iPhone hype and App hype exceeded by results: iTablet / iSlate to match it?
Along with all the hype before the first iPhone was released, I added my voice, noting that it would forever change the mobile phone business in important ways. I camped in line to be among the first to get one. There was enormous hype. Yet, in the two and a half years since, more change happened than most hype predicted.
When the iPhone app store was announced, I predicted that even the most optimistic scenarios projected by analysts were likely to fall short of the mark. It seems that apps have also changed more than even the hype suggested — they were off by even more than I’d thought.
So what will become of the Tablet that Apple announces this morning? Is it possible that the hype will be exceeded only by the results?
Until I learn more about what is being released, I suspect that there will always be a larger market for devices in a phone form-factor than in tablet factor. I doubt that tablet sales can even eclipse laptop sales within the next few years. Yet, there is the possibility that this will change as much about publishing as Apple has already changed about music, mobile and apps, and that computing will be further changed in the process.
I’m not sure what to predict, except that I hope there are some surprises today beyond what I’ve listed below and others have been predicting!
Display: With all the talk Apple has been doing with print publishers (books and magazines), I hope they’ve included a fantastic high-resolution display (OLED would be great), showing off images as good or better than some magazines.
Voice: Ironically, the thing iPhone seems to do least well at is voice. One wants to shout “it’s a phone, dammit!” Since the tablet will have a much faster processor and more memory than a phone can support, it will have even more capacity to support great voice recognition and speech as alternate input and output. It might even have a larger antenna with better wireless performance so that it drops voice calls less often (whether VOIP on WiFi or carrier voice).
Keyboard: Apple’s great little bluetooth keyboard will make it easy to use the tablet to enter long text and work as a laptop replacement.
Storage: Hopefully the machine comes with enough storage and the operating system includes better support for easily building all applications to work seamlessly offline or on. Of course, we expect Apple to announce working with other carriers today as well, but with the rapid shift to mobile data, all carriers may soon have the problems we currently face with AT&T.
Apps: Hopefully Apple realizes how important it is to have a seamless experience across computer, phone and tablet. I want my data and applications to work across them as in science fiction, where I can swipe to send a screen to my other machine, or to a colleague’s. And I want the app store ecosystem to include more than just mobile so that desktop apps can be monitized as well as mobile apps. I’ve been hoping for a Mac App Store for two years.
Depending on price, features and partnerships announced today, Apple might just have a three-peat on it’s hands: extending to the iTablet (or whatever they call it) hype that is exceeded only by the reality.
Check your plan: new lower cell voice rates not automatic
You’ve probably seen the ads: both AT&T and Verizon have dropped their rates for unlimited voice plans to $69.99 per month. But if you aren’t already on an unlimited plan, you may be paying more for less until you take action.
For example, I was on an $89 voice plan that gave me 1350 minutes a month with rollover. AT&T was going to happily keep charging me $20 per month extra indefinitely. (I effectively had unlimited minutes already — with text and data becoming my dominant means of communication, I had accumulated tens of thousands of rollover minutes.)
$69.99 per month for unlimited voice -- but I had to go online to make the change
I went online to login and make the change to my account. In approximately 90 seconds total, I switched and am now paying $69.99 per month for unlimited voice.
So now my iPhone costs $120 per month ($30 data plan and $20 unlimited texting) before taxes and fees (and apps!).
The change means that AT&T now effectively offers only two voice plans — the only other plan that might make sense is 450 voice minutes for $39.99. So if you’re sure you’re not ever going over on voice minutes, you could save $40 per month. Since AT&T keeps dropping my calls, that’s going to be tempting for me as I start giving out my Google Voice number and using my Google Nexus One phone on T-Mobile more.
Hopefully, dropping voice rates isn’t just the prelude to the carrier’s plans to raise data rates.
2010 Year of the App Phone (Android vs. iPhone vs. WebOS)
2008 and 2009 were all about the iPhone. Smartphones were obsolete, nothing else came close. That will be different this year. 2010 is the year of the App Phone.
Last week I looked at the version of a common app on Droid vs. iPhone. The iPhone still won hands down. (Not that a great app couldn’t be delivered on Android, but iPhone has been so much more successful that developers still prioritize it far above the others.) Why will that change this year?
iPhone has the lead in most areas as the most polished and intuitive device with the most apps. But Android and Palm are set to rapidly gain enough market share and maturity of their own to stand up as viable competition.
And they’re all being freed of carrier lock-in. Palm announced WebOS handsets for Verizon. AT&T announced that it will sell Android and WebOS. iPhone may be available on carriers other than AT&T as soon as June. Google has announced its Nexus One, and many more Android handsets are sure to come this year.
For me personally, this means a big change. I am, afterall, the guy who camped at the front of all three previous iPhone lines.
But at least in San Francisco and NYC, the experience of being on the AT&T network is bad enough to drive one to accept a distant second best phone in order to avoid dropped calls. I ordered a Google Nexus One yesterday. Now I’ll have two phones, one that’s good for apps and one that’s good for phone calls and Gmail. I’ll have to carry both until one does it all for me again. (Maybe I’ll even pick up a Verizon WebOS handset.)
On the one hand, I’m a little sad that I have to carry two devices. I thought the geeky habit of having two kinds of computers was a habit I broke a long time ago. On the other, these are exciting times — it’s been a long time since the competition and advancements have been significant enough that I considered using two computing platforms. Twenty-ten looks like it’ll be a fun ride.
Update: Harry’s having the same problem with AT&T coverage, and taking a vote on what he should do about it.
It’s time to end TSA-sponsored terrorism in the air and on American soil!
In nearly three years on Twitter, rarely have I seen such widespread, rapid and uniform response to anything having to do with politics, security or terrorism. The complaints and jokes came on rapid fire this afternoon, filling my screen with everything TSA and terrorism. It was a slow Twitter day, but perhaps 10% of the tweets I saw over a few hours were on a single topic — that’s unprecedented.
After a failed terrorist attempt yesterday, the TSA has responded with the next escalation after their previous high-water mark of stupidity (no pun intended), the no-liquids rule. Now: no more electronics in flight, nothing in your lap, only one carry on, and no movement in the last hour of flight. Many of those I follow on Twitter are frequent travelers, most are highly intelligent. All who’ve commented seem pissed (and not just that they won’t be able to pee).
They know the real impact of what security expert Bruce Schneier calls Security Theater (if you don’t like that link to his blog, try this one to 60 Minutes, even if they haven’t read his latest reaction.
My first reaction was When I stop flying, it doesn’t mean the terrorists have won, it means the TSA has!
As it sank in fully and I realized fully how absurd the new rules are, I wondered if we might all protest with our bodily functions. What are the TSA regulations on peeing into a ziplock bag from your seat?
Robert Scoble had one of the mildest reactions. As a 100,000 annual mile flier on United, he’s looking to cut back his travel and fly less as a result of the new rules. Though he did retweet several people to let them say things in more pointed terms, by linking to an XKCD comic and boiling it down to “the dumbest load of crap I have ever seen.”
TechCrunch had two great reactions: MG Siegler’s thinking that perhaps the TSA is attempting to save print media and Paul Carr’s NSFW: The Physical Impossibility of the The Future in the Mind of Someone Trapped In Chicago.
Here are messages I retweeted, along with a few reactions to my comments on Facebook. Please add your thoughts to the comments in this blog post, but more importantly:
Please let your elected representatives know that it’s time to end TSA-sponsored terrorism in the air and on American soil!
To marry a geek, propose like one. Engaged! (Yes, on Twitter, like real geeks.)
(photo by Ken Yeung)
If you want to marry a geek, you should propose like one. That makes Twitter and Facebook mandatory. Optional, but highly desired: a room full of San Francisco’s tech elite. At least, that was good enough for me, and I’ve managed to get very lucky.
At AT&T Unix Labs, Laura La Gassa helped maintain the C libraries and several standard Unix utilities. She was the build engineer for the first Pentium ‘C’ compiler. From there, she was an engineer in five silicon valley startups, though she’s spent the last ten years as a competitive ballroom dancer (and maker of dresses for same). They don’t come much prettier, more wonderful, or more geeky. (I’ll spare you lots of other adjectives I’d carry on with at length.) Fortunately, even though I’ve gone longer than she without coding, I have a small bit of my own geek cred, and was up to the task.
You can find the proposal (and about 150 reactions) in my Twitter favorites. Below are a few blog posts (with pictures) about the evening:
http://technologizer.com/2009/11/20/a-night-to-remember/
http://bub.blicio.us/the-twitter-proposal/
http://sunshinemug.blogspot.com/2009/11/twitprosal-at-tech-halls.html
iTunes 9 Home Sharing/Sync the Wrong Solution. Give us automatic media caching!
We live in an age when homes don’t have a single computer on a desk, everyone has their own laptop. It’s great that iTunes9 recognizes the need to share files between computers so that everyone in a home can make local copies to hear each other’s music and watch each other’s videos.
Except that we have tiny storage in iPhones, MacBook Air and netbooks — some iPods hold more. We need to solve the problem of keeping only the files we need with us and having the rest stored on the network. I want an automatic system to swap in and out the files on my machines based on my requests and favorites, caching all the most used files locally and pulling less-often used files off the network as needed.
TimeCapsule sucks as Network Attached Storage for iTunes or Sonos
Apple, please announce a beefier TimeCapsule (and/or Apple TV) today!
Here’s what I learned through trying to set the TimeCapsule up to act as drive space for music and video: The TimeCapsule works well as a wireless router, and works OK for backups, but it sucks to use as general storage. This is a shame since it was introduced at the same time as the MacBook Air, a machine which is great as your main computer but for the fact that it doesn’t have enough hard drive to manage any but the smallest collection of photos, music and videos.
I’ve struggled with this issue since I first got my Air 18 months ago: where to put all the files that don’t fit on the tiny 80gb drive? It meant I’ve kept only a small music collection. Hell, some iPods come with larger drives, a few are even twice the size.
It seemed simple enough to fix. Apple’s TimeCapsule is a combined 802.11n wireless router and Network-Attached Storage (NAS) device. It is designed to give you a place to backup your computers via the OS X Time Machine software, but it also lets you mount a drive for any other purpose. I’d bought one at the same time as my Air. But now I’d finally set it up as a shared drive, mounted it on both laptops, pointed iTunes to it (instead of the default local directory), copies all files there and started ripping CDs to it. This was going to rock.
Only it didn’t. Read more
Skittles goes all in on Twitter
Skittles Vodka (with instructions on Flickr)
In a brilliant publicity move, tonight Skittles made its website home page primarily a Twitter search on “Skittles.” (They overlay a menu that lets you get to other Skittles content, including Facebook, Flickr and Wikipedia.)
Even if they take it down quickly, everyone will be talking about it for some time to come.
Like any good publicity stunt, this required rare courage.
I’ve already read several folks putting obscenities together with Skittles (some more creatively than others), or folks just adding the word to any tweet. The conversation will be as much backlash and criticism as anything else. But the point is exactly that people are talking about what Skittles did. And any publicity is good publicity, right? You just can’t buy the kind of media this will generate.
As well, we’ll all learn something in the conversations and fallout. That alone is worth the experiment. Bravo, Skittles.
Update (9:21am Monday):
Skittles is generating so much traffic to to Twitter that users are complaining of timeouts on loading pages (and TweetSuite isn’t yet updating with all the folks who’ve been kind enough to tweet a link to this blog). I’m looking forward to hearing from @abdur, Twitter’s Chief Scientist and creator of search.twitter.com, what he thinks of all this (and whether Skittles gave him a heads up).
@dalelarson on skittles.com
Update 2 (Monday afternoon):
I liked this post, inspired me to think a bit deeper and comment:
Skittles Goes Modernista! With A Distributed Experience.
So far the only comments I’ve seen out of Twitter about Skittles are:
“I am neither… there are both pro and con points” (thanks for getting back to me, Abudur!),
and Netik’s quick response to @LaughingSquid: “I don’t know what they’re thinking.”
Though one might take this status blog entry to mean that Skittles blew a fuse at Twitter’s datacenter: “We experienced a brief data center power failure this morning affecting a small number of servers. Site performance was degraded for 5 minutes.“
Competition Reduces Friction for Payments
Great news for business models that monitize by charging users: new competition in the payments space is heating up.
The iPhone AppStore capitalizes on 75 million iTunes accounts attached to credit cards to make buying cheap apps frictionless for users. I still want to extend it to paying for web and desktop apps and add flexibility for content and subscriptions.
PayPal powers payments on EBay (where the payments are larger), but doesn’t have quite the same easy single-click power and hasn’t been widely applied to the application/content space. Others, such as Google Checkout have never reached critical mass.
Yesterday, Amazon.com launched its Flexible Payments Service (previously in limited beta), touting it as “the first payments service designed from the ground up for developers.” They clearly intend it to work for e-commerce, digital goods, donations and online services, including digital music and online storage, and provide for subscriptions and recurring payments. Customers pay using the same login credentials, shipping address and payment information they already have on file with Amazon. In other words, it looks like it could compete with both of the above.
Sounds like a great foundation for the service I want to create…
A hint about good presentations, Politics as an example of transparency? and OMMA Social
The best speakers bring authenticity through personal stories.
It was easy to focus on Rich Ullman’s lunchtime talk during OMMA Social today as he creatively wove in stories and slides from his experience over the last 48 hours. (Sorry about that olive, Rich.)
He made a point about transparency making newly appointed U.S. Senator Gillibrand an example. With the news around her appointment, he’d just learned that as a congresswoman, her Sunlight Report broke ground making her the first to list her official schedule daily (who she is meeting with) and among the first to disclose all her earmark requests and post her financial disclosure reports.
Cool!
Take it one step further:
I’d love it if every member of congress had a Twitter feed updated as they went through their daily meetings and proposed, amended, or voted on budgets or legislation. Following those I vote for would be manageable and give me a much deeper awareness and sense of engagement.
[Rich was kind enough to upload his slides to Slideshare within an hour of my request. Thanks!]
[You might also be interested in live blog posts about each presentation at OMMA Social by @dberkowitz]