China’s Cube Already Has An iPad 5 Clone

Click = big

It seems it’s easier to join a conspiracy you don’t even know exists than to extract information from some Chinese manufacturer websites.

Case in point is the snapshot above. It appears in a carousel at their English site. But clicking on it just opens the same page in another tab(!). And there’s no listing on their Chinese site.

However, there’s an online store that has a spec sheet!

iPad Mini Clone Onda V818 Mini Gets Firmware Update

Apparently the Onda V818 Mini went on sale a day or so ago in China and a firmware update (weirdly mislabeled as an SDK) has already been issued.

The Case For Facebook Home

Chat Multi-Tasking Is How Facebook Home Could Rattle Apple And Google

Innovation doesn’t need to hit you over the head. It just has to solve a problem in a new way. Until now, a real hinderance to text messaging on mobile was context switching. You were either communicating with someone, or you were in another app. ‘Or’. Not ‘And’. What Android and iOS call “multi-tasking” is really just more rapid switching. Even with pop-over notifications, you still had to leave one app and open another to respond. That moment you see your current activity fade to black and a messaging app ascend to replace it causes a mental break.

This context switching is unnatural and unhelpful. Often we are communicating about what we’re computing — giving someone the answer to a question, making a joint decision, guiding someone to a destination, or discussing a piece of content found online. I’ve definitely had to go back and forth multiple times in frustration between SMS or Facebook Messenger and other apps when I couldn’t remember a set of directions or other complicated string of information I was trying to pass to a friend. The best option was to carry on a voice call over speakerphone as you navigate around the phone, and some connection types don’t even support this.