Hasta La Gadget!

Yesterday I held the new HTC Hero next to my iPhone. Not only the new Android handset has a surprisingly cool design—straight out of JJ Abrams’ Star Trek or Kubrick’s 2001—but it kicks the iPhone’s plastic ass.

Simply put, the Teflon-coated back just feels and looks a lot better than the iPhone’s—now crappy looking, I admit—plastic back. The Hero’s polytetrafluoroethylene—the technical name for DuPont’s Teflon—coating feels perfect in your hand. It doesn’t appear to get any skin oil at all. No greasy fingerprints, just a perfect matte finish no matter how much I touched it.

It feels and looks like a white thermal tile out of NASA’s shuttle.

The iPhone’s plastic finish, on the other side, is a fingerprint magnet that looks as cheap as any Chinese knockoff after holding it for a few seconds. The Hero wins hands down on appearance, even while its front is too complicated for my taste. For a company like Apple—which takes such pride in their design and manufacturing—this is bad. For a consumer like me, this sucks.

“They are getting so boring”

Once upon a time Apple used to be innovators in the use of new materials. Those were the times in which they experimented with the iMacs and PowerMacs, which finished with the arrival of aluminum. Today, apart from the unibody manufacturing—which is just a form of aluminum manufacturing, a material that has been used forever in consumer products—their use of groundbreaking materials has stagnated.

I’m not the only one saying this. About a month ago Matt Buchanan and I asked the top executive of one of the most important industrial design firms in the world about his thoughts on Apple’s design. After seing Objectified—and watching a legend like Dieter Rams glorifying Apple as the only consumer electronics company that counts when it comes to industrial design—I was expecting an ode to Jon Ive and his team. Instead, he replied:

They are great, but we [him and his colleagues in the industrial design world] think they are getting so boring. I mean, don’t get me wrong, they got the use of aluminum perfected now… but what happened with the excitement that they used to generate with new materials? We all expect a lot more from Apple.

He is right. Their use of plastics in the iMac spread to every single consumer appliance out there. And Kara Johnson, materials expert from IDEO believes it’ll be going out of style any day now (Maybe yesterday.) But now, even aluminum is the new beige. (Even if some experts believe there are few alternatives, there are a few.)

So yes, Apple should use new materials. Not for the sake of it, of course. They should use whatever materials fit the product technical needs. And for me, one of these needs as a consumer is that the product should look great at all times, and not just look great in the box or behind a store glass.

The need for new materials

The iPhone has this problem. It looks like crap with little use. They have tried to fix part of it with the oleophobic coating on the front glass—something that the HTC Hero also has—but the overall effect keeps being the same: Its back still looks cheap after some time.

One thing to note

For this reason we were all hoping for a matte back in the iPhone 3GS, but apparently Apple decided not to release it for one reason or the other.

I don’t know and I don’t care. What I do care about is that, after playing with the Hero, my iPhone now feels like cheap crap. And I don’t even like Android.

Related reading: What Beautiful Gadgets Will Be Made Of

This article was written on April 17, 2008 by CyberNet.

Up until recently, Alexa has been best known for ranking websites based upon users who have installed the Alexa Toolbar. Because they only used the toolbar to determine a sites’ ranking, they have been highly criticized and many people have discounted the benefit and usefulness of Alexa saying that it is inaccurate. People have been asking Alexa to change the way they determine rankings for quite a while and now Alexa has responded. As of Tuesday, the ranking system has been changed and now there is a new and improved method to determine how a site should be ranked.

On the Alexa blog, they say that they believe their new system is much closer to what their users have been asking for. They say, “We now aggregate data from multiple sources to give you a better indication of website popularity among the entire population of Internet users.” So what are the “multiple sources” you ask? Well, that’s a very good question and one that Alexa isn’t willing to answer. All we know is that the toolbar isn’t the only method they’re using.

Some sites have seen their rank improve while others have seen it drop. Alexa says that the new rankings “should better reflect the interests and surfing habits of the broader population of Web users” and it’s not that the rankings before were completely wrong, they were just different. CyberNet’s ranking did improve some. The last time we checked, we were in the 34,000-35,000 range and now our ranking for today is 27,078.

The one complaint I’ve seen so far around the web about the changes is that the long range graphs are gone and there are only nine months of historical data available. I too was disappointed until I checked out the Alexa blog and read that this is just temporary. They say they’re working on recalculating historic traffic data and it’ll be added back in the coming weeks.

Copyright © 2009 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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The iPod is the most popular audio gadget of the decade, which is why it’s incredibly frustrating that it’s not easier to use it with your AV receiver. Either you’re stuck using a patch cable and getting up from the couch to make playback changes, or you …

Sony Ericsson T715

(Credit: Sony Ericsson)

A month after Sony Ericsson introduced three high-end media phones, the company scaled things down just a bit by unveiling the midrange Sony Ericsson T715. Also released in London, the T715 sports a very Sony Ericsson slider design in galaxy silver or rogue pink. …

Video uploads to YouTube have increased 400 percent a day since the launch of the iPhone 3GS, according to YouTube.

In a blog post, YouTube officials Dwipal Desai and Mia Quagliarello cited three factors driving an overall growth of 1700 percent in uploads in the last six months: new video-enabled phones on the market, improvement of the upload flow and a new, streamlined process to share videos on social networks.

Yowza — 400 percent a day due to the iPhone 3GS? We’re guessing AT&T is going to hate this: The company already prevented the TV streaming iPhone app SlingPlayer from working on the 3G network, saying it “could create congestion and potentially prevent other customers from using the network.” How will AT&T handle video uploads? That’s bound to stress the upstream of the 3G network. Guess we’ll have to wait and see.

Via Macworld