If Apple designed a coffee mug, what would it look like? Presenting, the iMug from Savage Chickens.

I’d buy one.

This just doesn’t make any sense. Taylor Wimberly from AndroidAndMe on the Droid:

The Motorola Droid will be the most powerful Android phone to date when it launches… However, the device still features the same shortcomings of all other Android phones. The Droid ships with a 512 MB ROM which contains only 256 MB available for app storage.

So, only 256MB available to store applications, utilities, games on the Droid. I have 180 apps on my iPhone which take up almost 4GB of storage.

Have you seen all the awesome iPhone and iPod Touch games? Hardly any of them would fit on an Android phone. It is not uncommon for popular titles to easily exceed 100 MB. For example, the game Myst takes up a whopping 727MB.

Droid might be nice but this is a killer flaw for anyone serious about handheld games.

What’s the impact of no Flash on the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad? Most customers don’t care. Here’s another crack in Adobe’s Flash armor. Gavin Clarke in The Register:

Start-up airline Virgin America has decided HTML is “good enough” for animating online content on its brand-new website, which went live Monday, dumping Flash.

Virgin CTO Ravi Simhambhatla:

I don’t want to cater to one hardware or one software platform one way to another, and Flash eliminates iPhone users. This year is going to be the year of the mobile [for Virgin]. When I looked at the Flash on our site, we weren’t using any Flash features except transition from one ad to another. When you use a technology, you want to use 70 to 80 per cent of the functionality.

The days of dominant, proprietary technologies on the internet are over. Goodbye Flash.

Despite the user interface differences, there are similarities between the latest Mac OS, and the soon-to-be latest Windows OS. Dwight Silverman:

Both are pretty good, and for similar reasons. Neither are complete rewrites, but rather they focus on refining and tweaking existing products. The result is that devotees of either platform are going to be pleased with the changes.

In a word, refinement.

1. Both are leaner. Both Apple and Microsoft have worked hard to make their respective OSes leaner and more nimble. Snow Leopard has removed the PowerPC code in Mac OS X, while Microsoft has trimmed the fat that was in Windows Vista.
2. Useful interface tweaks. Snow Leopard and Windows 7 aren’t dramatic reworkings of the user interface, but each contain changes that actually provide some benefit. The reworked Stacks in Snow Leopard (which are scrollable and allow Stack views in subfolders) make it much easier to find what you’re looking for.
3. Mainstream 64-bit computing. In the Windows world, 64-bit computing really began a march to the mainstream with Windows Vista. More and more hardware makers are offering the 64-bit version of the OS on their PCs. Apple advertises Snow Leopard as 64-bit “top to bottom”, though that’s not exactly correct.
4. More secure. Snow Leopard is the first version of the Mac OS X to include an antimalware component. If you try to install one of a handful of Trojans that target Mac users, you’re prevented from doing so by a warning popup. Microsoft includes Windows Defender, a basic antispyware application, in Windows 7 as it did in Vista, and there are more under-the-hood changes that make the operating system more secure.
5. Simpler, faster setup. Both operating systems have made the process of installing them simpler and faster. Upgrading Leopard to Snow Leopard takes just a couple of clicks and about 45 minutes. Windows 7’s upgrade can take longer.

A clean install of Windows 7 can be faster than a clean install of Snow Leopard.

Michael Wolf in Newser seems to think we should be afraid of Apple. Why?

Apple is a strange and dastardly company which, sooner rather than later, we’re going to regret pledging our allegiance to.

I’m probably like most of Apple’s customers. I have no allegiance to the company. I like their products, though I’m more of a techno voyeur. I like to watch the company’s antics.

The latest bit of no-good business is its arbitrary censoring of iPhone apps. This may be piddling, but it’s obviously part of the major control-freakishness that has always lurked below the surface in Cupertino, but which has now become broad-based corporate policy.

Except that by exercising such control Apple simply remains Apple. It’s what the company has done for many years. It’s not even news. It’s the way Apple does business. And it seems to be working rather well.

Just weeks ago there was the iPad rollout and its transparent designs on controlling the woe-begotten world of printed material.

If it was transparent then so much for Apple being a secretive company, right? Does anyone really think Apple would control print media with an iPad? What if the iPad gains a 20-percent market share of sub-$1,000 computing devices? Since when does 20-percent become control?

And need we forget, there’s the music business, fully occupied and colonized by Apple.

The iTunes Store has done well. It’s the biggest online retailer of music, TV shows, and movies. Yet, it does not dominate the market for media. If you don’t dominate how can you colonize? Wolff can turn a phrase. It would be nice if he could handle facts the same way.

Microsoft has come to seem eerily benign. Indeed, Apple becomes the poster child for a really sinister corporation. There may not be any corporation as militantly determined to have its way as Apple.

Wolf seems to be talking mind share vs. market share. Microsoft’s Windows remains on nearly 90-percent of the world’s PCs. Apple’s highly touted iPhone owns a tiny sliver of the cell phone market; a larger chunk of the smart phone segment. But control? Are there any facts and figures to back up the assertions, Michael?

Most companies can only dream of building a brand as strong as Apple’s, whereas Apple’s brand has reached a level where nothing it might do seems to hurt it. Apple has become the opposite of what it once was and somehow we don’t know it.

I’ll take that as a no.

Here’s where typical technology journalists—particularly the hit-whoring type—fall on their collective faces. Or, is it feces? That assertion would have been a good opportunity to describe in some detail what Apple was, and compare and contrast it what what Apple is. Somehow Wolff skipped over the opportunity. Why?

It’s all about sex.

After all, why would Apple purge these adult-themed apps? What sense is there to that? And, apparently, it isn’t all sexy stuff. It’s just some sexy stuff, arbitrarily. It’s not even consistent, it’s just weird, unnecessarily, and mean-minded.

Without saying so, Wolff gets to the heart of the matter. For him. Apple has purged the iPhone’s App Store of sexually suggestive apps; clearly some of which Wolff spent his lunch money to purchase. Now, he can’t get his groove on with his phone and a fist, so he’s going to blame the mercurial Steve Jobs.

Steve Jobs may be the oddest fellow able to hold a full-time job in America and hardly anybody even makes fun of him. In fact, everybody’s afraid of him, not least of all because he is so strange and mercurial.

Steve Jobs and the Apple story are precisely what makes following Apple so much fun. It’s a better story line than soaps, or Lost, or politics, plus we get to play with all these cool toys and apps. And talk about Apple. But to accuse Apple of being a hard-nosed business, or to accuse them of being secretive or controlling, is to accuse the Pope of being Catholic, or to accuse the sun of being warm.

The iPhone itself is a beautiful tool, locked up tight and full of draconian protocols—with a little AT&T sado-masochistic abuse thrown in for good measure.

Great. Now let’s bash AT&T. I’m game.