Amazing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GyWc-hhfYBk

Whatever the reason, she’s out.

How soon until someone does something with this video from North Korea?

http://youtu.be/pSWN6Qj98Iw

Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas on March 31, 2011, explaining why he was upgrading Tesla stock to “overweight” status and projecting sales of $9.5 billion by 2020, and declaring Tesla to be “America’s Fourth Auto-maker”:

The confluence of structural industry change, disruptive technology, changing consumer tastes and heightened national security creates an opportunity for significant new entrants in the global auto industry. California dreaming? We don’t think so. In our view, the conditions are ripe for a shake-up of a complacent, century-old industry heavily invested in the status quo of internal combustion. The risks are high. So is the opportunity. Enter Tesla.

That was then. Today the same Adam Jonas of Morgan Stanley slashed its estimate on Tesla and downgraded the stock to “underweight” status, saying electric vehicles are “not ready for prime time.”

The stock is in a swoon.

Yes, Morgan Stanley was an underwriter of the IPO.

Just a reminder that we’ll be doing a Newsweek Daily Beast Hangout on Google+ today at 4:30 Eastern time. Our guest will be Matias Duarte, the head of design for the Android project at Google. Matias is a really great guy with an interesting background — he studied fine arts in college, and aspired to become a painter — and if you’re an Android fan you’ll have a chance to talk to him directly. So please tune in.

I’m not talking about the abortion stuff, which was ridiculous. But I’m starting to see grumbling about the simple fact that Siri just doesn’t work all that well. In the latest pieces the writers aren’t willing to say, as Jordan Crook of TechCrunch did recently, that while Siri is disappointing, “in the end it’s my fault.”

Jason Kincaid on TechCrunch lashes out at Siri in his piece explaining why he likes the Galaxy Nexus better than the iPhone 4S. He calls Siri “completely underwhelming” and refuses to accept the fanboy rationalization that “Siri is just a beta product.”

Also: Beta, schmeta. Apple fans have repeatedly pointed out that Siri is being billed as a Beta by Apple, and so it shouldn’t be held to such high standards. In my mind Apple lost the ‘Beta’ fallback the moment it started running commercials promoting the feature — some people are buying an iPhone 4S exclusively because of Siri because it’s been so highly touted.

Then comes blistering write-up by Mat Honan on Gizmodo where he refers to Siri as “Apple’s broken promise” and calls it “a half-baked product,” writing:

Apple is the company that sells perfection. It’s a company that usually keeps its promises, and in its Siri ads, it promises far more than what it actually delivers. That’s not what any of us signed up for.

Honan also refuses to accept the line about Siri being a beta product, saying that you can’t call something beta but then advertise the hell out of it.

I’ve had a 4S for a few days and haven’t used it much. And a bunch of times I’ve tried to use it and it was not available.

I’m wondering what others are finding out. Has Apple over-promised and under-delivered?

My colleagues at Newsweek Daily Beast are trying to arrange some Google+ Hangouts with interesting tech industry folks. First one we’ve scheduled is this Wednesday, Dec. 7, at 4:30 p.m. East Coast time with Matias Duarte, a renowned computer interface designer who runs the user experience team for Android. I spoke with him recently during a visit to Google and hope to publish a Q&A from the talk very soon. He’s a fascinating guy who studied fine arts as an undergraduate and hoped to become a painter. Before joining Google he worked at Palm, Helio and Danger.

I’m really excited about the chance to meet via Google+ and have others join the conversation, so I hope you will take a minute to drop in on our chat. We’ll be talking about Ice Cream Sandwich, of course, and about the new Galaxy Nexus phone. But I am hoping to get Matias talking about his approach to design and where human computer interfaces might evolve in the future.

We have another exciting guest lined up for next week. Will tell you more about that later.

Which of these phones would you buy — the iPhone 4S or the Samsung (Google) Galaxy Nexus? If you saw them sitting side by side in the store, which one would you take home with you?

I finally got an iPhone 4S last night, and now can do side-by-side comparisons with the Galaxy Nexus I picked up at Google a couple weeks ago. First impressions: the camera on the iPhone 4S is amazing, and definitely better than the camera on the Nexus. (I still can’t fathom why Google and Samsung put a 5-MP camera in the Nexus when the Galaxy S II has an 8-MP camera.)

The feature I really wanted to check out is Siri, and I haven’t had much time yet. A few 4S owners I’ve talked to say they don’t use it much. But even in my few early tests it seems Siri is better than any of the alternatives on Android. (Vlingo, Skyvi, Iris, Cluzee.)

My other immediate impression is more visceral. The Nexus is much bigger, but also lighter. The screen is brighter. At first I thought it was too big, but over the past two weeks I’ve come to like having all the screen real estate.

Apple fans claim the iPhone 4S is the perfect size, because you reach every part of the screen with your thumb. I get that. But I think the iPhone is starting to look too small. I was surprised this week when one of my neighbors, a petite woman, said she’s frustrated with the small screen on her 4S. She tried out the Nexus and liked it. And her hands are really small. Maybe the ability to do everything with one thumb is overrated — or, at least, maybe it’s outweighed by the benefits of a bigger screen.

My technique with comparing phones is just to have a bunch of them lying around, all connected to Google Voice. I have all of them available and just see which one, over time, is the one I most naturally pick up and want to use. I try not to think about it, and just see which one do I grab and throw in my pocket when I’m headed out, which one is the one I pick up to check email in the morning, that kind of thing.

Recently I had a Nokia Lumia 800 running Windows Phone in the mix — and every time the phones rang, the Nokia was the one I picked up. The design is just really nice, and it feels great in your hand. I’m doing an interview with the head of design at Nokia next week, and I’m anxious to talk to him about the Lumia 800. It really is a gorgeous device, and the Windows interface is really fresh and different.

Another story for today’s hungry Beast — YouTube doing a major overhaul of its look and feel.

The real lesson around the Carrier IQ story is that soon everything we use will be spying on us. My argument on the Beast is that as long we’re going to have these feeding frenzies every time someone finds out about some new snooping technique, we might also start to realize that this is the new reality we’ve created. It’s only going to get worse when the “Internet of things” (sensors in everything) becomes a reality. Welcome to the digital panopticon. One funny footnote: When I wrote the Beast story, this morning, I ended by predicting that soon someone in Congress would recognize the opportunity to generate publicity and announce some kind of inquiry. I didn’t realize it would happen so quickly. Thank you, Al Franken.