Apple Thoughts - News & Reviews on all things Apple

I'm thrilled to announce the newest member of the Thoughts Media family: Android Thoughts. As you can guess, this site will be covering Android in all it's forms - phones, slates, etc. The site is being led by none other than our very own Jon Westfall; he'll be handling all editorial duties on the site, similar to how Apple Thoughts works. Android has exploded in popularity over the past 12 months, surpassing even the mighty iPhone in terms of daily activations according to some. It made sense to cover Android as part of what we do here at Thoughts Media, but I wanted to find someone who was passionate and interested in all things Android...and that person is Jon Westfall. Please go read his welcome message on the site to find out how Android Thoughts was born - and subscribe to the RSS feed and Twitter stream. And, above all, if you're interested in Android as a platform, contribute, share, comment, and become a part of that new community.

"As usual, Steve Jobs began his Apple music event keynote today by giving a breakdown of iOS devices sold to date - 120,000,000. It took them from June 2007 to June 2010 to reach 100,000,000 and only 3 months to add another 20,000,000 on top of that. Jobs also said they're activating new devices at a rate of 230,000 a day."

A not too subtle jab at Google when Steve said "if we counted upgrades in our numbers they'd be way higher than 230,000." Google of course had a response to this which was "The Android activation numbers do not include upgrades and are, in fact, only a portion of the Android devices in the market since we only include devices that have Google services." I guess Google and Jobs are interpreting data differently?

"As rumored last night, Google Voice is now embedded within Gmail, allowing users to make and receive calls to their Google voice numbers, from right within their browser. That's pretty impressive."

I tested this on Wednesday afternoon, and it worked great. I thought it was going to depend on either flash or HTML5, but in fact, it uses its own plugin, and it should run in any browser. I tested it in Google Chrome, Safari and Camino, and it worked fine in all three. You can go to http://www.google.com/chat/voice/ to download the plugin. If you want to receive calls in Gmail, you'll have to set it up as a destination in Google Voice.

"Good news for all of you fans of Google's Finance portal as it just has been updated to be more friendly to mobile browsers. Just like it did with YouTube in July, the company has found a way to bring amazing content to the iPhone/iPod touch without going through Apple's app approval process."

Google does a good job of making their mobile sites appear like an app, so it's easy to hit the "+" sign at the bottom of the screen and add their pages to your iPhone screen. You can even track your portfolio if you have it entered through Google.

"Good news for iPhone users who had lusted over the Android-only app Goggles from Google. It's set to hit the App Store sometime in the next three months."

This is one of the two things I miss about my Nexus One (the other is speech-to-text everywhere in the OS). Google Goggles is a great app that lets you take pictures of things like book covers, DVDs, logos, etc, and it will do searches based on that picture. You can find things like pricing information, or a cast list for a DVD, or anything else Google has indexed. It also has rudimentary OCR and access to Google Translate, so you can take a picture of a sign in a foreign language, and it'll do its best to give you a translation. The Android version also works with barcodes, and there's no reason to believe the iPhone version won't as well. Google Goggles is rumored to be coming out later this year.

"Google will roll out on Tuesday enhancements to Gmail's contacts manager, which the company acknowledges has been traditionally the webmail service's weakest link."

This update won't be noticeable on the Google Apps suite until later, but if you use an individual Gmail account you will see the changes. Google says they took into account the feedback and complaints they received about previous problems with the contact manager and want users to "give us another try." You can read more about the changes on their blog. What problems, if any, did you have if you used Gmail? Are you willing to give it another try? I use MobileMe to sync my contacts but I do like the Google Cal sync better so that is what I use for calendars. I'm on the fence on this one, how about you?

"Everybody's got a go-to in case of emergency (ICE) contact, but emergencies have a nasty habit of not caring whether your ICE contact is available to pick up the phone. Reader snappingleather's clever solution: Expand your ICE reach with Google Voice."

Image Credit: blogsdna.com

Now that pretty much anyone can get a Google Voice number, this is a pretty nifty trick from LifeHacker if you incorporate ICE numbers (in case of emergency) in your contacts. Basically it involves setting up a Google Voice number so that it rings several of your ICE contacts so you only have to list the one number.

"Google announced a new feature this week that lists apps in mobile search results. When searching for an app by name from your iPhone (it works with Android too, naturally), the top result is a link to the app's home in the App Store. In addition to the link, you get information like rating, publisher and price.

"

Nice addition to searches I suppose, but if I was on my iPhone anyway, I think I'd just go the App Store and search from there.

"It may not be a love-fest between Google and Apple these days, but internally at least, the search giant is showing Cupertino some love by phasing out Windows-based systems and replacing them with Macs."

This was based on a Financial Times story, that gained info from a Google memo outlining the reason for the change was for security reasons. As a side note, they also mentioned that Google is working towards running everything on their own software and that it might be the first step in going full scale into their Chrome OS.

"Company announced Tuesday that its Chrome browser for the OS X is now available as a stable release."

Let the downloads begin!

"Add Google to the list of companies planning an ebook service. The Internet giant's Google Editions service could be up and running as early as June, the Mountain View, Calif. company told publishers Tuesday. Google would compete with Apple, Amazon and Barnes & Noble for the growing audience of electronic readers."

The big difference here, between Google, iBook, Amazon and Barnes & Noble is that the "Google Editions" is going to be available from any browser, and not just on a particular device like the iPad or Kindle. Another twist to all this is that Google Editions will be sold through other websites so you aren't tied to a particular site such as Amazon.com or the iBook store. I prefer to have my books on a reader so I don't have to depend on an Internet connection to read them so I will have no interest in this, what are your thoughts? 

"As Microsoft's Internet Explorer falls to just under 60 percent of the browser market, Google's Chrome has jumped ahead of Apple's Safari, indicates a new survey released Tuesday. Although Mozilla's Firefox took the largest percentage of the market lost by Microsoft, Google's Chrome took 6.7 percent, versus 2.5 percent for Apple's Safari."

In two years, dropping 20% is not a good sign. Now Chrome has pushed aside Safari and heading upwards towards Internet Explorer. They have a long way to go to catch up to the roughly 60% market share that IE has but they have fired a warning shot over the bow it appears based on the new data. Personally, I pretty much stick with Safari, mainly because of the MobileMe syncing of bookmarks over several machines.

"You know how your iPhone says "Google" on the button you use to search? Not for long."

Apparently iLounge noticed this while they were going through the changes for iPhone OS 4.0. So does this mean Apple is going with their own search or adding some other company? And if you are interested in walk throughs of the new system, besides the iLounge version linked above, 9to5Mac also has posted a version.

"Investor Village's AAPL Sanity board, which requires a subscription to view its content, on Monday noted that iPad pre-orders dropped from an estimated 25,000 per hour on Friday, the first day of availability, to around 1,000 per hour over the weekend. For the three-day period, the cumulative total was estimated at 152,000."

Quite the demand, in fact the pre-order number total for the iPad is more than the number of Google Nexus One phones that have sold in the last 74 days. If you want to get your pre-order listed in the tally, email ipadsales10@gmail.com with the number of ipads ordered, order time, time zone, memory capacity and the order number (make sure the last 3 digits of the order number is deleted). Wonder how this will compare to the 3G version, any thoughts? 

"The first Google Buzz client is now in the app store, The Next Web's Tim Difford reports. Buzzie, from developer Alberto Hierro, gives you full access to your Buzz account, and also lets users who don't have accounts (or don't want to sign in) see what people are buzzing up in their area."

Called Buzzie, it's available now in the iTunes Store for $2.99 USD. I haven't gotten enough use out of Google Buzz to make having an application worthwhile. Have any of you, or do any of you use Buzz frequently? If so, how do you like it?

"Google released a new version of Chrome for Mac OS X on Thursday that restores a key feature, extensions, that had been missing for weeks."

According to Chrome programmer Mark Mentoval, "With this new version, you'll be able to install any of over 2,200 extensions (and counting!) currently available in Chrome's extensions gallery." This version also fixes some Adobe stability issues as well as including some new multitouch support. The new beta version should get some Firefox users to switch now that it has extensions I would imagine. You can download the latest beta version here, and if you currently are using Chrome, they expect an automatic update within the next few days. Still not sure? Check out the Macworld run through of the latest beta here.

"Today Google is kicking off its third installment of Doodle for Google, a yearly nationwide art contest for students in grades K-12. Eligible students can submit their own "Google Doodles," and the winning Doodle will appear on Google's homepage for one day. Plus the winner and his or her school will receive money and scholarships."

This year's theme is "If I Could Do Anything, I Would..." The idea, obviously, is to get those kids dreaming about what they would do or want to do in their future. You can get all the details at the official site and the school registration deadline is March 17th, with a deadline of submissions on March 31st, 2010. Cool contest.

"Google Jan. 29 said it would cease fully supporting Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 for its Google Docs and Google Sites applications March 1. This pledge extends to other older Web browser versions, including Mozilla Firefox 2.0, Apple Safari 2.0, as well as Google's own Chrome 3.0. The move is Google's push to rid the messaging and collaboration world of the dated, insecure IE6 and put Google Chrome in its place. Chrome has 4.63 percent of the browser market and would love to chomp away at IE's 63 percent share."

Doesn't seem on the surface to be anything as sinister as forcing their way into marketshare, appears to me like its natural progression of things as software advances. But I suppose since IE 6 has over 60% of the market for browsers that it would be natural to assume Google was up to some skullduggery wouldn't it? What are your thoughts? 

"Mail storage is the organizational conundrum of the early 21st century for many longtime Mac users. On your hard drive, you probably have an e-mail archive literally dating back to the last century, containing a few thousand irreplaceable, keep-forever messages in an ocean of saved detritus. Searching is a pain, but "reorganizing" your archive is a fate worse than death, so you've gamely stuck to your system-until now, when Google Email Uploader for Mac presented a viable alternative."

You can check out the uploader here, but note that there are a couple of "wait, read this before you do it" elements. It doesn't upload to gmail or google mail accounts, only those that are hosted by Google Apps for your domain. And it requires Mac OS 10.4 or higher. But it will upload from Apple Mail, Thunderbird and Eudora, automatically finding the archives and uploading them. If you have more than 500 messages, however, it may take some time (the author noted it would take the program about 69 hours to do it all once he started the process).

"New photos and a hands-on description have compared Google's custom-built Nexus One handset, rumored to be for sale to the public next month, with Apple's iPhone. Jason Chen of Gizmodo received some hands-on time with the hardware thanks to an anonymous source. He called the long-rumored, supposed Google Phone a 'Droid killer' -- ironic, because Motorola attempted to position its Droid, which launched in November, as an 'iPhone killer.'"

The video is a little shaky, so it is hard to tell the quality of the phone and it's screen which Chen calls "probably the best screen we have seen on a smartphone. Probably." But the screen doesn't have multi-touch, there is mediocre quality on music playback and they didn't test the phone aspect of the device. So still some unknowns. The phone is supposed to go on sale in early 2010.