Technovia

Joe Wilcox on Google's potential ace

Apple Watch - iPhone - God Phone Meets the Devil:

"What about the Google focus? The phone offers single sign-on to Google's plethora of online services, including Calendar, Contacts, Gmail, Google Talk, Maps Street View and YouTube. Suddenly, the hodgepodge of Google applications and services has a single point of connection and synchronization. If this mechanism works, and well, then the G1 and other Android-based phones will be powerful data and telephony devices out of the box.

As I've blogged before, sync is the killer application for the connected world. In 2007 I warned: 'If Google gets synchronization right before Microsoft, it's game over.' Ditto to Apple. Google's sync magic requires no PC."

As I've also posted, sync with no PC required is a huge feature. A phone which never has to connect to a PC is much more powerful than one which does.

What matters most about the T-Mobile G1: no PC required

Me, for Mobile Computer Mag:

"This is clearly a window into Google's view of the future – and it's a scenario that probably keeps many Microsoft executives awake at night. Microsoft's strength has always been the PC, and much of its marketing and technology has been geared to the idea of having a PC on every desktop. After all, Microsoft's Office and Windows franchises – the company's cash (sacred) cows – depend on it."

Both Microsoft and Apple see the mobile phone as an adjunct to the PC. Because Google has built the software inside the T-Mobile G1 to sync only with its servers in the cloud, this model is broken. The mobile phone gets set free.

Within a few years, I can see a large chunk of people not having their own "personal" computer, but instead relying on their phone for email, web, social networks, and so on. Oh sure, they'll use PCs - but why would you need your own when all your data lives in the cloud, and you can access that from any machine?

Could Apple's attitude to developers get any worse?

On the day that Google launched something with a rather different approach, this little gemcomes to light:

"Aparently [sic], Apple has now started labeling their rejection letters with Non-Disclosure (NDA) warnings:
THE INFORMATION CONTAINED IN THIS MESSAGE IS UNDER NON-DISCLOSURE"

So Apple's solution to the issue of developers being unhappy about their applications being rejected on spurious pretexts is to try and stop them talking about it to anyone?

It's this kind of crap that makes me want to make the Mac I'm typing on my last. There has to be way which supports neither convicted monopoly abusers or control-freak obsessives.

Two reasons why this is NOT an iPod Nano

Jason O'Grady links to a picture of a supposed iPod Nano, but I'm going to call "fake" on this one. First of all, as Jason points out, "why would a screen film manufacturer have a real, live 4G nano to photograph?" Answer - they wouldn't.

But secondly, look a the use of the font on the click wheel. That "Menu" looks out of proportion to the click wheel itself - it's far, far too big. Compare it to the "MENU" on the current iPod nano and you'll see what I mean.

Time to give MobileMe another go

I'm told by people who I trust that MobileMe is now performing as it should, so I'm going to give it another week's trial and see how it goes. Will it really be "Exchange for the rest of us" this time? Tune in in seven days...

Next quarter may be good one for Apple in European smartphone market

While the iPhone has been the big smartphone hit in the US, in Europe/Middle East/Africa (EMEA) Nokia continues to lead the pack, with a market share figure of 71.2% according to the latest figures for Q2 2008 by Canalys.

BlackBerry-maker RIM and Windows Mobile specialist HTC are in second and third place, with 7.2% and 7% respectively. Motorola and Samsung follow these two with 3.4% and 3.2%, while "Others" - including Apple - combine together to reach 8%.

However, it could be good news for Apple next quarter:

"Both HTC and RIM have been making steady progress toward the one million shipments per quarter mark in EMEA and are now very close to each other in market share terms, but it is possible that they will be overtaken by Apple in Q3 following the launch of the iPhone 3G in many countries in the region."

That, of course, implies that Apple will go from a market share of less than 3% to over 7%, which would be impressive growth. It would also be an indication that the iPhone has really arrived as a worldwide competitor.

The two form factors for phones

Davey Winder on the BlackBerry Bold versus the iPhone:

"Having lived with an iPhone for some time, and being in possession of relatively fat fingers, I beg to differ. It is all too easy to slip up on the virtual iPhone keyboard and not get rescued by the often irritating auto-correct system.

The tactile feedback of a proper, albeit shrunken, keyboard makes for more efficient text input even for the fat fingered amongst us."

Davey makes a good point. I'm a small-fingered guy, and I'm now at the point with the iPhone's on-screen keyboard where I can thumb-type as well as I could with my old BlackBerry 8800. But for lots of people, the iPhone keyboard just doesn't work for anything other than hunt-and-peck with a single finger, which makes it much slower than a BlackBerry.

That's one of the reasons that I think the smartphone market will shake out to two main forms, and probably two manufacturers: the keyboard-less iPhone-style design, which focuses on browsing and video; and the keyboard-based BlackBerry-style, which is more focused on email and text. Which is right for you will depend not just on your needs, but also your fingers.

Daring Fireball: Is the iPhone NDA About Patents?

Daring Fireball: Is the iPhone NDA About Patents?:

"At my company, our lawyers advised us to keep what we considered more-or-less public software under NDA for a very long time because demoing software to someone under NDA, no matter how many people it is, avoids ‘publishing’ the software and any inventions contained therein."

While John finds this credible, I'm going to call "bullshit" on this. Software is published the moment it is made available for sale. The iPhone is for sale. Keeping a tiny subset of customers under NDA will not affect that.

Of course, some might argue that there's something specific about the APIs which is patentable, but this is unlikely. Remember that patents don't cover the specifics of code.

My guess is there some unspecified legal snafu, but I don't think this is it.

Are Apple machines really overpriced?

Joe Wilcox on the Price differential between Macs and PCs:

"On Saturday, Aug. 2, I got to wondering about Mac versus Windows PC pricing after seeing two HP notebooks on sale at the local Target. One of them, a 14-inch model, the HP DV2946NR, sold for $699.99 and packed 4GB of memory and a 320GB hard drive. Capacity for both features is twice that of the $1,299 MacBook—and shared graphics is 356MB compared with a meager 144MB for the MacBook. I wondered: If Vista notebooks are selling for so little and packing so much, how does this compare with Mac desktops and notebooks?

Today I contacted Stephen Baker, NPD's vice president of industry analysis, about computer average selling prices at retail. That HP notebook is right on mark: ASP for retail Windows notebooks is $700. Mac laptops: $1,515. Yeah, right, they're more than twice as much. But there's more: The ASP for Mac desktops is more than $1,000 greater than for Windows PCs, and Mac desktop ASPs were higher in June than they were two years ago."

I'm not surprised by this, because Apple's pricing is always cyclical. It introduces a new, upgraded model which evens things out, usually to the point where people are paying a premium of 10% or so over equivalently-specced Windows machines.

However, it then maintains those specs until the next product rev, rather than continually incrementally upgrading them, as, say, Dell does. That means that over the lifetime of a product, the price differential increases until the point where Apple's machines are really overpriced for what you get - which is where we are now.

Of course, none of this seems to be damaging Apple's sales, which have shown excellent growth.

But in an economic downturn, will Apple be able to maintain this in the face of fierce price pressure? Even though I can't imagine buying another Windows PC (except in markets where this is no Mac, like ultraportables or tablets), I would be reluctant to buy an Apple at the moment, as the hardware you get for the money just isn't that great.

Even if, for example, my MacBook Pro broke down I probably wouldn't buy another one - I couldn't justify the expense, given that the hardware I'd get just isn't all that leading edge. I'd probably buy a MacBook instead - and curse its crappy graphics every time I wanted to play games.

It's time for the digital hub to quietly die

In a post about iPhone calendar syncing, John Gruber notes this:

"But as it stands today, with MobileMe syncing, there is no hub."

John is right - and it's now time for the digital hub to go away.

With the iPhone 2.0 release, iTunes has been reduced to music transfer, podcast hub and playlist management. Contacts, email, calendars are all pushed from the cloud. Songs and applications can be bought directly from the iPhone and iPod Touch. It wouldn't take much to completely set the iPhone free.