“Though handset makers buy their touchscreens as components from the same select pool of suppliers, a good touchscreen experience requires more than just hardware. It requires a bit of design alchemy blending software, engineering and calibration for the perfect feel. Few smartphone makers have managed to get that balance right, say experts,” Ganapati reports. “‘If you think that no other touchscreen out there is as good as the iPhone, its not all in your head,’” says Chris Verplaetse, vice president of the Moto Development Group, a product design and development firm. ‘It’s like asking what makes a Mercedes door close like a Mercedes door and a Hyundai door close like one though they use the same steel. There’s clearly a difference.’”

“The capacitive touchscreen in Apple’s iPhone changed the game, because it’s not pressure-sensitive. Instead, this kind of technology responds to the electrical properties of your skin, not the pressure of your finger, to figure out where you’re touching the screen. For the first time, just a light tap could open an application or a flicking gesture could get the screen scrolling,” Ganapati reports. “Best of all, it seemed effortless.”

Ganapati reports, “In theory, all capacitive touchscreens should offer consumers the same experience, but they rarely do, says Andrew Hsu, a technology strategist for Synaptics, one of the biggest touchscreen component makers. ‘Capacitive touch-based handsets involve a lot of development work and quite a bit of engineering expertise in order to give them their ‘magical’ quality,’ says Hsu.”

Full article here.

Rizzo continues, “Windows 7 and Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard each contain features that originated in the other OS. Some features were stolen so long ago that they’ve become part of the computing landscape, and it’s difficult to remember who invented what. Here we give credit to Microsoft where credit is due.”

1. Finder Sidebar: Windows Navigation pane
2. The Mac Path bar: Windows Address bar
3. Back and Forward navigation buttons in folder windows
4. Minimizing to document windows into app icon
5. Screen Sharing: Remote Desktop Connection
6. Time Machine: Backup and Restore (Rizzo admits, “Apple didn’t steal Time Machine from Windows, just the concept of including backup capability with the operating system.”)
7. System Preferences: Control Panel (Rizzo calls Windows’ Control Panel “one convenient place,” thereby proving he’s never used Windows.)
8. ActiveSync and Exchange 2007 support (Rizzo’s run out of “thefts” already.)
9. Command-Tab: Alt-Tab
10. Terminal: Command Prompt

Full article here.

Direct link via YouTube here.

Trefis highlights the three factors that make the iPad more valuable for Apple than Mac desktops:

1. Pricing gap between iPads and Mac desktops expected to narrow over time
2. Unit sales of iPads will exceed Mac desktops sold (We expect Apple to sell 4 million iPads in 2010 compared to 3.8 million Mac desktops.)
3. Gross margins for Mac desktops are lower than iPad margins

Full article here.

“Segue to 2007. Apple introduces the iPhone without support for Flash. People complain, but iPhones sell at ever-increasing rates. Today, with some 40 million of them around the world, and the iPad on the immediate horizon, Steve Jobs has made it quite clear that Flash is the floppy drive of the 21st century,” Steinberg writes. “It’s time for it to go.”

“As tens of millions of additional customers acquire Apple’s mobile products, the number of visitors to Flash-based sites will also decline, which pretty much forces the issue. Web developers must either build two versions of their sites to accommodate the different requirements of their potential visitors, or just set Flash aside and try to work within open Web standards,” Steinberg writes. “That may be happening. Google is beta testing an alternative to YouTube without Flash, and just this week Virgin America, a small airline, decided to drop Flash from its site. In the Macworld article reporting on the change, writer Dan Moren concludes, ‘Because, as we know, all it really takes in the corporate world is one executive with an iPhone to ask why she can’t use the company’s site on her device.’”

Steinberg writes, “As has already been mentioned, even if Flash runs with decent performance, and even if it doesn’t hog system resources or compromise stability, that doesn’t mean that you’ll be able to magically access all or most Flash sites on your smartphone. Flash is designed to work with regular personal computers that have conventional input devices [not] multitouch… As a result, Web developers might begin to look for the free, open source alternatives to Flash that don’t require paying fees for Adobe’s products.”

Full article here.

Kennedy continues, “Speaking at the Digital Landscapes conference at UCD, Herlihy said that the cloud-computing opportunity will make sure that every mobile device will be capable of doing rapid-scale applications. ‘In three years time, desktops will be irrelevant. In Japan, most research is done today on smart phones, not PCs.’ Herlihy [echoed] comments by Google CEO Eric Schmidt at the recent GSM Association Mobile World Congress 2010 that everything the company will do going forward will be via a mobile lens, centring on the cloud, computing and connectivity.”

Full article here.