So Dieter wrote up a review of Google Translate’s shiny new, iPhone optimized WebApp, and it intrigued me enough to check it out. Since I live in Montreal, French was the first language I decided to try out. Since I’m damaged and have issues that would make Lucy jack her price up to 50 cents, the very first thing I tried to translate was: “leave me alone.”
And what did Google Translate’s WebApp say “leave me alone” was in French? “leave me alone”. Oui-mais-wha?
Curious, I went from MobileSafari to desktop Safari, and what did translate.google.com tell me? “leave me alone”. German didn’t work either. Spanish and Dutch, however, did.
Kicker: “me dejen solo” from Spanish to French? You guessed it! “leave me alone”.
Well, if I ever get pounced on by our local language police, I can always try to tell them Google says “leave me alone” is perfectly acceptable French!
(For the record, Yahoo! Babel Fish actually offers a translation, if somewhat formally: “laissez-moi seul”)
Is this a known bug? I silent plea for help from an overworked Googler? A strange Babylonian plot? Or just one of many glitches in the system?
Have you run into any crazy Google mistranslations?
Digital Daily brings BOOM!ing word that Apple’s market cap has just exceeded Google’s, at $159.37 vs. $157.56.
Good on Steve Jobs and Apple. And kudos to Valleywag for saying, way back in 2007 that this would happen because “Apple knows how to design not just gadgets, but the businesses that go around them.”
We, like pretty much everyone else in the blogosphere, probably can’t help but wonder how Michael “I’d shut down Apple and give the money back to its shareholders” Dell is doing lately? But is all this market cap stuff really anything more than a seriously juicy headline? Any savvy investors reading, please enlighten me on how much more or faster this news, never mind the ever fickle and capricious dice-game that is the current market, will restore our childlike sense of wonder?
Quel surprise: Google’s Android will be delayed. It looks like Google and their hefty consortium of partners are struggling a little with getting a new mobile OS deployed across a wide array of hardware connected to all sorts of different networks. Who coulda predicted it? (Yeah, okay, basic high school chaos theory, given complexity growth and propensity for system break down and all, but other than that…)
Originally slated for second half 2008, its now looking more like fourth quarter, if not 2009. Seems like the T-Mobile launch is so Google-tention intensive, it’s pushing Sprint’s launch further back. Also — wait for it — Sprint doesn’t want to just deploy a clean Android build, they want to wall it off brand it up all personal like (couldn’t see that one coming?). Meanwhile, mega-carrier China Mobile is “running into issues” pushing its launch back as well.
To top it off, Android is more challenging to develop for, which is also a startling revelation, given the alpha/beta status of the SDK. Hitting deadlines is one thing. Hitting them through an asteroid storm of OS changes is another entirely.
Not evil twin to theiPhoneBlog.com Week in Review, not an invasion by Fake Steve, This Week in Smart Phone Schadenfreude brings you all the feel-better news you need about the smartphone world outside Apple’s current media dominator. (Who knew there was such a world? We were just as surprised! Inelegant, interface challenged, keyboardy, crashy, single-touchy place — best not to linger…). Join us as we mock review the big news from last week at our sister sites. Everybody loves sibling rivalry!
In this week’s edition: Windows Se7en, Great Googley Android, India’s circling the RIM, the Treo 800w guest commentary, and no other news on Safari for Samsung…
Sorry PC Users. And non-iPhone users. And we’re not sorry for you having to think about an upgrade to Vista or Windows Mobile 6.1 either. No, we’re sorry because Google loves us iPhone users more than you. Google has an iPhone Fixation. The newest evidence? The latest and greatest update to the Mac OS, 10.5.3, just came out today and it has a new feature: syncing of contacts with Google. Gmail already works better with the iPhone than it does with any other mail app, now it works better with the iPhone when plugged into a Mac, too.
Odd that it would only work if you have an iPhone, though, innit? If you’re not “one of us” (Google! Goggle!), you can still sync your contacts up with Yahoo, who still is also the only way to get Push email pre-iPhone-2.0.
Update:Ars Technica chimes in with a hack for your forlorn non-iPhone-owning Mac Users. For my part, I very much want to apply 10.5.3 but I have a policy of waiting at least a week before installing it. Crazy? …Or crazy like a fox?
Ladies and gentlemen, we give you the first ever live demo of Google’s new Android platform… and it’s on the iPhone!
[Er... That's the HTC Dream.]
What? Sigh. Okay.
Maybe it’s me. Maybe it’s a proof of concept. Maybe it’s because of the Diamond. Maybe it’s just a hormone thing. But does all the innovation have to lead back to Cupertino these days? Does it?
So, another week, another iClone, and more specifically another HTC iClone. (At least they’re giving RIM a run for their Bold, Thunder, Storm money for the official iClone volume title…)
Still, it’s nice to see Android. As I mentioned in the Top 5 Things the iPhone Could Learn From the Competition, the cloud looks to be the future, and Google currently owns the cloud. Never mind their CEO is on Apple’s board of directors (he reportedly recuses himself from iPhone discussions to avoid a conflict of interest), the industry needs the drive Google can provide, even if they wrap it up in a horribly derivative package for now.
Here at Smartphone Experts we use gmail for our main email and also use Google Apps Premier for our documents. Looks like we can add to the list of things that the iPhone excels at, business-wise: Google Apps. That list, by the way, is coming up shortly as a Wait-a-Thon post.
Meanwhile, if you, like us, use Google for business, your iPhone is now a great tool for that business:
Google has produced a new, generalized iPhone interface for its Google Apps suite of web applications. [...] To access the new interface, people should visit “http://www.google.com/m/a/your-domain.com” in Safari, where “your-domain.com” is replaced with a user’s actual account domain. The new interface is currently only available for the English-language version of the Apps website. - [ipodnn]
Can’t wait till iPhone firmware 2.0 to get your corporate calendar on your iPhone? Here is a great trick to get your enterprise appointments onto you’re your iPhone.
What you will need:
Novell GroupWise (tested, though should work with other mail applications)
A Google Account with:
Gmail
Google Calendar
For the bonuses, you will need:
A calendar that can subscribe to .ics files (iCal)
I found the basics of this idea here, but have elaborated it to iCal which works great for me.
Just when you thought it was safe to switch to WinMob of Misfortune, iPhone JEOPARDY is back with a bonus round!
Joining us via lifeline is Google Android, first among Linux vaporOS’s (sorry Nova, Access, and OpenMoko!) and fresh from CEO Eric Schmidst’s latest iPhone briefing at Apple’s Board of Directors meeting, we give you the suddenly chatty group manager for mobile platforms, Rich Miner:
“There’s a much larger potential market on Android than for the iPhone. There are things I saw people doing with the first version of the Android SDK that it seems like you can’t do with the iPhone at least at the moment.”
Then, as if catching the Shining-like glare in Daddy Jobs’ eyes, he quickly added:
“[If I were a developer] I’d certainly be looking at the iPhone, and if you believe there will be lots of Android phones out there, as we do, I’d be developing for both platforms.”
Now, for those of you just joining us, remember that Google’s core business is advertising (no, not search, that just pulls the ad revenue), not OS development.Few companies can be good at more than one thing, and Apple is traditionally very good at hardware and software (and wisely leaves Google and Yahoo to do the heavy services lifting on iPhone). Google hasn’t managed to monetize everything in it’s vast repertoire yet, much as Microsoft is struggling to grow outside of Windows and Office.
If Google plans on hitting WinMob standard and Symbian on the low-end and leaving Apple to duke it out with WinMob premium and Blackberry on the high, maybe Miner is making the kind of sense that does. However, if Eric Schmidt is the fox in Apple’s development henhouse and (bigger and), Google can ship a working OS sometime this decade, things could get interesting.
Two weeks later and we’re still waiting for the SDK. Mike talks about what he hopes will come, Dieter about what he fears. Plus we discuss the Tiny Code excitement (lies!) and, yes, Google again too.
The iPhone Blog merged with the Phone different site in May of 2008. Both sites were founded on a premise that comes one from one of Apple's old slogans: Think different. The iPhone Blog: for people who dare to phone different.
