It’s only been about three weeks since Samsung unveiled the Galaxy S5 in Barcelona. We’re a week away from HTC unveiling (ahem) something in New York and London. (Gee, whatever could it be?) And I’m getting antsy as hell to spend some quality time with some new, finished hardware and software. That last qualification is important, I think, as it was the initial software experience that really soured my on the GS4 a year ago. Great features, but serious problems with speed. In fact, picking up the GS4 again this week after T-Mobile’s version got KitKat, I’d honestly forgotten what a slick phone that was.
We’re about to be buried in a couple great phones, I think, in the new HTC One and the Galaxy S5. This is going to be a very busy spring.
We’ve been hard at work behind the scenes as well. For those of you who frequent the front page, you’ll notice that we’ve been running a number of posts a day in a smaller format. That lets us do a couple things — first and foremost is that lets us give more weight to the more important posts, while downplaying but still publishing smaller bits of news. It makes me more excited to cover all the things.
We’ve also gotten started on our new topic pages. Nothing new, really — we’ve had this sort of reference material before — but we’re more serious about it than ever now. Here’s just one example, for the Nest family of products. We’ll be growing these out, of course, and our traditional device pages (a la the aforementioned GS5 and HTC One) will take this form as well. More news. Better reference pages.
And that’s just the beginning. Big things are afoot.
A few other nuggets from the week that was:
- Jerry’s got a must-read piece on what’s happening with Android 4.4 KitKat and SD card storage. It doesn’t make it any better if your favorite app stopped working — and for sure Google and the manufacturers could have done a better job explaining things. But at least we know what’s going on.
- But how about those new Google Drive storage prices, eh?
- And good on Google for giving us new options for locking down purchases through Google Play. I’m still of the opinion that if I let my kid have my phone, I can’t bitch too much when they do something with it — they’re kids, after all — but this new option is good.
- Something has to be done about this Photos/Gallery thing. It’s just bad user experience and can’t continue. I’d expect more on that around Google I/O this year, I think.
OK, keeping it short this week. Let’s get back to work.