Samsung has launched a pair of low-end smartphones in South Korea, both of which are running Android 4.1 Jelly Bean. While they are styled to look like the larger Galaxy S3, the internals of these 3.5 and 3.27-inch phones read pretty much like the original Galaxy S series with 1 GHz single core CPUs and 512 mb RAM. So in reality these are really shrunk-down Galaxy S devices with smaller, lower res displays.

Until a week ago, my son was using a Galaxy S Fascinate and from mid-December 2011, it was happily running and Android 4-based custom ROM. Clearly Samsung could have upgraded these phones if they wanted to, it was just a business decision to push customers to newer phones.  

I love +Monoprice and it's my go-to site to buy cables and accessories of all sorts. However, I wouldn't be at all surprised if the rise of Monoprice is part of the reason that today's iPhones and iPods use a proprietary connector instead of the standard micro-USB found on virtually every other mobile device. 

Apple is the most profitable tech company in the world and not so long ago Best Buy was also very profitable. One of the key's to Best Buy's profits was selling ridiculously over-priced cables and other accessories along side no-margin TVs. I wouldn't be at all surprised if Apple recognized the trend toward generic connectors early. A decade ago, Mac laptops had standard DVI video outputs, Firewire and USB. DVI was eventually supplanted by the mini-display-port which was smaller (good) and unique to Apple at first (bad). Similarly iPods went from Firewire to the 30 pin dock and now the Lightning connector. 

By using proprietary connectors, Apple can charge a premium for its own connectors and extract a tax from any other company that wants to get into the business of hooking up to its devices, which is bad for consumers. 

I've been using this plugin to push my G+ posts to my blog for more than a year and it works great. I just have to remember to go in to the blog periodically to clean out revisions since the plugin updates earlier posts with comments and any edits.

Reshared post from +Guy Kawasaki

+Daniel Treadwell's Google+Blog WordPress Plugin is simply magic. It takes your Google+ posts and places them in your WordPress blog. 

I learned about this a few months ago from +Peg Fitzpatrick, but Holykaw.com, the site where I wanted my Google+ posts to appear, was not running on Word Press until this weekend. 

For some reason, I have no problem writing Google+ posts, but I have great difficulty writing blog posts. If you're like me, Google+Blog WordPress Plugin can solve the problem. Now I can make a Google+ post like this (the picture on the left):

https://plus.google.com/112374836634096795698/posts/4fNMNjjJ7pD

And it will automatically appear like this in our WordPress blog (the picture on the right):

http://holykaw.alltop.com/ape-on-wall-street-journal-bestseller-list

Even the comments are carried over, so that the Holy Kaw post instantly looks popular because it shows the Google+ comments.

Here's where you get the WordPress plugin:

http://gpb.minimali.se/google+blog/

Thank you +Daniel Treadwell!