This past week, a New Zealand man was looking through the data Facebook had collected from him in an archive he had pulled down from the social networking site. While scanning the information Facebook had stored about his contacts, Dylan McKay discovered something distressing: Facebook also had about two years' worth of phone call metadata from his Android phone, including names, phone numbers, and the length of each call made or received.
Android is open. Apparently completely open. Google, what say you? I think there’s even more of a falling out to come especially with Apple’s Tim Cook doubling the down on Apple as well as Walt Mossberg mentioning how he secured his tech life in retirement.
What is Home?
Home is a new Android skin for your Android phone. It turns it into a money making and advertising platform in favor of Facebook but not until you fall in love with it will we turn on all the banners and advertisements. We want to suck you in first.
How can I get Home?
Of course we are offering it for free on April 12 through Google's Play Store. You can also buy the experience for $99 on th HTC First which has Home pre-installed. But it's actually only for the most current devices for now too.
Where is Home available?
We are testing the U.S first on April 12 but the rest of the world will follow shortly primarily due to Android fragmentation.
What Android phones does Home work on?
Because of Android's fragmentation, we were only able to implement Home on a few select devices on launch including two future devices, the previous generation Galaxy and the Note II.
How can I buy a phone with Home on it?
AT&T is the first sucker looking for something else besides the iPhone and they will offer the HTC First on April 12.
Is Facebook building a phone?
No. We built an experience to install on a phone. Skinning is cheaper.
Is Facebook Home an operating system?
No, but we want it to be that way with the family of apps we are going to release. They will become part of your phone.
I'm not sold on it but as Dan Frommer sees it, he thinks there's a market for it. Again, I don't see too many of my friends, if any, who will install this or use it after the first day. Most of us don't live within Facebook but rather visit.
Om Malik published his review and I couldn't agree more.
When I asked a couple of friends through Facebook or Twitter on their opinions on a specific camera choice, I got an overwhelmingly response. They all gave great insights coupled with personal experiences and I just wanted to post my experience and my gratitude. First the twitter story.
Now a post from a great friend from High School.
I'm actually shooting with an Olympus Pen EP-3
(with misc panasonic/ oly/ third party Micro-Four Thirds lenses)
The NEX-7 is a nice camera, but Sony's native lens selection is kind of lacking. It's worthy of praise because you can use old manual lenses that benefit from Sony's focus peaking. Also, due to the large APS-C sensor size and flang mount in relation to a streamlined body, the NEX lenses are designed to be inherently big. It feels like handling a smart-phone with a soda-can attached. Kind of defeats the purpose of a smaller form factor when there's little to no native compact pancake lenses available. Plus, they try to bury every feature in the menu screen, requiring a proprietary learning curve... if only it worked like an apple product.
The OM-D EM-5 is pretty much an evolution of the EP-3. A compact Micro-four thirds camera with some "raise-the-bar" type features like the 5-axis stabilization, weatherproofing, fast rate viewfinder etc... The stabilization provided some extra stops for low-light hand-held shots. (Great for non-flash shots when your child is an infant, and better hand-held when the little one takes off running) In the flesh, this thing is pretty small. It's about the same size as my EP-3 sans the view-finder hump. I'd say MFT cameras had a lot of catching up to do in the last couple of years, but the current generation MFT cameras are the shit.
As for the full-frame 5D's:
No one will argue against the Mark III as the current industry standard. (And some confess: most of the time it's just to appease the clients). As a matter of fact, I was introduced to the smaller MFT cameras from a bunch of guys who have to lug around 5D's for a living. From a practical standpoint, the Mark III is a big investment on just a body when most of us don't get paid to do this. Not to mention, once you get the essential full-frame lenses you'll be lugging around a lot of equipment, averaging the cost of a Hyundai under the baby stroller. Try to chase your toddler around with all that.
To conclude, you should base your decision on what you like to shoot and the overall system. The body is pretty much dated in a year or two since the consumer camera industry is as, if not more fickle than the computer industry.
^Being a gear-head, I'm sure you already know all this but I figured I'd share my thoughts anyway. Good luck with the camera shopping man, there's a lot great choices. Just make sure you do it soon so you'll have a handle on the hardware before the baby starts to grow up quick.
Let me know what you go with and if u have any questions on the MFT side of things. And read up...we're all biased in some way.
Over the last couple of weeks, I've been attending a weekly 5K in San Diego called Nites Moves SD which takes place on every Wednesday night at Liberty Station Park in Pt. Loma. I've been improving constantly (by seconds almost a minute one week ago), finding my rhythm & stride and what I initially thought was good headway. That is, up until last night's performance. I finished a miserable 28:45 which makes it my worse time in four tries! I've been running treadmills a lot lately on a incline of 1.0 at a steady speed of 6.5 / 7.0 so that might have made this run a little slower but I thought that I could best my 27 minute wall. Granted the last few days looked like this:
Monday/Tuesday Morning: I worked all day and was delayed on the flight back to San Diego for 2 hours arriving at 2:00AM not going to bed till shortly after.
Tuesday: Woke up around 8:00am motivating myself for the move to the new apartment in Downtown San Diego. Excited but somewhat exhausted
Tuesday Night: Definitely had a hard time falling asleep being anxious, excited and just new
Wednesday Day: Breakfast was a quick bar, daily mass, meeting w/ our priest to tie up loose ends before the wedding, coffee, head home to pack up more stuff, spill the full venti caramel macchiato in fiance's car, meet up w/ the caterer for finalization and payment, show mom the new apartment, grab lunch at JWok which is conveniently around the corner from our new apartment, head to Vons in PQ, drop off mom, go the bank on the way back to the apartment, get ready for the 5K.
If you notice, my nutrition and liquid intake prior to the 5K wasn't all that great. I didn't get to stretch that well nor was I feeling the tip top shape that I've been use to the previous weeks. It's crunch time and August is a big month . Good times! I'm just glad that it's somewhat smooth sailing from here. *crossing fingers*
