Las Vegas Again, Twitter Goonery, Cameras and Phones, VW Beetle, More

Good afternoon.

I'm back in Las Vegas this week, this time for Mobile Connections. I got to meet  Aaron Hillegass today. I'm a fan.

So I give the Winklevoss twins some credit for persistence. But seriously guys, we get it. Just give it up: You were swindled.

One from the loony files: Twitter is reportedly considering buying TweetDeck for $50 million. WTF? What? It's an app. A free app. 

Apple has updated iTunes yet again, this time to version 10.2.2, in order to fix iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad sync issues. How about updating it to version 11 to fix all those suck issues?

The conventional wisdom is that smart phones have killed, or in the process of killing, a variety of single-purpose devices, including point and click cameras, handheld video cameras (Flip), and personal recorders. As is so often the case, however, the conventional wisdom may be wrong. According to Wired and others, "worldwide still-camera sales increased 10 percent to 141 million units last year." So smartphone use is rocketing, yes. But people still use cameras because of the additional functionality and picture quality.

I've been driving a 2000 VW New Beetle for, well, 11 years now and have sort of been holding out to see what the new version looks like. Today, we found out, as VW unveiled the "New New Beetle" (really, what it calls the 3rd generation VW Beetle). Looks nice. But since I understand VW, I won't even consider this vehicle until at least year two.

AT&T will finally start shipping the February and March updates for Windows Phone 7 tomorrow, on April 19. Why so late? It may be in part because they're including two custom apps.

Speaking of mobile platforms and Microsoft, the software giant has delivered a new mobile photo app ... for iOS. Wah-wah-waaaaah.

Paul Allen agrees with me that Microsoft moves too slowly. I wonder if he's in the penalty box now too. :)

Discuss this Article 2

spivonious
on Apr 19, 2011
Smartphone cameras may be better than the point-and-shoots from 10 years ago, but today's lineup of P&S cameras blow the best smartphone camera away in terms of image quality. It is not all about the megapixels in digital cameras; it is about the sensor size and the lense quality. Would I buy a $100 P&S camera if I had a smartphone? Probably not. But the phones of today just cannot compare to the $200-$300 range of P&S cameras.

I think the new Beetle is ugly. It looks more like a Dodge Caliber than a Beetle.

Any update on what Leo said on WW about the other Facebook origin claim? I agree with you that Zuckerberg never looked like a techie. It wouldn't surprise me at all if he stole the code and idea.



Mustang17
on Apr 20, 2011
I love the idea of having a decent camera in my phone, especially one thats 12 megapixels! That's better than my 3 year old digital SLR. The advantage is that you can easily post your pics to Facebook or flickr immeditately. I would need one with a tripod adaptor.

The SLR would still win out when it came to 'serious' photography, simply down to lens quality and the variety of lenses. they are lighting fast with many frames per second and you can do spot metering amongst other things. Interestingly I have heard you can wifi your pics from an SLR to your smartphone using a special SD card.

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