Posts Tagged ‘Apple’

Relative to the iPhone 4’s antenna issues everyone’s howling about, I’m trying to square this with this. Is the software really displaying the reception-strength bars wrong, or is it really a hand-position-muffles-antenna issue?

Independent, Apple loses an opportunity to shed its ‘too authoritarian’ image by stone-walling, especially with it’s somewhat shocking press release on the topic, parodied here by @gruber.

The Anandtech review – using real reception measurements not the graphical bars – indicates that iPhone 4’s antenna is better than earlier models in areas of low reception. This is great news for folks who have to endure poor connectivity in their usual locations, but it does nothing to explain the mysterious death grip issue – whereby holding the phone in a normal and comfortable way reduces the antenna’s effectiveness.

It’s important to point out that all phones employing the built-in-antenna or antenna-inside-case paradigms can suffer from attenuation just being held in the hand. It’s just that Apple’s problem seems dramatic – and surprisingly like something that would/should have been caught early on in the product cycle.

From my viewpoint – I’m not an iPhone owner, though I have had a long succession of smartphones – it makes perfect sense for iPhone 4 owners to get themselves a bumper-type case which reduces (resolves?) the attenuation problem. The double benefit: normal handling doesn’t ding up the phone’s case and even an occasional drop will be tolerated. To those who would get pissy over spending $29 on such a case, I’d simply ask that you take a long look at what the iPhone is costing you over the two-year period of your contract (upwards of $2000 including all fees for hardware and services) and recognize that perhaps $29 is worth it to protect that investment.

UPDATE: Here’s a great, recent, review of the iPhone 4 discussing both the quality of the device compared to earlier models (and Android devices) and the antenna issue (which, it’s claimed, happens only under low-connectivity conditions).

After opening up their international sales shortly after crossing the two million mark, Apple’s iPad was even quicker to cross the three million threshold – just twenty more days, another million units sold. Can you spell S-U-C-C-E-S-S?

Apple also announced it had sold 1.7 million iPhone 4 units in the first 4 days of availability, almost making a mockery of iPad’s great run and setting a company record.

Hopefully, this will signal to anyone listening that we’re offiicially in the post-PC era now. America, especially, is moving closer to the European and Asian model where the main Internet access point is mobile. Yes, it took the larger screen of the iPad to convince us, and it’s a great sign that our foreign colleagues and friends also see the new form-factor as valid.

As I talk to clients and potential clients, the world has changed. With the exception of enterprise customers – still stoically soldiering on with their secure, managed, and aging PC-based applications – the new focus is on crafting a new range of experiences adapted to the easy-to-carry, easy-to-access iPad hardware. The set of ideas pouring forth from clients – who in the past wanted, at best, “me too” mobile applications – is really quite exciting. And the iTunes AppStore model for delivering low-priced applications in high volume will assure these new treats will be accessible to a broader range of people.

I’ve enjoyed my iPad since the first day of sales in April, and I’m completely happy with my wifi-only unit. I urge potential customers to consider this option instead of the wifi/3G edition simply because the tariff for 3G connectivity is way too high (in both initial, and on-going, costs). If you need occasion access via 3G, consider purchase of a smart phone that allows tethering – e.g., all the Google Android-based devices can be modified to add tethering. See my blog post on this topic.

Kudos, Apple, for a fine product!

Haters gonna hate…

…but, nonetheless, Apple’s iPad has two million customers in less than 60 days. At that figure, iPad has already eclipsed the total sales of Amazon’s Kindle (which has been in the market for over 2 years) if we extrapolate a bit from this 3Q09 estimate. Barnes&Noble’s Nook device entered the market later than Apple’s iPad, and no sales estimates have been forthcoming from B&N. And, the Border’s Kobo…well.

In the run-up to Apple’s January 2010 announcement, the pundits misjudged the iPad as a tablet-format computer and embued the non-existent device with all sorts of wished-for laptop features. When iPad arrived – as primarily a media-consumption device rather than a new-format personal computer – these same pundits, now wronged by Apple, derided the device for lack of the features they’d projected on it. Even those that liked it commented how Apple’s control over media sales and distribution to the device would create a world Google recently labelled “one man, one company, one device”. Cory Doctorow went bonkers on the iPad.

I think we’re seeing the “one superpower” problem here. With IBM and Microsoft both vanquished, Apple is clearly king of the hill in personal digital technology these days. And digital entertainment. There’s no longer any we versus they. No over-arching ideological battle. There’s only a string of solid home runs from Apple – redefining digital music, redefining the mobile phone, and now defining a new category of must-have device, the portable high-definition media consumption device (that’s jjjuuuussstttt good enough at work-related tasks to possibly supplant the need for a laptop for a lot of people).

So the conspiracy-theory types have come out of the woodwork to turn the former David into the new Goliath. You’d think Apple had turned into Alan Moore’s vision of Norsefire, the totalitarian regime that runs Britain in the movie V for Vendetta. In fact, it’s worse than that. We’re at Redactio ad Hitlerum already (whereby it is nearly impossible to discuss Apple’s incredible success without mentioning their “unprecedented level of control”).

I have another theory, however, and it’s simply this: We lived too long under the computing dominance of Microsoft. Except for Apple – who remained the only company clearly rebelling – everyone else just fell into line. The consumer-oriented companies of the last twenty years simply waited for Microsoft to innovate, and Microsoft always innovated in a single way – the way that best suited Microsoft’s need to keep itself powerful (which, some would say, usually included appropriating the ideas of others more than inventing new ideas itself). Now the sun is shining again – we have a true consumer-oriented innovator in personal computing – and writers and bloggers everywhere (let alone competitors) can’t figure out how it all happened so quickly and without their blessing.

Customers are now showing themselves to have been waiting all these years for an alternative to the Microsoft-dominated world. They want a device that puts less between them and their media, not more. They’re ready to embrace books, magazines and newspapers in this new format whose user experience technologies seem tailor-made to encourage new-found creativity among publishers. They’re ready to think beyond the personal computer.

Frankly, I think Apple’s success does more to pave the way for genuine competition than the vast majority of pundits are willing to admit. With Google’s Andoid operating system running on mobile phones, tablets and now TVs, many companies can participate in this freedom to move beyond the stale personal-computing world defined first by IBM and later monopolized by Microsoft.

We should all be thankful for that.

That’s the only way I can describe the build-up to tomorrow’s launch of the Apple iPad.

The iPad’s caused an amazing fury. Everything from like-when-I-met-my-first-love adoration, to out-and-out demonization. David Pogue, at the NY Times, reviewed the iPad from two perspectives – a middle ground that kept him off the hate-list of many a blogger but for which he’ll probably be ridiculed by the anti-Apple intelligencia.

I’ll be getting mine tomorrow, so I’ll withhold comment until then. But in the meantime, these sentences from Michael Arrington’s TechCrunch review struck me:

I suspect I’ll rarely be away from this device. In fact it will make my phone far less important for non-calling uses.

This is the first time I’ve heard the “smartphone killer” angle. Certainly, here in the USA, where we are accustomed to having big-screen computers available all the time, we some times don’t get what’s up with those mobile hordes pecking away at ridiculously small keyboards peering into 1 1/2 inch displays. But, at a price point that rivals or beats the retail price of most honest smartphones, and with battery life to match it, Arrington could be onto something here – an iPad (for email, Twitter, browsing, apps, and lightweight work) and a cheap phone for calling might be a far more economical combination for the mobile professional than the choices we’re faced with today.

Until tomorrow’s unboxing, I am sticking with my initial view – the iPad is a device that will re-frame the way we use commercial media, along with the way commercial media is presented to us. If the iPad can accomplish that – a great leap forward for the publishing industry – that will be sufficient to call it revolutionary.

But, I suspect very quickly it will become much more. Like its little brother the iPhone did.

I’ve pre-ordered my Apple iPad today, for pickup locally on opening day, April 3. Excitement!

Apple iPad

More importantly, for readers of this blog, let me point you to an excellent post on why the iPad is going to start a revolution in the publishing industry: Books in the Age of iPad.

I’ve been around computing hardware long enough to watch hundreds of mobile-ish, laptop-ish, tablet-ish hardware devices fail. Industry – and we’re talking hardened industry – is the only market where these devices have succeeded in the past. And it’s a tiny market.

What Apple’s got here is a device, marketplace and community that are likely to become the mainstream way people consume publications in all forms.

The hardware’s cheaper than a PC – and how many people need a PC if they are doing just email and browsing, especially with all the ugly virus protection owners of Microsoft products have to contend with? It’s smaller, lighter and easier to carry than a laptop – and, once again, how many people need to lugging around all that weight just to get at their corporate email and applications in this age of Salesforce.com? Yet, the iPad also has a large enough screen to make running applications and browsing the web a comfortable experience – unlike the vast majority of mobile devices industry pundits have told you were the next wave of the web experience. The fact is, to consume certain types of media, the mobile device – even ones as thoughtful as the iPhone – are just insufficient. And, hey Kindle!, iPad’s got a color screen. To say nothing of the multi-touch UI. To say nothing of the industrial design quality.

But the genius only starts there. We’ve seen digital bookstores before – Amazon pioneered this space nicely while B&N just barely beat iPad to the buzzer, shipping only two days ago – but we’ve never seen content purchase so seamlessly integration into the user experience. Not just books, but everything that’s in Apple’s multi-media store.

But that’s not what’s got me jazzed. What’s got me jazzed is that iPad, and the iBookstore along with it, are going to support the ePub digital publishing standard. This allows people like you and me to publish and I have a very strong intuition that Apple will do for self-publishing what they did for podcasting – legitimize the space, make it accessible, and remove the stigma (people used to say “podcasting is not broadcasting”).

And that’s the real reason Apple’s got a leg up on Amazon and B&N. Those firms are beholden to publishing houses who offer a dinosaur of a service in the age of social media and electronic publication. Amazon does not have relationships with individual authors, but Apple has created a space for those individual authors to carve out their own profitable niche. Apple is doing authors – not middlemen – a much bigger favor than Earth’s Largest Bookstore. Apple’s also got many more years of experience running a store with low-priced or even free goods. This, I think, has huge implications on profitability and on their ability to move the market to a new model of electronic – rather than paper – distribution.

And that low-cost model is the magic that will also attract magazines and newspapers who, heretofore, have had no way to charge for their content. This is the model those industries have been waiting for. If they miss the bus this time, it’s over, folks.

I’ll post on this topic again when I get my iPad, April 3.

Gartner validates what we’ve all been feeling – in 3Q2008, worldwide growth of smartphone sales was at its weakest point since tracking began (at 11.5%).

North America was a bright spot, however, growing at 68% with Blackberry and iPhone devices totaling 70% of sales. In Europe, Apple made great progress – moving to number two behind Nokia. MacOSX is now the third most popular smartphone operating system worldwide. Windows Mobile is taking a beating – with numbers down 3% – another illustration of the importance of brand in the mobile marketplace.

An interesting side note: Gartner monitors smartphones from manufacturer HTC only on its own-branded devices. HTC meanwhile is the ODM for numerous other brands and for carrier-branded (predominantly) Windows Mobile devices (like the TMobile Wing). HTC also manufactures TMobileUSA’s G1 device, based on the Google Android operating system (which Gartner is not measuring as a separate category yet). One wonders where inclusion of these numbers would put HTC in the charts!