Posts Tagged ‘apple’

Many people used last week as a chance to lay into Apple, describing the iPhone 4S as a disappointing release.

I honestly can’t image why. It really is the iPhone 5 in everything but name, and perhaps a bit of exterior work, but from every other point of view, it’s a whole new phone.

They’ve put the dual-core A5 chip in it, which is the same chip that is inside my iPad 2, it has the dual antenna system, the battery life has been extended, and it’s new 8-megapixel camera not only has a new censor allowing it to capture 73% more light but it also shoots 1080p high definition video as well.

What I am most in love with however, is Siri. Their new voice control system not only allows you to do things just by speaking to your phone, but actually have a conversation with it!

Of course, speech recognition has been around for a long time and nobody really uses it, but this is what Apple do best – they take a niche technology and package it in a way which brings it to the mass market. For example, the first tablet came out decades ago, but it was only when Apple released the iPad did tablets really see the first mass adoption. Hopefully, Siri is the opportunity speech recognition has been waiting for.

Yesterday the technology industry was saddened by the passing of Apple founder and chairman, Steve Jobs.

Steve was a visionary who literally changed the world for the better by bringing new and innovative technology to the public in a way which was always intuitive and more importantly, magical. Every time I pick up my iPad, I still feel like I’m living in Star Trek.

Tributes have poured in from politicians, to business leaders, to the many, any Apple fans across the world. In a touching note Bill Gates described working with him as “an insanely great honor.”

He’ll be missed by all of us in the field of technology.

I finally got round to watching the first episode of Secrets of the Superbrands which looks at technology.

I’ll be honest, the presenter, Alex Riley, really failed to endear himself to me with his surely attitude. I’m sure he’s an intelligent guy who on purposely plays the fool with comments like “iPhones, and iPads and 3gs and stuff like that.”

In fact, these go on and on with comments like “that’s a massive electromagnet, so if I brought in anything that was metal it would fly over there and rip Adam’s face off” or “is there any time when you think eww, it’s a brain, it’s horrible” to which the woman succinctly answers “no.”

Anyway, as we are all aware, marketing these days is brilliant. It’s amazing. Remember the last time you went round Tesco – did you buy something that wasn’t on your list? Buy an extra one because it was two for one? That isn’t an accident. You didn’t go out to buy that stuff, but you did, and it might sound like a simple thing, but millions of pounds of Tesco’s money goes into making sure it happens, every time you walk in that door.

Apple especially have some amazing marketing too. People hang off Steve’s every word.

But I really felt the show suggested that Apple were somehow tricking us into buying their products. Missing the point – that Apple produce really, really good products. So they should be – they are really expensive. But isn’t that just how the world works normally? You pay more, you get a better product? I don’t buy Apple products because it’s a cult, I buy them because I have enough disposable income to buy better products.

As for his treatment of Microsoft, there seemed to be disdain in his voice when he said they spend $5.5 billion on research and development. Of course R&D helps their profits in the long term, but it’s also giving back to the community (OpenOffice is great for example, because they just copied Microsoft Office which is great is because of all the money Microsoft spent making it great).

Also some of it was just factually incorrect. Microsoft’s income isn’t dwindling, they’re setting new quarterly records.

There is nothing wrong with his Nokia 6330 Classic but it’s just silly to take an attitude of “if it isn’t broke, don’t fix it” when new phones are adding some amazing new features bringing you better communication to those you care about and access to the sum of all human knowledge.

As for, us getting better software because they get our details to target ad at, surely that is actually a good thing? How many boring ads do you sit through on TV ad breaks? Most of them don’t target you, so there is no point you looking at them. What if you could just watch the one advert and then get back to your programme? That is what targeted ads offer.

And seriously the presenter was very, very annoying. No surprise he labels himself as an agnostic. And who asks the man behind Kinect if he was abused as a child? He’s like annoying, offensive, shit version of Louis Theroux.

Anyway, rant over lol.

I’ve now had my iPad 2 for around two months. There are probably two words I would use to describe it – magical and revolution.

I would also agree that it sports an unbelievable price tag. It’s a lot of money, especially considering the other tablets which are coming out now. But these tablets are rubbish. It’s like comparing a £150 netbook to my £1,200 MacBook Pro and it’s the same situation – there are really two distinct classes of devices and because they have come out in reasonably similar time frames we find the iPad incredibly expensive. It is expensive, I will say that, but it’s such, such good value for money.

I really can’t think of a device which has changed the way I use technology in such a short period of time.

Comparable events I guess would be when I first began using computers, arguably you can never really top that. And when I first got my iPhone, that was a revolution as I was upgrading from my much loved, but a little featuring lacking k800i so for the first time had mobile internet access, allowing my to surf the web, use Google Maps, Twitter, Facebook and hundreds of other web services on the move.

But equally, the iPad 2 has simply changed the way I use technology. I don’t cart my laptop around any more, I don’t even bring it to work. It acts as a desktop mostly now, sitting on my desk hucked up to my wide screen monitor, and I use my iPad whenever I’m on the move.

I will switch from my laptop to my iPad to check Twitter because the experience is so much better. I no longer have to make a choice between browsing the web and reading emails or relaxing on the sofa, because it’s no longer a hassle to bring my internet device with me. I probably do more web browsing on my iPad than any other device now.

I don’t watch TV on anything other than my iPad now. Beyond the few times when I have it on in the background or we’re collectively watching a film, any time I’m watching TV by myself I will watch it on my iPad. Same for anything I stream off my media server.

It’s the first thing I look at in the morning when I’m checking what today’s weather forecast is and it’s the last thing I look at at night as I do a final check of my emails before getting some sleep. A job traditionally given over to my phone.

I buy most of my books on it via Kindle or iBooks, and do a lot of my reading on there as well. If I have a PDF to read, I’ll send it over to my iPad using Dropbox and read it on there, rather than reading it on my monitor, or printing it.

Finally, sometimes I just sit and gaze at its awesomeness. I mean, the thing is 8.8mm thick! That’s thinner than my iPhone 4, the world’s thinnest smartphone! It’s actually thinner than the tablets used in Star Trek – that means it’s thinner than the futurist Gene Roddenberry imagined tablets would be 300 years in the future. That’s really, really thin!

The point of that last paragraph is that it feels like a real advancement in technology, like the first time you browsed the internet or used a touchscreen.

The batter is a revolution too. It’s quoted as ten hours and you actually do get ten hours, and that is actual active using time – if you just leave it on standby, it will run for about a month.

The change here is that you no longer really need to think about it. Gone are the days when you would turn on a device and wonder if it had enough battery life to do what you wanted. With the iPad, you just turn it on and use it, and there is always enough battery life. You just charge it up, once or twice a week and it doesn’t matter if you leave the house with only 30% battery life because that is three hours of usage still!

In short, the iPad is amazing.

Having miserably failed to get an iPad 2 on launch date, I had back ordered one and quoted a time of 2-3 weeks. I was thus very pleased when I took a phone call the next Wednesday telling me that my iPad 2 was now really to collect.

First impressions have been great – it’s not the lightest device in the world but it is so amazingly thin (at 8.8mm, it’s .5mm thinner than my iPhone 4 – the world’s thinnest smartphone!) and the battery life is excellent. The screen doesn’t have smudge when you’re using it, but you can’t tell when it’s turned on so the display is excellent.

It’s fast – things that I have to weight to load on my iPhone 4 come up almost instantly and the graphics power for something so thin is bordering on witchcraft.

I’ve fallen in love with Garage Band. I can’t play any music instruments, despite trying to play the guitar on and off for five years (mostly off to be honest, I have no commitment to it, on purpose, but that’s a whole different story) so having the “smart guitar” which has the chords pre-defined into it is amazing.

Overall though, I see it more as a practical device than a toy. Being able to check my emails in bed, on a reasonable sized screen is fantastic and it means I can have access to a computer without having to lug my laptop to the pub.

I’m what you might call a fan of swearing. I don’t swear more than anyone else on average, but I support the concept of swearing – why shouldn’t we be able to use these words in public, they are just words after all. If I use the word fuck in conversation, it isn’t offensive, it’s just language. It only becomes offensive if I am it at some one – calling someone a “fucking idiot” for example, which is hurtful, but no more hurtful then calling someone a “stupid idiot” – the offence is in the personal insult and the malice rather than the word itself. We should be able to swear in public without fear of offending silly people, and to be honest, I imagine we will be able to in 20-30 years time when the current older generation are gone.

Given this view on words then, it is strange that I, as many people do, still choose to place so much value on the L word. You know, love.

But then, it really is a big deal. It’s a bomb shell when you drop it. Perhaps for good reason, to say you are falling madly in love is a big claim to make. Certainly, not a claim to be made likely. I’ve always thought less of those who nievely through out such a claim early in a relationship – you really need to put the time in before you can see you’re in love.

But time makes fools of us all, and recently I’ve found myself in this exact situation.

I confess. I did it. I used the L word.

As many of you know, I’ve recently begun what I consider to be a new chapter in my life. It’s amazing; it’s everything I hoped for. It’s magical and it feels like such a rush, I never want this feeling to go away.

The reason I said it, it plain and simple. I genuinely am in love. I kind of always dreamed I would feel this way but to actually experience it, first hand is an amazing feeling. I feel like I have been waiting so long for this, indeed I’m sure I have been waiting years for this moment and it does not disappoint.

Everything about this is perfect. The speed and elegance, the front facing camera, the Retina display. I love you, iPhone 4.

Got myself an iPhone this week as, as much as I love my Sony Ericsson k800i which has served my exceptionally well for these part three years (it is honestly a fantastic phone) it is started to look a bit dated and as what most people would consider to be a geek, I decided I needed to move with the times a bit more.

So far I have thought it a very nice device to use, it’s not the greatest invention to ever benefit man kind but as a smart phone it does what it needs to do exceptionally well. I don’t use a great deal of applications but I am loving having Tweetie and Facebook at my finger tips and easy access to Wikipedia and the web has proved very useful as well – not that these are something specific to the iPhone of course.

It really came into it’s own at the pub today though when Norm informed me that my podcast feed was down. This was a most amateur mistake on my part of having the permissions set wrong on the config file and so when I did an upload the local copy which specifies the full domain name as the database host overwrote the live permission and MySQL kicked the remote connection from my server’s ISP into touch.

I needed to fix this fast so I headed over to the Apps Store and found myself a (free) SSH client which installed in a few seconds and allowed my to connect in to my server via SSH from my iPhone, go into the file I needed to update using vim and edit to the host to the correct setting. Problem solved!

The real test of course is when my number ports over on Tuesday and I start actually using it as a phone.

I also have yet to work out how I am going to set everything up – at the moment I have it syncing with iTunes at work because I don’t want to spoil my home machines with such software. However I need to sync it with my music so I can make use of the music functionality. And work out if I can connect it to the hands free kit in my stereo – otherwise I may end up making in car calls on my k800i still!