I’ve now had the Droid as my defacto cellphone for two weeks. It’s time for a comparison. Which is better? Why? After all, Google handed me a free $600 phone to do a review like this. I feel honor-bound to present it.

First of all, this is not a post for the ages. 18 months from now, one or even two generations will have passed in the smartphone market. Almost anything available in 2011 will be better than either of the entries we have today.

See the full review here.

There were indeed some very bad months in 2009. There was a year-over-year drop of 31% in June, as well as a 29% drop in July. A record-breaking December, however, particularly with the PS3 price cut brought the year-end totals close to normal.

-> US decline in videogame sales for 2009 were 9.3%, the worst of the lot.
-> Europe declined 3.5%
-> Japan declined 2%

On consoles, sales of Xbox and Wii were flat for the year, but PS3 jumped 22%.

The analyst has two potential conclusions to the unexpected recession, however mild. One is that the growth of the games industry means there are many more casual gamers, people more likely to reduce their purchases in a downturn. Many of these turned to second-hand games, web games or mobile titles.

Another possibility, sited by Shigeru Miyamoto of Nintendo, is that there were fewer compelling titles released in 2009, at least compared to 2008. “We were not able to produce fun-enough products,” he says. The top 20 games took a larger share of sales in 2009 than in 2008.

According to the Economist, the jury is still out on whether or not the games industry is fully recession-resistant.

The full article appears in the March 25, 2010 edition of the Economist.

I, unhappily, received a Droid. And I am not the only unhappy one. There was a line of attendees with Droid in hand at the exit of the Google booth, begging the lucky Nexus One recipients to trade with them. I passed the Google booth several times, but there was always a long line of unhappy new Droid owners.

I imagine that Google was extremely surprised by this state of affairs. The Droid is selling 10-to-1 over the Nexus (see chart). What’s wrong with these game people?

I think this indicates that the popularity of the Google phone is not that everyone wants an Open Source, Freedom Now, let’s-get-away-from-Apple’s-walled-garden smartphone. It’s really about the network.

Tim Bray’s assessment of the Android vs. iPhone ecosystem is (hat tip to Slashdot): “The iPhone vision of the mobile Internet’s future omits controversy, sex, and freedom, but includes strict limits on who can know what and who can say what. It’s a sterile Disney-fied walled garden surrounded by sharp-toothed lawyers. The people who create the apps serve at the landlord’s pleasure and fear his anger.” But this isn’t what drives our average techie.

No, what legions of Droid purchasers want is a smartphone with all of the abilities of the iPhone, but which uses Verizon’s robust and superior cell network rather than AT&T’s.  The average GDC attendee, given the choice, will much prefer a free phone with a choice of cell service providers rather than being stuck with Verizon. Those who are already stuck with Verizon need the Droid, since they have no alternative.

Lesson for Google: you have a short time to certify Android as a worthy alternative to the iPhone. Once the iPhone is on Verizon’s network (should that come to pass), Android will be left without any advantages. Not to say Android is bad: the screen blows the iPhone’s away, the GPS is far stronger and the ability to link to Google’s services is reasonably cool. Both Android and iPhone suffer from severe, unexplained email problems compared to the Blackberry.

But, in the end, iPhone offers a bigger market to app programmers, and that makes all the difference. Runkeeper and TweetDeck are on the iPhone, so that will remain my phone of choice. Yes, there are worthy alternatives on Android, but there are fewer and their free versions are less usable.

There are a few surprises here. Chinese is a full 26% of our workload, by wordcount. One reason for that, as well as Russian’s place in the statistics, is that a couple of clients decided to translate their backlists into these languages. Another reason is that, for several of our clients, we are one of many translation houses working for them. Either our Chinese work was faster, better or they didn’t offer the language at all, as we were receiving quite a few more requests from them for Chinese than any other language.

It may well be that other houses are seeing more work from the standard French, Italian, German and Spanish combination, but here we’re working quite a bit on the expansion languages.

There was a poll last year that ranked games not by how many people bought a copy, but rather by how much time was actually spent playing them. World of Warcraft was first; Civilization was second.

Link to the Civ V website.

—The Na’vi’s system of hereditary rule proves that democracy is not universally applicable.
—Dr. Grace Augustine shows the weaknesses of intellectuals, which are not to be trusted.
—When (will) Westerners stop seeing foreign cultures as female and themselves as male?

October 1987. Edwin Steussy, 24, in India.

This is a photo recently rescued of me in India. I lived outside of the United States for about ten years, and this was the biggest adventure in many ways. This photo has been lost for over 20 years and just came back to me. The story is here.

Ordos, the Empty City

So, China has made $600 billion in infrastructure investment? Where has it gone? Is this one of the answers? Click here for the video – the report starts at 1:15 minutes in.

For the Gettysburg Address, it took 19 iterations and mangled it as much as you would expect.

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

…becomes…

We are one of the two continents, seven years ago, for a new country, the same proposal, the ancestors of free time, many of us, to create a single-point one four.

Take this as a lesson — this technology is not quite ready yet.

It’s certainly interesting food for thought, though I don’t take it very seriously. Smaller countries and cultures, like Mr. Heineken’s own Holland, have always felt pushed or sidelined by their larger neighbors. I see this map as a way of taking them down in size, so all groups have a “fair fight”.

Even if enacted (and how could that happen, pray tell?), I’d still expect the English-speakers to band together against the French-speakers, etc. etc. The Flemish, Hungarians and Finns would still be on the outskirts.

Map and subject courtesy of the Strange Maps blog, original here.