Robert Scoble

The Samsung Mobile Galaxy S4 is at Verizon Wireless stores starting today. I picked one up and immediately shot a photo comparison.

First gut feel? I like the thing better than HTC One (which has really crappy reception, lots of dropped calls, damn do I hate AT&T) and even my iPhone 5 (which is nicer in areas, but I can no longer giveup the SwiftKey keyboard, which makes me much faster than Apple's keyboard does).

Highly recommended. Apple has been passed in a lot of ways. It really does pain me to say that (Apple is my hometown company, I grew up in Cupertino and have always been a fan, even waiting overnight to buy several of its products).

"Frustratingly simple": What is it like to develop with Google Glass.

Yesterday I spent a while with the Thirst development team. They built a Glass app over the weekend even though they don't own a Glass themselves.

Thirst's Glass app is here: http://www.thirst.co/glass What is it? It's a news aggregator based on topics. Put in a topic, like, say, "Oracle," and you'll get news delivered to your Glass about that.

Why is this important? Because developers like Thirst will really decide whether Glass succeeds or not.

Some things they told me:

Glass is frustratingly simple. Already my Glass is seeing too many notifications for the simple "single strip of cards" interface that Glass currently has. Getting back to something a week old is nearly impossible.

Also, the cards themselves can't have much complexity, either, due to the small size of the screen. Google Glass is optimized for a very quick glance at information. If a user experience requires more than a quick glance it'll be hard for developers to build. We both believe that Google needs to do a lot of work to make it possible to separate out streams of cards from each app (I'd like to see just notifications from Google+ and keep those separate from Facebook or Gmail or Path, for instance).

Debugging is a bit frustrating since the emulator doesn't exactly match what actually shows up on screen, so you still need to get access to Google Glass to test your app.

Anyway, listen in here for more about what it's like to develop for Glass.

Make your Google Calendar a LOT more productive with @baydin's Boomerang Calendar. See how it works in my video.

Saves me a lot of time on scheduling people.