Posts Tagged ‘Apple’

Sifting through iPhone 2.0 wish lists, predictions, prognostications, forecasts, prophesies

by Daniel Langendorf

June 5th, 2008 | Posted in Comms, Mobile | CommentsNo Comments

wwdcBy now, everybody in the known universe has offered up their iPhone 2.0 predictions, prognostications, forecasts, and prophesies. We even think that NASA’s Phoenix Lander may have found an iPhone wish list on Mars, but we’re not sure.

As you can imagine, iPhone 2.0 speculation has reached a fever pitch again — just like iPhone 1.0 did last June — with ideas ranging from the obvious “duh” to “out there”, just like Mars.

For our own amusement, and yours, we’ve sifted through wish lists and predictions to come up with what we think will happen, what may happen, and what’s still to come for iPhone hardware, features, and applications.

You’ll be able to judge the pundits on Monday, after Steve Jobs delivers the keynote speech at the Worldwide Developers Conference. Until then, if you see something missing, add it to the comments. Because there is one thing we’ve learned: Everybody has a special feature or application they’d like to see on the new iPhone, and we can’t predict ’em all.

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Will Apple develop MobileMe as my own personal cloud?

by Daniel Langendorf

June 4th, 2008 | Posted in Other | Comments1 Comment

dot mac logo smA lot is being made of cloud computing these days, especially in light of Microsoft’s Mesh initiative and the various online products and strategies cooked up by Google.

With the rumored changes coming to Apple’s .Mac product, could a revamped MobileMe or Me.com — whatever it is ultimately called — eventually become my personal cloud?

I hope so. My digital life needs one, whether supplied by Microsoft, Google, or Apple, it doesn’t matter.

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iTunes UK adds movie purchases and (48 hour) rentals

by Steve O'Hear

June 4th, 2008 | Posted in Net TV | CommentsNo Comments

iTunes UK adds movie purchases and (48 hour) rentals Six months after their U.S. debut, Apple has finally made movies rentals, along with purchases, available to iTunes customers in the UK.

On the plus side, new film releases for purchase will be offered the same day as their DVD release and, in a near industry-first, the viewing window for rentals has been extended to 48 hours (from 24), whereby customers have up to 30 days to start watching a rented download, and once the movie starts they have two days to finish it or watch it multiple times. As we wrote in our earlier analysis of Apple’s U.S. iTunes movie offering (Content, pricing and convenience. How do movie rentals on iTunes fare?), a 24 hour limit “makes it impossible to split a film over two nights, a requirement that is more common than you’d think, especially for those with kids”.

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Android, it's the browser stupid

by Steve O'Hear

June 1st, 2008 | Posted in Mobile | Comments2 Comments

Android at a crossroadsIt’s hard not to be impressed by the latest demonstration of Android, Google’s soon-to-be-released open-source mobile OS. While my colleague Dan Langendorf is reserving judgment until a killer application and real handsets emerge, I’m already sold on Android’s User Interface, which looks to have borrowed just enough from Apple’s iPhone, as well as some of the design Zen of the original Palm OS, to more than satisfy my needs.

Of course, the biggest promise of Android isn’t its UI but its openness, and it’s here where comparisons to the iPhone are also inevitable. On the one hand Google wants us to believe that Android isn’t a direct response to Apple’s own offering (which, chronologically, may well be true), but at the same time is keen to remind developers that in contrast to the iPhone they won’t need to get Android applications certified by anyone, nor will there be any hidden APIs (application programming interfaces) accessible only to handset makers or mobile operators — another dig at Apple.

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Google demos Android again; it's full of promise, but we're still waiting for the real deal

by Daniel Langendorf

May 29th, 2008 | Posted in Comms, Mobile | Comments2 Comments

android ioGoogle demonstrated its Android operating system again, this time at the I/O conference in San Francisco. And, well, it’s still full of promise, just in case you were wondering.

As you would expect from the company that brings you search and Google Maps, Android handles information delivery, location and navigation extremely well — or so we think. There’s still no actual Android phones to play with.

The coolest feature shown was a “compass” tool that automatically roams with the phone while a user looks at photos of a city map.

But the rest of what was shown was, well, underwhelming or just plain expected.

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Details are scant, but Amazon will be launching online video streaming service soon

by Daniel Langendorf

May 28th, 2008 | Posted in Net TV | Comments2 Comments

bezos at all things dThe details, unfortunately, are scant. This is what we know:

Amazon, the world’s largest Internet retailer, will be launching an online streaming video service in the next several weeks, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said a little too matter-of-factly at the D: All Things Digital conference. (Reuters)

One detail: The streaming service will start immediately for viewers, unlike Amazon’s Unbox product, in which users are required wait a period of time as content downloads.

Another semi-detail: The streaming service will operate a-la-carte, but we don’t know what this means exactly. Can viewers stream movies on a pay-per-view basis, presumably at the industry standard $3.99 per rental? Or will this service operate ala Netflix, where people pay a monthly subscription fee (like $15) for a certain number of movies?

We’re sure additional details will be forthcoming in the coming days, or weeks.

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Location-based services like Whrrl on iPhone to usher in Internet of people, places, and things

by Daniel Langendorf

May 27th, 2008 | Posted in Comms, Mobile | Comments4 Comments

kocb logoGet ready for the Internet of people, places, and things. Thanks to the iPhone and Android, it’s just around the corner — no pun intended.

BusinessWeek reports that Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, the venture capital firm behind the iPhone funding program iFund, have chosen two companies as its top picks to date — Whrrl from Pelago and Home Security 2.0 from iControl Networks.

Kleiner Perkins, a big fan of location-based services, has extended an offer to one other startup and are “seriously considering” 10 others, whatever that means.

whrrlWhrrl combines the mapping capabilities of the iPhone with the ability to find information on your friends, where you’ve been, where anybody has been — in essence, connecting people, places, and things. Whrrl currently works on the BlackBerry Pearl and Curve.

iControl’s application isn’t as sexy as Whrrl — it is home automation after all — but it gives users the ability to communicate to the places and things important in their lives, namely their homes or businesses and what’s in them like door locks, air conditioners, lights, and so on.

Add these programs to the applications being developed as part of the Android Developers Challenge (Bread Crumbz, LifeAware, Beetaun) and you can see a locations, locations, locations trend forming. In Wired lingo, it would be:

  • plain old voice communications: “expired”
  • mobile Internet surfing: “tired”
  • using mobile devices to interact with people, places, and things: “wired”

“There’s going to be a ‘what’s going on around me right now’ button,” Kleiner Perkins partner Matt Murphy told BusinessWeek. “You’re always one button away from that immediate context.”

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Could we be edging closer to a Europe-wide 'iPod tax'?

by Steve O'Hear

May 27th, 2008 | Posted in Audio, Mobile, Net TV | Comments2 Comments

Could we be edging closer to a Europe-wide 'iPod tax'?Consumer electronics companies including Apple, Nokia and Sony, maybe softening their stance against a Europe-wide copyright levy on “the sale of products that can be used to copy music, books, films and other protected content”, reports the Financial Times.

Currently 22 out of 27 European countries already enforce the so-called ‘iPod tax’, at greatly varying levels, on products ranging from digital music players, printers, mobile phones and even blank CDs. Notably, the UK doesn’t currently enforce any kind of copyright levy. The charges are designed to compensate for the losses copyright owners may face from “private copying” of works.

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Forrester sees picture frames, clock radios, remote controls, and house calls in Apple's future

by Daniel Langendorf

May 22nd, 2008 | Posted in Audio, Comms, Mobile, Net TV | CommentsNo Comments

forresterThis is why the analysts make the big bucks. Predictions. Forecasts. Gazing into crystal balls to come up with . . .

  • Digital picture frames.
  • A clock radio.
  • A remote control.
  • A media server that’s not called a “server.”
  • House calls.

This is Apple’s future, according to Forrester analysts J.P. Gownder and James McQuivey [via Wall Street Journal].

Gownder and McQuivey predict that Apple, who brought us the OS X operating system, elegant computer products, the iPod line of digital music players, the iTunes store, and the iPhone in the past eight years, next will come up with products and services that will connect computers to content throughout the digital home by 2013 [Wired].

Forrester thinks that, judging by Apple’s performance under CEO guru Steve Jobs, the company is set for radical change over the next five years.

But a wall-mountable digital picture frame — even if it looked like a MacBook Air display? A clock radio that pipes music across a home network? An “AppleSound” universal remote control with a touch-sensitive screen? A media storage something-or-other that’s not a “server” because the word “server” scares the average person? And house-call technical assistance from mobile “Genius Bar” workers?

This is a joke, right?

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Google prepping more iPhone-native apps

by Steve O'Hear

May 19th, 2008 | Posted in Mobile | Comments4 Comments

Google prepping more iPhone-native appsWith Apple set to roll out the next major software update for the iPhone, and with it official support for third-party applications, it will come as no surprise that Google is busy prepping some new wares. “We expect to have applications at Day One”, Google’s vice president of engineering, Vic Gundotra, tells Macworld.

Even before the publicly available Software Development Kit (SDK) announced in March, Google had partnered with Apple to produce two of the iPhone’s flagship applications: Google Maps and a native YouTube client.

So what can we expect next from Google? While Gundotra didn’t give many clues, he did say that the company is eager to take advantage of native access to Apple’s device.

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