I’ll admit it, I laughed.

I’ll be honest, I had no idea you could do this.

[Via DF]

I’ve never owned a V, but that looks really nice.

Sounds to me like this is a no-brainer purchase.

Our team has been working hard to bring your most-requested features to the Gmail app for iOS. Today, we’re excited to add three new improvements to that list of updates: full notification center support, the ability to send messages from your alternate email addresses and an improved login experience.

Rags Srinivasan:

If Apple sees no change in total number of units sold from the current quarter, this ASP bump will still result in a minimum additional profit of $200 million. If you include net new purchases and higher percentage up-sells, this number could easily become $1 billion in additional profit.

A good bit of humor on a Monday. I especially like the “Find My Socks” feature.

The report mentions Facebook and Amazon as potential buyers, but on Sunday several people close to RIM dismissed the news as “a silly fantasy,” and “one of the most ridiculous ideas I have heard in a while.”

The Globe and Mail’s headline says that “RIM dismisses report of splitting firm in two,” but that’s not actually true. It’s unnamed sources that said that.

So if they’re not going to split the company, how about just shutting it down.

Marketing Land:

After seeing yet another “hands-on” review of the Microsoft Surface tablet, I thought it would be interesting to shed more light on what exactly the journalists who assembled in Hollywood this week for the Surface launch event actually got to do with the tablets. In short, not a lot. Come along as I explain the hands-off reality of what I saw.

Nice to see someone calling a spade a spade. No matter what you’ve read, none of the assembled media got any real “hands on” with the Surface.

Our Mac and iOS support has now become so mainstream that we realized we just don’t need to keep Mac news on its own blog, so we won’t be posting here any longer.

The Verge:

In US federal court this evening, Judge Richard Posner just ruled that the case of Apple v. Motorola will be dismissed in its entirety. The case, in which Apple alleged Motorola was in violation of four of its patents and Motorola was left with one claim in return (the patent counts had originally been higher on both sides), had been in litigation since 2010, most recently with a hearing in Chicago this past Wednesday.

Renena Joy talked to iPhone in Canada about how she uses the iPad as a learning tool for her daughter.

David Roth:

I would argue that, in many instances, the record companies’ desire to force people to buy (or rent) music in a way that contradicts their desires as consumers “justifies” (in the users’ minds) the continued stealing.

Great post.

Om Malik:

Google is very likely to launch a cloud services platform at its annual developer conference, Google I/O next week in San Francisco. It was one of the topics of discussion in the hallways of our Structure 2012 conference. We have since confirmed with multiple sources who are familiar with Google’s plans which include a more comprehensive offering that its current app engine and storage offerings.

This will be very interesting.

Many thanks to Sidecar.me for sponsoring The Loop’s RSS feed this week.

Sidecar re-imagines the traditional phone call for your smartphone.

Sidecar lets you call and share:

• See What I See Video: Share amazing real-time videos.

• Photos: Snap brilliant pictures, or share photos from the phone’s gallery.

• Locations: See where you are in relation to others, and share locations.

• Contact: Information: Pass along and integrate contacts from their phone’s address book.

• Whisper Text: Send a private text message to another Sidecar user during a call.

And the price is unbeatable:

• Sidecar users can call each other anywhere in the world for free

• Sidecar users can call regular phones numbers in the US or Canada for free over Wi-Fi.

Download the app for free in the App Store:

Nick Bilton:

Why? Well, I didn’t knock their baby teeth out, that’s for sure. Instead, I said something slightly negative about an Apple product.

First of all, when you title your follow-up article “When Apple Fanboys Attack,” you’re probably going to get some shit.

Second, it wasn’t a negative article about Apple that I had a problem with. It’s the fact that you seemed to ignore all of the creation possibilities on the iPad.

You said:

Although there are hundreds of third party products available, Apple doesn’t seem to want the iPad to be a creator, but more of a consumer.

That’s just not true.

Nick appeared to narrow the focus of what he considers creating content means in his article today to typing. Clearly you can do more than that.

I asked Nick on Twitter if he had a chance to actually use the Surface¹, but he didn’t respond.

Update: Nick Bilton changed the headline of his article from “When Apple Fanboys Attack” to “When Zealots Attack”

Matthew Panzarino:

By a huge margin, the number one request by these developers was for Apple to allow them to respond directly to reviews on the App Store.

I agree.

Doug Pasnak, Cruftbox (via Harry C Marks, Curious Rat):

To ask that every piece of modern electronics is designed to allow the tiny fraction of hackers to upgrade is the height of hubris, unreasonable, and a huge imposition on everyone else that has no desire to ever crack the case. All that ‘upgradability’ ends up making the product cost more and be more susceptible to failure. Catering to the fringe is not the way to make good products. Making the best product you can for a low price is the way to make good products, even if it means eliminating upgradability and home repair.

This goes further than Doug’s point about the Retina Display-equipped MacBook Pro, which has been criticized for its lack of upgradability. It also speaks to the criticism of iOS (and, to an increasing extent, OS X) by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Cory Doctrow and others, who tell us that big, bad Apple is dumbing down the computing experience for us by abstracting us from things like file systems.

Clearly many consumers are happy with the tradeoff, which makes for easier use from a wider swath of people who don’t want to be concerned with the myriad fussy intricacies of computer use. It’s not Apple’s fault that the vast majority of consumers who want iPads don’t give a damn about hacking it. Apple’s simply responding to a market need.

MG Siegler, Massive Greatness:

I get it. I really do. What I don’t get is why no one calls them on this? Their stances are often nonsensical bullshit with no basis in reality. The Microsoft Surface just made the MacBook Air and the iPad look obsolete? Really? It would be an insane thing to say that an un-launched product with no release date, no price, no real app support, and which Microsoft was clearly afraid to let journalists actually play with, would harm one of those Apple products. Gizmodo is saying it will render both obsolete.

Uh, plenty of us call them on their bullshit, MG. Jim did it here on the Loop right after Jesus Diaz posted his ridiculously sycophantic garbage. And heck, taking Gizmodo to task for lousy analysis is almost a weekly sport on my Angry Mac Bastards podcast. But good on you for calling it like it is. Welcome to the club.

I don’t think we should discount the Surface – if there’s one company out there with the wherewithal to take on Apple in the tablet space, it’s Microsoft. But Gizmodo’s early crowing about Microsoft as the new winner is utterly foolish.

TabToolkit now includes a Tab Store right inside the app, with instant access to hundreds of officially licensed, full-score transcriptions with complete notation for each guitar, bass, drum, and keyboard part, as well as vocal tracks with lyrics.

I’ve been using TabToolkit since it was first released. Love this app.

This is so cool. Check out the video.

My latest Techpinions column looking at Microsoft’s Surface strategy compared to Apple’s:

From what I’ve seen, it seems to me that Microsoft is trying to do a similar type of dance with the Surface that it did with previous tablets. The company is trying to convince consumers that this device can be a computer and a tablet at the same time. Based on the sales of the iPad, I’m not sure that’s what consumers really want.

Macworld:

Smile on Thursday released TextExpander 4, the latest incarnation of its typing shortcut utility. Among the new features are additional options for “fill-in-the-blank” snippets, fill-ins for multi-line text fields, dropdown menus for multiple choices, and optional text blocks that you can trigger as needed when expanding a text snippet.But because TextExpander 4 can’t adhere to Apple’s recently-enforced sandboxing guidelines, the new version of the app isn’t available in the Mac App Store.

TextExpander is an indispensable piece of software for me.

Trevor Johns, on Google’s Android Developers blog:

User reviews on Google Play are great for helping people discover quality apps and give feedback to developers and other potential app users. But what about when developers want to give feedback to their users? Sometimes a user just needs a helping hand, or perhaps a new feature has been added and the developer wants to share the good news.

That’s why we’re adding the ability for Google Play developers to respond to reviews from the Google Play Android Developer Console. Developers can gather additional information, provide guidance, and — perhaps most importantly — let users know when their feature requests have been implemented.

This is something iOS app developers have hoped, dreamed and prayed for since the day the App Store launched. It’ll be interesting to see how many Android developers end up creating problems for themselves with less-than-diplomatic responses or all out flamewars with testy app buyers.

Darren Pauli:

The app, dubbed paycardreader, will skim card numbers and expiry dates, along with transactions and merchant IDs, and was successfully tested against a German PayPass Mastercard.

I haven’t used Drobo since the first version, but this looks really nice.