Ben Bajarin:

Carriers own a cell tower that they upgrade to provide faster service and broader access. That’s about it. They used to have much more differentiation than they do today. Some had proprietary devices or solutions. Some were known for better quality or were the only ones available. Those days are long past in most cases. Pricing is a particularly strategy that T-Mobile and Sprint are trying to compete with, but they have simply embraced their “dumb pipe-ness” sooner than other carriers.

He’s right.

BlackBerry, once a must-have device for every business executive and government official because of its pioneering secure email service, has hemorrhaged market share to Apple Inc’s iPhone and rival devices running on Google Inc’s Android software.

Clearly BlackBerry doesn’t see competing with Apple will work, so it’s going after the low-end of the market to boost its sales.

SMS startup Nexmo is finally launching its voice service at Mobile World Congress. The new set of application programming interfaces basically allows any app developer to embed calling features into his apps and set up voice services in the cloud.

Watch this space.

Such a great rock band.

In short, Apple’s focus is the product and what’s best for the consumer. This is a great article with lots of insight from Steve Jobs.

And what you can see is that on the 16GB model of the Galaxy S5, half of the on-board storage is used up before the owner even turns on the phone.

That’s just awful.

As it turns out, this isn’t a native Windows Phone app — and it wasn’t made by Redfin. It was developed by Microsoft, by packaging up Redfin’s mobile website in the form of an installable app.

In fact, the existence of the Redfin app for Windows Phone was a surprise to Redfin.

So, Microsoft has gone from irrelevant to slimy and irrelevant.

Congrats to everyone at Mariner Software—24 years deserves recognition.

As Om Malik points out, Bitcoin wasn’t the first.

Apple has released an update fixing the SSL encryption issue for both Mavericks and Mountain Lion. In addition, OS X Mavericks 10.9.2 also:

• Adds the ability to make and receive FaceTime audio calls
• Adds call waiting support for FaceTime audio and video calls
• Adds the ability to block incoming iMessages from individual senders
• Improves the accuracy of unread counts in Mail
• Resolves an issue that prevented Mail from receiving new messages from certain providers
• Improves AutoFill compatibility in Safari
• Fixes an issue that may cause audio distortion on certain Macs
• Improves reliability when connecting to a file server using SMB2
• Fixes an issue that may cause VPN connections to disconnect
• Improves VoiceOver navigation in Mail and Finder

You can download the updates using Software Update on your Mac. More information on Mavericks 10.9.2 and Security Update 2014-001 for Mountain Lion can be found on Apple’s Web site.

So many things I didn’t know.

Gestrument is a powerful tool for the professional musician but also an intuitive app for the beginner. Gestrument lets you delve into the “musical DNA” of a genre, artist or song. With full control over all musical parameters you can play and compose music with just the swipe of your finger.

Visit www.gestrument.com to see Gestrument perform music by Meshuggah, Richard Devine, Claude Debussy or see keyboard wizard Jordan Rudess from Dream Theater demo his own preset.

Apart from our artist we have videos and presets showing how to play for instance Dubstep, Cool Jazz, String Quartet and Indian Raga – all with just the swipe of your finger.

Gestrument is developed by contemporary classical composer Jesper Nordin and software developer Jonatan Liljedahl – Kymatica (the developer behind AudioShare, Sector, AUFX, NordBeat, BitWiz and many more iOS music apps).

If you have any questions at all, read this article on Macworld. Dan Moren, Dan Miller and
Serenity Caldwell did a great job answering common questions.

Fantastic article by Daniel Eran Dilger.

We shouldn’t really be surprised with any of this, but how are we supposed to move forward when things like this are in place?

Steve Kovach got some time with the S5.

Netflix has agreed to pay one of the largest broadband providers in the United States Comcast Corp for faster speeds, throwing open the possibility that more content companies will have to shell out for better service.

This seems to set a bad precedent. Maybe I don’t see the bigger picture, but I’m uneasy about this going forward.

ReSound LiNX offers a superior sound experience, setting new standards for hearing aid performance.

This Made for iPhone hearing aid provides direct sound streaming, personalized to your every need.

Mic Wright:

The reasons I make these comparisons between me – a writer-turned-CEO who is hoping to upgrade his pot to piss in – and Zuckerberg – one of the visionary founders of his generation – is to ask this question: why do so many pundits presume that Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t know what he’s doing? This is a guy who persuaded a group of some of the Valley’s most respected investors to back him, a guy who managed to navigate law suits and scaling issues to build a company that is now one of the big four tech companies beside Google, Apple and Microsoft.

This is exactly what pisses me off when people talking about Apple. Analysts and pundits always think they know better than Tim Cook. If that’s true, why aren’t they running a billion dollar company? The answer is simple—they aren’t qualified.

An ebook for iPad and OS X, designed to help you learn CSS transitions and animations through interactive examples.

This is a kickstarter project by Vicki Murley, who spent more than 10 years at Apple working on the Safari web browser and as the Safari Technologies Evangelist.

I have a tremendous amount of respect for Steve Jobs and everything he did in his life, so I wanted to put together an issue of The Loop Magazine dedicated to Steve and his accomplishments. What better day to publish it than on Steve’s birthday.

I gathered together people that worked with Steve and those that were influenced by his extraordinary life. Former Apple executive, Richard Kerris, tells of introducing Jobs to The Rolling Stones to show off iTunes before it was released to the public; Don Melton, head of Safari at Apple, tells of a number of interactions with Jobs; Industry analyst, Tim Bajarin, recounts how he watched Steve grow into the showman we all saw on stage; Actor Matthew Modine played John Scully in the recently released “Jobs” movie and talks about that experience; Matt Gemmell believes we’ve all met Steve through his work; and Jonathan Zufi talks about why he set out to photograph as many Apple products as he could to publish “Iconic,” a design book about Apple.

You can download The Loop Magazine from the App Store on your iPhone or iPad.

I don’t subscribe to many newsletters, but Dave Pell’s Next Draft is definitely worth it. The newsletter is free and a great daily read.

The Air Force is replacing 5,000 of its BlackBerry devices with Apple smartphones, in a broader move to eradicate the legacy devices in favor of more modern commercial technologies.

I wonder if the BlackBerry CEO will yell at the US military like he did with the CEO of T-Mobile.

Explore the majesty of nature in breath-taking 3D with Professor Brian Cox as your personal tour guide.

This is such an amazing app. Interesting note: This is built on the same platform that powers The Loop Magazine. The same developers built both apps.

Wow, this is great.

Remember the negative film about Samsung I mentioned the other day—now Samsung is trying to get newspaper coverage of the film killed too.

With more than 120 million smartphones sold in the U.S. in 2013, Apple’s iPhone accounted for nearly half of those, taking a 45 percent share in its home market last year, new data released by the NPD Group on Thursday reveals.

Samsung had 26%.

Om is a good friend and I’ll really miss his writing.

Benedict Evans has some interesting thoughts on Google. Of note: this is one of the only articles I’ve read on Google lately without using the word “creepy.”