The New York Times reviewed the Amazon Fire Phone.

At its best, Dynamic Perspective adds helpful gestures that allow you to get around the phone more quickly. Snap the phone to the right while you’re in the calendar app, you see your daily agenda; snap left and the agenda disappears. But these shortcuts are never reliable; a lot of times you’ll snap and nothing will happen, because the app you’re in isn’t coded for gestures.

Other instances of Dynamic Perspective are downright annoying. Take Auto Scroll, which moves the text on your screen as you tilt the phone back and forth. Because Auto Scroll calibrates its scrolling speed according to how you’re holding the device when you first load up an article, your brain will struggle to find a set rule about how much to tilt to get the right speed. Often I’d scroll too fast or too slow.

Worse, if you put your phone down on a table while you’re in the middle of an article, the scrolling goes haywire and you lose your place. The best thing about Auto Scroll is that you can turn it off.

When you introduce a gimmick instead of making sure the feature simply works.

iPhone in Canada reported on BlackBerry and Dell’s responses to the Apple-IBM partnership.

BlackBerry CEO John Chen:

I am not afraid of competing when I know I am more nimble. I never think [that] going alone is the right strategy. But we have a value add that no one else can do.

John Swainson, head of Dell’s global software business:

I do not think that we take the Apple-IBM tie-up terribly seriously. I think it just made a good press release.

I have some trouble understanding how IBM reps are going to really help Apple very much in terms of introducing devices into their accounts. I mean candidly, they weren’t very good at doing it when it was IBM-logoed products, so I do not get how introducing Apple-logoed stuff is going to be much better.

This reminds me of the famous quote by Steve Ballmer:

There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance. It’s a $500 subsidized item.

Microsoft missed the mobile market under Ballmer’s watch as CEO. BlackBerry and Dell are struggling in the mobile and PC markets respectively. To be unconcerned by the Apple-IBM push in enterprise won’t bode well for them.

Computerworld reported on the resales of older Apple devices on eBay.

Like one of an infinite number of multiverses, eBay’s traffic in primarily old-but-still-sellable Apple goods mirrored, more or less, Apple’s product line breakdown. The iPhone dominated on the online auction site, accounting for 55% the $1.94 billion in sales of Apple goods. Meanwhile, Mac products accounted for 20% of Apple sales on eBay and iPad sales represented 19% of the total.

John Bell wrote on Medium about Google’s numbers.

Which brings me to Chromecast. All Google will say is they’ve sold “millions” of the $35, (presumably) break-even device. But recently they announced 400 million “sessions”. Sounds impressive! A recent headline states “Chromecast turns one: why this small streaming stick became such a big deal” and the subheads are “So cheap, and so different”, “400 million cast sessions”, “Competitors are getting the streaming stick fever”, and “Why Chromecast continues to be disruptive”.

So kudos to Google for an enormous number, and for getting great press from it. But, wait. We’re actually going to record “uses” of products now? Well, sure. Because it makes the number look bigger. Why wouldn’t Google report a number that makes you shrug and think “Google seems to be doing well” before reading the next article? Or buying into what’s clearly a successful device with a successful, stable, supported ecosystem?

Bell then dived into the numbers.

400,000,000 uses per year, if every user uses it seven days a week on average, means 1,095,890 customers globally. Whereas if each user is using it four times a week, that’s 208 uses per year. That would point to 1,923,077 customers.

Since Google has said they’ve sold “millions”, 1.9 is a bit low. So let’s adjust usage down a little bit to get past 2 million. That gives us a guess of 2,564,103 Chromecast users using the device 3 times a week.

Imagine if Apple reported the number of times the AppleTV is used.

In April, Apple said it has sold 20 million Apple TVs total, and the current numbers seem to point to 8-10 million a year. If we assume their engagement is similar to those of Chromecast users (3 times a week), that works out to between 1,248,000,000 and 1,560,000,000 “uses” of the product in the same time period.

At the lower end, that’s 1.2 billion sessions versus Chromecast’s 400 million session.

The Verge reviewed the Amazon Fire Phone.

Dynamic Perspective is meant to keep the screen simple, showing you only information when you ask for it, but it mostly just hides useful information. Exposing that information then requires such finesse that for a long time you’ll be seeing things rapidly flicker in and out of existence, not knowing how to make them stick around or find them again. Dynamic Perspective makes for awesomely fun lock screens with much more to them than first meets the eye, but it does nothing to meaningfully improve the smartphone experience.

A clever phone:

You’re entirely reliant on gestures and flicks of the phone to access these menus. Most apps have no indicators or helpful icons; you just have to open every app and twist the phone around like a lunatic to find things. You can’t even see the time without tilting your phone just so. An errant buzz is your only indication that you have a notification, prompting you to cock your wrist or swipe down from the top bezel to open the notification windowshade. None of this is explained, none of it is intuitive. Dynamic Perspective makes everything look cleaner, but makes actually using your phone a lot harder. I don’t need my phone to be clever, or spartan. I need it to be obvious. The Fire Phone is anything but.

Benedict Evans wrote about app Store revenues.

• Google said it paid out $5bn to developers from Google IO in 2013 to Google IO in 2014 (a little over 13 months)
• Apple said it has paid out $20bn to developers in total by the end of the June 2014 quarter, and at WWDC June 2013 it gave a figure of$10bn paid to developers (at the June 2013 earnings call a month later it then said it had paid out $11bn). So in the last 12 months, it paid out roughly$10bn.

No surprise which platform app developers would want to go for.