Why Samsung’s new Bada OS is a good move

by Janet Tokerud on December 8, 2009

bada

Samsung is a big player in the cell phone market. But, they excel in the feature phone space. The writing is on the wall and feature phones are rapidly losing ground to smartphones. Samsung has to get into this game with their own OS.

Bada can come in all about the lower end of the smartphone market and match up well to feature phone users who are thinking of switching to a smartphone.

Samsung has developed bada to make these exclusive smartphone experiences available to everyone. – Samsung

If you are one the biggest companies in the world, you can afford to make the effort to create a niche for yourself that favors your agenda rather than forever playing second fiddle to Google, Microsoft, Nokia or Apple.

Apple has shown all the other players the way. Half the battle with software development is seeing how something can work. Everyone gets to play with an iPhone and all the accompanying iPhone apps and see for themselves what works and what doesn’t.

Apple paid for all the prototyping and market testing and made smartphones worth having. Now Samsung can imitate, extend and perhaps favor both Samsung and the Asian market — which, by the way, it going to be huge.

Why not? Consider the resources they have. They can afford to do their own OS to control their own destiny in this increasingly mobile, constantly connected world. Don’t run out and buy the first Samsung Bada phone, but eventually all the big phone makers will learn to play in the mobile web space.

And, yes, I’m sticking with my iPhone for the foreseeable future.

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State of the Mac (and iPhone) Nov 2009

by Janet Tokerud on November 14, 2009

Time is flying by as usual and it is time to give you my take on what’s up at Apple. This is easy since they are doing so well. I’ve been writing about Apple in one way or another since the early nineties. Back then I was writing a paper newsletter once or twice a year.

Snow Leopard has been great for me. The only hassle was that quite a few things broke and weren’t fixed for a few weeks. Apple had said Snow Leopard in September and all the developers thought that meant September 30. Apple got crazy and introduced Snow Leopard on August 28. How rude!

iMac27

The main thing to know about Snow Leopard if you haven’t upgraded yet is that (1) it makes your machine noticeably faster and (2) the screen pops and dazzles in a way Leopard doesn’t. Apple rewrote the Finder in Cocoa and put the full horsepower of their core graphics engine under it. Now windows pop like you’ve never seen them. As soon as you install Snow Leopard there’s no going back. It’s too lush and enjoyable — and did I say fast!

Then in September we had the new iPod touch and iPod nano. I covered them in my last post, so will skip those here. I still think the Nano makes a fantastic Christmas gift for anyone who likes music or gadgets the least bit. The iPod touch is for all those people who can’t do iPhone due to contracts, crumby reception or exhorbitant data plan charges. iPhone-less college students are perfect mates for the iPod touch because wi-fi runs rampant on a college campus and money isn’t all that plentiful in most cases when you are a student.

Then came a *mightier* Mac mini upgrade, a fast, battery-laden $995 white Macbook with everything but firewire and a crazily ginormous iMac 27. Apple rocks! They do not let up. They drive the tech world.

I only have two tiny complaints at the moment. I wish Apple had knocked Mac prices down a little more somewhere to increase Mac marketshare. But if they did, they could not wow us as well with things like the 7-hour battery life of the white Macbook. Second, where’s my iPad? Lots of people have shiny little netbooks and I want a mini-tablet as an alternative. Lots of Apple owners *had to* go out and buy netbook PCs. Since I have a Macbook Air, I held the line. I highly recommend Apple’s video about the new iMac – there’s a lot of Apple’s amazing industrial designer, Jonathan Ive, on there.

Windows 7 is here. As an after thought, I’ll mention the big W from the North country. I haven’t seen a screen with Windows 7 on it. I go by my tech reading. What I see is that Windows 7 is a great boon to Microsoft’s bottom line. Since a lot of the good things about it are already in OS X, Mac lovers need not be concerned. We know who the innovator is between Apple and Microsoft. Since there is an incredible inertia in favor of Windows, Apple will have to hustle. Glad of that.

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Steve Lives and Back in the Saddle

September 9, 2009

We are disappointed with Apple’s decision to leave the camera out on the iPod touch. On the other hand the 64gb model looks pretty nice. The little nanos with video cam, microphone and fm radio look like great Christmas gifts this year.
Lots of goodies in iTunes 9 – finally better design so you can find [...]

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Using Thesis Theme on our Studio Manager site

July 28, 2009

Even though it is going to take a while to figure out how to take care of every single minor issue that occurred moving from our static website to this blog-driven WordPress site, we are sure it is a great move.
We’ve got the basic pages of our tokerud.com site up now with tabs across the [...]

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My Twitter Followers Profile Cloud

July 17, 2009

This is just a little too fun to resist blogging about. Here’s the profile cloud for my followers on Twitter. Now I’ll need to figure out what to make of it.
If you would like your own personal follower profile cloud, just go to twittersheep.com and enter your Twitter name into the prompt. No registration required.
I [...]

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State of Apple – July 2009

July 16, 2009

I see AAPL is at about $147 per share today. Not too shabby for a deep recession. Steve Jobs is back at the helm after a successful liver transplant! That was a surprise for everyone but seems to have come out for the better. I’m relieved and hope to see him live a long life. [...]

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We Are Doing a Makeover of tokerud.com

July 15, 2009

Heads up friends. We re-engineered the tokerud.com website so that it is based on WordPress. I’ve been blogging since 2003 and it only seemed right that we underpin this website with blog smarts. I will put in a FileMaker tab and other niceties shortly. I’m really liking the look as is but we are making [...]

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State of Apple – April 09

April 1, 2009

It’s about time for an Apple update. The Expo is well behind us now and new Macs have been recently released. We know that iPhone 3.0 will be out by July. Here are the recent high points and things to look forward to.
The Return of Steve Jobs? At Apple’s Annual Meeting on Feb 25th, spokes [...]

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Remaking tokerud.com as a Blog, Day 1

February 3, 2009

The tokerud.com site has been around since 1995, but I’m a blogger and wanted to make tokerud.com revolve around a blog. From my point of view, blogs are superior technology. They package together a ton of functionality and allow me to formulate content in bite-sized chunks.
Blogs make it easier for our visitors to see what [...]

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Let’s Rock!

September 9, 2008

Apple Keeps on Rocking. The Apple innovation machine continues to delight. The rumor sites had the outlines, but didn’t do the 4G nano justice like the photo above does. The new nanos have the same size screen in a vertical orientation. But the built-in accelerometer allows you to turn sideways to view content horizontally. Vertical [...]

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