Am I the only one that feels like this article (along with this resulting HN thread) is straight out of the Hey PR machine? I guess I just don't understand the value this type of post adds to the HN community.
These systems should really just fetch all remote content in advance, rather than waiting until it's read. That would make it impossible for a sender to know if a message was read or not.
I remember reading their articles about the Windows Phone and some early Android devices, and realizing that the 'review' was just some guy complaining about how it's not like an iPhone, as if approaching a user interface or solving a problem in a different manner than Apple was inherently a bad thing for all use cases, in all places. That sort of promoted fanboy-ism permeates, well, almost all of their articles, be it a tech piece or a purported report on politics.