The brainwashed brown-noser pens a vicious critique of Apple’s new maps app. Apparently he just noticed that the software is terrible:

In short, Maps is an appalling first release. It may be the most embarrassing, least usable piece of software Apple has ever unleashed.

Question remains: How did Pogue not notice this when he was preparing his original glowing review? The one in which he said the new maps app was one of the “chief attractions” of the new phone?

Did Pogue write his original review without even looking at the maps app? Or did he know how bad it was and just neglect to mention it for fear of pissing off Apple?

It’s hard to believe any reviewer could not look at the maps app at all. The new maps app was a big deal. It was the kind of thing a reviewer would have high on his or her list of things to check out.

It’s also the kind of thing that an editor at the Times might get pissed about when he sees that everyone is ranting about these messed-up maps and the situation is so bad that someone has even created a Tumblr to mock them and yet his own world-famous and notoriously Apple-conflicted reviewer failed to notice any problem.

So, maybe that.

To hell with the weird remake of REO Speedwagon’s “Keep On Lovin You.” Here’s the song that captures the essence of RIM.

http://youtu.be/ZDN9y2vTdUs

Much is being about the problems with the new maps issue on iOS 6. The best piece I’ve seen so far is this one on The Verge. The key angle to this story, the one that might resonant with customers, is this: “Apple’s decision to swap out Google Maps is a rare example of the company openly placing its own interests above those of its customers,” write Nilay Patel and Adi Robertson.

I’m not sure how rare that is, but anyway. I don’t expect to see anyone getting out of line at the Apple store just because the maps app has some flaws.

But the Mapocalypse does raise a question: If the new maps app is truly this bad, how come none of those glowing first-round reviews made any mention of this fact? Thousands of words were devoted to the thinness, the lightness, the wonderful way it feels when you hold it in your hand, but there was hardly a quibble about maps.

Mossberg did the best job of covering his ass, writing that maps was the “biggest drawback” and “in other ways a step backward” — but he also pointed out that the new maps app “has one big advantage” over its predecessor, meaning turn-by-turn navigation.

Scott Stein of CNET also quibbled a bit wasn’t too upset, saying, “Odds are, you’ll own a couple of maps apps and swap back and forth.”

Pogue called the new maps app one of the “chief attractions” of the new iOS.

MG Siegler of TechCrunch wrote, “Testing the maps these last few days, I’ve come away impressed.”

Jim Dalrymple of Loop Insight wrote, “I really should mention Maps, Apple’s new turn-by-turn direction app on the iPhone. I love it. I used in Cupertino and I used it at home — it worked equally well in both places.”

Ed Baig of USA Today touted the new turn-by-turn navigation, saying “Apple has generally done a very good job with its own turn-by-turn feature,” and made no mention of any problems with maps.

Gruber’s review ran several thousand words but made no mention of maps at all. (Though yesterday, after people started howling, Gruber conceded that, ahem, the new maps app is “a downgrade.”

This is weird, isn’t it? How could all of these top reviewers have early access to the device, test it thoroughly, and not notice anything wrong with the maps app?

I’m sure there’s a good explanation.

Hell, why not throw in TVs, refrigerators and microwave ovens? Sue everybody, right? Punitive damages.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhjBlPucpd0

Lenovo just leapt past Apple to become the #2 smartphone seller in China, after Samsung. Guess what? Lenovo’s phone, the K800, looks exactly like the iPhone. Meaning: rectangular, with a glass screen, and a phone icon that looks like a phone and a mail icon that looks like an envelope. This must not stand! Especially since Apple’s share in China has fallen to 10 percent, despite the fact that the iPhone is the original smartphone and the best smartphone and can do magical, wonderful things. To be sure, Apple will regain share when the new iPhone 5 ships, since it will have a slightly longer screen, which will make it massively, magically more magical and spark a new boom in sales. Nevertheless, Lenovo must be punished.

Ah, remember the good old days, by which I mean November 2010, less than two years ago, when there was no bubble and all those crazy valuations in the secondary market made perfect sense because, as John Doerr pointed out here, Zynga was “the most profitable, the fastest growing and has the happiest customers” of any company KPCB had ever invested in. Yay! Back then Zynga was valued at $6 billion and it seemed like the sky was the limit.

Cut to today: Zynga is valued at $2.5 billion. The stock is down 70 percent from the IPO. When you read about Zynga it’s stuff like this saying they should sell if they can find a buyer. And when you read about John Doerr, it’s stuff like this, talking about the “end of an era,” and how these days KPCB looks like a clown running across a minefield.

For me the sign of the end times was captured in this photo of John Doerr trying to look hip by wearing a hoodie (a la Zuck) and announcing the social fund in Oct. 2010.

Oh well. Just because Zynga is struggling doesn’t mean the whole investment thesis was wrong. I mean there’s still Groupon and Facebook. Oh wait.

The Onion strikes again. Much love to Dave Thackeray for passing this along. Made my day. Sort of.

I know the Great Man Himself once said that the iPad was the perfect size and that 7-inch tablets were “tweeners” (too big to be a phone, too small to be a tablet) and thus would be “DOA.”

But I’ve been using the Google Nexus 7 for a few days and it has already become my go-to device. It’s small enough to toss in a bag, and small enough that you can sit with it in a cafe and not have this huge thing out on the table in front of you, small enough to keep on the table by your bed and just grab to take a quick look at email — and yet big enough that the screen and keyboard are comfortable.

And the Nexus 7 costs only $200, versus the new iPad, which starts at $500 and goes up over $829. What’s not to love?

Now Bloomberg and others are reporting that Apple is indeed defying the Great Man’s words and working on a smaller tablet. It’s a great idea, and a smaller iPad, priced to move, will be a huge hit.

One thought: Apple as it exists today is so powerful and so successful in the mobile (post-PC) space that that the only tablets that can even remotely be considered to be credible competitors to the iPad are the Kindle Fire and the Nexus 7, and both those devices are priced so low that their makers at best break even and possibly lose money on each device.

In other words: Even with tablet products that are sold at or below the cost of making them, these guys still can’t knock off the iPad.

Another thought: It seems to me that the form factor that needs to die is the one we today call the smartphone. Why not just put phone capability into a 7-inch tablet like my Galaxy Nexus and let that be my phone, with some kind of Bluetooth earbud or wired headphone to go with it? And/or build telephony functionality into your Google Glasses?

The whole idea of having this phone-sized thing that you hold up to your ear, this slab of plastic and glass with some kind of keypad (physical or virtual) on it — isn’t this just another example of another way in which we’ve created digital tools that simply mimic the tools we used in the analog world?

Mobile phones have evolved lot since this one. Basically over the course of 40 years they’ve become smaller and smaller, until now, in reality, the “phone” part of a smartphone is really just an app on a tiny mobile computer.

The phone itself has disappeared, but we cling to the name, and the form factor, because we like to stick with what seems familiar. As John Gruber points out, smartphones aren’t really phones at all. They’re portable computers. Apple called the iPhone the iPhone in part because that’s what people thought they wanted, but the name itself was a bit of misdirection, Gruber says.

But what is the point of a portable computer with a 3.5-inch (or 4.3-inch, or 4.7-inch) screen? That device is the one that starts looking like a “tweener” — caught between embedded/wearable devices, and tablets.

I can envision a time, maybe not so far from now, when I won’t carry a “phone” at all. If my Nexus 7 could make phone calls, I’d be there today.

I just had coffee with Tom Thai, who runs marketing at Bluefin Labs, which is one of the most exciting companies I’ve come across in a long time. Bluefin sells a social TV analytics service that tracks what people are saying on Facebook, Twitter and other social sites about the shows and commercials they see on TV.

It’s extraordinarily powerful stuff and it’s catching on like crazy. Bluefin is still a pretty young company — its first product was launched last August and the company has only 45 employees — but they’ve already signed up more than 40 TV networks as customers, which is basically everybody in the US.

Bluefin is also now reaching out to ad agencies and in some cases directly to brands, which can use Bluefin to see what people are saying about the commercials. Customers include PepsiCo, Kraft, Mars and Estee Lauder. It’s a subscription model. You pay based on the number of seats you’re using.

The power of Bluefin is that networks and advertisers can listen to their customers and respond by reshaping sitcoms or changing ad campaigns based on what you’re hearing. Another place where there will be huge and obvious impact is political campaigns. This fall’s election will be a big test of Bluefin’s capabilities.

Bluefin grew out of a project at MIT that uses incredibly sophisticated machine intelligence and was originally intended to sift through massive amounts of data to study language acquisition. Deb Roy, the co-founder and CEO, is a tenured faculty member at MIT and director of the Cognitive Machines Group inside the MIT Media Lab. He created the algorithms as part of what he called the “Human Speechome Project.”

If you want to learn more, you can check out a very good article in MIT’s Technology Review about Bluefin.

And if you want to have your mind blown, go see Deb Roy’s talk from the TED conference in March 2011. He brought down the house, and deservedly so.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RE4ce4mexrU

Venture capitalist and longtime Valley guy Bill Davidow pens a thoughtful piece in the Atlantic about how values have declined in tech since the days of Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard. In a nutshell: In the old days the emphasis was on helping customers; today it’s on exploiting them. Google, Facebook and Zynga get zinged. Not that they care.