HTC EVO™ 4G

Sprint Evo 4G

Sprint is gushing about their new Evo 4G which will soon be more available in the USA although it appears sold out in some areas from pre-orders.

That’s right. The phone that captivated international trade show CTIA is here, and we’ve packed it full of features! A large vibrant 4.3 inch screen, dual cameras, 32GB MicroSD card slot and wicked fast web speeds, this is more than a phone. It’s a Mobile Hotspot for up to 8 of your Wi-Fi devices. It’s a high-quality mobile device – featuring Android™ 2.1 and the award-winning HTC Sense™ experience, and it’s your personal portable HD media center with an HDMI output so you can share in HD.

Hyperbole aside, the reviews from CNET, Engadget, and early users are very favorable.

CNET Reviews

Engadget summary:    Let us be crystal clear: we love this phone. Nay, we adore it. But the fact remains that it’s still very much an Android device — which means that if you don’t like Android now, odds are good that even Android executed on the most amazing hardware to date won’t do much to change your opinion of it. You’ve also got to be concerned about upgradeability; Froyo is almost certainly around the corner now, and HTC hasn’t done anything to suggest it’s able to push Sense-powered updates in a timely fashion.

That said, this is truly one of the best smartphones ever made, and even spotty 4G — a reality of a young technology that’s going to take years to properly build out — probably won’t do much to hamper your enjoyment of this thing. It’s reasonable to assume that phones like the EVO will ultimately come to every carrier over the next few months… but hey, if you jumped ship for Sprint to pick up this monster, we wouldn’t be able to blame you.

I’m anxious to read more discussion of the 2-5 year  future of iPhone vs Android devices, but maybe I’m missing something here to think that’s very relevant.    Apple folks will always have iPhones and new folks will choose on the basis of factors that are not necessarily technological.     It is very clear that mobile devices are already shaping the future in key ways, and there is plenty of room for many models.

Important plan and 4G coverage info from Sprint.

Below is a quick summary of the most recent update from Yahoo regarding the Bing (Microsoft Search) / Yahoo advertising alliance, an attempt by both companies to stem the tide of Google’s search dominance.   Yahoo’s history of bad search decisions makes me a bit worried that they may try to compromise Bing’s (pretty good) search quality in favor of paid listings, further eroding the credibility gap between Google and Yahoo/Bing search.

Ironically Google search is probably more vulnerable than ever to the advent of a new, great search engine  thanks to Google’s current tendency to   1.  Elevate old and well SEOd (Search Optimized) websites above newer, better ones   2. Avoid proper policing big players like Ebay / Amazon who often appear high in paid and sometimes even organic rankings despite no/thin content about the query.  3. Maintain unreasonably high per click charges on many terms, effectively favoring the big money / big box  advertisers over small businesses.   4.  Not use enough social media feedback to help rank sites (they use some and I’d guess are slowly integrating this, but nobody has made the breakthrough that will come from clever “crowdsourcing” about websites.        5. THROUGH 10.      LACK OF TRANSPARENCY!       Google remains very opaque when it comes to website rankings, and Yahoo in their infinite lack of cleverness 3 years back missed a golden opportunity to come to the rescue of advertisers, webmasters, and most importantly users by creating a more level field with a lot more information about how rankings work combined with public identification of site owners, webmasters, and spammers/ abusers.    Creating this type of transparency would solve many of the problems that currently plague the search game, most importantly the problems that come from webmasters trying to please Google rather than create new, innovative sites.    Best single example is the fiasco of Google’s insistence on “Nofollow” links, which have seriously distorted the entire search landscape to favor cleverly optimized / costly sites over new mom and pop operations.

You see this often  in the travel space where large, thin sites outrank rich, local sites that are newer and don’t have the link base of the older sites.     With Google as pretty much the only search in town, new links will flow mostly as a function of  the rank of the website, so we have a circular system where the “rich get richer”.     [for the record this aspect of the algorith benefits me in the case of some of my very old websites, so this is not a "sour grapes" rant as much as a critique of the approach].

However I’m not holding my breath on Bing Yahoo taking up much of Google’s market share.    As we’ve noted before Google remains an excellent tool, and it took hold of people’s search consciousness at the time they were developing their online habits, so even a superior search would have trouble hurting Google’s dominance, and to Google’s credit I think they continue to approach things more from a quality side than a revenue one.

From Yahoo:

Assuming our testing continues to yield high quality results, we anticipate that our organic search results will be powered by Bing beginning in the August/September [2010] timeframe.

This appears to be a good sign that they will not compromise organic quality in favor of elevating paid listings, a move that would probably lead to significant loss of their current (low) market share.

From Yahoo:

This on the other hand seems a little more alarming, suggesting that people may want to pony up to maintain their ranks after the Bing transition.      Over the coming weeks there will be a lot of Bing quality testing by other SEO centric websites and we’ll try to summarize that in a later post.      We’ll also be blogging the upcoming SES San Francisco (Formerly SES San Jose) search conference – the most influential search gathering  in the world, and have more on the Bing Yahoo changes.

———–  Full Text of Yahoo’s Note ———-

Dear Advertiser,

As we continue to work closely with Microsoft to implement our search alliance, we wanted to provide you with an update on our progress, as well as call out some important, upcoming milestones to help ensure you are prepared for the changes to come.

Transition with Quality
Our goal remains providing a quality transition experience for advertisers in the U.S. and Canada in 2010, while protecting the holiday season. We’ve continued to make good progress against this goal, and we regularly evaluate our progress. However, please remember that, as we continue to go through our series of checkpoints, if we conclude that it would improve the overall experience, we may choose to defer the transition to 2011.

Organic Search Transition
To date, we’ve focused most of our communications to you on the paid search transition to adCenter. However, another key aspect of the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance is the transition of Yahoo! organic search results (those found on the main body of the page). Assuming our testing continues to yield high quality results, we anticipate that our organic search results will be powered by Bing beginning in the August/September timeframe.

If organic search results are an important source of referrals to your website, you’ll want to make sure that you’re prepared for this change:

For more specifics on the organic search transition, please refer to the Self-service Advertiser FAQs on the Yahoo! Transition Center.

Organic and Paid Search Testing
To help us deliver on our goal of transition with quality, we are conducting the necessary tests to ensure that all of the many complex, logistical pieces are in place. While there’s nothing you need to do to prepare for testing, please keep in mind the following:

Editorial Guidelines
Yahoo! and Microsoft have created joint editorial guidelines that will begin taking effect for both Yahoo! and Microsoft paid search advertisers in early August. We encourage you to review these now, so that you understand any potential impact to your ads or keywords. Notable changes include new guidelines for gambling and contests, and disallowed content. For a detailed overview of the editorial policy changes that will soon take effect, please read the New Editorial Guidelines article.

We are committed to making this transition as seamless and beneficial for you as possible. We appreciate your business, and look forward to bringing you the benefits of the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance.

Sincerely,
Your Partners at Yahoo!

Disclaimer:   Joe has Yahoo Stock.   Not that he’s happy about that fact.  Nope, not happy at all.

Two of the sharpest tools in the Search Engine Optimization “SEO” shed talk about the evolution of SEO in an April 2009 interview of Ralph Tegtmeier by Aaron Wall at Aaron’s excellent blog  ”SEO Book“.

Although I don’t endorse some of the SEO tactics they discuss, it’s important that everybody has a better understanding of what very advanced folks are doing to adapt to the many changes in search over the past several years.    Also very interesting is the discussion about SEO morality.    I’m not as critical of Google as Ralph is in this interview but I do agree that Google’s dominance has severerly distorted the way the internet would ideally assign rankings to sites.    The best example of this in my view is the overzealous use of “NoFollow” tags, which are allowing older, inferior, highly SEOd content to trump fresh, high quality, new content because the incoming links to that content are too often nofollowed, coming in from Twitter, Facebook, WordPress,  Flickr, and other major sites that are automatically nofollowing links.

Google would say this is necessary to avoid the kind of manipulations that don’t serve users, but I remain skeptical this approach has done more good than harm, and certainly Google’s “very low transparency” working philosophy has stunted the growth of quality content.    I know this for a fact because my own decisions in developing content have changed greatly over the years knowing that quality is often not  rewarded, and site downrankings are so confusing that it leads one to abandon sites rather than improve them.

Social media gives us a wonderful opportunity to use human input to screen out junk, and I think better use of this by Google would open up newer, better sites that currently fall well under the radar screens.

Back Angle

Originally uploaded by SniperStand

The Sniper Stand deserves an award for elegant simplicity. A tiny plastic nub allows iPhone users to prop up their phone as a TV / Computer screen using the Sniper Stand and a Credit Card. Although a tiny plastic blob is arguably overpriced at $9.95, so is everything else with respect to iPhone accessories and at least this one seems to provide a valuable service to users.

The thing I really like about this is how it demonstrates that functionality in technology does not need to be complicated. Too often we assume that an advanced technical solution is required when in fact all we need is a little ingenuity. Good show, Sniper!

More from Wired, who likes it:

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/07/sniper-stand-turns-credit-card-into-iphone-kick-stand/