Month: December 2011
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Google’s design mess: Android’s Ice Cream Sandwich adds to the problem
That lock screen looks promising, doesn’t it. That’s how Google’s newest version of Android looks. It is a major release of Android, and one of its major features was to supposedly make its design “lovable”. As Android’s design chief Matias Duarte himself said: people sort of respected Android, but no one loved it. Its latest…
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Upgrade your European Nexus S i9023 to Android Ice Cream Sandwich 4.03
Happy to report that I have just successfully upgraded my European GSM Nexus S (i9023) to Android 4.03 Ice Cream Sandwich, manually. I didn’t want to wait for the Other The Air (OTA) update to be rolled out in my territory (Jordan). I was a little reluctant to use the instructions on Android Central because…
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Talent of community: sketch-a-talk videos animate Arab Spring themes on Ikbis
What happens when you interview a diverse bunch of Arab activists and new media geeks one Skype, edit all of it dow to a few minutes, get an amazingly talented cartoonist, mix in a video camera and some video and sound editing dudes? Ikbis has been experimenting with “community produced videos”. By pulling in different…
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The Nokia N9: a phone for real rebels (and normal people too)
The Nokia N9 has a strange story. It’s an exciting story. It’s a sad story. It’s an amazing story that is still unfolding. But if you walk today into any of the shops of Amman’s “mobile phone district” near the 7th Circle, you might not even feel that there is a whole saga around the…
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Taj Mall opens: the (still dusty) crown of Jordan’s shopping?
The opening of a major mall in Jordan in this post-financial-crisis era is certainly an event to watch. We live in very different times compared to, say, 2005, when we were awash in Gulf money and grand real estate dreams. Can developers and retailers pull off another mall in a market were people are…
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Testing Ecto
Just downloaded Ecto 3, the latest version of my favorite blogging application. Let’s see if it works.