200 POSTS!

For my 200th post I decided to talk about the holidays. And some of my favorite posts of this week

Well, sort of…

Apple's Black Friday sales "supposedly" leaked.

Here it is.

I JUST REALLY HOPE THIS IS TRUE!

Google Chrome OS WIll Be Unveiled In Two Days

Surprise! Friday's report that the Chrome OS "launch" for this week was almost true: Google's OS will be shown in "complete overview" on Thursday. In other words, we'll finally get to see it.

According to Techcrunch this isn't is a launch, but a chance to give us a first look at the OS, and for Google to detail the real launch plans (for now, we're still hanging on the "late 2010" projection from the initial announcement):

The plan is to give some technical background information as well as show off some demos, we're told. More notably, they will be giving a "complete overview" of the new OS, which they say will launch next year.

Knowing what Chrome OS will look like is only half the fun anyway—three months after it was announced, we still don't really know what the hell it is, or how it's going to work. [Techcrunch]

Samsung Behold II Non-Review: Oh God, the Ugly

Samsung's Behold II is the most impressively ugly Android phone in existence. The custom interface is so bad, so gaudy and so confusing it turned my brains into ooze.

TouchWiz is the first custom Android interface that's worse than the standard one, and shows what kind of horrible things emerge when Samsung's interface designers are left unchecked. Here's how I think the design process went, roughly: The designers dropped a bunch of acid, stared at old Atari games while binging on Taco Bell, then proceeded to shit all over the phone for hours and hours.

If it's not inherently ugly, like text input screens with awful '80s neon orange and blue, it's gratuitous and redundant, like the 3D app cube. Or an entirely separate menu of Samsung icons for apps. And some things, like moving the slide-out menu to the left instead of its traditional place on the bottom, actually work against the way you use the phone—the menu gets in the way now, since I'd often bring it out by accident while changing between desktops. It's just... terrible. Worse, Home Switcher, an app that reverts phones back to the stock Android home screen, can't erase Samsung's disgusting mojo. The Behold II would be 10x better with a vanilla build of Android 1.6.

Even the phone hardware is a mess. The front of the phone is an orgy of buttons: seven, to be precise, not including a d-pad, with a dedicated button for the app cube. The lock key isn't just on the side but it's kind of hidden, flush against the bezel. The USB port is weirdly shoved on top. And, uh, what the hell is up with the back plate?

Two things are good about the Behold II—Samsung's custom camera setup comes straight out of their point-and-shoot cameras, and is packed with features, like extensive manual controls and burst shooting, and it's very fast, unlike the rest of the phone. The other is the AMOLED display which is nice, though marred by the same kind of bluish tint as Samsung's other AMOLED Android phone, the Moment.

Take a good long look at the Behold II though: It's a warning to other developers what not to do, and a scary look at one dark possible future for Android, in its infinite permutations. Not just deep fragmentation of the platform, but customized crimes against humanity, perpetrated in the name of Android. It makes me want to cry, except that my brain's too mushy to make my eyes work.