One of the handiest features in Safari mobile for the iPad (or iPhone or iPod touch) is the ability to double-tap on a column of text to make it zoom to fit the display width. It allows me to comfortably read text that is just a bit too small at its default size. It works great on every website except TechCrunch’s for some reason. You can see the problem in the screenshot above. Its banner and a few other web page areas are in focus. But, the title and text column are blurry.
I’ve had some minor issues updating Windows Phone apps through Microsoft’s Windows Phone Marketplace app in the past few weeks. But, this is the first time I’ve seen anything like this – The screen photo above shows what looks like an install-file path visible in the apps list on my Windows Phone. You can see the progression that led to this in the screen photos below.
This is unbelievable. Samsung is shipping the new Galaxy S Blaze with Android OS 2.3 (Gingerbread). Sure, it has T-Mobile’s so-called 4G (HSPA+42). But, Gingerbread? Really?
Forty-four (44) apps installed one time or another on my iPhone or iPad were updated in the past week. Let’s take a quick look if anything interesting showed up in these updates.
I have an old(ish) Eye-Fi Home Video 4GB SDHC card that I got as part of a promotion to buy 200GB of Google Docs storage space in 2010. At the time, the transfer was through my Mac (or PC) to Eye-Fi’s service and then to Google Picasa. The process was slow and, it seemed, not 100% reliable. So, the card got put away after a week or two of disappointing tests.
However, Apple’s new iPhoto for iOS (released last week) is such an amazing tool on my iPad (it also works on an iPhone or iPod touch) that I wanted to get photos from a digital camera to my iPad without using SD card readers. My guess was that Eye-Fi’s free iOS app would not work with my old low-end card (the model is not even listed on Eye-Fi’s web site). However, to my surprise it worked fine after following the simple instructions provided by the app itself.
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Microsoft let Windows Mobile users know that the Windows Mobile Marketplace will shut down on May 9, 2012 and that Applications and games acquired from the Windows Mobile 6.x Marketplace service installed on your Windows Mobile 6.x phone will continue to work after the service is discontinued on May 9, 2012. However, additional downloads of these applications and games from the Windows Mobile 6.x Marketplace service will no longer be available. This may not be a huge issue for people who did not buy apps through the marketplace (I did not). But, it may be a problem for those who did and need to hard reset a Windows Mobile device to restore functionality. People who bought Windows Mobile phones in the fall of 2010 before Windows Phone was released will have a less than 2 year old phone that cannot restore some apps in the event of a loss or hard reset.
This situation also illustrates a problem with all of the single platform stores that have sprung up since Apple led the way with its ultra-successful iOS App Store, however. And, it makes one pause to wonder what will happen if Microsoft ever stops supporting the Windows 8 app store since WOA users cannot get apps outside of that venue.
The 1960s Lily Tomlin video above may be useful in attempting to understand Microsoft’s (and perhaps Google too) customer service attitude.