MacTheBlog
iPad: first impressions
Written by Alex Kidman Thu Jan 28 2010, 01:36pm
I woke up this morning terribly excited. Sweaty with anticipation. Delirious with the possibilities.
One of the better App sites I frequent, Touch Arcade, was reporting that the C64 emulator for iPhone would shortly offer up both Wizball and Elite for sale.
Yes, I know. It's exciting stuff, isn't it?
Of course, my elation was short-lived. Checking the App itself, Wizball and Elite were nowhere to be seen. On the plus side, Jeff Minter's rather trippy "Attack Of The Mutant Camels" is now available, for free no less. Joy!
Oh, and in other news, Apple released some sort of product. You might have heard a bit about it by now. Not the Slablet, not the iSlate, not even the HyperMegaThreeToedSlothPodlet. But the iPad. You know, that thing that's been mooted since ... well ... since Apple stopped making Newtons, really.
OK, I've got to come clean here out of the gate. These are my first impressions based on web reporting, Apple's own videos of the iPad and not a whole lot else. I don't have an iPad to hand as I type this. It would be coming out a fair bit slower on the touchscreen keyboard, for a start. Or I'd have to start liking the tiny iMac keyboard in the dock a whole lot more than I actually do.
Still, after all the endless speculation about naming, the rumours about what the specifications would be and what turned out to be a whole lot of lies, Apple's finally announced the iPad in both WiFi only and 3G flavours, "starting" at $US499.
Well, it's announced it if you happen to be an American citizen. Exact details for Australian buyers are still a little thin on the ground and, while it would be an interesting mathematical exercise to work out exchange rates — indeed MacTheMag's editor has already done so — it's not much more than speculation at this stage. My enquiries to Apple Australia so far have yielded nothing more than the comment that there were "no details at this stage".
I really can't go past the name without commenting. Yes, I did comment on the iPad name last week. I still think it's an overly bland name for a product that Apple's trying to get everyone excited about, and as others have commented, it's also dangerously close to sounding like a feminine hygiene product of some type.
As an aside, while cross-tweeting around the launch on Thursday morning, I noticed that the iPhone didn't try to auto-correct "ipad", although it didn't try to capitalise the P either. I tweeted this, and was informed by others that apparently it did on theirs, to "Upas". With credit to @juhasaarinen, Upas is "a deciduous tree that yields latex used as arrow-tip poison". That makes me slightly nervous about my first time using an iPad, frankly speaking. A poison-tipped iPad might make a great anti-theft add-on, I suppose. I'll have to wait and see.
From a capability point of view I'm a little torn. No multitasking is something of a pain, although multitasking here is still a bit of a misnomer. Apple seems to manage it just fine, as my iPhone cheerfully gathers mail and plays back music while I'm running other applications. It's just the third-party ones that don't seem to be allowed to get beyond push status — something that could be better. Then again, the demos (and impressions I've got from those who have handled them) suggest that the iPad's processor runs applications a whole lot faster than the 3GS. If an App can launch and quit in the blink of an eye, will multitasking matter? I'll have to wait and see.
I'm still not sure what the story is with getting my data on or off the iPad, but I've got some guesses. I presume it's going to work like the iPhone/iPod Touch, in that without some hackery you won't have direct file system access. That makes it less compelling as a work tool for my purposes, as I'd have to email or sync my own content out to other devices before making it truly useful. Once again, wait and see, wait and see.
The split 3G/WiFi only models are an interesting choice too. I wouldn't be holding my breath for Australian mobile data providers to offer an "All you can eat" style package — as AT&T are apparently going to do — any time soon. Then again, AT&T's version of "unlimited" data has had limits hidden in the fine print before. It also occurs to me that a clever iPad user could pair up the cheaper WiFi-only iPad with a MiFi-style portable router (Virgin Mobile sells them, as do Internode) for the same kind of 3G connectivity that the more expensive iPads will have built in. Given the daft way wireless broadband is sold in Australia, that might also be a whole lot cheaper, depending on whether iPads end up on mobile broadband or mobile phone style data tariffs. Yeah, I know, the iPad isn't a phone. Doesn't mean the Telcos won't charge for it as if it were.
There are obvious comparisons with existing Apple lines to take into consideration too. A full-priced iPad 64GB with 3G is unlikely to come out with much change from $1200, at which point you could consider a 13" MacBook. Slightly heavier, but with 3.9 times the storage, better processor, true multitasking, an easy way to protect the screen by simply closing it and even an inbuilt optical drive. No need for additional dongles to attach cameras or other devices, as the ports are built in.
OK, so the MacBook's likely to be $100 or more than the iPad. But what about the iPhone 3GS? Even leaving aside a potential price drop, that same $1000 could get you 32GB of storage, the same App store, ebook reading capability. Oh, and it actually is a phone. Clearly there are different target markets for the iPad and iPhone, but due to the common App base, it's undeniably a less compelling option for iPhone users, unless it's revealed that you can pair the two together to share a 3G connection. Expect the WiFi-only model to dominate sales figures that Apple will never publicly reveal anyway if that's the case.
Another thought that arises from this is exactly what happens to iPhone OS development after this? Apple's claim with the iPad is that it's rewritten the core Apps "from the ground up" to suit the iPad form factor. Will we see a retooled calendar/email/Safari to more closely emulate these new App styles, or will the OS stagnate a little in order to push iPad sales?
It's certainly feasible we'll see a drop in the price of the iPhone itself, and I'd say pretty likely that if Apple can get ten hours out of a screen the iPad's size from its battery technology and A4 processor while still running iPhone OS that we'll see an iPhone update with some form of A4 in it mid-year — if only to keep as much of the design (and therefore the profits and patents) in-house at Apple as possible.
So will I buy an iPad? Leaving aside professional obligations (I do write a lot about Apple gear), I'm honestly not sure. You may have noticed the "wait and see" mantra used heavily in the paragraphs above this. That's for a reason. While Apple has let the Pad out of the bag, there's still a tonne of unanswered and untested questions swirling, and no clear confirmation one way or the other. I certainly wouldn't be rushing to pre-order one as soon as they pop up on the Apple Australia online store, not that you can at the time of writing.
Then again, Touch Arcade's just popped up some iPad details, including revealing that Firemint's working on an iPad-specific version of Flight Control. Sigh. Where did I put that credit card again?
Discuss the iPad over at MacTheForum!
iT minus 24 hours and counting
Written by Matthew JC Powell Wed Jan 27 2010, 01:36am
This time tomorrow we will know. We will know for an absolute fact whether or not Apple is about to release a flat rectangular touch-screen device for computing applications. We will know what that device is called. We will know what operating system it runs. We will know what its specifications are in terms of screen resolution, processor speed, networking — will it have 3G or not — and more. Most importantly, we'll know precisely what it looks like and, with any luck, what it will cost.
And where will the fun be in that?
For years people have been speculating about a tablet/slate device from Apple (hereinafter referred to as a "slablet"). When tablet computers first appeared from other vendors, people assumed Apple would come out with a slablet that would do the one thing none of the others did — sell in sufficient numbers to bother.
Tablets came and sort of went (they're still out there, honest) and then there were netbooks. Steve Jobs's derisive comments about netbooks convinced some people that he must be about to release a netbook (because Jobs is funny that way sometimes), and convinced others that the day of the slablet was indeed about to dawn.
The past couple of years, while people have become accustomed to the touch interface on the iPhone and iPod touch, speculation has gone beyond fever pitch that Apple must surely be about to release a device that would be just like this, but a little bigger — seven inches, maybe ten, split the difference and make it eight and a half.
No longer is there speculation about the slablet. There is certainty. Except, of course, for the fact that there is absolutely no certainty at all. No-one who is allowed to say anything knows a damn thing about whatever it is Steve will unveil at Yerba Buena tomorrow morning. Everything you have read is speculation, guesswork and out-and-out fantasy.
And hasn't it been fun?
We've all been little Jonny Ives, designing what we reckon the slablet ought to look like. We've added the features we want, regardless of the considerations of cost, size, temperature and so on that actually go into manufacturing these things. Because we don't have to take all that stuff into account — only the people building it do. In our fantasy world, anything is possible for the slablet. Anything.
Three-dimensional holographic interface? Got it.
Virtually unlimited battery life? Absolutely.
Running an unlimited number of iPhone apps and Mac OS X applications at the same time? Of course.
High-Definition screen for watching 1080p movies on? Can't do without it.
Physical keyboard that somehow also isn't a physical keyboard? Sure.
It has been a most fantastically creative ride for us all, sparking a genius for invention we may never have realised we possessed. It's somewhat akin to the lead-up to the first of the Star Wars prequels, when everyone knew exactly how they wanted the movie to go, right down to dialogue and finely-choreographed lightsabre duels.
OK, maybe I shouldn't have brought The Phantom Menace into it. It largely disappointed people and of course we all hope the slablet will not. But how many people, driven by that vision of what they wanted Star Wars to be, ended up writing stories or screenplays of their own? How many created their own films? George Lucas may have given us Jar Jar, but he inspired creativity, just as Steve Jobs has done (my candidate for Steve Jobs's Jar Jar would be iPod socks — hop over to the forum if you have a better suggestion).
In a day, we will see what the engineers at Apple have produced, bound as they are by laws of physics, realities of economics and the fact that the world doesn't run on fairy dust. We will see the actual object — if indeed there is an actual object — and we will see what it can do. The reality almost certainly will not match the fantasies of the past few years of imagining.
So enjoy this last day while you can. Imagine that anything is possible while it still is.
And after the house lights go up at Yerba Buena, start imagining the next thing.
Discuss this with me at MacTheForum!
The genius of Steve Jobs
Written by BGrant Mon Jan 25 2010, 12:07am
The real genius of Steve Jobs is making products that appeal to the general populace as well as the tech-savvy. The true success of iPod and iPhone is that people have embraced these products for ease of use and reliability. They may not have the highest specifications or the most features, but they have what counts: the best user experience.
You can point to the iTunes Store and the App Store, but neither of these products began their lives with these amenities, no matter how indispensable they seem now. To this day, there are iPhone owners who've never plugged into a computer. They're happy enough to get a new OS when they upgrade at the end of their two-year contract.
Apple's "newest creation" may be the device for all media, music, movies, television, books, magazines, newspapers, text books, journals and more. It may not start out with all that content, but Apple needs only to point the way, sign up a few media partners and given time, such a device could change the world — again.
If it can do enough internet communication and basic computing, it may even snare a market that never existed before: people who don't want a computer, but need to do some of the things for which we just happen to use computers these days. Skype video calls would need to be on that list. Just saying.
So what is the real genius of Steve Jobs? There were MP3 players in the market before the iPod. There were smartphones in the market before iPhone. Aside from impeccable taste and design genius that reduces a function set to the minimum, with maximum effectiveness — which in their own right are rare qualities and major factors in Apple's successes — Steve Jobs is a good listener. He watches everyone else's mistakes and learns from them. He listens to how the public responds to a product and associated services. Steve Jobs distils all these into the 'Apple experience'.
The music industry thrashed about dealing with online copying of its product. Apple listened to the users and learned from the music industry's mistakes and offered a way out of the wilderness — a way to make music profitable online — by offering music lovers a simple service at reasonable value. US99¢ a song is a convenience charge. Sure you can get it for free if you look hard enough, but Apple can give it to you in one convenient place. It's great that some of that money goes back to the music distributors and hopefully ultimately the artists, but really the price is for the one-stop shopping convenience.
Similarly, App and game developers can sell their products at low prices because of the huge market the App Store presents them: every iPod Touch and iPhone sold, over 100 million of these owners with credit cards already in the iTunes Store and purchase only one click away.
So to the "newest creation". Steve Jobs and Apple have been watching a rudimentary ebook market develop. Newspaper publishers despair at the loss of classified ad revenues and declining sales due to information availability on the internet. Magazines are dropping like flies for similar reasons. Jobs and Apple have been listening to how we have responded to these changes and the products offered, both hardware and software.
Television, cable networks and movie-makers are also losing market to internet availability of their content. Each of these creative industries has attempted to meet the internet challenge and failed in some way. Apple's opportunity is to offer all these content producers a proven model for selling their products in the digital/internet age — potentially saving their industries from their own short-sightedness and lack of technical savvy.
Steve Jobs and Apple have the smarts to simplify all these complex problems into one beautiful user experience that will not only capture the imagination of the tech-savvy, but general consumers of these media, in a way that nobody even thought possible before.
And that's Steve Jobs's legacy: to refine the technical issues of a device to meet the general need and all the business issues of the creative industries adapting to the digital/internet environment and distil this down to the Apple user experience. Even Mr Jobs will admit, he couldn't do it without the Apple team around him and it appears Apple fans have much to which they can look forward, in the next few years, from the "latest creation".
Bring on 27th of January!
Discuss this post in MacTheForum!
Names have power
Written by Alex Kidman Fri Jan 22 2010, 05:59am
OK, so Apple's doing something next week. I've emphasised something there, because for all anyone outside of Apple's elite inner leak circle knows, based on the invite, it could be releasing a new range of non-toxic body paints. Sure, it seems unlikely now, but ten years ago would you have picked Apple as one of the world's biggest music sellers? See?
[I didn't see iPod Socks coming either — MJCP]
Anyway, popular rumour-mongering suggests it'll be some kind of flat computer-style device for the delivery of content. Will that content be books? Magazines? iPhone Apps? Complimentary massages?
Only Apple knows, and while the rumour mills are churning out the possibilities as to what it'll do, only a few are thinking about what it'll be called. Apple's full of interesting and sometimes very clever people, and I'm sure more than a few meetings have been held to decide on what name the something should go to market with. So, in no particular order, here's a few of the suggestions I've seen, and my own opinion of them.
Next Wednesday/Thursday should hopefully reveal all, as it'll be reported all over the internet, naturally enough. In the interests of making sure I get my next paycheque, I probably should point out that you can follow all the exciting action via MacTheTwit's Twitter feed by clicking right here!
Apple Tablet. OK, so all the reporting from the regular press is still referring to it as the "Apple Tablet". The odds of it being called just the Apple Tablet seem remarkably low to me, for a couple of reasons. First, while the company is called "Apple", very few of its products go to market with the Apple prefix so predominant in the marketing strategy. It's never far behind (and there's a logo on everything), but if you check Apple's online store, you'll be offered an iPhone. Or a MacBook Pro. Or an iMac. The identifying "Apple" is more or less presumed, but it's not typed out as part of the product name per se.
Without that, however, all Apple's left with is "Tablet", which is problematic on a number of fronts. For one thing, it'd be impossible to trademark, and if Apple succeeds with its something strategy, you can reasonably expect the competitors to emerge rapidly. For another thing, Tablet computing's been around for quite some time and, as a consumer-led branding, it's rather damaged. Yes, niche vertical markets such as medicine have implemented Windows-based Tablet strategies with success, but consumers have never really bitten. It also pretty much effectively kills the idea of "iTablet", and I'd hope Apple's marketing people weren't quite that lazy anyway.
iSlate. Another widely popular choice, and another bit of possible bad marketing. First, there's the once-upon-a-time-owned-by-Microsoft online magazine with which Apple might not want to associate. Then there's the obvious problems with reviews. If a reviewer doesn't like the something, then it'd be pretty obvious to say that they've, well, slated it. And heaven forfend what might happen if manufacturing or supply issues mean that delivery of iSlate iS late. Further compounding that problem, Wikipedia informs me that a Slate may also be a type of turkey. Outside of Christmas, you don't want your product associated with turkeys.
Palette. Based off the invite's splashes of colour, promising Apple's latest "Creation", the Palette idea has some appeal, although again it'd be a tough one to keep as Apple's own trademark. Realistically too, it could be that Apple's planning to release the something as the "Creation", although that wouldn't put Richard Dawkins on side.
Slablet. The favoured choice of MacTheMag's hairy editor. I still can't decide if it should come with a slab of beer or a pre-engraved tombstone that hands out iTunes vouchers. Still, the uber-fanboys could slobber over a slablet, I guess.
Newton: The Next Generation. Not in this lifetime.
iPhone Xtra. OK, I just made this one up. It's still possible, however, that Apple might try to ride the wave of iPhone popularity with some kind of tie-in to the iPhone branding, especially if the rumoured App compatibility turns out to be real.
iPad. Aside from Palette (or, if you must, iPalette), the iPad idea seems to be the one with the most steam. At the time of writing, Macrumors is running heavily with it as the name of choice for the something, although the circumstantial evidence it's uncovered could indicate it's just a name that Apple's grabbing rights for purely so that competitors can't. I'm ambivalent about the idea of the iPad as a name. It's a touch bland for my tastes, and I can't help but think that with accent changes it could be dangerously possible to try to order a iPad and end up being sold an iPod.
What do you think Apple will call its device of mystery? What names are good or bad, and why?
Discuss it with me at MacTheForum!
A Nexus Point
Written by Alex Kidman Fri Jan 8 2010, 02:51am
The big hype this week leading into the Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show (CES) has been focused around something that Google long held it would never do. That is, release its "own" phone based on the Google Android platform. The Google Nexus One is that critter exactly, now on sale from Google's web site for the low, low price of only $US529!
Except that, well, you know, it isn't. Not if you aren't in the US, Britain, Singapore or Hong Kong, at least at launch time. No Australian release dates have been announced for the Nexus One, beyond the fact that we're not getting it at launch. It is available in the US partnered initially with T-Mobile (and can be bought either with a T-Mobile contract or unlocked so you can take it to the carrier of your choice). Whether we'd get a purely unlocked model, or a carrier-specific model or even both isn't clear.
Naturally enough, if you're really keen, you could try to buy one over eBay and hope against hope that you don't end up being sent a brick wrapped in somebody else's laughter. It might even work locally. (The phone that is, not the brick, as bricks don't typically come with any kind of carrier locking beyond the mortar that holds them to other bricks.)
I also find it interesting how heavily the reporting has relied on calling it a "Google" phone. It's not. Google is selling it, to be sure, and the Android platform is Google's, but it's a bit like saying that the iMac that you could buy at JB HiFi was a "JB HiFi Mac". HTC is the mob building the Nexus One. It's an HTC phone, like the Magic, Dream, Tattoo and Hero Android phones. Yes, it's got a slightly-improved build of the Android platform, but that build could be made available (hardware permitting) to any smartphone vendor.
As an aside, HTC's got a lot of Android phones — or, more accurately, a lot of phones full stop. HTC likes making phones — that's clear enough — but it also likes hedging its bets, which is why one week it'll talk up Android, and the next week Windows Mobile 6.5. Then back and forth and back and forth, making its own branded phones as well as models like the Nexus One (over 80 percent of all the phones running Windows Mobile are manufactured by HTC, whether they are HTC-branded or not). You can bet that if for whatever reason Apple decided to license out iPhone OS, HTC would have a model on store shelves even before representatives from Apple had finished refusing to comment on plans they hadn’t yet announced.
Still, the presses — both online and physical — have worked hard this week with the inevitable lines being drawn between Apple and Google. The Nexus One is "a direct challenge" to Apple, or "the first serious threat" to the iPhone. Does that mean that all the other competing phones, such as the HTC Hero or Motorola Droid/Milestone were in some way flippant?
I've even seen the dreaded "iPhone killer" tag being bandied about. Stop it. I've never liked the "killer" tag, simply because it's inaccurate. None of these devices stop iPhones being iPhones, so why are they "killer"? It's because it's an emotive term, but it's a poor descriptor. While I'm at it, the term "Superphone" being applied to the Nexus One is equally silly. There aren't even enough phone booths left around for it to get changed into its costume for a start, and as it's a phone itself, it's only making that problem worse!
Still, even if the Nexus One doesn't have a local release date yet — heck, even if it never gets a local release date — it's still good news for Apple customers. And that's simply down to innovation and competition. The Nexus One pushes the tech boundaries that little bit further. Higher resolution camera, with flash, than the iPhone. Much faster processor. A big flashy launch designed to get everyone's attention — which it certainly did. And while Apple has shown it's entirely capable of living in its own bubble and working to its own timeline, there's no way that competing products in the same space, such as the Nexus One/iPhone 3GS comparison, go unnoticed by the design and technology bods at Apple.
[Not to mention marketing — MJCP]
The Nexus One might never sell in Australia, and it might never sell huge numbers beyond the geek crowd. But as Apple showed with the iPhone, what the mobile market needs is innovation to push the market as a whole along. I don't think it's unfair to say that the 3GS wasn't exactly a revelation in the mobile phone space; much more a gentle meandering along from the iPhone 3G itself. Left to its own devices, I'm confident that Apple would happily sell minor variations on that model for many years to come, just as every other mobile vendor did in the years before the iPhone reshaped matters. Needless to say, I don't want that. I want the next iPhone to be really good, not just "now available in shades of pink" different to the previous model.
Just as Apple's innovations with the iPhone have been endlessly copied, and indeed improved upon in some cases, Apple can draw inspiration from the common pool of ideas to make the next iPhone truly special.
Discuss this post with me in MacTheForum!
