Is it really though? Those of you who know me well enough would probably be expecting me to rush out and buy the iPhone 3G as soon as I set foot back on British soil. There’s no denying that I’m an Apple fan boy but I’m also not stupid. The next generation of the iPhone doesn’t represent enough of a change over the original version that I already own. Sure it has GPS navigational capabilities but I tend to know where I am most of the time anyway. The obvious upgrade is the 3G bit - it’s obviously a big enough revelation to even be included in the product name instead of it being simply iPhone v2 or something.
I have never found the EDGE (2G) speeds to be all that crippling to be honest. Besides, like most people with an iPhone, I use the wifi connection a lot. I’m usually at home, in the office or within range of a wifi hotspot from The Cloud or the newly announced partnership with BT Openzone.
That’s the new stuff on the hardware front far as I can tell apart from a crappier back to allow the GPS signal to be of any use. No new camera (optic or sensor), speaker, microphone or chipset. There will need to be something pretty awesome to make me upgrade to the next version too - whenever that may come be pass.
When the University of California at Irvine built their campus, they just planted grass. Then they waited a year and paved over where people had made paths in the grass. I first heard this in an interview with Larry Wall about 10 years ago but it may well be apocryphal.
I’m seeing parallels with what could be going on with Apple’s iPhone development plans. Release a basic device and wait for the crowds to clamour for what they feel is missing from the device. Pay attention to those that shout the loudest (case in point: the recent enterprise features) but make sure that you set some of the most popular requests to one side for introduction in the release of your second generation model.
Compare and contrast to the usual practice of bundling a metric ass-load of rarely-used crapware that serves mainly to clog up the menus on other phones. Video editing and ringtone composition on a mobile phone have been nothing more than gimmicks.
This year has already started to see the blurring of the edges between online Web 2.0 and traditional desktop applications. The traditional downside to this software as a service (SaaS) has been what to do when there is no connection to the Internet. There are various technologies now available from the big players (Adobe AIR, Google Gears, Microsoft Silverlight, Mozilla Prism and Sun with JavaFX). These all allow developers to keep your data in sync when you don’t have Internet access to their applications.
Another obstacle is changing attitudes to software. You will no longer own the software that you use but instead be charged either on a pay-as-you-go tariff or, more likely, on a monthly subscription basis.
There is also a gathering trend toward smaller, more portable computing devices with limited hard drive capacity like the Asus Eee PC. New solid state Flash drives offering a reasonable amount of storage are still expensive but these drives offer better battery performance and allow for smaller footprints.
Couple these new machines with a wireless connection, offline synchronisation and advancing online applications and you’re not a million miles away from the thin client model of computing in the 1970s. The major difference I can see between the aged dumb terminals and the new emerging way is a matter of the public perception of security and trust online. Throw in reliability (or lack thereof) issues, encryption bottlenecks and the economics of dealing with a serious amount of bandwidth into the mix and it’s clear than there is still a lot of progress to be made.
Yesterday Toshiba all but threw in the towel on the ultimately redundant next generation movie format battle between their own HD-DVD offering and rival Blu-ray from Sony. Shares in Toshiba went up by five per cent after these rumours. Sony shares rose by only one per cent.
Sure enough, Toshiba today confirmed that they will stop production of HD-DVDs.
Maybe I’m missing something again, but since when did losing become something that inspires confidence in a company? I don’t seem to remember the failing of any number of the bespoke formats (UMD for example) that Sony are so keen on having the same effect on their market value.
I’ve just this moment realised that Sony appear to have actually garnered widespread industry support for their own technology.
For me the winner has always been clear-cut: it may be more expensive but “Blu-ray” just sounds so much cooler. Well, that and the fact that the porn industry decided the winner a couple of years ago.
I read about the secrets of a slim wallet on Lifehacker a while ago and realised that I could go a little further and stop carrying around several things when just one would suffice1. I’ll freely admit that the camera on the iPhone isn’t fantastic so it hasn’t totally replaced my Pentax.
Now, apart from my keys, I only have one thing to remember to take with me but at the same time, only one thing to lose.
Before: Sony Ericsson k800i, 2nd generation iPod behemoth with headphones and wired remote, wallet, Pentax Optio S4.
Now: iPhone, headphones with inline remote and Krussell case.
The Krussell case has a few slots for cards, in which I keep a business card, my gym card and debit card as these are the ones that I use the most often.
I haven’t included the various docks, cables and chargers in the comparison but taking these into consideration makes using just the single device even more of an appealing option. I do have a way to go before I reach the levels of Australia’s geekiest man.
1 Okay, so strictly speaking I still carry more than one item but everything is kept inside a single thing. Stop splitting hairs.
“Bad artists copy. Great artists steal.”
- Pablo Picasso
Imitation is rife. Apple may just have been inspired by Braun design from the ’60s and ’70s for the iPhone calculator, iPod and G5 tower. The Apple vs. Microsoft vs. Xerox GUI copyright lawsuits are well known.
Over the past couple of years I’ve noticed more and more pieces of PC software that try to achieve one thing: make the PC behave more like OS X. The application notifiers Growl and Snarl. The application enhancers Quicksilver and Colibri. The window managers Expose and Exposer. Unsurprisingly not one of them quite match-up to the Apple versions.
Now after years of mediocrity it seems that the PC manufacturers have finally realised that good design will set them apart. The days of the big beige box are thankfully long gone but until very recently the aesthetics of the offerings from Dell, Gateway and the like have been distinctly poor. Dell have upped their product design staff to 90 (from just six a few years ago) and are already receiving plaudits from the industry for their efforts.
In this years Microsoft CES keynote Bill Gates boldly predicted that we’ll be relying less on the keyboard and mouse in the next five years. Gosh Bill, do you really think so? What a revelation! Take a look at some bleeding-edge design concepts for some examples that might just make it to market over the next few years.
Today’s (and probably the last of the year) Edinburgh Coffee Morning was the busiest it has been for a good while. The cryptic promise of some gifts that Ewan McIntosh left in a Facebook message last night turned out to be some really nice signed Hugh MacLeod posters for Stormhoek. The season of goodwill and giving continued with some warmed Panettone and some chilled Prosecco courtesy of our hosts at Centotre. Many thanks to the aforementioned for their generosity.
A couple of stand out things from this morning before the conversations paired off as things are wont to do in group dynamics. Ewan briefly demoed Seesmic which seems to be some kind of video Twitter. I’ve never sent a “tweet” in my life and do have difficulty of seeing the point of it if I’m being honest. At least with Seesmic, there is an element of a two way thing going on.
Via Will Richardson, I found this video of Johnny Chung Lee turning the tables on the light sensing aspect of the Wiimote to produce an interaction whiteboard for around £40 much more interesting:
Maybe this is the verb Amazon wants to replace “reading”. I’m not convinced that they’ll succeed. The Kindle is the new e-book reader from Amazon and one of the topics of conversation at last Friday’s ECM. Coupling the high price of this device with the notion of paying for content from blogs and news sites that you can ordinarily access for free on the Internet and also paying once more to load content that you already own makes this device a non-starter as far as I’m concerned.
Initial cost and content pricing aside, I find the aesthetics simply fugly. Which is suprirsing surprising considering the background of the employees of Lab126. Former employees of Palm and Apple run the start-up but looking at the Kindle design I can’t help but wonder why they are ex-employees of Palm and Apple.
So the Kindle has sold out almost immediately. This comes as no surprise to me as pretty much anything that has an ounce of hype behind it does so. This is usually due to under-stocking to create a false impression and lets the marketing department release the good news to the newswires.
However I think the biggest failing of the Kindle is the fact that it isn’t a plain old-fashioned book. I love a good gadget as much as the next geek but the whole concept of e-books is actually lost on me and is something I feel tries to address a non-existent problem.
I’ve followed the iPhone since the Steve demoed it at MacWorld back in January. I thought that I knew pretty much everything about it but after using it for a week I’ve discovered a couple of things that I didn’t know. Not good things either. Don’t get me wrong, I still absolutely love it and as far as I’m concerned, it’s a game changing device. Seeing several friends crowd around last Friday evening and start streaming YouTube videos, browsing the Internet and playing music without any need of a hint proved just how intuitively clean and simple the interface is.
Continue reading ‘More Apple goodness’
There’s only a few weeks to the release of the iPhone to the UK market but after several months of availability in the USA there’s still no sign of a proper SDK for third party developers to build applications for the iPhone. Yes there’s Safari and web-based apps but can these access the whole system — like camera or address book for example?
Apple may have their public reasons for not allowing native apps and others have their view but I’m starting to wonder if it may be not a little bit of snobbery on Apple’s part. Think back a couple of months to Facebook’s announcement of third party applications. Despite the initial excitement no application has blown anyone away. Pirates, Zombies, Vampires. Well whoop-de-doo. I can’t help but think that the Steve would go bat-shit crazy if anything like this was to pollute the iPhone.
What does the iPhone really lack on the software front? Obviously different people would like different things but I’m sure not going to miss the extraneous crap that vendors like Sony Ericsson insist on giving you. Kind of analgous to the pre-loaded software on a new Dell.
I can see an official Apple iPhone SDK being released at some point in the future — but not quite yet. Let the initial giddiness subside and then announce some kind of approval process for third party applications, somewhere along the lines of how it works for the Sidekick.