degusta

I wrote the underlying article - thanks for catching that I wasn't using 2007/iPhone as the timeline base.

The 2002 date was when I was saying smart phones reached general consumer availability, not when the very first one was invented. As I mention in the article, it was 2002 when Blackberry phones and Microsoft Pocket PC phones came out, as well as the aforementioned Palm-based Treos.

FWIW, here's the source article: http://www.technologyreview.com/business/40321/ And the HN discussion thread (empty, just submitted it) for it: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3951352

I wrote the original blog post about Teslas bricking. This IDC/IDG post is embarrassingly wrong about basically everything. The cars are most definitely not "just in need of servicing". Tesla's not even arguing that - I even have a written statement from them that it's $40k to fix.

This alleged "expert" can even get the number of cells right (6,831 by the way).

The article should be retracted.

That's every Samsung phone released in the US through mid-2010. I do intend to keep at it and add more. (& yes, Motorola does appear to be particularly bad)

You might be right re it gets better - though not as sure about the ICS bit. It is my intention to keep at it & add (ideally) every phone.

I agree they're maybe not essential to a lot of consumers. Lord knows most people never thought about whether their dumbphone's OS was outdated or not, but I do think it's less than ideal for the ecosystem in the long term.

Concur. Similarly, general consensus seems to be that the skins actively hold things up because manufacturers have to port them to each new OS on each device.

It'll be interesting to see how much life the skins have left in them in the post-ICS era.

Unfortunately I suspect you're right.

Yes, it's 7 that were "never" and 5 more that were "weeks", so 12 total that were "weeks or less". I struggled with that phrasing a bit - either way seemed wrong.

No, the original iPhone & 3G don't support iOS 5. But they did support the current version of iOS for 3 years after they were released - far more than any Android phones of the period.

(And, no, they don't charge for iPod Touch updates any more - that was technically an accounting regulation issue that the government changed.)

Very much so - I made a note or two re extension & non-US at the end of the post. Definitely my intention.

I actually had letters on there ("E", "F") etc for releases but on top of the sales windows & the support windows it was just too much on one chart.

I do plan to provide all that information as a comprehensive list of phones/updates, ideally along with the ability to sort by carrier, manufacturer, etc.

I actually originally started doing it that way, but thought it was more relevant vis a vis release date than calendar date. I do intend to include that when I finish doing all of the phones. (Yes, I'm a bit OCD :) ).

Google apparently says less than 50% are on Gingerbread, despite way more than 50% of Android phones having been sold since 2.3 shipped.

I do think manufacturers might have gotten a bit better, but I guess we'll see. That's one of the reasons I want to do the next 6 months or so of phones.

I wrote the piece / did the research. Happy to answer any questions or comments people might have.

(Disclosure: I did the understatement.com piece)

I agree with many of the points people are making (there are some differences, there are many Helvetica/etc based fonts, etc). Really the most amusing thing to me is that Google made a big deal out of the type change - it was the first point in their Ice Cream Sandwich launch. Can you imagine if at Apple's iPhone 4/iOS 4 launch they said "and our first big feature is: we're dropping Helvetica! For Helvetica Neue!"

Haha well said (& well done).

Here's an animation/toggle I did comparing Roboto & Helvetica: http://und.st/pqCj4I.

In the lowercase, there are only 5 letters (a, e, f, g, k) that a normal person would have much chance of distinguishing, even some of those are subtle. The other 21 letters appear virtually identical.

Indeed. And Susan Wojcicki has also come to life (after only making one public post ever back in August). :)

Actually, I agree that might have been a better title - would have avoided some of the controversy while making the same point. (And, fwiw, I don't have any ads or make any money off my blog, nor did I really think the post would catch on to this extent.)

(I'm the author) Actually, I would tend to think that TV execs do watch their reality TV programs & even suspect Zynga execs have at least played a bit of Farmville, and certainly should if it's their company's biggest initiative of the year. But I do think the eat-your-own-dogfood applies more in some businesses than others, as jonmc12 pointed out below. Though Google+ is one where it certainly could apply - not exactly steel beams or something.

(I'm the author) That's a really good observation re the content of the founders' posts, especially Mr. Brin's.

(I'm the author). Your last point is very true, and the chart tries to make it very clear it's only talking about public posts. Obviously entirely true that they could be using it purely privately, but I still think is an observation worth making that they're not using it publicly.

As far the correlation in general, as I mention in the thread above, these aren't normal people, they're the leaders/overseers of the company using (or not) a landmark initiative whose leader (Vic Gundotra) clearly thinks that ideally it'd be used for both private and public interactions. At the very least, it'd look a lot better if they had accounts, tried making a public post (even just to congratulate the team publicly), and looked a bit more publicly engaged.

I'm the author and you're right. I hadn't thought of that, I was just thinking in the narrow space of consumer-y services/devices that have a broad target market. Something like "and being intimately familiar with them" would have been much better.

Disclosure: author :)

I don't think what a "normal" person has done on Facebook over the past 5 years is a fair comparison. Facebook didn't even have a public "subscribe/follow" concept til last week, whereas Google+ launched with one. Also, these aren't normal people, they're the leaders/overseers of the company using (or not) a landmark initiative whose leader (Vic Gundotra) clearly thinks that ideally it'd be used for both your private and public interactions. At the very least, it'd look a lot better if they had accounts, tried making a public post (even just to congratulate the team publicly), and looked engaged.