“Did Google and Samsung do what Apple wouldn’t?“, asks Joe Wilcox. As you might have heard, Samsung/Google pulled the Nexus Prime announcement, arguing it was “just not the right time”. I wondered if other reasons were behind the delay, but the two companies later confirmed:

We believe this is not the right time to announce a new product as the world expresses tribute to Steve Jobs’s passing.

Of course, this might still be misdirection to deal with some other problem with the device, but anyway.

Wilcox argues, bizarrely, that Apple should have done the same thing with the iPhone 4S:

So what? Google and Samsung show respect for Jobs, but Apple doesn’t?

Apple announced iPhone 4S on October 4. A day later, the company revealed that Jobs, Apple’s chairman and until late-August its CEO, had died. The world is mourning the loss of one of the rarest of humans — a true visionary who compelled loyalty among the people closest to him and those who used Apple’s products, in part by aspiring for something better. How does Apple remember Jobs? By keeping business as usual.

News of Jobs death came late-day on October 5. My colleagues and I couldn’t really discuss it until the following day. When everyone was online in group chat I chimed: “Now comes the test of the new management’s character. I would delay iPhone 4S launch a week out of respect”.

If that’s really what Wilcox chimed, he doesn’t get Apple and he didn’t get Jobs. Steve Jobs was hugely proud of everything he achieved at Apple. The iPhone 4S is one of the last things that will have his direct involvement. Delaying its release and therefore potentially hampering its success, to mourn Jobs, would have not been respectful but an insult to the man. More to the point, Jobs remained involved with all things Apple right to the end. Does anyone really believe that Jobs himself wasn’t pushing the rest of the team to go ahead with the launch, regardless of his health?

[The] assertion that “business is business” is bunk. Google and Samsung show respect for Jobs’ passing in ways the Apple hasn’t — and should have. The new management has failed the test of character I put before my colleagues two days ago.

Absolute garbage. The best way to show respect for Jobs is to celebrate his life and to ensure the company he rebuilt continues to thrive. The way Apple can do that is by ensuring the latest thing he worked on is a success, and you don’t do that by shutting down.

Also, it’s hardly like Apple is entirely without heart. There can’t be too many companies that would remove everything from their website’s home page—including details about their shiny new product—in order to present a picture of their late visionary. But perhaps in his desire to bash Apple and its management team, Wilcox has failed to visit apple.com at any time since Steve Jobs died.

You probably already read Stephen Fry’s intelligent, thoughtful article on Steve Jobs. If not, go and do so now, because it’s very good. But the Macalope‘s column today reminded me that I wanted to briefly discuss a couple of points Fry makes that at least half the tech press simply doesn’t seem to understand, and yet that drove almost everything Jobs worked for: design is about how something works, not just how it looks. Good design encompasses everything, from form to (where relevant) technology to human impact.

Fry:

Only dullards crippled into cretinism by a fear of being thought pretentious could be so dumb as to believe that there is a distinction between design and use, between form and function, between style and substance. If the unprecedented and phenomenal success of Steve Jobs at Apple proves anything it is that those commentators and tech-bloggers and “experts” who sneered at him for producing sleek, shiny, well-designed products or who denigrated the man because he was not an inventor or originator of technology himself missed the point in such a fantastically stupid way that any employer would surely question the purpose of having such people on their payroll, writing for their magazines or indeed making any decisions on which lives, destinies or fortunes depended.

This is something I entirely agree with. The mistake people make is to assume not only what Fry mentions later, quoting a Jobs interview with Fortune magazine —

In most people’s vocabularies, design means veneer. It’s interior decorating. It’s the fabric of the curtains and the sofa.

— but also that this was all Apple and Jobs have ever been involved with.

It’s depressing that too often these days in technology, someone will talk about design in the negative. They will dismiss a well-designed product as an expensive trinket, or something unsuitable for anyone who doesn’t want a dumbed-down experience. They’ll suggest cheaper alternatives. But, really, good design improves everything: how something looks, how something works, how something interacts with you, how something can save you time or bring you joy.

The final words,I’ll leave to Jobs:

Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service.

Odd article on TechRadar about Samsung and Google pulling the Nexus Prime product announcement:

Samsung and Google decide to postpone the new product announcement at CTIA Fall.

We agree that it is just not the right time to announce a new product. New date and venue will be shortly announced.

TechRadar leaps to the conclusion a lot of other sites have come to:

It’s likely that the companies decided to postpone as a mark of respect to rival Steve Jobs, who passed away earlier this week.

If so, that would be astonishing from a business standpoint, allowing a rival to steam forward, because an industry figurehead has passed away. Frankly, I don’t believe it for a second. Maybe I’m just a big ol’ cynic but I reckon if this really was the case for the delay, the joint statement would (and should) have said so. Instead, chances are that the delay is down to other reasons (technical, or just not wanting to get buried in the tech press, which, clearly, mostly has Steve Jobs on its mind right now), and the statement has been cunningly worded.

Ian Betteridge agrees:

Call me a cynic, but thats a vague enough statement to allow people to interpret it as Jobs-related, while meaning something else.

Hmm.

Update: All THings D now reports:

We believe this is not the right time to announce a new product as the world expresses tribute to Steve Jobs’s passing.

So, turns out I am a cynic, but this is also a lesson in communication for Google and Samsung: say what you mean and don’t be vague.

I was lucky enough to chat with Graham Linehan recently, for a magazine interview. As is often the way with interviews, we ended up just chatting in general for a bit, mostly about the internet and Twitter. He made some comments about social networking, social and digital evolution, and Twitter, which were too good to end up on the cutting-room floor. Therefore, the interview’s now online on the .net website. Go! Read!

It’s like accelerated evolution, but at the same time, it’s kind of an artificial evolution, because it’s all technology-based. If the oil runs out, we’re back to just sitting in pubs.

Lost among the noise of the Apple event and subsequent online whinefest by idiot tech hacks was the gem you see when you scroll down to ‘more features‘ on Apple’s iOS 5 features page:

AirPlay now supports video mirroring. Which means you can wirelessly — and securely — stream whatever’s on your iPad 2 or iPhone 4S to your HDTV via Apple TV. Everyone in the room sees exactly what’s on your iPad or iPhone display up on the big screen — even when you rotate your device from portrait to landscape or zoom in and out.

For some people, this won’t make any odds, but for me, this is fantastic. It not only enables me to get mirroring over AirPlay without buying an iPad 2 (hello, iPad 3 instead!), but it shows Apple’s moving ahead with this technology, for any devices that have the relevant clout. This is particularly good news for gaming. By next year, Apple’s iPods will have A5 chips, meaning all current-gen iOS products will have AirPlay mirroring with an Apple TV. This has the potential to revolutionise Apple’s ‘hobby’ device, not least in the field of gaming.