Apple’s iPad – It’s all about the apps.

I’ve had some time to digest Apple’s announcement of the iPad this Wednesday, and despite being confused and unsure at first I think I’ve come around on it.  Is the iPad perfect?  No.  Is it a device you need?  No more than you “need” an Amazon Kindle.  It’s a luxury device that’ll fill some use cases for you and probably make your life a little more convenient, but certainly not a necessity.

There has been a lot of commotion about the iPad being “just a big iPod Touch.”  I disagree with that sentiment completely, for a couple of reasons.  First, it’s about the user experience.  What’s the most-obvious difference between the iPod Touch and iPad?  The display size, of course.  Because the display for these touch devices doubles as the user input interface, it means developers can do a hell of a lot more with the software they create on the iPad.  I think it’ll be the first device to truly recognize the full potential and yes, I’ll admit it, “cool factor” of multitouch.  Sure I can do some multitouch functions on my iPhone, but usually only to zoom in or zoom out on an object.  Imagine the possibilities of the iPad’s nearly 10″ of screen real estate, particularly when you can set it down on the table or in your lap and have two free hands with which to manipulate the on-screen information.

The second major difference is the horsepower.  My current smartphone is the iPhone 3GS, which has a ARM processor clocked at 600mhz by default and only 256MB of memory.  The iPad on the other hand, has a 1ghz processor and rumored 1GB of RAM.  That means that the applications that are being developed for it will have a much wider range of capabilities and a richer user experience.  While watching Apple’s keynote it wasn’t until Scott Forstall brought developers up on stage to show their iPad apps, not to mention when Phil Schiller did the iWork demonstration, that I began to truly understand the amazing amount of potential this device has.  Compare the iPad right now to where the iPhone was when it launched: there are very few native applications and those that do exist were created by Apple.  The one thing that the iPad has going for it over the iPhone though, is that we already have an SDK for the device before it’s even released.  How long did it take Apple to get the iPhone SDK out there?

I’ll be the first to admit that I think the way they’ve chosen to integrate iPhone apps into the iPad is a little cheesy.  You can either run them in a native mode, which displays them in a tiny black box in the middle of your 9.5″ display, or you can use “pixel-double” to expand them to fit the screen.  Pixel-double might be good for apps that are predominantly text or image-based, but I have a feeling that there’s going to be significant graphical degradation with video playback and games.  With all that said though, iPhone apps on the iPad are not what users should be excited for.  Software developed with the iPad in mind will truly make the device sing, and I think it’ll be the best media-consumption device we’ve seen so far.

Plus you can’t read ibooks on your iPod Touch, you illiterate brigand!

Google Voice

I was fortunate enough to get invites to both Google Voice and Google Wave this week, but for now I’m going to stick with discussing Google Voice. This is mostly because nobody I know has Google Wave yet and, for a product that’s about collaboration with other people, it makes it hard to form an educated opinion about its usefulness.

Google Voice is a new service from Google which lets you link multiple phone numbers (home phone, work phone, mobile, etc.) to one new number of your choosing, as long as it’s available.  You can search for numbers via keyword (for example your name), area code or zip code.  Once you’ve chosen your new number all you have to do is link your pre-existing numbers to that one and you’ll have access to the host of cool features that Google Voice provides.

The most obvious feature Google Voice provides is call forwarding.  Using the site’s settings you can set Google Voice to forward calls and messages to one of your various phones automatically.  For example, you could set your work phone to only receive Google Voice calls between 9 and 5 on weekdays, or your home phone to only receive calls on weekends.  You can even setup and manage certain groups of contacts and set the default phone for each – for example, if you want to direct work calls to your mobile phone you can do that.

The next feature I like is getting Google into some hot water with carriers – free SMS messaging.  From the Google Voice website you can send text messages to any phone, for free.  Many people have presumed that this feature alone is why the Google Voice application was denied from Apple’s App Store.  You can be sure that AT&T wasn’t too excited about the idea.

One of the best features you get with Google Voice is the purest form of free visual voicemail I’ve ever seen.  Voicemails sent to your Google Voice account are automatically transcribed to text and forwarded to the Google Voice website where you have an inbox for all incoming messages.  The transcriptions are surprisingly accurate, but you can also playback the message from the website if there are a few missed words.  As you would expect, from your Google Voice inbox you can read incoming messages as though you were reading email from your Gmail inbox.  You can search for messages, leave notes to yourself and even add stars to important messages so you can come back to them later.

All said I think Google Voice is an excellent service.  I can only hope that someone at Apple or AT&T decides to let the application through to the App Store.  If not, you can bet that Google will work on a mobile web version of Google Voice like they’ve done with most of their other services, and we’ll get access to it anyways.

Snow Leopard – Impressions after 24 hours

So I’ve had 24 hours to use Snow Leopard on my iMac, and I have some thoughts. First, some background.

Though my original intent was to do a fresh install, I decided to go ahead and try an upgrade from Leopard instead. I have all of my data backed up but being that this week has been a busy one I didn’t really have the time to restore it (especically because my iPhone is connected to the iMac). So, I went ahead and upgraded. It took about a half hour which is bit longer than expected, but not altogether bad.

On the first boot of Snow Leopard I had two reactions:

1. Oooooh, pretty wallpaper
2. Okay, what else changed?

Snow Leopard has been getting more negative attention than a lot of people expected because the changes are so minute.  Sure there’s dock expose, the 6-7GB of extra space after install, and scrolling stacks but most changes will go unnoticed.  For example the entire Finder has been rewritten, but it works 98.8% identically to how it did in previous versions.  It’s a bit faster but other than that there are no noticeable changes.

To be honest, Snow Leopard does feel like sort of a service pack for Leopard.  In fact, to an average user, the changes might be completely non-existant.  Things are a bit snappier and most of the animations look a lot better but otherwise there isn’t much to say.  Here are the few features I’ve noticed and liked so far:

• Improved Text-To Speech - I use the mac’s text-to-speech to alert me of the time every half hour.  The new version is noticeably less robotic and overall sounds much better.
• Animations – When flipping between spaces or opening a stack the animation is much more fluid and cooler-looking
• All New Stacks - Stacks basically work like they should have worked from the beginning.  You can scroll through stacks, and most importantly you can navigate folders in stacks without having to open up the Finder
• Selectively Snappier - Though I haven’t noticed much of a boost in speed in all-around computing I do notice that the Finder, Spaces and Stacks respond much snappier in Snow Leopard
• New Wallpapers
• More HD Space – Freed up about 6GB of space after my upgrade, kind of negligible on a 500GB hard drive but it’s better than losing space I suppose

So is Snow Leopard worth it?  Honestly, maybe not.  The changes aren’t all that impressive to me yet.  Maybe over the next couple weeks I’ll really begin to appreciate the new upgrade but right now it’s a slight improvement at best.  I think this weekend I’m going to go ahead and do a fresh install and if that improves the experience at all I’ll make sure to do a follow-up post.

Snow Leopard on Friday

After a bunch of speculation the release date for Apple’s OS X Snow Leopard is confirmed – August 28th, this Friday. That had been the rumor going around and yet again it proved to be true.

There really isn’t much else to be said. If you have Leopard on your machine and you’re looking to upgrade, you can get your copy of Snow Leopard for $29. Even better, if you’ve bought a Mac anytime between now and last June, you can get your upgrade copy for just $9.95.

Because I bought my Macbook Pro in June I preordered my copy way back then, so I should have it on Friday. Expect a post about how the update goes.

Google’s Eric Schmidt Resigns from Apple Board of Directors

This is a very interesting development given very recent conflicts between Google and Apple/AT&T.  Sure, Steve Jobs has stated that Eric’s resignation was a mutual decision made by both companies because Google’s encroachment on familiar territory is becoming a conflict of interest.  Still, Android has been out for some time, so why now?

One of the biggest stories last week was Apple’s denial of the Google Voice application on the iTunes app store.  The dispute has since been consumed by the gaze of the FCC to determine if this choice was made by AT&T moreso than Apple, or if AT&T in any way influences the content found on the App Store.  If that’s the case, as it may very well be, the ruling could be important for a couple reasons.

1. Consumers have one more reason to detest AT&T
2. It gives no logical support for the claim that the denial of Google applications has anything to do with Schmidt’s descent from the board
3. Consumers have one more reason to dete….oh, I already said that one

Honestly though it doesn’t sound like Apple’s style to bend to the will of AT&T.  They love their products enough to say something to the affect of “Listen, we have a product that has made you millions, you think this app conflicts with your service then tough cookies – we’re working on a Verizon version of the iPhone anyways.”  I’m getting off-track here.

Does this departure setup a feud between Apple and Google?  The two companies have seemed almost philosophically aligned for some time now, and most pundits don’t really consider Android or what we know of Chrome OS as major threats in their individual markets (phone and PC operating systems).  All this time it has been Microsoft who has been desperately trying to compete with the big G, and just when it seems that they’re making a solid go of it the focus might be shifting towards an Apple/Google main event instead.

There is one area in which the philosophies of Apple and Google conflict, however.  Openness.  It’s been proclaimed that this might be the achilles heel of Apple.  Google always happily opens up their projects to developers while Apple severely shies away from such behavior.  Sure, the iTunes App Store is extremely successful, but the only complaint we seem to hear about weekly is that certain apps get shot down for seemingly silly reasons, and of course Apple’s proprietary take on their hardware and software is always criticized.  If Apple had the market share Windows does, they’d have one of the worst monopolies we’ve ever seen.

The only thing we could possibly say Google has a monopoly on is the search engine market, but with Bing approaching 10%+ market share that’s not as much of a compelling case.

AudioBoo: Spill Disasters

This is just another quick AudioBoo recording in which I describe my beverage spilling woes.  Very exciting.

iPhone 3GS – The “S” is for speed!

Apple has announced a new version of the iPhone that looks like the 3G, but packs faster hardware and a new 3 megapixel camera that captures video.  They’ve also integrated voice commands, but not just dialing.  You can interact with the phone’s music as well.  For example, from anywhere in the phone you could say “Play Silversun Pickups” and it automatically starts playing.  Last but not least are a new built-in digital compass and text-to-speech.

My favorite feature is that, despite these hardware updates, the battery life has received much-needed boost and it all comes at the same price of $199 for a 16GB version and $299 for 32GB.  Still too expensive for you?  You’ll also be able to get the original iPhone 3G for just $99.   Available June 19th.

OSX Snow Leopard Pricing

Hot on the heels of the major announcement that Windows 7 upgrades will only cost $50 this fall, Apple has just announced that Snow Leopard upgrades will be even cheaper at just $29.  The full retail box copy will cost $169.

I’m loving these cheaper prices on operating systems.  Maybe the industry is starting to figure out that people won’t pirate what they can actually afford?

And the winner is…my next laptop:

Apple’s new Macbook Pro.  Just announced a few minutes ago, it has all of the specs I was looking at from the HP HDX, the 7 hour battery only found in the Macbook Pro 17″ before, 4 gigs of DDR3 ram, etc.  The chart (from Engadget) is below.  Only $1699, $300 less than previous Macbook Pros and it’ll probably be bumped down to $1599 with a student discount.  I’m very happy that I held out on buying anything until WWDC.

Now I’m just waiting for iPhone news.

iPhone OS 3.0 for Consumers

I’m sure you all saw this one coming.  Here’s my run-through of what Apple announced at their iPhone OS 3.0 event earlier in the week.  Since most of what intrigued me in the keynote was related to their “features for consumers” I’m going to dedicate this post to those.  Some of the SDK additions for developers are interesting but that relies quite a bit on the actual developers putting them into good use.  So, without further ado:

Cut, Copy and Paste
Shocker of all shockers, Apple finally got their act together and found some way to accomplish the impossible task of integrating cut, copy and paste into the iPhone.  This has been a long time coming, and I’m glad it’s finally here.  With the new cut, copy and paste feature you’ll be able to, surprise, copy and paste text not just inside of one application, but across all applications on the iPhone.

Landscape Mode
Another obvious and necessary upgrade, landscape mode lets you run all of the standard Apple iPhone applications in landscape.  Most importantly, this means that you’ll be able to get the larger-format widescreen keyboard that was up until now exclusive to Safari in all of your Apple iPhone applications.  Note that I say Apple iPhone applications because, as far as I know, this will only count for their traditional suite of pre-installed apps (Mail, Notes, Contacts, etc.).  This update should help some of the folks out there with bigger fingers to type a bit more easily, especially in Mail.

MMS
Again, it seems as though with iPhone OS 3.0 Apple is just trying systematically tick off items on a fictional checklist titled “Cell Phone Necessities.”   With MMS you’ll finally be able to send and receive multimedia messages on the iPhone including pictures, sound files, and contact cards.  To me personally this isn’t a feature I’ve been waiting for since you can already do most of those things in email, but I know that a lot of consumers have been deterred from purchasing an iPhone because of its lack of support for MMS.

Voice Memos
Have you ever seen one of those commercials with an older lady using a small voice recorder to remember where she parked, or what to pick up at the grocery store?  That’s basically what voice memos are.  Using voice memos you can now use your iPhone to record short messages for later playback so you too can overcome your forgetfulness.  I think this is a feature that seems kind of hokey, but some may like it.

CalDAV and Calendar Subscriptions (.ics)
Getting calendars to sync properly on your touch device has always been a tall order.  Sure it can be done, but you have to jump through a lot of hoops if you’re not using exchange.  Now that the iPhone calendar app supports CalDAV hopefully keeping my Google Calendar synced won’t be as much of an issue.  I’m pretty excited for this feature, as I’d love to have my calendar events synced perfectly between calendar.google.com, iCal on the desktop and my mobile device.  Also being able to subscribe to calendars will be a nice addition.

Search and Spotlight
Finally we come to search.  Search has been integrated into all of the standard Apple iPhone apps so you can now quickly and easily search through your inbox, contacts, calendar of events and so on.  Apple has also integrated a new homescreen, Spotlight, which lets you search the entire phone at once.  Say for instance I typed in “Ron” with Spotlight.  Not only would the Spotlight results show the emails I’ve received from my friend Ron, but also the songs on my iPod by the artist Ronnie Drew and a calendar event I set to have lunch at “Ron’s Cafe.”  Okay that last one was a bit of a stretch but check out the image below to get a better idea of how it works.

Conclusion
So that’s it.  Like I said there were no bombshells really, and most of the event was devoted to checking off some features that Apple has been inundated with requests for since the iPhone launched.  Some of the developer SDK additions seem promising but I can’t really comment on those until I get a chance to play with the apps that utilize them.  It was a pretty straight-forward and almost mundane event, but that leaves a lot left for WWDC in June.