Archive for the 'Analysis & Commentary' Category
Excitement is brewing with anticipation for the iPhone 3.0 OS update preview tomorrow. Rumors are already spilling details that include Copy and Paste (FINALLY!), MMS, and built-in tethering (at a cost, I’m sure.) Unfortunately, folks, I really don’t see this as a major update, just like 2.0. Apple, with Steve Jobs on stage, does a great job of making nothing seem special. Tomorrow it will have a difficult job pulling that task off without iCon front and center. If you’re honest with yourself, you’ll agree with me, there’s nothing special in what we’ve heard thus far. Copy and Paste should have been released in a minor update with 1.x. MMS should have been there on Day One and tethering introduced no later than 2.0. So if these rumors are true, and most likely they are as Kevin Rose is backing some of them and was dead-on with his last predictions concerning Apple, why are we all getting excited? Give me a break, the Plane Jane Motorola RAZRs have 2 out 3 of these features. Yawn.
Some may point out the addition of the Premium App Store as another rumor for 3.0 but I discount that since it’s not tied to the OS and more to the back-end of the store. Who cares. This is nothing more than Apple trying to make more money, encourage better games, and crack deeper into the PSP and DS market. This is not an operating system advancement.
Now don’t get me wrong, I’m happy that these reported features will finally make it to the phone I love to use, but I’m just trying to add perspective here. There’s no reason to get all giddy for nothing short of what we should have already had. I truly hope there is MUCH more coming and that the Palm Pre tit-for-tat reports are correct. It would be nice to see a turn-by-turn GPS application announced (which again, nothing new for many other smartphones), video support (more same-old-same), and push-notification finally supported promised by Apple at its last software upgrade preview nearly a year ago. I want to be dazzled like I was at Macworld when Steve announced the iPhone. Please Apple, don’t just repackage your competitions features as something new and amazing. Do us right.
So Apple has left its heart in San Francisco with Tony Bennett singing farewell to the Keynote crowd on Apple’s behalf this year at Macworld Expo 2009. So what’s on tap for next year? Who will do the keynote? Will there even be a keynote? What is IDG, Macworld Expo presenter, going to do? Think anchor. As in one for a mall and not one that sinks a ship… Next to Apple, what company in the South Hall has the money, brand recognition, and guts to take center stage in Apple’s place? Microsoft.
Imagine it. Steve Ballmer up on stage smacking out some of its own sales figures. You know, how it sales more office productivity applications than any other company in the world? How it is number one in sales for things like mice and stuff of that nature. Want big announcements? Maybe X-Box integration with the Mac? ‘Watch X-Box Live content on your Cinema display through your Mac,’ Microsoft CEO, Steve Ballmer, could tell the crowd. Or how ’bout, ‘Today we’re announcing Office Live for the Mac. Do all you can on Windows on your Mac. Today. For free.’ Microsoft could pull it off.
Now granted, Microsoft isn’t well known for innovation as of late, look at the Zune for an example of copy-cat failure, but it is well known, period. Putting up Ballmer, of even Gates, to speak before a crowd of emotionally injured Mac faithful could turn the tide for the Redmond-based computer company. Just the fact of Microsoft stepping in for arch rival Apple would be enough to cause the media to stomp over each other in the West Hall to get good seats for the keynote. Mac fanboi’s may hold to their code of loyalty, but there would be a lot more curious showing up to see how it all plays out in their place. Think about it, Microsoft at the All Things Mac expo. The center of the Macintosh universe…and Microsoft is right there in the middle of it all! Without a doubt, a Microsoft anchor at the 2010 Macworld would cause a flurry in the industry and best of all, for Microsoft, piss off Steve Jobs to no end. Just watch Triumph of the Nerds for a Jobs reaction to when he’s burned by Microsoft. You know, Macworld 2010 has potential…
One of my more interesting meetings at Macworld was the one at the Google booth. I had a good chat about the Google App and it’s difficulty with translated voice properly to text. The hint given was to wait a second or two after the beep on your iPhone so the application can get a signature of the white noise and clean that out of your command. Seems to help get more accurate results. Nice.
Now that tip was a great one and I searched for another like revelation and asked, “Why do I need Google Earth on my desktop when I can do everything it does in my web browser that requires less resources?” The first Google employee didn’t have a good answer and led me to another co-worker who was “better at Google Earth”. He, too, really couldn’t give a good answer and searched out yet another “better” suited Google employee. Would third time be the charm?
My Google Earth pro proceeded to show me the 3-D modeling of San Francisco and then of the GooglePlex, Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California, and talked about the cool factor of all the 3-D. I stopped her and said, “Ya, I get the eye candy stuff, but what about practical needs?” I gave her an example. “Let’s say I have a crew of people I need to send to various locations in the Bay Area. I want to nest this into a folder called ‘Project 1′. I would like to create maps from point to point of these locations or even from a new location.” The Google Earth “pro” responded, “I don’t know how to do that in Google Earth but can show you how on Google Maps.” I assured her that I knew the procedure and re-iterated my original question. Why do I need Google Earth, then? Her answer? “I don’t know.”
So folks, from the mouths of Google, you really don’t need Google Earth and its heavy appetite for your system resources other than just to “goof off”. Google Earth really doesn’t perform any other useful function than its sister, Google Maps, can do at a whole lot less resource wise on your Mac or PC. But, it is up to you. If you like waste, then go for it. Me? I’m a practical guy and have already deleted Google Earth from my Mac.
Rumor after rumor of Apple’s CEO, Steve Jobs, impoverished health seems to be bring down the Cupertino-based computer company’s stock price faster than the fall of crude oil and yet still, Jobs hides behind his ego and doesn’t put an end to it. While many critics of the Jobs Health Report cry foul and point out no other company is effected by the well being of its CEO, most of them are all forgetting that those companies don’t have Steve Jobs at the helm. Since day one, Jobs ego has carried, and hurt at times, Apple to great heights. Folklore of his direct hands on for everything from the iPod development to every iPhone application being OK’d by him first has proven that Jobs has his hands in everything. No other Big Honcho can make this claim. To many Chiefs, this would seem a ludicrous task but for Jobs, it’s a necessity. Truth is, this style of running the company has been a great asset to Apple and its stock holders, for the most part, but it is now becoming a liability.
Because Jobs has made it his priority to put all things through the Gates of Jobs (no pun intended), it has created this vacuum in the world of all things Apple. Once Jobs is removed, that vacuum will collapse upon itself. From uneasy stock holders to dismayed Apple fanboys, the companies finances could take a terrible hit by a Steve Jobs void. While it is silly to even care about someone’s health that runs a company — Jobs has surrounded himself with a fine group of lieutenants — again, Jobs has made this all happen because of the precedent HE created. HE has given all the keynotes at Macworld since his return as interim CEO in 1997. HE has been the one presenting the world with new products and services for all of 2008. HE has been the man on the cover of Macworld, Time, Newsweek, and other national magazines. HE was the one that made the monumental deal with AT&T for the iPhone without even showing then-Cingular a stinking sketch let alone a mock-up phone. HE has been the one to make hard-nosed and egotistical comments in the name of Apple since its inception. It’s always STEVE JOBS and no one else in the lime light and making the decisions. So, logic would say, if HE goes, so will HIS company.
If Apple, er, Steve Jobs wants to put an end to this madness, he needs to respond to the rumors. Again, it is asinine for such a thing to be done, but it is also foolhardy for the general to ride a chariot at the front of the line during war. Jobs has brought this upon himself with his swelling ego and now he must answer the very bloggers he hates. He must acknowledge their power as well as his miscalculation of monarchy company rule if he desires to see Apple continue its skyward journey. Otherwise, it’ll be difficult for the phoenix to rise out from the ashes for a second time.
Mr. Jobs,
I am an enthusiastic switcher that has brought many friends, colleges, and clients to Macintosh platform. I love Apple products and the experience associated with it. While I understand one company can not be all things to all its customers, I would think healthy competition would be something Apple to welcome. However, based on recent reports of the App Store refusing applications such as Podcaster and now the Opera Mini browser, I would seem to think Apple is actually scared of it. This surprises me coming from a company that defied all odds in the late 90s to which Michael Dell suggested that Apple close down and pay off its stock holders. Yet here we are a decade later with Apple worth more than the company named after Michael to hear it saying, ‘No!’ to apps that are “similar to other iPhone applications’.
I guess your true intent for the iPhone is drive its overwhelming success into the ground much like you did with the original Macintosh in 1986. Make it a close system and you become the gatekeeper. Prevent competition and hold the keys tightly. Steve, what if AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, and all the other carriers had told you years ago when you brought the iPhone to them, “No, your phone is too similar to other devices we carry”? You would have fought tooth and nail to have one of them open their network to Apple. But here you are, closing your network. Why? What possible reason could you have that would be justifiable? Your company just recently threw its support to a controversial proposition with a statement saying marriage shouldn’t be held back from any one. Then Apple turns around and tells its customers that they do not have the right to choose what browser or podcatcher they want. Have you knocked at the door of Hypocrisy this Halloween, Steve?
Don’t kill a great platform with your anti-competitive practices, Steve. Stop tricking us into thinking Apple rocks when it just keeps ruining our treats with such foul offerings in our bag. Do the right thing, Steve. Do the right thing.
Apple made a lot right moves with the revamp of its notebook line today, yet it missed a tremendous opportunity to steal Christmas away from Dell, HP, and Toshiba. While $100 off the previous MacBook is nice, it’s not good enough. In a slow economy, cutting-edge and quality take a backseat to affordable and usability. Windows machines will win that race come this gift-buying season. Unfortunately, Apple has made a miscalculation with its price point and it won’t be enough to have just three figures on the price tag to lure in new customers. No, buyers will see the sea of laptops at Costco, Wal-mart, and Best Buy selling PCs loaded with Windows Vista at reduced prices. Consumers in general usually won’t pay a premium for a superior product and with the slow down in the economy, $100 off an Apple laptop isn’t going to change anyones mind from a PC to a Mac.
I hear the same argument daily from my clients that “Macs are too expensive” and how they can buy 2 laptops at Costco for the price of one Mac. Even when I educate them that the cost of ownership will be much greater with the PC, they don’t care and don’t listen. This mentality will continue in this lackluster economy even more so than ever.
While the MacBook is a great piece of hardware with some incredible features, it missed the prime feature of all: a great price point. It’s not to say that the MacBook won’t do good, its sales will be good if not strong; however, it won’t be spreading like a Southern California wild fire like it could have.
You get what you pay for. An old but still very true saying. While Twitterrifc is a beautiful client, it’s lacking features just make it a pretty looking client. The Premium edition costs $10 and still doesn’t bring up the feature list to par for the asking price. TwitterFon is nice and free, but with little more offering than Twitter’s own mobile web page, it’s not too worthy of icon space on your iPhones home screen. Twinkle is nice, but since it is tied into its own network, your replies sometimes do not appear on Twitter and there are other issues, such as the near impossibility of activating the application. Not much left in the App Store for you to find, but thankfully Stone Design has upped the ante from Twittelator (its free offering) with Twittelator Pro (App Store link.)
With slew of features and an interface that rivals Twitterrific’s awarding winning look, you’d have to be silly not to consider Twittelator Pro’s $4.99 price. Any Twitter user that finds themselves tweeting at least a few times a day, or needing to read others tweets, will need to have this on their first page of their iPhones home screen. Some of the offerings of Twittelator Pro includes the ability to tweet from any screen, paste links, text and images, full reply ability, tweet from within Safari (!), various themes, copy tweets, easy to read tweets, post photos, TwitPic photos show as thumbnails in tweets, delete your own tweets, read up to 200 tweets, advance filtering, in-depth user details, en or disable following, drill down into friends, super advance search, bookmarks, recent, and emergency tweeting. This is just SOME of the offerings of Twittelator Pro!
SvenOnTech has used all the Twitter clients available on the iPhone and without a doubt, we like Twittelator Pro the best. We’ve given the clients a few months to mature and the only one that really has done that is Stone Design’s client. Author, Andrew Stone, has taken the time to listen to our and other users requests and implemented them into Twittelator Pro quickly to allow it to pull well ahead of any other Twitter client for the iPhone. As of this writing, an entire chunk of new features and fixes are on their way and are only waiting for Steve Jobs (our assumption, not Stones) to okay it. Any day now you should see the following in the update:
NEW FEATURES:
- New Twitter Keys panel to insty insert cool graphics into your tweets - tap Guy Smiling
- New Advanced Setting to thread your replies and direct messages right in with your friends
- You can edit existing accounts to fix typos or change password
- Groups show where Nearby is
FIXED:
- Better memory management when memory runs low (less exits!)
- Handles bad TwitPic image in tweet (doesn’t exit!)
- Better error message if you direct message someone who isn’t following you
- Search results with unicode characters appear correctly now
- & appears correctly in tweets now
- & and quotes don’t take as many characters to encode
- No error message if TwitPic times out
- Upside down landscape photos fixed
- Failed image/tweet combo uploads let you retweet them
- increased timeout for TwitPics to deal with their success
- Fancy curly quotes are displayed correctly
Look, we’re like the next guy looking for a free hand-out at the App Store but for a mere $5, you’re getting a quality and slick looking Twitter client that you’re just not going to get anywhere else. Twittelator Pro is just plain and simple, slammin’! And yes, I’ll tweet that! 
That said, what about iDisk? I mean, all my Macs happily share documents, files, and such via the synchronized “disk” in the Mobile Me cloud. Why can’t my iPhone have access to it? I mean, the iPhone can already handle many document types and via QuickTime other multimedia files. So, browsing ones iDisk hierarchy shouldn’t be a problem at all, right? I mean, the column view was made for the iPhone! To be able to realize while at a business meeting that you forgot some information from a document and then be able to say, “Oh, I’ll just look it up via my iPhone on the iDisk,” would be a life saver! Or being able to show videos off to your friends at a party by just simply logging into to your iDisk. Speed shouldn’t be an issue with 3G or Wi-Fi, right?
Apple, I hope you’re on the same track that I am and that you’re just simply being very secretive as usual. I hope, along with my cut-n-paste, this will be coming in the firmware update 2.1. Please tell me it’s so! If not, please add this to your list ASAP!
(PS: I know I can log into the web site and do this, too, but come on, we want native support!)
[Picture courtesy ronbailey’s weblog]
Aaron Vronko thinks a lot of people are too caught up in the 3G iPhone frenzy and thus are missing something big right before their eyes. In fact, it’s right there in their hands: the first-generation iPhone.
Aaron Vronko is the co-founder of Rapid Repair, popular for its iPod repair and used sales, and he spent some time on the phone with SvenOnTech last week. Building a strong business from an abundance of used and damaged music players by Apple, Vronko believes that it can continue its growth by adding iPhones to the mix. Vronko senses that there are two markets with the first-generation iPhone come July 11th, the date of release of the 3G iPhone. The first market is that of sales from the slew of five to six million 2G iPhones in the wild. Rapid Repair intends to see one to two million of those iPhones being shipped to its facilities in Michigan. This leads to the second market: sales of used iPhones. Vronko estimates these cleaned, repaired (if needed), and certified iPhones will be in the sub-$100 range (or lower) when Rapid Repair puts them on sale.
“Why would anyone want to buy a first-gen iPhone near the same price Apple and AT&T are going to offer the 3G iPhone at?” I asked Vronko. He responded that many people out there are not going to want to lose a ton of cash on activating the new iPhone (AT&T and Apple will require in-store activation at purchase) when they can just purchase the older one and easily unlock it. “People can’t live without it,” Vronko told SvenOnTech about their phones. Not wanting to have to wait two years on AT&T to jump ship to T-Mobile or any other GSM network, this desire creates a strong demand for old iPhones. Being on par with the 3G iPhone, sans the updated network support and GPS, the older iPhone will continue to have shine factor.
Then there is those who don’t want to upgrade and just want to stick with their current love. Come June 29th, warranties will run out on iPhones and those that did not opt for the extended warranty from Apple Care will now be able to use Rapid Repair’s service to fix their iPhone. “Fifteen precent of these devices will break in the first year,” Vronko told SvenOnTech on the phone last Friday. Vronko continued, “That’s a huge parts supply”. Yes, that means Rapid Repair will even purchase defective iPhones. Rapid Repair will pay between $50 and $75 depending on the condition of the phone. So even if you’re looking to upgrade, or are forced to due to a damaged iPhone, then you have a reputable place to sell it to. Vronko warned that, “You don’t know what you’re getting with eBay,” and such services. With Rapid Repair’s well respected reputation and reasonable purchase price, selling your iPhone couldn’t be easier.
Sale or buy, Vronko wants you to come to Rapid Repair first and see what it has to offer. Drop by to get your sale underway or to start your purchase today. Tell them SvenOnTech sent you.