Anyways, I had forgotten about it until a few days ago while looking at a comparison review of the HTC One S and One X on Engadget. Amidst their benchmark results was...moonbat! Since discovered that Anandtech has made use of it as well.

This has been a recurring finding: Tools and entries often seem to find value to someone, somewhere, years later. Pretty cool. Content endures.

Pre-ordered an HTC One X afterwards (EDIT: Since cancelled my pre-order give that Samsung is set to unveil the Galaxy S III just a few days later. I love my GS II so I should wait to give them a shot...and if rumors are true and it comes with the dual-core A15, that would be incredible). Good to see HTC back on top, at least until the Galaxy S III is released.

My 3rd generation iPad arrived early Friday morning. I had rushed to hit the buy button right after orders opened, but it turned out that you had about two full days to order and still receive the device on launch day. Apple is quite brilliant at logistics.

Bias

My own wife, surprised that I was ordering, described me as "anti-Apple". Sigh. I am anti-Apple domination. More accurately I am anti-any big corporation domination. It seems like a pretty default position, and I'm truly surprised that anyone could feel otherwise: People actually gloat about enormous Apple, Microsoft or Google profits or influence? If they aren't insiders, that's just sad.

The Screen Leads

The screen on the 3rd gen iPad is simply gorgeous. Considering that the screen is the primary methods of inputs and outputs on a tablet, it's a pretty important attribute, and this does not disappoint. Text looks close to perfect. Photos and websites look stunning, courtesy of both the raw pixel count and the improved colour saturation.

There are observations making the rounds that if you see an iPad 2 and an iPad 3rd generation side by side it is difficult to impossible to tell which is which. Those people must be legally blind. The display is a night and day improvement over the old screen. Text in particular is a work of art.

It isn't a perfect display, however (regardless of how infatuated with Apple DisplayMate might be). Black levels are more like grey levels, with a contrast ratio that is middling at best. After seeing a video on an AMOLED+^2 screen, the new iPad looks underwhelming in comparison, although it leads in every other use.

Speaking of videos, the aspect ratio is suboptimal for video entertainment, with most modern content having substantial black (or rather grey) bars above and below. I have long believed that Apple's original 4:3 aspect ratio was a mistake for many uses — in particular video — and I maintain that position.

It's also possible that the display simply has too many pixels, overloading the system excessively for limited return. Pixel-heavy apps like SketchBook Pro have substantial lag trying to service the screen on the new unit (particularly given that the non-GPU part of the SoC saw no improvement aside from the doubling of RAM).

Because, of course, the Retina branding is, pardon the expression, horseshit, as it was on the iPhone 4 (misunderstandings of competitors and their lack of desire to chase Apple on the PPI meter misses the mark). Apple chose this resolution not because it hit some magical biological threshold, but rather because it was a whole-number multiple of the prior technology-limited resolution due to some short-sightedness in the original platform.

A higher resolution is a benefit, though the return diminishes beyond a certain point . I doubt there is measurably increased utility of this 3.1 million pixel display (compare with the iPad's prior 0.8 million pixels) over the 2.3 million pixels of some upcoming competitors, yet the battery and computation cost still needs to be paid.

Getting Going

The iPad and iPhone that you can buy today are quite evolved from their beginnings. One of the big improvements is the decoupling from a PC. I enjoyed the fact that not once did I have to let this suckle on a PC's teat. Instead the setup was all on the unit itself, as has always been the case with Android devices. Setup was a breeze and I was quickly using the device. It is generally intuitive and responsive.

I discovered multitasking gestures by accident while using Garageband (the one app where I wish it would disable them) and quickly came to depend upon them. That is a very intuitive interface mechanism that is a welcome alternative to hitting the physical home button constantly.

Quirks and Quarks

It isn't perfect, however, which is a bit surprising given some of the narrative about the mythical iOS.

During the setup, as I was quickly jumping through the steps, it kept notifying me how to move icons on the home screen, as if it was committed to making me aware despite the fact that I was much further in the process, busy entering my credit card number for iTunes.

If you set the iTunes password to immediate expiry, many operations will see you forced to enter your iTunes password two or even three times for a simple operation. Either they don't test this setting at all, or they are heavily trying to dissuade against choosing that option.

The browser has inexplicably stalled out a number of times on me despite connectivity otherwise working perfectly. The music browser can access your library on a PC running iTunes (a crashy app that is nonetheless far improved over its infamous past), but it won't even provide the option to access that shared library until you've added at least one track on the iPad itself. A quick Feist purchase later and I could now access my completely unrelated shared library.

I've experienced lagginess and brief stalls in a number of apps. I see them much less frequently than was common in Honeycomb, and still less than in Ice Cream Sandwich, but thought that was interesting.

Options are generally non-existent. You can record surprisingly good quality video but have absolutely no control over the video quality. That is a general philosophy throughout iOS, with fairly typical options being omitted. I think Apple did the right thing: Making the choices for the user leads to a cleaner interface and a simpler implementation, thus with fewer bugs. Competitors should learn from that. Less is often more.

The Good

The overall platform is polished and beautiful. The web browser — greatly improved in more recent iOS outings — is second to none. It really is an incredible browser and I can honestly say that it is probably the best browsing experience across any device, including full-powered PCs. Sites like The Verge somehow offer a much better experience than they do on the desktop.

Garageband is, I believe, the killer iPad app. It is a full-featured demonstration of all of the potential of this platform. There is nothing remotely like it on Android. iMovie is also one of those apps that makes you re-evaluate what is possible on a power-sipping mobile device like this. Virtually all of the Apple apps are stellar.

Many other apps, though, are less impressive. I was primed and ready to dish out to load it up with good apps, but many just aren't worth the trouble. Many of the educational apps seem incredible on first blush but you quickly learn that the App Store is absolutely overloaded with superficial apps hosting lot of flash but absolutely no educational value. Essentially tech demos.

The App Store is a thousand miles wide and an inch deep. Perhaps this is a side effect of the low prices of apps limiting the investment. It is interesting that the $0.99 app marker was set on trivial apps, yet the expectation has remained for complex apps made by teams of devs. After buying what I thought was reams of apps, my iTunes receipt came through and I'd barely passed $50. Somehow I feel like developers are the losers in this equation, a few lottery-winning exceptions notwithstanding.

On the gaming front, Infinity Blade II is the go to iOS game, with impressive visuals for the platform but with gameplay that is incredibly superficial. That game is such a disappointment with lofty reviews that focus overwhelmingly on the visuals. I suppose if I weren't accustomed to incredible PC graphics I would be more entranced by that, but as is it's a game that hasn't held the attention of any member of my family.

My children, I've noticed, have absolutely no inclination to favour the iPad over the Android 4.0 tablet. The apps they enjoy — Angry Birds, Where's My Water, Fruit Ninja HD, Cut the Rope, Netflix, YouTube, and so on — are virtually indistinguishable from their Android counterparts, if not deficient in some ways (unsurprisingly the Google Maps and Google YouTube players in Android 4.0 are far superior to their iOS counterparts).

Conclusion

Having tried to drink in the iPad 3rd generation for a bit, I think I'm a bit surprised that the competition is as close as it really is: The gap has dramatically narrowed. The iPad lacks features that I've come to consider critical on my Android tablet, most important being widgets: I don't want to jump from app to app to app to get information delivery that I have ganged on my home screens.

You can't even set an alarm on the iPad without buying third party apps (all having various warnings and negative reviews about their detriments). Really?

If the Asus Infinity were the same price as this unit, I'd still have to say that the iPad 3rd generation is probably the better choice (unless you heavily use it for videos in which case you have to consider a device with a more appropriate aspect ratio). The iPad is just so refined and has such an excellent web browser that it's a tough champion to unseat.

The competition really has to bring some incredibly compelling benefit, whether something technical or a significantly better price, to upset the iPad. It had looked like the screen was where they would differentiate, but that window has closed and it's going to have to be something else.

It has a 2048x1538, 40% greater saturation screen serviced by double the GPU cores (2x the performance of the A5, while purportedly 4x the Tegra 3). It has 1GB of RAM and a 5MP, 1080p video capable backlit camera. It has a 44Wh battery — a massive 76% improvement, making me think that the WiFi-only model will feature incredible battery life — and iOS 5.1.

It is a spec bump. A very impressive spec bump that takes the wind out of competitor's sails, but still a spec bump.

So it's odd seeing people like MG Siegler still railing on about how "specs are dead". Specs are very much alive and kicking, and Apple plays that game as hard and as fast as anyone. They lead in the specs department with almost every release, though usually later in the lifecycle, as competitors naturally catch up and surpass them, the various sycophants start the chorus of "specs don't matter". Sure they matter. Specs deliver the goods that allow for the experience.

This is the first time I've purchased anything from Apple. Ever.

During the Apple II days I had an Atari 400, 800, 800XL, 800XE, Commodore 64 and then 128. During the Mac days I had an Atari ST 512, 1040, 1040 STE, and an Amiga for a time. Then it was onto PCs, from that first Diamond Speedstar 24x equipped 386 that I'd run DJGCC on.

In the smartphone era I've gone through Blackberries, Windows Mobile and Android devices. My tablets have all been Android devices.

Of course I've used Apple devices, playing with IIe's, Macs, iPhones and iPads along the way. Always someone else's, and never enough draw to get one of my own.

The iPad (3rd generation) enticed me enough to put in an order, however.

Firstly there's that screen. Ignoring any marketing branding, at 2048x1536 that is an impressive amount of information displayed on the surface and exceeds even premium laptops. Every pixel represents a discrete output, so conceptually this device has quadruple the information delivery of the prior generation. Given that my primary complaint with prior iterations of the iPad was the low pixel density and resolution, this eliminates that concern.

Secondly there's the A5X. With purportedly double the GPU power it might actually fall behind the iPad 2 in fill-rate limited benchmarks (double the GPU power, but then loading it with four times the pixels, might see it posting seemingly unimpressive numbers, though obviously we'll have to wait and see if they made other architectural improvements to it), but given the considerable lead it still held, it's still very competitive. Debug leaks have the device featuring 1GB of RAM which should give plenty of headroom.

Thirdly, it's available almost immediately. If there's one thing that Apple does right it's announcing products on the cusp of their availability. The Asus Transformer Infinity looks compelling, for instance, but when could I realistically buy one? In a month? Three months? Late summer? Apple's competitors all have a terrible tendency to announce products half a year in advance of availability. Samsung seems to have gotten a clue and is holding off any Galaxy S III talk until it is close to an actual global release.

Fourthly, I want the device to test a web project I've been working on. Obviously I want to provide a first-class experience for iOS users, so I need to test on an iOS device. That also provides a nice excuse to justify a flippant purchase.

Apple is going to sell crazy numbers of this thing. Seriously crazy. Somehow with each pinnacle of revenue it seems like they can't top it, but this release (which only a raving nut could call underwhelming and disappointing. This device is hugely impressive) will keep them on course to being the first trillion dollar company.

EDIT: Forgot to mention another very compelling reason I decided to purchase one: Garageband. I find my Android 4.0 tablet perfect for Netflix, web browsing, information apps like IMDB and Flixster, and even casual gaming, but it lacks anything remotely comparable to Garageband (even if someone tried there are architectural issues in the platform itself that make responsive music applications less than enjoyable). I really do think that is the killer app of iOS.

Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2 are both leading operating systems in their respective domains: Both are bulletproof, support just about everything and anything, while offering the rare qualities of being both easy to use yet immensely powerful.

IIS 7.5 is superb. SQL Server 2008 R2 is excellent. .NET is a remarkable platform that needn't envy any other.

Over the years I've done a lot of work in the Microsoft stack, and it has been a very powerful partner. Along the way I obtained an MCP, MCSE, and MCDBA (obtained simply to have goal-markers in thoroughly understanding the products. Despite being a developer and software architect, I always want to fully understand the platforms I develop upon to leverage what they had to offer).

I have a BizSpark company. I have an expensive MSDN software subscription.

So please trust that it isn't based upon bias or anti-Microsoft bigotry when I offer up the opinion that Windows 8 is a disaster in the making. That it is a product that will not manage to serve either the tablet or the desktop market competently.

I say this after trying to appreciate the product for a couple of days: The vision just isn't there. The platform is horribly ugly (the overriding design principal of "contrasting color tiles" is tolerated only because it remains novel given how few users of Windows Phone 7 there are), has poor usability, and offers such a split-personality that each simply becomes a grating half-measure.

Microsoft is giving a gift to Apple, voluntarily ceding market to them. They saw what it was accomplishing and tried to reproduce it, poorly.

Windows 8 is akin to KFC switching to Kentucky Fried Beef after seeing McDonald's gaining marketshare. Customers might as well simply buy a Big Mac.

While it is obvious that the traditional desktop is not the center of the computing universe that it once was, and Microsoft should always be attacking new markets, sacrificing the advantages that the desktop platform holds, while gaining little or nothing, serves no one. The desperate attempt to acclimate the desktop base to the mobile and tablet vision will do nothing more than alienate.

Apple should ramp up the manufacturing, as Microsoft is doing a wonderful sales pitch for both iOS and OSX.

Just over a month back we were told that Google has cumulatively activated 200 million Android devices, rapidly closing in on the 250 million+ iOS units Apple has reported.

How many of those remain in play?

I strongly suspect that many more early Apple devices remain "on the road", and the operational current count heavily favours iOS.

Rapid Obsolescence

I currently have four Android smartphones. The original HTC G1 and Magic+, a Nexus One, and a Galaxy S II. Add two Android tablets (a viewSonic gTablet and an Acer Iconia A500).

The HTC G1 and Magic+ inhabit the bowels of some drawer somewhere. The Nexus One sees periodic use only when my oldest son wants to watch some YouTube videos on the couch and can't find my S2. The gTablet is derelict, while the A500 sits broken.

I have six Android devices, five legitimately activated through Google, of which one sees real use. Many early Android devices were, in many regards, the Hyundai Pony's of the technology world, quickly rendered unusable or with limited resale value.

Speaking of which, resale value is a good indicator. Early in the era of the Magic+ I considered selling it to get a better device, my hopes dashed seeing Craigslist jam packed with people trying to do the same, pricing down to "not worth the trouble" prices. At the same time the few used 3GS units were barely discounted from retail price.

The same was true of the Nexus One, the Galaxy S, and various other Android devices. The resale value just isn't there, and I suspect that rather than supporting a robust second-hand device market, most simply got abandoned.

The same certainly isn't true of the Apple devices. I would wager that the overwhelming majority of Apple devices from the 3GS on are still in use, whether by their original, second, or third owner.

Like a Toyota, the value (and corresponding resale value) is still there.

Supporting Metrics

All of this is just speculation. Further, it's from someone who loves what Android has become, and what it represents. Android is big enough, and successful enough, that we don't need to hide from this reality.

There are some metrics that support the hypothesis. Look at the Facebook metrics for iOS versus Android - 79 million monthly average users on the former, versus 45 million on the latter. Despite having some 80% of the reported activated base of iOS, Android only sees just 56% of the Facebook use.

Vast differences between the demographics might explain the usage difference, but if that were the case then it should actually skew things in favour of Android: it is the platform that is preferred by younger adults where Facebook use is saturated, while iOS has primarily taken off in the 35+ realm.

It isn't demographics. Any nonsense about people getting Android phones and using them as dumb-phones ring ridiculous.

Among devices still in use I would guess that Facebook usage rates are similar. It's simply that tens of millions of Android devices are no longer in play.

Which is a number far more relevant than the gross sum of ever activated devices. Tell us how many devices are still in use, and strive to keep that number as high as possible.

So what gives? So many pundits tell us that it's a great device. That it's the best option....if for some reason you don't want an iPhone.

Which, as they say, is the rub: The people who love Windows Phone 7 are almost universally iPhone boosters, and they love WP7 as the non-threatening, adorable little scramp that they hope will distract the Android legions. The regular cheerleading squad is at play: Marco Arment, John Gruber, MG Siegler, and others of the "Apple profits are righteous" gang.

They love Windows Phone 7 because it legitimized the iPhone by making an almost identical set of philosophical platform choices. The few areas where it differs are often facile. Windows Phone 7 comes from multiple manufacturers, for instance, but the hardware is so strictly defined that the differences are minor, the advantages of the competitive spirit extinguished.

It turns out that if you want an iPhone, there is a company that already does a really good job making one.

Whatever misdirected soul has demolished all of Microsoft's once legendary advantages, desperately trying to out-Apple Apple, needs to be punted from the company. This strategy will not and cannot work. When the people who supposedly love your product, giving it endless praise, are people who would never buy it, you're doing something wrong.

From Gizmodo's email blast last eve-

If you have any decently modern Android phone, everything you do is being recorded by hidden software lurking inside. It even circumvents web encryption and grabs everything—including your passwords and Google queries.

So I went checking, actually hoping to find this villainous software.

My Galaxy S II - No Carrier IQ.

My wife's Captivate Glide - No Carrier IQ.

My Nexus One - No Carrier IQ.

My peer's new Razr - No Carrier IQ.

I expect little from Gizmodo, but such a fundamentally unproven claim — so trivial to dismiss — really sets a new low.

But they're hardly alone. This whole story has been an exercise of hysterics and technical ignorance. Even on self-purportedly enlightened sites like Hacker News, the dominant opinion is superficial, lacking any real curiousity or discernment at all.

Why I Don't Fear Carrier IQ

If I did find the software on one of my devices, I can't say I'd be overwhelmed with fear.

The "security researcher" — realize that the media invents professions and credentials when they need a stooge to prop up a story without legs: when the WSJ ran with some domain stats I had gathered, they declared me the "world's preeminate domainologist". In reality my interest in domains started and ended with the fact that it was a large set of data usable for an index tutorial — became aware of the daemon on his Sprint phone while using the logcat tool available in the Android SDK. This is a tool run by millions upon millions of devs.

His observation actually wasn't unique, and the service had been noted and dismissed by many other devs using Sprint Android handsets over the prior year. He was the first, it seems, to announce unsupported, hysterical conclusions, the drama escalated when Carrier IQ poured fuel on the fire by sending him a heavy-handed cease and desist, which they later retracted (though I suspect that this whole episode will end in some large libel lawsuits against very sloppy organizations like Gizmodo).

He wasn't using a "packet sniffer". He was using the most rudimentary debugging tool that Android developers use, whereupon he found this software literally announcing its presence and what it was doing. Basically the exact opposite of hiding itself.

"But it records your keystrokes!" you say. There has been zero proof of this thus far. What has been shown is that the daemon software intercepts keystrokes, proudly announcing its achievement into an in-memory ring-buffer log. I suspect — with zero proof — that it uses these events to populate basic aggregate data such as "uses the keyboard heavily". Nor has it been shown that any of this data is actually transmitted to Carrier IQ beyond aggregate statistics.

Where are the logs of this activity? The history of your keypresses and your web activity? This is brutally easy to find, if it exists. Find it and become an internet hero.

But I doubt you will. Know why? Because the legal landmine that Carrier IQ would find itself in, operating in one of the most heavily regulated industries around.

It goes against intuition that they would record, much less transmit to themselves, this information when it would represent enormous liability. Perhaps I'll be proven wrong, but I highly doubt it.

Nothing that has been found contradicts exactly what Carrier IQ stated in their public announcement. All of the purported proof otherwise is a demonstration that most of the people manning the keyboards of the tubes don't have the slightest clue what they're talking about.

EDIT - 10:28PM - I've gotten a few emails deriding my "douchey" tone, in particular that I scarequoted "security researcher". I did so intentionally: Tech news has gone down a path of stupidification where nothing is validated, and where an expert opinion is drawn from the most rudimentary, superficial analysis. Looking at logcat entries does not make a security researcher — it makes a log dabbler.

In any case, Carrier IQ has spoken up regarding the issue, explaining pretty much exactly what I guessed above. Do you have to trust them? Perhaps not. But their explanation is entirely rational and in line with the service they provide.

EDIT - December 5th - Quite a dramatic narrative change has occurred. Now instead of being on every newer Android phone, it's actually on a subset from two US carriers (AT&T and Sprint). Further it isn't "recording" your keystrokes, it is, perhaps insecurely, logging a subset of details to the in-memory ring-buffer log (which is not "recording"). A nefarious app — if it requested and was granted the READ_LOGS manifest permission that startling few apps have — could exploit this sloppy logging.

Even the mainstream media is reporting on Adobe's announcement that they're retrenching from Flash on mobile. While Adobe's statement is wishy washy and half-hearted, the outcome is certain: Flash is dead.

Flash is dead on every platform, including the desktop. Flash on mobile was a zero financial return activity Adobe took to try to extend the best-before date of the technology as a whole. As it fades away the whole stack becomes questionable.

Increasingly there is one web as the days of the mobile romper-room draws to a close. While client specific limitations remain, my smartphone is more capable than some desktop browsers. Binning by the physical size of the device isn't reasonable (and is almost always unwelcome, which is why many smartphone users now spoof their userAgent to avoid such web crippling).

If Flash is a no go on many of the web's consumers, it makes no sense for any of the web's consumers. If you have HTML5 resources and implementations at the ready, why would you ever publish a synonymous Flash resource? The answer in practice today is for economic segmentation: Many sites demand a subscription to access the HTML5 resources, temporarily taxing iOS users. That isn't sustainable.

My Position On Flash

More than a few have emailed me with what amounts to a "nah nah told you so!" victory dance. Apparently some took a prior missive I wrote as pro-Flash. How they came away with such a fundamentally incorrect interpretation is open to serious question.

Nonetheless, technically Flash works on mobile, perhaps simply because the devices finally caught up to its demands. On the Galaxy S II it plays simply brilliantly, without an ounce of hesitation or strain. It really, actually works.

Nothing Steve Jobs said about Flash — his position motivated by the lucrative (in more ways than the obvious) app store — was proven right by Adobe's financial predicament and resource refocusing. Steve Jobs fulfilled his own prophecy, however, helping to hasten the demise of a derelict technology.

False Prophets

Flash sucks. Flash sucks slightly less, however, than exclusive ghettos for single platforms, leaving alternatives and the spirit of competition out in the cold.

And let's be real -- Many of the false prophets of HTML5, cheering the loudest over Adobe's announcement, boost HTML5 half-heartedly as a proxy in a fight they should have little interest in. These usual suspects take every other opportunity to cheerlead native apps over web apps.

Save us your fraudulent cheering.

It's going to fail miserably. It will sell in limited numbers to the few looking for something new and interesting — a conversation piece to bore guests with — but it's a partial solution searching for a problem.

People who have difficulties with programmable thermostats don't care about learning thermostats. The claimed energy advantages are almost certainly overblown, as they generally are with energy efficiency products: A modern insulated home has temperature inertia that sees limited benefit from anything short of vacation mode, and certainly sees no benefit over the hypothetically miniscule advantage this might provide over a standard "business day/night cycle" pre-baked programmable thermostat cycle.

Add that people who have the sort of schedule it could learn are exactly the sort of people that a bog standard programmable thermostat, of the hundreds commercially available, caters to perfectly. The people who don't aren't served by this product.

But it's a very interesting initiative, and the brains behind it will hopefully evolve into more interesting and more commercially viable solutions.

These are the offshoot benefits of the smartphone war: Displays, processors, RAM...it is astonishing how inexpensive incredibly powerful solutions are now, coupled with a low power draw that makes them viable and embeddable in everything. I have derelict smartphones stashed away in drawers that would demolish the expensive embedded solutions we used to drive critical systems just over a decade ago.

Years back a peer and I did the initial steps of a "startup" in exactly this space. We contrived the name "tenom", with our imagined logo being Monet's signature rearranged (not sure of the legality of such a repurposing), the second idea being the bar code representation of ten Ω (get it? tenom...ten ohm? I was so proud of myself). We were in the embedded computing market and it was obvious that the home as it was lacked intelligence. We wanted to give it some IQ.

Our imagined solution included occupancy sensors, switched ducts with area HVAC control, and integrated security. We spoke with some builders and it was fairly obvious that it wasn't going anywhere: the markup on a home to implement the solution had a baseline in the tens of thousands of dollars, but worse most buyers simply didn't care.

Technology has come a long way since then.

Now your HVAC controller can actively monitor current and coming weather conditions to, essentially, "prepare" (flush the home with exterior air during a cool night and then seal it up as the sun rises, or vice versa). Rather than rudimentary light and proximity sensors, it could know where every member of the household is simply by the fact that many carry a smartphone nowadays.

It could monitor our calendars, hook into our Google Latitude accounts, all to proactively prepare for ideal conditions the moment the first of us arrives home.

And of course people are doing things just like this right now with homegrown solutions. Embedded control boards are a pittance now.

The future is wild. Inexpensive, fantastic quality displays/touchscrens and high performance but miniscule power processors ensure that it will be a rich experience.

I've written a lot about smartphones over the past while. It's a topic that I get more passionate about than I need to. I've tried to pull away from the discussion but it keeps pulling me back in.

It is a discussion that matters. It really, really matters. It is the most important technology shift that has happened in years, and it will have, and is already having, a very strong influence on this industry.

But the primary battle is over. The war is won, with users victorious.

This is true regardless of the smartphone platform you choose to embrace, whether iOS, Android, Blackberry, Windows Phone, or other.

There was a brief period where service providers and application makers felt that the market had become uniplatform: If you wanted to watch their movies, listen to their music, do banking, match colours, and so on, they only needed to cater to one closed platform. It's no surprise that many of them were overjoyed with this situation at the outset (before it was turned against them), as it makes life simpler.

It also threatened innovation and competition.

That lock is broken. It is a thing of the past. No longer does one platform reign supreme, and the new reality of a multiplatform world is established and will be going no where anytime soon.

We all win. Even if you prefer the previously dominant platform, you win as you can be sure that the innovation and pace of improvements in their product are heavily motivated by the competition.

It is a fantastic world that we live in. We're in an amazing place.

Where do we go from here?

Since it's unveiling, however, quite a few have questioned why Apply didn't bump up the screen size. Some of the popular competitive devices have larger screens (while others have smaller screens, but such goes a market where people choose devices ideal for them), so many expected Apple to respond in kind and grow the device from the size it adopted back when 3.5" was actually a pretty huge display.

They didn't. For whatever reason they stuck with 3.5"(*). Some declared it a weakness.

Never fear, though, the Ex Post Facto squad is here to save the day. They're ready to tell you that a small screen is not a competitive weakness, but instead is actually a universal strength. Once Apple let the cat out of the bag, the hordes started defensively building justifications for why a 3.5" screen is not just good — which it most certainly is for a large class of users — but rather that it is, in fact, superior to other options for all uses for all users.

Larger screens are undesirable, they say, because they project a need to compensate for a small penis (this is seriously one of the arguments, taking a breather from its traditional utility in making jealous people feel better about people having nicer stuff), they're like the tail fins on 1950s cars, or they're too large for the single use case of walking in a parking lot while using your device with one hand.

The last one astounded me not for its irrational position — such ridiculous claims are a dime a dozen, especially among the cottage industry of "I own an iPhone and now I'm trying an Android device and thus I am an expert on mobile devices and my complaints are righteous" — but rather that it actually gained traction across the net: I've seen it linked and held as if it were a scientific truth on countless sites.

Ignoring some technical flaws in the presentation, it opined that because the smaller iPhone is arguably more usable for one-handed on-the-go usage, at least in the pre-voice recognition era, that validates the design as a work of brilliance.

But what about every other usage model. 99% of the time that I use my device I flip it to landscape mode and type with both hands, enjoying a large, clear, sharable-if-I-want display that doubles as a navigation device. Don't those uses count? Doesn't that invalidate that irrational claim right at the outset? Isn't it just as brilliant and considerate for makers to satisfy those needs as well?

A modern smartphone has a lot of uses. You choose the size of device based upon how you use your device, not because someone is desperately trying to rationalize the heavenly design of one single option.

* - the iPhone features a 1.5:1 aspect ratio versus the 1.66:1 screen on most competitor devices. This is how the Galaxy S II, with 7.8 square inches of screen space (38% more than an iPhone 4's 5.65 square inch screen) is just 12% wider than an iPhone 4. What this means in practice is that maintaining that aspect ratio while growing the screen leads to a quickly chubbifying device. To grow the iPhone screen to 4.3" would increase the device width, assuming a similar bezel, to 15% larger than a Galaxy S II (or about 75mm wide). I would guess that Apple would rather gain resolution independence in their API before growing the device, with which they can start to vary the aspect ratios.

This is fantastic news as it discounts all rumors that the device was running ancient versions of Android. That's important as it ensures the device comes out of the gate with the many foundational improvements that Google has added to the OS. It also amply demonstrates that Amazon's fork is minimalist, and is likely limited to the shell.

The hardware itself is missing a few features. It doesn't have a gyroscope, for instance, however such is a hardware facet that has gone almost entirely unused in the few products that feature it (some are confusing a gyroscope for an accelerometer. The device does have full motion sensing, just not of the gyroscope variety). The target itself is generally locked down, but that's okay -- for Android developers you can choose to participate in that curated garden or not, with ample alternatives if you decide not to.

Has capitalism ever seen such a rapid accumulation of corporate wealth before?

I'm less enthused about Steve Jobs the legend, created in the wake of his death. While I appreciate that there's the "too soon" period, during which mass ignorance and rewriting of history are more excusable, the canonization of Jobs, and the overstating of his and his organization's contribution, has reached intolerable levels.

Like most greats, Steve Jobs stood on the shoulders of others. He rightly believed that good artists borrow, great artists steal.

He was but a real human being, with all the limitations and failings that come along with such a reality.

And it runs Android.

"But the Android part doesn't really matter" so many pundits are busy stating, trying to convince each other that this device falls in the "other" category.

Utter nonsense. The Android part is critical.

Instantly the device has countless available applications. Those apps are built on a matured, evolved, well understood coding platform.

They went the curation route, hooking it into the Amazon App Store (not sure about side-loading), however that is an almost irrelevant bit of fluff, as anyone building apps for Gingerbread or lower is now heavily motivated to go through the trivial process to get their app in that catalog.

No special coding necessary. If you've built an app for Android, including copious use of the NDK, submit it to Amazon's App Store and voila, you're rolling on the Fire, and can benefit from its success.

I think Amazon's "forking" is a tad overstated. Given that they have the entire runtime platform to support the very, very broad functionality of third-party applications, it seems more likely that they essentially replaced the shell while hooking in some media programs. If it's true that they're running 2.3.5, as rumor has it -- and the version really matters because with the version come the many improvements that have happened in the code chain -- then such a superficial variance is proven as it would be unlikely they could merge from the trunk so quickly otherwise.