John Smith's Blog

Ramblings (mostly) about technical stuff

Iconography

Posted by John Smith on

Carphone Warehouse had a brochure in their stores just before Christmas extolling the virtues of Android and the handsets they were selling. Just flicking through it yesterday, I noticed something amiss on the third page...

Low-resolution scan of pages 2 and 3 of the Android promo brochure distributed in Carphone Warehouse branches in late 2010

Specifically the right hand side...

Close up of an icon shown on page 3 of the brochure

Thing is, neither of the Android devices I have use that icon, instead they use this:

Actual icon for Google Maps used on Android

However, the icon in the brochure shows up twice in the top 5 Google image search results on 'google maps icon', I wonder where it might come from, maybe the actual location depicted on the icon itself?

Grab from Google Maps browser application, showing Apple's Cupertino HQ, which is the location in the icon used in the CPW Android brochure

Mind you, the copy in the brochure isn't much better. Given the recent uproar about Experia X10s not getting Android 2.2 I wonder what the likes of Trading Standards would make of this:

Clipping from page 2 that talks about free updates and constant improvements that are downloaded straight to your phone

About this blog

This blog (mostly) covers technology and software development.

Note: I've recently ported the content from my old blog hosted on Google App Engine using some custom code I wrote, to a static site built using Pelican. I've put in place various URL manipulation rules in the webserver config to try to support the old URLs, but it's likely that I've missed some (probably meta ones related to pagination or tagging), so apologies for any 404 errors that you get served.

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About the author

I'm a software developer who's worked with a variety of platforms and technologies over the past couple of decades, but for the past 7 or so years I've focussed on web development. Whilst I've always nominally been a "full-stack" developer, I feel more attachment to the back-end side of things.

I'm a web developer for a London-based equities exchange. I've worked at organizations such as News Corporation and Google and BATS Global Markets. Projects I've been involved in have been covered in outlets such as The Guardian, The Telegraph, the Financial Times, The Register and TechCrunch.

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