From the Editor’s Donut: Back from the West Coast

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Phil Nickinson

Awwwwww, ain’t that cute? When your producers “suggest” you do something, I suggest you do it. And that’s how I ended up in that pose inside the Donut statue last week outside Building 44 on the Google campus.

We swung by the Googleplex last week to update our B-roll pictures of the statues. That’s it. No secret Nexus meetings, folks. Just a quick, 20-minute (out-of-the-way) stop on the way back to our hotel in Palo Alto, where our real work was for the week. As for that that was … well, you’ll have to wait for that.

But if you’re ever near Mountain View, you really should swing by and check out the statues. Just drive up, find a visitor’s parking spot and snap away. Do try to remember that folks are working in the offices above, though.

A few other thoughts for this fine Sunday …

  • I’ve been wearing the Qualcomm Toq smartwatch for the past few days. Price notwithstanding — this thing’s another $50 above the Samsung Galaxy Gear — it’s a surprisingly decent effort. 
  • I’m very much on the fence about the Mirasol display. Can’t deny the battery life, though.
  • So we’ll have more on the Toq in the next week or so. It’s a pretty good smartwatch that fits somewhere between the Pebble and Galaxy Gear, I think, in terms of experience.
  • Speaking of smartwatches, now’s the perfect time to bookmark Smartwatch Fans. You’ll probably see some familiar faces there soon enough.
  • I’m really enjoying our “Through Glass” series. It’s great to read about the experience others are having, and I loved getting MoDaCo’s Paul O’Brien on board this week. We need to step out of our own little circle here more often. 
  • We got a rejection letter last week from Samsung regarding getting our app in the Samsung app store. Nothing we can’t work though — but what was really interesting was that we got a short video showing our app in testing, and the technical thing they’d like us to fix. That was cool. So, we’ll go back to work on that.
  • The feel-good hit of the holiday season, for sure.
  • I think the Nexus 5 camera update helped a little — but only so much is going to be fixed by software.

That’s it for this week. Lots of fun stuff to come. Thanks for being a part of it!

More from the editor’s desk …

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