Get Groupon on your vintage mobile

Man, this is fantastic!  Love the idea. (via Groupon Mobile)

Building a (tiny) race car with Basecamp

The race car looks kind of tiny. Insert sarcastic blurb here about how one can only create small things with Basecamp, and if they had used something more robust they could have created a full Formula One racer, and a bunch of smiley faces and LOLs.

That said, we too use Basecamp to build big things and we’re happy with it.

Rule #2: Focus on what we can do with the device, not the guy in a polo shirt

Somehow I got rickrolled into learning more about the Dell Streak. I was doing some research just now on basic versus smartphone penetration in Africa (really) and somehow ended up watching this video (really). But in keeping with the Streak theme today, I just had to comment.

Why is it that every technology company feels obliged to parade out an engineer or product manager to talk about their latest product? Just look at this grab from the video: during at least four minutes of the video, the Streak takes up roughly 6.7% of the video real estate, with the remaining 93.3% of the pixels paying homage to Benjamin Moore paint and Ralph Lauren shirts.

Dude, get out of the frame, set the Streak on the table, and point the camera at it. Talk about that giant display, or how you can use the phone while surfing on WiFi, or how you can stick it in one of the smaller pockets in your Scottevest Carry-On Coat, ok?

Rule #1: If it doesn’t compete with an Apple product, don’t say it does.

Geek.com: “Dell’s Android-powered Streak slate takes on the iPad tomorrow.” Are they just trolling for pageviews?  Come on, just because it’s roughly rectangular, has a touch display, and does things online doesn’t mean it’s an iPad competitor.

The way to make this thing an iPad competitor is to focus on what you can do with it, not the features and functions under the hood:

1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon chip 

Does it surf the web and do YouTube? Good enough. Speeds and feeds turn the average consumer off.

Five-inch capacitive multitouch 800×480 WVGA display 

How about “Brilliant large display that still fits in your pocket or purse, but makes videos and family photos look fantastic”?

3G, UMTS/GPRS/EDGE class 12 GSM radio with link speeds of up to 7.2 Mbps, WiFi 802.11b/g, Bluetooth 2.1+EDR

Right now, thousands of eyes are glazing over.  Try ”Gives you both WiFi and 3G, so you can stay in touch with your friends and family whether you’re at home, in a coffee shop, or traveling the country on vacation.” Oh, right, and “And Bluetooth so you can make phone calls without looking like a dumbass with this thing pressed up against the side of your head.”

Five-megapixel autofocus camera with dual LED flash VGA camera for videoconferencing

“Videoconferencing” makes me think of putty-colored cubicle walls and bad lighting. Talk it up, make it personal, connect emotionally: ”Front-facing camera so you can stay in touch with people at home while you’re on the road!”

Android 1.6 (Froyo update is due later this year) with Android Market and Dell’s custom UI skin

Wait, you mean it’s coming out tomorrow, but it’s got an operating system from nearly a year ago? What’d you do, stick the developers in an air-tight room and tell them they wouldn’t get out until they ship?  (Explains the front-facing camera for videoconferencing, natch).

Packaged with cushions made from 100 percent sustainable, compostable bamboo

Which, for some reason and in this context, just highlights how the rest of it looks like a block carved from petroleum.

(via Dell’s Android-powered Streak slate takes on the iPad tomorrow – Cell Phones & Mobile Device Technology News & Updates | Geek.com)

American Airlines: Should I stay or should I go?

After filling out a good 20-30 fields of information on the American Airlines site, looking things up on the calendar and making all sorts of little decisions, I’m faced with this set of buttons.  And the one I’m supposed to click is red, which at a rapid glance screams “Whoa, stop, start over, cancel!”  And the one that clears out all of your information and makes you go and look it up and type it in all over again?  That’s the friendly little grey button there to the left.

Grrr.

Confusion in Mountain View

Icon Design Guidelines, Android 2.0 | Android Developers

Back when we wrote How people really use the iPhone, one of the key things that I mentioned was that a lousy icon was enough to turn someone off from trying or buying an app.

And since then, I’ve even been known to delete an app from my iPhone just because (I know, I know) the icon wasn’t quite as nice as the Apple icons.

Google has published updated icon design guidelines for the Android.  Unfortunately, if the current crop of apps in the Market is any indication, about 80% of the developers will summarily ignore the guidelines and pull out MSPaint.exe instead.  Oh, and what’s with using the Android robot in your icon?  I mean, it’s cute here and there, but after a while … sheesh!

Speechless.

The new Amazon Kindle: What they should have said

Dear Customers,

I believe in the transformative power of reading - the ability of an author to transport you to new worlds, introduce you to new people, and even alter your perspective. Reading is important. Reading is why we build Kindles. Reading is why millions of people use Kindles.

However, despite all of our jumping up and down about our ‘paper-like’ displays on our Kindle family of devices, we’ve decided to bring this message to you using a highly compressed 472x1629 pixel JPEG which makes all of the letterforms look like ass and yet still weighs in at a hefty 258,739 bytes.  You see, if we put lousy pixelated text on our homepage (and yes, these Kindles have been here for a good couple of years, despite the fact that you, dear page viewer, have never clicked on the damn thing), then when you look at your Kindle you’ll be overjoyed with the slightly less lousy pixelated text - that is, until you look at your iPhone rectal display or whatever it’s called, that we hope to god never shows up on that confounded iPad thing.

[…]

Yours, Jeff

Lixo Digital | Pristina.org | Everything Design

Makes you want to keep using that three year old computer, instead of upgrading to the latest shiny-shiny, doesn’t it?