Jim Dalrymple, The Loop:

Everyone is writing about the iPhone’s birthday today and how much it changed the industry. That’s all true, but I thought I’d take a different approach and look at some of the iPhone naysayers so we could make fun of them together.

On the iPhone’s birthday, it’s fun to look back at those who expressed confident doubt in Apple’s new phone. In fairness, who knew the iPhone would sell 250 million units and generate $150 billion in revenue in only five short years?

My favorite quote from Dalrymple’s article is from Microsoft CEO, Steve Ballmer:

[Apple’s iPhone] is the most expensive phone in the world and it doesn’t appeal to business customers because it doesn’t have a keyboard which makes it not a very good email machine… So, I, I kinda look at that and I say, well, I like our strategy. I like it a lot.

I wonder if they still like their strategy?

Today, RIM released financial results for Q1 of fiscal year 2013. Company speak needs to end and management should apologize to investors for running a crap-ass business. Here is the rundown.

• Revenue of $2.8 billion, down 33% from last quarter and 43% year-over-year.
• Loss of $518 million.
• Shipments (not sales) of only 7.8 million BlackBerry smartphones.
• Shipments (not sales) of a measley 260,000 BlackBerry PlayBook tablets.
• RIM’s supposed savior, the BlackBerry 10 platform, has once again been delayed - not launching until 2013.

This is ugly. They aren’t selling current devices because they suck in comparison to offerings from Google, Microsoft, and Apple. They won’t sell the next-generation devices because they keep getting delayed. In the meantime, consumers are forgeting the BlackBerry brand. We are about at the point where BlackBerry will be known as an antiquated business tool that our parents once owned.

Laura June, The Verge:

On stage at Google I/O, Brian Rakowski, Vice President of the Chrome division at Google has just announced Chrome for iPhone and iPad. It’s something iOS users have been asking for for a very long time, and plenty of people will be happy about this news. The app will be for iOS 4.3 and higher devices, and will be available today. The app will also support Chrome sync, and looks like it’s just as full-featured as the browser which many of us know and love.

Early impressions are that this is a pretty feature-rich, solid browser. It won’t, however, have access to Apple’s Nitro JavaScript engine - the key to Safari’s “snappiness”. I’m interested to learn what people think in terms of speed.

U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh:

Although Samsung has a right to compete, it does not have a right to compete unfairly, by flooding the market with infringing products.

I just don’t know why people think Samsung copies Apple.

Brian Fung:

The chart ranks the top ten causes of death for each year. In addition to the remarkable decline in mortality overall, it’s also noticeable how heart disease and cancer have surged to become two of America’s top killers.

Interesting chart. As Fung notes, the increased cancer could actually be caused by increased length of life.

John Moltz:

I just re-watched the whole Macworld 2007 keynote where Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone — which is probably the Apple announcement most comparable to Microsoft’s Surface announcement — and here’s a few things I noticed.

I think Moltz is spot-on. The Surface is an intriguing product suite from Microsoft, with the potential to take the Redmond company to great heights in the tablet market. However, when you enter a market late, the messaging has to be great. Microsoft is struggling in that department. My guess is that as long as Steve Ballmer is running the company, it won’t get better.

Wired.com, on how the future presented in Minority Report compares with today’s reality - a decade after the movie’s release:

He wanted the world of the movie to be different from our own, but he also wanted to avoid the exaggerated and often dystopian speculation that plagued most science fiction.

[…]

The script hadn’t been written at that point, yet many of the discussions from that weekend would go on to become visual touchpoints in a movie that turned out to be remarkably prescient: We really do operate computers by gesture, live in a world with self-driving cars, and have police departments that predict crime hot spots. (So far, though, no jetpacks.)

How would you envision an undated future?

Laura Owen, paidContent.org:

The Department of Justice’s trial against Apple, Penguin and Macmillan, who are accused of colluding to fix prices on e-books, will take place in a little under a year, on June 3, 2013, presiding U.S. District Judge Denise Cote ruled Friday.

I’m sure Amazon is getting their popcorn ready.

John Moltz critiques the Microsoft Surface announcement presentation:

The funny thing is that I was actually pretty impressed by the Surface when I saw the live blogs and post-event reports. And then I was less impressed after watching the video. It’s unreasonable to expect everything to come off perfectly when the product is months from shipping, but it was more uneven than I expected.

Coupled with the late start, it goes to show how important preparation is when unveiling a product.

An iPhone made in CSS. Very cool.