Writings on laptops and smartphones, including devices, software and development.
A single thought on each OS manufacturer and my biggest concern for each:
Ever since the rumors cropped up again about Apple and Verizon, I have been thinking about the impact of that deal. I have thought, at various times, that Apple won’t do it because it is a completely different device infrastructure (CDMA instead of the world-standard GSM), that Apple would wait for LTE, the fact that Apple is letting Google catch up by not moving to Verizon, the fact that Verizon’s network can’t handle voice and data at the same time, which is a big deal for Apple and a chief selling point of the iPhone.
And then Marco Arment, creator of Instapaper and lead developer of Tumblr, wrote a great piece on his experiences and thoughts this morning. Spot on, Marco, and thanks for killing my LTE hopes. Hmmm…. now I have no idea if and when Apple will ship iPhone on Verizon but am concerned it won’t happen soon enough. Or maybe Apple’s strategy is to skip the carriers and go straight to VOiP services with multi-tasking on an iPod touch. (But I still think Apple wants Verizon.)
(Hey, I make money from this platform, iOS. I want Apple to sell 3 trillion units per year.)
I am at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) this week. On Monday, Steve Jobs gave his keynote where he focused exclusively on iPhone 4 and iOS 4. (Apple changed the OS name from iPhone OS to iOS.) The new device looks nice: camera, video in HD, new OS features, beautiful and innovative device design and the new open sourced FaceTime for video chat.
But what was more interesting was what wasn’t mentioned. No discussion of Mac computers at all. Most of the rumors turned out to be false: no Apple TV, no MacBook refresh, no fancy mice. (Really? Mice? Since when does that merit keynote mention?)
But my question to all those lementing is, why would Apple announce all these now? Apple never makes announcements until the products are ready to go. The company does not believe in vaporware at all. And if anything, Apple knows how to keep the focus on it. As far as I can tell, I am expecting a major new Apple announcement every couple of months for the next year. Let me outline them for you:
July: Mac event
This is where we hear about the MacBook and MacMini refreshes, potentially new monitors and the new mouse, if it exists. Perfect for those back to school shoppers, especially those who are sending their kids off to college.
October: “Music”event
Every year Apple does a music event with iPod refreshes for the holiday season. I think this will be a very special announcement that advances Apple’s strategic goals. The center piece of this event will be the new iPod touch with optional 3G. The reason this will be special is because optional 3G+wifi devices coupled with multitasking in iOS4 will make it possible to use Skype or another VoIP service for all your phone calls, bi-passing the carriers all together (except to act as a pipe). Both Google and Apple have this important goal in common.
February: Connected Life event
Apple has made a number of acquisitions and is doing a number of things behind the scenes that will set up this event. What am I talking about? How about a massive, $1 billion data center in North Carolina, purchases of Siri and LaLa, and very old Apple TV. This will be Apple’s web strategy coming out party, where all of your devices – iPad, iPhone, laptops and desktops, Apple TV (which must be re-branded iTV and will now be powered by iOS)– and all of your files are connected via one cloud-based account that is tied into iTunes and based on MobileMe.
March: iPad 2
The iPad is updated to take advantage of iPhone 4 innovations: forward and backward facing cameras, video recording, and higher resolution “retina” displays. It will be magical… all over again!
April: iOS5
The next rev of the operating system that powers iPhone, iPod touch, iPad and iTV will be introduced with betas ready for us developers right after Steve Jobs’ keynote.
June: iPhone 4G
Apple’s next generation phone will be LTE compatible, which means you can use it with any carrier, and will be 4G compatible. Good-bye AT&T hell. Hello Verizon hell.
I love my iPad but there are too many videos I can’t watch thanks to this Flash problem. As a developer and thinker, I completely understand where Apple is coming from and agree with everything Steve Jobs said in his open letter. As a user, though, it is just a pain in the neck. I wish the two could get together and figure out some way to make this work. Something like a separate app that could only run videos. I know it is not going to happen, but I sure wish it would. (Or I wish the world’s video hosts would transition their sites to run on the iPad faster.)
One of the things I hope we see from WWDC is a new Apple TV. Now that I have the iPad I am finding myself watching a lot more video. And not just movies and TV shows and Netflix streaming and baseball games, by the way. A lot more video on the web. I would love to have all these things in one place and available on the big screen in the house when I want it. The problem, of course, is that it will likely run iPhone OS, which still means no Flash, which means many of the videos I want to watch still won’t work.
I also hope Apple is more grown up than Google. I use a lot of Google products and use them every day, but their Google I/O spit balls aimed at Apple were sophomoric at best. I didn’t like that stuff when I was in middle school. I sure don’t like it now. Let’s face it, the smartphone market is not one of those markets where we are going to have a 90-10 split between two competitors. It is likely that we will see a couple of companies in the 30-40% market share range and a couple of others in the 5-10% range. We are talking about 3.6 billion potential customers here! Let’s also realize that Apple and Google are both better off for having each other. Apple will push Google to make better UI and streamlined devices. Google will push Apple to create better and better products and (hopefully) curb their worst tendencies.
I’ve railed here against mobile apps that should be mobile web sites. One of my favorite examples is IMDB but there are a ton of them. After all, all it is doing is grabbing web site data and downloading it to the local app anyway. It’s useless without a web connection.
But then the Facebook incident at ReadWriteWeb happened. To refresh your memory, a whole mess of people tried to log into a ReadWriteWeb article on the changes made to Facebook Login page.
All of a sudden I can’t help but wonder if I have it all wrong. Maybe the browser is confusing and its the presence of apps — little icons that live on a home screen — that really makes this easy. Maybe the rise of website-as-application is critical for mainstream adoption of mobile devices. After all, an iPhone app is a lot more fool-proof than a mobile website. (Of course, we can save icons to the home screen but that takes some technical knowledge also.)
If the iPad is the device for my grandmother to use, than should I expect my grandmother to understand how a web browser works and what addresses are? Or does it make more sense for those things to be applications that sit on the desk?
Google did an interesting study, asking what a browser is. Turns out, very few actually know, which might be the greatest reason yet why people are taking to apps like a fly to honey.
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