iPad: “Only” a Big iPod Touch?
Posted on January 28, 2010 - Filed Under Apple, Macintosh, iPad, iPhone, iPod
Yesterday Steve Jobs introduced the world to Apple’s latest creation, the iPad. Say what you will about the name (you may have seen links to an old MADtv sketch for a completely different product of the same name), I believe Apple delivered a fantastic product. Does it live up to the hype? If it worked by mental telepathy instead of multi-touch, I don’t think it could have lived up to the hype. That’s the blessing and curse of Apple product launches.
While I expected the reactions both of the “gotta have it no matter what” fans and “gonna hate it no matter what” critics, I thought the general reaction would be something along the lines of “looks really cool but I’ll wait and try before I make up my mind.” To my surprise, the refrain I keep hearing is a rumbling disappointment that iPad is “only” a big iPod Touch.
The big revolution the iPhone brought into the mainstream was the idea that a smartphone shouldn’t be a phone with a few computer-like features. Rather it should be a pocket computer that among other things has a phone application. In fact, there was so much perceived value in this proposition that Apple realized that you could remove the phone from the iPhone and still have a product that lots of people would want. Thus was born the iPod Touch - the pocket computer that would replace your media player, give you access to thousands of applications and give you a great web and email experience.
That’s the innovation - pocket computing for the masses in a stylish device with a simple and intuitive user interface.
Personally, when I got my iPhone, my computing habits changed almost instantly. Very quickly I found that I did about 80% of my computing on my phone. I reserved booting up my Macbook Pro for media stuff and my PC for gaming.
But like many other people, I found there was a gap. For me specifically it was e-books. The phone screen was too small and the laptop too heavy and hot. So, I bought a Kindle for my “in-between” needs. It has it’s quirks but I am generally very happy with it. For other people, their “in-between” needs were met by small inexpensive basic laptops that came to be called netbooks.
As Steve Jobs pointed out in his presentation yesterday, the challenge of filling this “in-between” space between smartphones and laptops is what drove the design of the iPad.
So what would that device look like? It would give you a great web and email platform, play videos and music, let you update documents and presentations and read ebooks. It would be bigger than a smartphone and smaller that a laptop. It would be light and thin and have use a touchsreen for its primary interface. The screen would have to be big enough to give you a nice experience watching videos, browsing the web and typing on the virtual keyboard. Portable but not fit-in-your-pocket small. It would be built to leverage the scarcities of the mobile environment as strengths not to avoid them as weaknesses. Its underlying concept would not be a laptop with features removed, but rather a smartphone-like pocket computer with features added.
In other words, the perfect “in-between” device is a big iPod Touch. And if iPad isn’t seen as being a game-changer it’s because Apple already changed the game. Based on his opening remarks, it’s clear Steve Jobs intended iPad to further cement Apple’s identity as the company that defines how we do mobile computing.
And by filling the “in-between” ecological niche between smartphones and laptops with a big iPod Touch, I think he succeeded.
One giant leap into tabloid journalism (WTF CNN?)
Posted on July 20, 2009 - Filed Under News, Science, Space
CNN pisses me off. Here it is, the 40th Anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. At once, humanity’s single greatest technological achievement, greatest mission of exploration and greatest testament to the best within us all. What story leads their technology section of cnn.com? “Conspiracy buffs say moon landing is a lie.”
That’s it? That’s the tribute you pay to this incredible event and to the thousands of people who worked the greater part of a decade to reach this amazing goal? “Some people say you never did it.”
WTF CNN?
Universal to produce “Asteroids” movie; will it be better than “World of Warcraft”?
Posted on July 3, 2009 - Filed Under Film, Video Games
Yup, that’s right … according to Variety, Universal Studios will produce a full-length feature film based on the classic 1979 Atari video game Asteroids. Now, I know you might be thinking that the game had absolutely no plot whatsoever, so why make it a movie? Or more to the point, what is there in the game that you could make a movie from?
I see it in a completely different way. There is a basic premise - guys in space ships blowing up stray asteroids and alien spaceships. Definitely interesting visuals for today’s CGI wizards. However, beyond that, there is nothing for this movie to live up to. The original game was white-on-black vector graphics. There’s not even a visual style to emulate (although if the fighter cockpit displays don’t give a nod to this game aesthetic, I’d be really disappointed).
Think about it - instant “franchise” recognition and no creative shackles. Sure, this could get screwed up big time if they just go for visuals with no story or characters. However, the producers are not obligated to shoehorn their movie into a world designed for a completely different medium. This is why video game movies, in my opinion, generally suck. There’s so much back-and-forth about how to adapt the game world to the movies, that they forget to write a good movie. With Asteroids, the checklist is small:
- Asteroids
- Spaceships
- Explosions
Beyond that, it’s a clean slate.
Contrast this with the World of Warcraft movie that’s been talked about for the last few years. The Warcraft universe that Blizzard Entertainment has created is huge and vast. Beyond that, WoW is the most popular video game of all-time, with millions of players around the world, who are literally spending weeks, even years of real-world time, completely immersed in the WoW universe. How do you please an audience who would look at a scene and feel that something is wrong because a rock or a tree or a building is out of place, or painted the wrong color? How do you balance the experience of people playing Horde vs. Alliance? High-end raiders vs. casual players? Players who play against the game vs. against each other vs. immerse themselves in the role-playing aspect? There is so much to the world, that surely it’s a curse not a blessing. It’s seems that the more story comes with the video game, the more likely that you’ll wind up disappointing everybody.
So, do I think “Asteroids” will be great? Not sure, but I think it has the potential to be, if the producers use the blank slate as an opportunity to tell us a good story with good characters. Who knows, if they can pull that off, will “Missile Command” or “Defender” be far behind?
The metric system is a liberal plot?
Posted on July 2, 2009 - Filed Under Politics, Speculation
In a commentary on CNN.com, John Feehery rants a bit about the implications of Al Franken being seated as Minnesota Senator, giving Senate democrats a filibuster-proof majority. I won’t get into the politics of the discussion since this is a tech blog, but I had to laugh at Feehery’s dire warns that the Democrats would soon crumble under the weight of their own power. Yes, according to Feehery, Senate Dems will overreach their bounds, trying to impose evil things on an unwary public. Dreaded things. Horrible things. Things like … the metric system.
What is it about human nature that makes us pick what is easy over what is smart?
There are a few things Americans are uniquely attached to in this regard. We just got over our desperate clinging to standard-definition television (HDTV has been about 20 years in the planning, and they still were trying to delay the digital broadcast mandate at the last minute). We keep indulging our “love affair with the automobile” (i.e., choosing cars with big, powerful engines instead of economical, fuel-efficient ones) even though it endangers our economy, our national security and our environment. But nothing is so uniquely American as is our ridiculously outmoded system of measurement “US Customary Units”.
Seriously, at this point it’s an international embarrassment that we’re only one of three countries on the entire planet that hasn’t adopted the metric system (more precisely the International System of Units or SI) as the standard system of measurement. Yup, it’s just us, Liberia and Myanmar. That’s just awesome!
Our best scientific minds aren’t even exposed to SI in any great depth generally until high school. Why are we content to lag behind the rest of the world with our stupid 12-inches-to-a-foot mentality? We have a trillion dollars to bail out banks, but we have no money for NASA to convert to metric? Though there is a cost associated with switching to metric, isn’t the potential gain greater still?
Really Smart Way: 1 millimeter x 1000 = 1 meter; 1 meter x 1000 = 1 kilometer
Really Dumb Way: 1 inch x 12 = 1 foot; 1 foot x 3 = 1 yard; 1 yard x 1760 = 1 mile
So, if the worst thing you can imagine that Al Franken and the Senate Democrats want to do is convert the US to the metric system, I say let’s do the smart thing. No matter how hard it may seem, we can do it. After all, we’re Americans.
GoDaddy Support: All is forgiven
Posted on July 1, 2009 - Filed Under GoDaddy
In my last post, I bitched about getting crappy technical support from GoDaddy. I was truly shocked because their tech support is usually excellent. So, I decided to give them another shot.
For the longest time, I’ve been meaning to transfer the hosting for my podcast The Dave and Matt Show from a Windows server to Linux. Without getting to into the details, if I were to make this kind of a change on a computer at home, it would take a lot of time and hassle. This is one of the reasons why I had put it off for so long.
I waited on hold for GoDaddy support for about three minutes (not a bad at all for calling at lunchtime) and was greeted by a support tech with a friendly voice. In a matter of another three minutes, the guy already had my website transferring to a Linux server. No fuss. No muss. I didn’t have to back up any files or transfer anything by hand. They’re taking care of everything. I didn’t even have to click the button to start the transfer. Zero clicks beats one click any day.
Now, that’s the kind of support I expect. Maybe it’s because I called during business hours, not at midnight. Who knows?
What I do know is that all is forgiven for the previous bad experience (but seriously GoDaddy, take a look at the consistency of service across all your shifts).
GoDaddy Support: super-friendly but not very competent
Posted on June 29, 2009 - Filed Under E-mail, GoDaddy
I use GoDaddy to host my websites and e-mail. I’ve used them for years and never had any complaints. Their tech support has always been excellent. So, this past weekend, I was shocked to get such poor support from them.
This is a nice contrast to my last post about my experience with folks in the Apple Store. They were competent and fixed my iPhone in record time, they just weren’t very nice or friendly. My experience with GoDaddy was quite the opposite.
I host several e-mail accounts with GoDaddy, and manage two of them using Mail on my Macintosh and iPhone. For as long as I can remember, I’ve had a problem where I could only get outgoing mail to work from one or the other, but never from both. It was inconvenient, but simple enough to work around. Finally, the other night, I got fed up and decided to get to the bottom of things. It was late (I think around midnight) but GoDaddy has 24/7 tech support.
I didn’t wait on hold long at all. The woman who answered the phone was upbeat, friendly and pleasant. She didn’t have an answer for me, so she put me on hold to talk to an engineer. After several back-and-forths where she relayed irrelevant tidbits of information from the tier-two guy, she finally came back and said, “Yeah, that’s a known problem. It’s a problem with Apple Mail, it’s not on our end.”
I was incredulous. What kind of idiot did they take me for? If Apple couldn’t figure out SMTP (the dumbest protocol ever invented) they would be out of business. Maybe GoDaddy didn’t have the A-Team working at midnight, but I still wanted a real answer! Heck, I could haved speculated that it was Apple’s fault all by myself. The thing is, what I was trying to do was so simple, that it being Apple’s fault made absolutely no sense at all.
But the pleasant non-supporting support person was willing to leave it at that. She even had the brass to ask if I would mind if she sent a survey to me.
Sure. Why not? Whatever …
Knowing that the real problem was on GoDaddy’s side, I started poking around in the management settings for my e-mail hosting account. I notice a setting that controls how many e-mails per day I was allowed to send out. It was set to 250, which was 250 more than I was actually able to send. I reset that value to 0, and then reset it back to 250. After a few minutes, my mailbox was back up and running, and hey presto, I could send outgoing mail again!
In other words, as my friend Tony later said, I had to “jiggle the handle” to get it to work.
I was happy that I got the problem fixed, but pissed that GoDaddy was no help to me. Then I remembered the survey. Was the support person friendly? Yes. Knowledgable? Nope. How satisfied was I with the service? Not at all, and I told them why in detail.
I hit the Submit button and I got a popup that says something to the effect of, “You are about to send in negative feedback. Are you sure you want to do that?”
Yes, I was sure. So sure that if I could have, I would have made my review worse because of the inanity of the question. I’m sure if I gave them five stars in every category, it wouldn’t have prompted, “You are about to tell us how awesome we are. Are you sure you want to do that?” Can I go back and give you no stars?
I haven’t heard anything back from them about the survey, so I can only assume that it was either removed from the system for being negative, or was never read in the first place.
Some words of advice for GoDaddy:
- Make sure all your tech support people are top-notch. If you’re claiming 24/7 support, make sure you have the best people in place 24/7. If not, put the better people on the off-hours shift. From an IT perspective, if I need help 9-5, I need help. If I need at help at midnight, I REALLY need help.
- Train your people never to blame another vendor. It’s not helpful at all. If Apple products don’t work with your service, guess what? That’s up to you to work out with Apple. Leave your customers out of it.
- Have your people at least try. I do not believe that I am the only customer to ever have had this issue. My solution was the e-mail equivalent of rebooting my computer. That is literally the least they could have instructed me to do, and in this case, it would have been sufficient to fix my issue.
- If you get negative feedback, don’t try to prompt people not to submit it. Instead, read it, understand it, learn from it and respond to it.
So, I have my definitive answer. If I have to choose between competent and friendly, I will gladly pick competent every time.
Apple Store employees: competent but not super friendly
Posted on June 25, 2009 - Filed Under Apple, iPhone
[My iPhone drama continued]
I went to my local Apple Store to meet with a Genius. Getting an appointment was easy to do online. I was helped right on time at 8:45 p.m.. The Genius was knowledgeable and was able to quickly replace my defective screen. The entire process was easy and painless.
My only critique is that nobody in the Apple Store was especially friendly. I got to the store a few minutes early and sat at the Genius Bar. Nobody greeted me, and I had to get a Concierge’s attention to ask what I was supposed to do now that I was in the store. I’m glad I did, because he had to check me in the system to let the Geniuses know that I was there. It would have been nice if they offered me a bottle of water or something while I waited.
Don’t get me wrong, I much prefer competent and stand-offish than stupid and warm-n-fuzzy. My primary concern was getting my phone fixed and they did a wonderful job with that. But still, I left thinking it would be better if they kind of pampered you a little.
iPhone in Critical Condition
Posted on June 23, 2009 - Filed Under Apple, iPhone
My iPhone, faithful cell phone, web browser, e-mail client, iPod and portable computer platform lost its display due to complications from a fall on a hardwood floor. While initially I thought a reboot might be enough to get the iPhone back into working condition, I quickly realized that the device wouldn’t respond to any input. I couldn’t get it to reboot. I decided to flash the firmware, since that forces a reboot. However, this was not enough to bring it back to life.
My only hope - a Genius at the Apple Store.
[to be continued]
Microsoft’s “Mojave” and Folger’s Crystals
Posted on July 30, 2008 - Filed Under Marketing, Microsoft, Mojave, Vista, Windows
So, MS-haters and MS-lovers are back in the trenches yet again over Microsoft’s latest pro-Vista stunt. They conducted focus group testing on what the participants were told was “the next Microsoft OS”, codenamed Mojave. The results of the testing were very positive for MS. However, it turns out that the testers were in fact not using “Mojave”, but rather Microsoft Vista. The Mojave cover story was intended to get the testers to look at Vista without any preconceived notions.
The anti-Microsoft crowd quickly took the position that this is just indicative of the kind of lying, underhanded marketing that continually comes out of Redmond. Others defending MS, saying this was a smart way to show that even though Vista got off to a shaky start, the OS is a lot better than it was.
I have to agree with the latter point of view. When I first saw Vista, I did not like it whatsoever. As a result, I didn’t switch from XP. Even after I read news that Vista has gotten a lot better, I know that my opinion was colored by my initial experiences. Though I’m not in the market for a new Windows box, if I were I think this kind of information might make me take a second look.
As for the “stunt” part of this, do I think it’s underhanded lying on the part of MS? Not really. If they packaged the same software in a box and sold it as a different product, that would be unethical. What they did was on par with the old Folger’s Crystals ads, where they would go into a four-star restaurant and replace their regular coffee with Folger’s Crystals. It’s to get an honest reaction from people outside of their prejudices.
Will I be buying Vista anytime soon as a result? Probably not unless my gaming machine unexpectedly catches fire and melts into a pile of plastic goo.
For almost everything else, my MacBook Pro is my main computer.
Thoughts on the paperless office
Posted on July 26, 2008 - Filed Under Apple, Enterprise, Linux, Macintosh, Microsoft, Surface, Windows, iPhone
I had a great conversation last night with my friend Mark. Among many other things we talked about, we came around to the topic of the paperless office. For about a decade now, we’ve heard that we are at the dawn of the paperless office. Documents can be virtualized, then organized and re-organized on a whim. Data in XML format can be ported and shared between people and applications with very little loss due to “friction” in process. We are no longer beholden to the costs of filing and storing physical paper pages.
So, why do we still use paper?
I think there are two main reasons:
- Paper is cheap.
- Paper is simple to use, and as a technology, provides additional functionality over what current computer displays can provide.
Since I know very little about the economics of paper production, I can’t really address the first point, other than to say if paper suddenly jumped in price the way gasoline has, I doubt you’d see nearly as many people in the office sending those 200 page reports over to the LaserJet.
The second point however is firmly in techno-weenie land (my happy home). What kind of digital technology can compete with paper for functionality and ease-of-use?
Readability
Face it, computer screens are hard to read. If you look at them too long you go cross-eyed. Innovations like the Amazon Kindle make me hopeful that in the near future, all monitors will be similarly optimized for document readability.
Organizing, highlighting and notetaking
The one thing you definitely learn after you’ve shuffled papers around your desk for any length of time is that paper is easy to shuffle around. If you want to combine a spreadsheet and a document into one report, all you need is a stapler. Marking up printed documents is simple and quick.
Touch screen interfaces seem to be the best prospect for easy manipulation of digital documents. Personally, I think the best current implementation is Apple’s iPhone. Microsoft also has an exciting offering in this space, called Surface. Rather than being a touchscreen you can fit in your pocket like the iPhone, with Surface, the interface is a multi-touch tabletop. The demo shows applications in the home, restaurants, bars, etc.
Imagine a different application where your physical desktop is replaced with a Surface interface instead. You can do your regular computing with your standard keyboard/mouse/monitor. Then, we you need to, you just drag your document over to your Surface desktop, where you can use the touch interface to flip through documents, shuffle pages, blend documents together, insert photos, markup documents with a pen or stylus … whatever you want to do, all with the same relative ease of manipulating paper documents. The best of both worlds.
The biggest downside to this is that currently Surface is not available to consumers. Also, it’s very expensive, the main current target market being hotels, resorts, casinos, trendy high-end bars, etc. Also, let’s face it, as this hysterical Surface parody from SarcasticGamer points out, Surface is a big-ass table. There is a long way to go before this could be integrated into the workplace.
Power Consumption
You don’t have to plug paper in. Not sure what we can do about that one.
I believe the paperless office can actually become a reality, but we’re not really there yet. Why do I care so much about it? Because even though I’ve never hugged one, trees are nice. They provide shade, they make the air smell nice, they use up carbon dioxide and exhale oxygen, and it sounds cool when wind blows through their leaves. We should cut fewer of them down.
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