So very sad.

Well Motorola was just sold to Lenovo, and while that has no immediate impact on my Moto X it does make me very sad. The issue at hand is whether Lenovo will actually support the software side of the phone like I've always assumed that the Google/Motorola would.

First Shot Fired?

Recent rumors suggest that in addition to announcing the SIV on March 14th Samsung will also be unveiling a 3D panoramic software tool called "Samsung Orb". The only problem is that it's a feature that already exists in the Android world since the release of 4.2 on the Nexus 4. Further more, by all accounts the SIV will ship with a TouchWiz skin on top of 4.2. So why go through all of the trouble to include a feature that should by all accounts already be included? The software will also sync naturally with Facebook and noy necessarily with G+. It seems to me that Samsung is intentionally trying to maintain some space from Android/Google. I'm going to predict that in the next year or two there's going to being some sort of power struggle between Google and Samsung; not entirely dissimilar to what seems to be happening now between Verizon and Google (Or I could just being reading way too much into it) http://www.android.gs/samsung-galaxy-s4-photo-sphere/

You know, I seem to be running into a lot of people dealing with music file format incompatibility issues. The first case was a person who couldn't burn an mp3 CD off of Itunes because all of her original media was in Apples proprietary format and the second was that some couldn't play any of their songs on their Nexus7 because they were in a .wma format. I understand the reasons for high quality media formats, but why hasn't a universal format been adopted?

http://www.androidpolice.com/2013/01/14/international-giveaway-win-a-galaxy-note-ii-galaxy-camera-or-one-of-two-nexus-7s-from-basatne-and-android-police/ Lets face it, a free note 2 would be awesome.

Nexus 7 Review

In November my wife and I decided to purchase a tablet to shift some activities away from her decrepit laptop onto something a little faster and a little less maddening. We both use Android phones so the Nexus offered some obvious advantages over the Ipad, and I'd read a lot of positive things about Jelly Bean so I elected to go with the Nexus over the Kindle Fire. So far I've been very impressed, although to be fair my other data point is my Droid X. The Nexus operates incredibly smoothly, a regular (and valid) point brought up against Android is how clunky the interface is. Hesitation, lag delay ect... it's one thing that Apple has always had over the Android phones, and while I haven't spent a lot of time with Iphone/pad I can say the Jelly Bean (4.2) hasn't had any where near the issues that my Droid X has. Really the only time I've noticed any slow down is when switching between profiles (a feature that is fantastic BTW) Additionally I LOVE stock Jelly Bean on the Nexus, after using it for a month I started playing around with a co-workers SIII and it immediately began to infuriate me. I'm sure samsung added some features that I would love but all in all it struck me as subtraction by addition.

Google Voice and the Death of Carrier Texting

So I downloaded Google voice the other day, partly because of the rumor regarding a Google-Dish LTE network and partly because I read some favorable reviews of the service. After testing it out for awhile I've got to say that it seems to work fairly smoothly. The ability to make calls over wireless was immediately useful when I was visiting an in-law's house where coverage was terrible. I've been using the texting service too, it seems to work pretty well and I'd like to try drop my current texting plan. Ultimately I've got to imagine these services are going to replace texting services offered by carriers.