That resulted in inferior products with lots of bugs, drawing bad reviews and heavy criticism from its users. PenUltimate, a handwriting app Evernote acquired in 2012, received a lot of complaints when it rolled out an updated version for the first time in 2014, causing the company to issue an apology and another update within a week.

Skitch, an app that lets you add captions or markups to photos, has a three-star rating (out of five) on the Apple App Store, while Work Chat, the new messaging feature it released last year, is seeing a lot of negative feedback on its own forum.

Evernote Food, a standalone app that lets users share recipes and food photos, entirely shut down last month, as did other experimental products like Evernote Hello and Peek.

via Evernote is in deep trouble – Business Insider

I’ve used and loved Evernote for a long time. However over the past year, I’ve been making many attempts to migrate away from it. It’s not exactly one specific reason/issue that is causing me to move away, but many little quirks that give you the feeling of death by a thousand cuts. Sadly they’ve also killed Evernote Food which I quite liked, but that’s understandable, as it always felt like some kind of a side project.

Nowadays I seldom use Skitch or Penultimate, as they now feel clunky and troublesome. It’s not entirely Evernote’s fault, as there are other factors that count against it, such as the current version of OS X offering pretty good annotation fools, and a solid Notes app. However, Evernote’s feature set is still powerful enough that they should be able to get through this tough period.

If anything, I feel Evernote should get back to sorting out some core issues, such as:

• Sync speed

• Sync conflict handling

• Stability of offline notes

• Ease of use

I’ve since tweaked my workflow to use these apps (Evernote is still a part of it):

• Simplenote: Still my current favourite quick note-taking app due to lightning fast sync, plain-text only notes, and support OS X, iOS, and web.

• OneNote: For offline notes. Evernote’s offline notes feature is still horrible, and what makes it worse is that it’s a paid service. I’ve had too many instances where I needed an offline file while traveling and couldn’t get to it.

• Evernote: Functioning more like an “archive of everything else” which I search slowly (because it really is very slow and clunky) for random bits of information.

• Apple’s Notes: The latest update of Notes with iOS 9 and OS X El Capitan offers support for images and PDF, which I’m currently testing as a replacement for OneNote as my travel notebook. Useful information such as scans of my passport, boarding passes, etc, can be stored in here now. So far so good. If it works out, I’ll be switching from OneNote to this. It also supports multiple levels of sub-folders, which is really useful to me.

I’m still a paying Evernote customer, but unless they get these core issues fixed, I probably won’t renew my subscription and will revert to the free tier.

Softpedia reported on Samsung not patching kernel vulnerabilities in non-Lollipop S4 phones.

According to Jonathan Salwan, one of QuarksLAB’s junior security researchers, Samsung took 3 months to acknowledge the bugs (November 2014), and only responded to QuarksLAB’s emails after the company went public with their research on September 21, 2015.

“They just acknowledged the issues, then went silent until this blog post popped,” said Mr. Salwan. “Samsung just confirmed to us that the JB and KK families will not be patched and that the vulnerabilities are only patched on the LL family.”

Because security is a priority.

Boing Boing reported on Samsung being accused of programming TVs to cheat energy efficiency ratings.

Samsung admits that its TVs radically changed their power-consumption during testing, but say that the low-power mode was inadvertently triggered by the tests, and was meant to be an automatic power-saving feature.

If it’s a power saving feature, why is it only activated during tests and not in real-world usage?

Quartz reported on millions of Facebook users having no idea they’re using the internet.

This is more than a matter of semantics. The expectations and behaviors of the next billion people to come online will have profound effects on how the internet evolves. If the majority of the world’s online population spends time on Facebook, then policymakers, businesses, startups, developers, nonprofits, publishers, and anyone else interested in communicating with them will also, if they are to be effective, go to Facebook. That means they, too, must then play by the rules of one company. And that has implications for us all.

This is a very interesting trend, and a reminder that everyone’s introduction and experiences with smartphones and the internet differ a lot.

The Verge reported on Google’s Nexus phones being just ads.

It almost seems innocuous, except that it’s not. There isn’t a single Android device manufacturer that is happy with the Nexus program, and I’ve spoken with them all. Those who build Nexuses for Google often do so reluctantly — with the possible exception of Huawei this year, whose US reputation stands to improve dramatically from the halo effect of being associated with Google by manufacturing the Nexus 6P. Still, neither Huawei nor LG, maker of the Nexus 5X, expects to make much direct profit from these new phones: they are priced aggressively and distributed narrowly, so there’ll be little (if any) profit per device and few devices sold overall. Like Google, all a Nexus manufacturer can hope to gain is the benefit of indirect marketing and a better reputation among Android diehards.

[…]

In previous years, I’d have said the Nexus devices were necessary, vital even, in steering Android in a better direction and fighting the fragmentation of ugly, dysfunctional, and inchoate manufacturer software slapped on top. In 2015, however, Android phone makers have grown more conscientious and restrained. Their software and industrial design are more elegant than ever, and their pricing is as aggressive as it can be.

There is no Android villain left for the Nexus crusader to slay. The premium Nexus 6P and the value-for-money Nexus 5X are just diving into a crowded field without any mission for improving it — in fact, they’re going to make everyone worse off by hastening the price erosion that is the bane of every Android device manufacturer’s existence. This situation might look just dandy for us, the consumers, today, but I don’t think we’ll be happy if it leads to the extinction of companies like HTC or the exit from smartphone making by the likes of Sony.

The Android ecosystem still needs Google to take the lead. The race to the bottom is borne from the way the ecosystem works and Google not making Nexus devices will not stop the dwindling profits for Android devices.

When Dropbox founder Drew Houston met with Steve Jobs in 2009 to talk about Dropbox, Houston famously shut down Jobs’ approach to buy the file-sharing service. According to a report from Forbes in 2011, Jobs let Houston know that he was making something of a mistake banking on Dropbox’s service to sustain a company, telling him that Dropbox was “a feature, not a product.”

Now, it sort of feels like Jobs was right. Dropbox doesn’t feel like it’s future trajectory is up. In fact, it kind of feels like the rain has started and the Dropbox is getting soggy. Dropbox isn’t going to get much further without becoming easier, more meaningful and high-powered. Dropbox isn’t going anywhere but down as a standalone app, but if it can find a way to make itself a part of our lives the way it began to before iCloud, Google Docs, Box and the rest, it might stand a chance. And, well, if there’s one company that’s become the leading expert on making itself an essential part of daily life, it’s Apple.

via It’s time to revisit Apple buying Dropbox Gigaom

Online file storage and sync is increasingly commoditised, but regardless compared to OneDrive, iCloud Drive, Google Drive etc, Dropbox still stands out in terms of reliability and ease of use. That being said, I totally understand that the importance of Dropbox as a standalone product is less so nowadays. Hopefully Dropbox will be able to get past this, it’s still my favourite online storage and sync service.