Hat tip to Felix Metzger for pointing me at Electronista’s MacBook Air review, which contains some oddball pros and cons. First, cons:

Not as fast as costlier rivals.

Is that really a ‘con’ of any hardware? The more expensive iPhone 4 is superior to the cheaper iPhone 3GS, but is that a ‘con’ regarding the older hardware? Surely if an alternative option is cheaper and faster, that might be something you should criticise, but more expensive and faster is just par for the course.

Battery life could still be longer.

That’s a statement, rather than a criticism. If Apple had a MacBook Air battery that lasted 24 hours, there would still be people who’d moan that it could last longer. But Apple’s 13-inch notebook lasts around seven hours, which is at the forefront of this technology. Again, if Apple was falling behind its rivals, that would be a ‘con’. “MacBook Air doesn’t include technology that doesn’t yet exist” isn’t really a criticism at all.

And then there’s a lovely pair of opinions. First, the ‘con’:

Display isn’t as vivid as on a MacBook Pro or similar.

Then a ‘pro’:

Sharp, low-glare display.

The gist is that Apple’s toned down its MacBook Air display, so it’s no longer akin to a mirror! Hurrah! But then that means it’s not quite as vivid as it once was. In this case, Electronista has a valid complaint, but it strikes me that you get one or the other (with current display technology): either you have glare with vibrancy or matte with dullness. Apple’s struck a balance, and so the review has complained about something it’s earlier championed. Odd.

Note that this doesn’t showcase that Electronista is stupid or that reviewer Jon Fingas needs a slap. The review itself is imperfect but pretty good and balanced. What it does show is that if you run a publication that forces reviewers to add ratings or the inevitable and rather pointless ‘pros’ and ‘cons’ lists, you must take extreme care on those overview elements. They are the things readers are driven to first, and they can so easily mislead, unintentionally or otherwise.

Apple Q3 results:

• Record quarterly revenue of $28.57 billion, up 82%
• Record quarterly net profit of $7.31 billion, up 125%
• 20.34 million iPhones sold, up 142%

Nokia Q2 results:

• Sales of €9.275 billion, down 7%
• Operating loss of €487 million (operating profit of EUR 295 million, down 41%)
• 16.7 million smartphone sales, down 34%

I wonder how many people are still deluding themselves that Apple isn’t now a major player in the smartphone industry.

Damn You, Auto Correct (DYAC), if you’ve not seen it, is a site that showcases amusing typos in text messages. These mostly occur due to the auto-correct functionality in iOS, which aims to guess what you’re writing, replacing misspellings accordingly. It’s pretty clear that a good number of the submissions to the site are set-up, but some are unintentional errors.

With DYAC having been in my RSS feed for a while now, I’ve started to notice a number of patterns. A good number of the replacements are down to user error. There’s a trend, especially in the US, to add a bunch of letters to the end of words, for emphasis. This is illustrated in the entry Learn From Your Fail:

There are also many examples on the site of people who simply do not know how to spell certain words, and so iOS makes its best guess, often to comical effect. However, Father And Son shows another side of auto-correct:

This post’s contributor said his mother was trying to remind him to drop his dad off, not, er, something else entirely. There are quite a few posts along these lines on the site, often from older users. People claim their phone (typically their iPhone) is ‘changing’ their words. I therefore wonder if there’s a discoverability problem here, in people not noticing when iOS offers an alternate spelling; either that or there’s a usability issue in people not knowing how to pick a word when iOS isn’t sure what you meant to type.

It’s also pretty infuriating that iOS still denies you access to its custom dictionary, yet is insanely over-zealous about storing and offering back your more bizarre words. Type a long string in caps and deny iOS changing it to a string of its own devising and you’ll find it subsequently popping up time and time again. While you can nuke your entire custom dictionary in Settings, it’s absurd that Apple doesn’t enable finer control over custom words and mappings, although I suspect DYAC is pretty happy about that, as are its followers.

Harry Marks:

Windows is not a mobile operating system and should not be branded as such. Microsoft should abandon the Windows brand on the mobile side to show that it is capable of growing and adapting to the shifting tech landscape. This isn’t about “staleness” vs. “freshness”, this is about what’s best for the brand and Windows isn’t a good brand for mobile.

I agree with this entirely. The worst thing about Windows Phone 7 is the sodding name. It’s clunky and unwieldy; worse, it links something new, fresh and genuinely exciting with something old and creaky. And it means you can’t bung it on a tablet without it suddenly sounding utterly stupid. Well, even more utterly stupid. Imagine:

Hi, here’s my new Windows Phone 7 tablet!

Sorry, have you gone mental?

Of course, Ballmer’s WINDOWS IS THE BEST mentality means the company’s attempting to weld bits of Windows Phone 7 to Windows 8, in order to create something that’s both shit for touch and pointless for PC use, so we’re not going to see a Windows Phone 7 tablet anyway. If we did, Marks has a good idea about naming:

Rename Windows Phone 7 to “Metro”, based on the UI name. This would make it much more versatile for other mobile devices, like tablets.

He adds that this would stop people avoiding Windows Phone 7 because of the ‘Windows’ part and also get engineers excited about it being a new frontier for Microsoft. Instead, Ballmer’s reached the frontier and erected a fucking great wooden Windows billboard, while Apple, Google, HP and others happily show off their super-futurisitic Direct Into Your Brain™ adverts.

Good grief. Via The Medium is Not Enough, here’s Fox News’s take on the News International hacking scandal. In short: “They’ve done the right thing! Why do people keep banging away at this story?” Well, maybe that’s because News International was so powerful it had an entire government scared stiff and also practically decided who was elected. And, frankly, that Fox News piece pretty much showcases what happens when a media organisation has too much power. Impartiality? Facts? Fuck that—much more fun to pander to your parent company’s CEO’s wishes!