trouble thinking of something – anything – that might be interesting. […] continued