@Terrillo M Walls

Yeah, as if cell phones aren't bad enough, it's like they're going out of their way to create more ways to distract people while driving. And this comes just when there's starting to be some momentum behind getting the message across that talking on the phone (hands free or not) is never safe.

Isn't it funny that cars get safer and safer (more types of airbags, better and better breaks, traction control) and yet the number of fatalities in cars never goes down (about 40,000 per year in the U.S.)? There was just a study that said one in four accidents are now caused by people talking on the cell phone. I guess we as a culture just like accidents and inventing ways to get into them. They should just give all these new dashboard inventors the Darwin Award.

@cashclientel

Yeah, this post by Engadget is really misleading. The AdMob stats are about numbers of ads AdMob served to different devices. So it does not necessarily reflect smartphone online traffic in general. It doesn't even reflect advertising in general, just the ads served by one of many advertising companies. The statistic is almost meaningless.

AdMob has been doing this a lot lately, issuing vague and poorly labeled reports that encourage people to misunderstand them and think they reflect sales in general or internet traffic in general. Of course, that's in their interest, to get everyone to confuse the entire market with just the portion that's AdMob's profits from.

@gerrrg No, the report is about numbers of ads AdMob served to different devices. So it does not necessarily reflect smartphone online traffic in general. It doesn't even reflect advertising in general, just the ads served by one of many advertising companies. The statistic is almost meaningless.

AdMob has been doing this a lot lately, issuing vague and poorly labeled reports that encourage people to misunderstand them and think they reflect sales in general or internet traffic in general. Of course, that's in their interest, to get everyone to confuse the entire market with just the portion that's in AdMob's interest.

It's just so disappointing that the A3 diesel, in the U.S., has not option for a manual transmission. Why put it in the Jetta, but not the A3? I wrote to Audi and they responded saying that they have found manual transmissions are becoming less popular in the U.S. Um, yeah, like four decades ago.

They only way I can explain this is that Audi thinks the A3 is a care for women and women aren't so into manuals in general. But I think that's wrong. Anyway attracted to a small sporty car like the A3 is the sort of person who would appreciate the control and pleasure of a manual. The DSG is cool and perhaps even technically more precise at shifting, but it's not the same.

Some of the new sidebar graphics are cool.

But mostly I find the design to be busy, overdone, and annoying to look at. You've also actually managed to add more stuff and pack less text from the posts on the page at once. This is a classic case of confusing eye-candy with user friendliness. Looks slick, bewildering to try to read. More turns out to be less.

I honestly thought there was nothing wrong with the old design. I am much less motivated to read the site now. I hate it when blogs shift away from a standards, straightforward, readable format, to trying to look more like a magazine or something and undermine the one thing that was good about their layout: simple delivery mechanism for posts.

Yeah, this is a classic case of AT&T shooting themselves in the foot. The lawsuit just draws more attention to the ads and has caused Verizon to run them more. And it confirms for Verizon that they've really hit upon something. It's amazing that a huge company like AT&T can make such a basic PR mistake. Then should be trying to figure out a way to get the attention on something else, not doing Verizon's job for them.

I think it's a mistake to view this ad as dystopic, as Engadget suggests, or in some way meant to be ominous. I think the idea is that something as advanced Maemo (note the text in the bottom right of the screen says "Project: Maemo//", not N900) could only come from some sort of top secret black box (literally and figuatively) project. Perhaps involving Alien technology, as a comment below suggests. What we're looking at here is that somehow the most advanced, most secret, most gaurded technology of a powerful secretive organizatoin/government is leaking out. So the dark underground room and the people watching behind the glass suggests not dystopic or ominous, but rather secret, gaurded, protected.

I think that's the idea.

It's a little hard to believe that Engadget is this naive about Google being a business that makes most of it's revenue from advertising. Does Engagdet really think Google is some sort of democratic institution that belongs to us all and should never be besmirched with something as base as commerce? And Android is their own product, for Pete's sake. What do you expect?

The sooner people stop believing in the goodness of Google the better. We're all selling ourselves (via our privacy) down the river, to a huge advertising company, and then complaining when what was right in front of our faces (in this case literally) turns out to be the truth.

ejvictor, I appreciate your analysis and think it is very astute and I basically already came to the same conclusions as you. But you put it together nicely and state it well.

That said, I have to agree with others that your $100k number doesn't really make sense. It's the only part of what you say, with which I have a bone to pick. First you said an Android phone gives Google "$100,000 worth of value per year," then you qualified your claim saying, "if you don't think that your Android phone is worth $100,000 check googles [sic] valuation," and finally you changed your statement to, "I said $100k value - I did not say that they fully monitize [sic] that value."

Saying in the first instance that Google gets $100k of value "per year," certainly sounds a lot like you meant they fully monetize that value. But anyway, if your point is that each customer reflects a portion of Google's valuation, the math still doesn't add up. If each Android customer is worth $100k and Google's current market cap as of today is $175 billion, then that would mean that 1.75 million Android users account for the entire value of Google as a business. G1 sales hit the 1 million mark in April, 2009, after six months of availability, and may well have already passed the 2 million mark or more. So in order to accept your claim, one would have to believe that 1-2 million Android users alone account for more than half and perhaps the entire value of Google as a business and subsequently that the more than 100 million unique monthly Google search engine users on regular computers and tens of millions of Gmail users account for somewhere between a pittance and nothing.

Again, I think your concept is right, but the $100k number just doesn't add up.

I agree with you in principle. Unfortunately since there is no standarized frequency bands or mobile technology between the different carriers the device you get from one carrier almost certainly won't work on another carrier (or will lack some crucial functionality, like 3G compatibility). So owning your device outright doesn't enable you to take it with you from carrier to carrier, because it's just not technologically possible. Another example of the brilliance of American "deregulation." Thank God for our all American small government and how it brings innovation and choices to the people.