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Samsung or iPhone? A screenshot worth a thousand tweets

18 October 2011 - 8:29am | Laura Scott

screenshots of maps apps on Samsung and iPhone

(Okay, maybe not a thousand. But a lot!)

So last night, I saw that John Gruber had favorited one of my Flickr photos from 2008: a screenshot of the Google Maps app on the iPhone. Hmm, what was that about?

It turns out quite a bit. I found Gruber's Daring Fireball post pointing out what appears to be Samsung's alteration and reuse of a screenshot image I created in 2008. You see, three years ago I blogged about iPhone apps I thought were a big deal — "game changers." (The post was cross-posted on BlogHer, where it got noticed.) Scroll down to see my excitement then about the ever-useful maps.app, with screenshot in question.

Some nice sleuthing there, John! I tweeted about it and went to bed.

New details in the sunlight

This morning greeted me with more references as this issue caught on. Retweets. The Next Web. Gizmodo. All the scraper sites that pull from them. (I haven't done a thorough search.)

Embarrassing for Samsung, if true. I'll leave judgment to you. But if it's true, it's also a violation of copyright and the Creative Commons license. Not that it's any skin off of my nose. But it's never good for image when marketing gets caught hawking apparent bulloney. (I can't help but wonder why a marketing department would not use screenshots from its own device? Would the Samsung version of the app really so unappealing?)

"The world has infinite knowledge," writer Jascha Kessler would tell his students, meaning that you really need to write what you know and research what you don't know, because the readers will see your bullshit. Of course, that's all the more true now in the web world, where search, social links, and literally a world full of readers are archiving, contextualizing, tagging, bookmarking, and remembering what you put out there. I'm not sure how Gruber found the image match. One of the image search engines, possibly?

"Good artists copy, great artists steal."

Setting aside Picasso's original meaning for the moment, l leave you with the late Steve talking about design in 1994.

Good publicity out of the bad

Oh, and by the way, Efrain's II is indeed the best Mexican food in Boulder. I'm glad they got some free indirect publicity from all this. The green chile is to die for.

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WiMax song by Samsung

8 November 2006 - 8:25am | Laura Scott

WiMAX is on the way, finally.

The Mobile Intelligent Terminal was unveiled at a Samsung-sponsored industry conference on Mobile WiMax, which is just coming into use and promises fast broadband connections over long distances.

The device weighs about a pound and contains a fold-out keyboard, 5-inch screen and 30 gigabyte hard drive. It runs the full version of Microsoft Corp.'s Windows XP operating system and also supports the CDMA mobile phone communications standard, which is used in South Korea and other countries including the United States.

Kim Hun-bae, Samsung vice president for mobile research and development, told reporters that the gadget is the world's first WiMax device that also works as a mobile phone. It also can access the Internet, make video phone calls and display television as well as other video.

The "MIT" is so new that googling up the model number, SPH-P9000, yields nothing, not even a hit on Samsung's own site, where they promote their WiMax products, but not this new mega-phone-thing.

(Is "MIT" really going to be the acronym? "Hold a MIT in your mitt!" "Communicate mit MIT!" "MIT me sometime!")

Never mind the funny-looking device — I mean, check out this AP photo [pop-up window] — I'm really excited that WiMAX is almost here.

WiMAX is a wireless digital communications system, also known as IEEE 802.16, that is intended for wireless "metropolitan area networks". WiMAX can provide broadband wireless access (BWA) up to 30 miles (50 km) for fixed stations, and 3 - 10 miles (5 - 15 km) for mobile stations. In contrast, the WiFi/802.11 wireless local area network standard is limited in most cases to only 100 - 300 feet (30 - 100m).

With WiMAX, WiFi-like data rates are easily supported, but the issue of interference is lessened. WiMAX operates on both licensed and non-licensed frequencies, providing a regulated environment and viable economic model for wireless carriers.

WiMAX can be used for wireless networking in much the same way as the more common WiFi protocol. WiMAX is a second-generation protocol that allows for more efficient bandwidth use, interference avoidance, and is intended to allow higher data rates over longer distances.

This is going to change more than cell phones. [More on Wikipedia.]

It all makes my new Palm 700p seem rather archaic.

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