The Verge on WSJ-reported rumors that the new iPhone will have a 4-inch screen:

A move up from the iPhone’s persistent 3.5-inch form factor has started to feel overdue in the current climate of 4.7- and 4.8-inch flagship Android smartphones, so this may finally be a sign of the Cupertino company relenting and giving in to popular demand.

The iPhone outsold all Android phones at AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon last quarter. Apple may be increasing the iPhone’s screen size, but it won’t be because the public are demanding it.

The Verge reports on some recent Apple-Samsung legal wranglings:

In a recent filing, Cupertino's attorneys accused Samsung of allowing large amounts of evidence to be destroyed in what it paints as a pattern Samsung has followed across several different lawsuits. The motion itself is heavily redacted, but in what we can read Apple cites prior cases from 2010 and 2011 where Samsung was sanctioned for continuing its policy of deleting emails every two weeks — even though it had an obligation to preserve them.

… .

Unsurprisingly, Samsung sees things differently, characterizing Apple's claims as "baseless" and "speculation."

That's rich. Of course Apple has to speculate about the content of the emails: Samsung's destruction of said emails is what requires the speculation! If Samsung hadn't destroyed the evidence, Apple wouldn't have to speculate.

In other legal news, Apple has yet to respond to Samsung's repeated requests for why Apple keeps hitting itself.

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The sleeve itself costs $99, and as far as I can tell, there’s no monthly fee associated with the 4G wireless service. Will they sell ads that interrupt the service somehow? How on earth can they make money? And if they can do this, why can’t Apple?

It was only a few days ago that Patrick Rhone and Pat Hines were touting the benefits of Republic Wireless’ $19-a-month, unlimited-everything smartphone plan. Essentially, Republic piggy-backs off your broadband service, working similarly to FaceTime, but for all calls rather than just video calls. Such a service has two problems: you need to consistently be around wi-fi networks to really reap the benefits, and the $19 a month price tag doesn’t include what you have to spend on broadband.

If, on the other hand, you had a constant, free 4G LTE connection, both those problems go away. Apple (or any other company) could essentially become a carrier without the paperwork. That’s interesting.

Horace Dediu, of Asymco fame:

The Critical Path has been an exceptionally well received podcast. It has an audience of hundreds of thousands of thoughtful listeners. Many of the concepts covered can and should be reviewed in a medium that can be referenced and annotated and shared. For this reason I would like to publish edited transcripts of the podcasts as an eBook. This will be an edited and tagged transcript of the first year of The Critical Path.

I don’t think I’ve listened to any other podcast (or, really, anything else at all) so consistently insightful and surprising as The Critical Path. It’s $25 for the (DRM-free) e-book, and $10 more for the printed (and signed) version.

Jonathan Weilbaecher of The Flick Cast on The Avengers “record-breaking” box office performance:

You read that correct, The Avengers made an estimated $200.3 Million [sic] this weekend at the Box Office. For reference the next closest film was Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 which brought in over $169 Million in its opening frame. Kudos to me for the prediction last week.

There is a fitting symmetry for Marvel this week, as it was the original Spider-Man movie in 2001 that was the first to breach the $100 Million Dollar [sic] plateau. In the twelve years since that first triple digit weekend five of the films to achieve the mark were based on Marvel properties, the most of any single franchise.

The thing you have to keep in mind with the litany of box office records that appear to fall with every new summer blockbuster season is how meaningless they all are. Inflation in ticket prices, which has accelerated all the more with the 3D surcharge, means that virtually every year these numbers will get bigger. This isn’t even taking into account the fact that, as the population grows and more theaters open, of course these movies will (and should) make more money.

It used to be that 2000+ theaters was a wide opening. Then studios started cracking the 3000-theater mark (so-called “super wide”).

The Avengers opened in 4,349 theaters. I guess that’s “super-duper-wide”.

That’s not to say that an awful lot of people didn’t go see The Avengers this past weekend. Just that, when The Avengers 2 comes out in a few years, and breaks the records all over again, it’s not quite as meaningful as you might think.

Via Shawn Blanc.

Just so you don’t think I disagree with every single thing Ben Brooks right, I think he’s nailed it here:

Where I do see a need, is for better Markdown support in iOS text editors. Specifically in getting some of the Markdown keys to the top layer (such as the asterisk and hyphen keys) — that’s something that is problematic because of the iPad keyboard, not because Markdown users need more help.

I love iA Writer (for iPhone and Mac — I haven’t had the pleasure on an iPad), but I’d love it even more if it would replace the typical punctuation keys in the top row of the soft keyboard with Markdown-specific punctuation.

Dan Shapiro, describing his email list-serv project “The Best Thing This Year”, in which 365 writers get one post a year, and only one:

“Sometimes restrictions can be inspiring, and self-control can create great things,” said Shapiro. “And so I asked myself – how fascinating would it be if you could hear from thousands of people about the best thing they’ve done, and share your best work with a broad audience — but you could only do it once a year?  If you only have one bullet, you’re going to aim carefully.”

I eagerly await all the tech writers decrying this as a “stunt” and a “gimmick”. What a terribly arbitrary restriction!

John Gruber, on The Avengers:

It really offers the best of what theatrical big-budget blockbusters can offer. Effects that demand a big screen, and laughs that are best shared with a packed house.

When I was in film school (the worst possible beginning to any anecdote), I had a professor who berated students whenever they talked about getting the “cinema” experience with DVD. The equivalent now, of course, would be Blu-ray (and soon, Blu-ray 3D, and then the HD feed they beam into your head). It doesn’t matter how good the picture quality gets, or how big your screen is, if you’re not in a theater, watching the film collectively, you’re missing out on a big part of the experience. If the film industry is interested in fighting the effects of piracy, those are the experiences they should be cultivating.

Anyone want to lay odds on whether or not Amazon is an NDP client? If so, they’re certainly getting their money’s worth:

This current firestorm around the Kindle Fire numbers is a perfect example of how mistaking shipments for sales leads the market to incorrect and faulty conclusions about trends and opportunities. In this case my friends at IDC reported that the Fire shipped 750k units in Q1 2012 following the introduction of the Fire in Q4 2011 when 4.8 million units shipped. (NPD DisplaySearch reported 5 million shipped in Q4.) That’s a total of 5.5 million shipments over the first two quarters of its product life (please remember that number). While it may appear that sales for the Fire fell off a cliff in Q1 that would only be the case if shipments actually equaled sales. And since they don’t, any analysis that might indicate the Fire is losing ground is fundamentally flawed, especially since the Fire is only through two quarters of its life. 

I think NPD is being a bit disingenuous here. Yes, shipments aren’t sales; they’re a superset of sales. In most normal instances, shipments will be greater than the number of sales. The only time this won’t be the case is when there’s a build-up in the retail channel from too large a shipment in a previous quarter (i.e., the things are sitting in a warehouse or in inventory somewhere), and this most definitely isn’t a good thing.

Even if NDP’s actual sales numbers are correct (3.7 million Fires sold in the holiday quarter, followed up by 1.8 million Fires sold in the most recent quarter), these still aren’t heartening numbers for an Amazon executive. In an absolute sense, they’re selling an entry level device at less than half the price point of an iPad at about a tenth the rate (11.9 million iPads in the most recent quarter). This is down from the holiday quarter in which they sold about 25% as many Kindle Fires as iPads. You expect a drop from the holiday quarter, but, again, for comparison’s sake, Apple experienced only a 25% drop from the holiday quarter (and that’s with their supply constrained — Apple’s selling literally as many iPads as they can make), whereas the Kindle experienced a greater-than-50% drop.

Whatever way you decide to slice up the numbers, the Kindle Fire is not doing well. That doesn’t mean it’s a failure, and it doesn’t mean it can’t still be a success. But it’s definitely not the case you can’t argue (contra NDP) that the Fire is losing ground.

Via Ben Brooks.

Paul Santos describes an e-ink lover’s worst nightmare:

To put it short. The Kindle eReader has dropped out of bed. It has fallen beyond the wildest dreams of Amazon.com’s management. They never told it to the market, but this is reality. I have proof, and the proof is undeniable. The drop in Kindle eReader sales came with the introduction of the Kindle Fire, and the cannibalization has been nothing short of stunning, massive. Why do I say this? Well, Amazon.com has slowed down its demand for Kindle eReader e-ink screens to near zero since December 2011, the month after the Kindle Fire was introduced. Basically at that point Amazon.com had enough Kindle eReaders’ screens on hand to fill demand for at least 4 months straight.

Amazon could have had a fantastic run building the world’s best dedicated reading device (similarly to how Apple’s committed to continuing to build the world’s best music-playing devices, despite the massive success and cannibalization by iOS devices). But they saw the future, and the future was general-use tablets. Admirably, they were willing to switch horses mid-stream. Unfortunately, they chose to do so with a commoditized piece of junk.

It looks like rather than eat up Kindle eReader sales to the benefit of the Kindle Fire, the bottom’s dropped out from underneath both. Apple was willing to bite into its own massive marketshare because they knew they had a better device in the pipeline. Amazon was willing to give up brand quality to get any sort of foothold in the growing tablet market. Maybe if the Kindle Fire had been a better device, it’d be a different story, but that ship has sailed. The question now is whether Amazon can get some momentum back with an improved Kindle Fire, or at the very least, whether Amazon can re-kindle (sorry) the eReader market with some serious upgrades (flexible displays, color e-ink, better touch responsiveness and UI).

As a Kindle fan, I’ll keep my fingers crossed for the latter.

As a realist, I’ll keep my money in $AAPL.

Via DF.