All posts by GNC

Windows era is ending

Android, Apple, google, IPAD, iPhone, Microsoft, RIM, Windows

It’s true.  I am aware of the percentage of people who have windows installed on their desktop and laptops.  Further, the monopoly will not collapse it will erode, and quicker than you might expect.  I moved from a city where the local lake has risen nearly 30 feet in the last 20 years.  Everyone said, “It’s going to stabilize, it won’t. . .”  It did.  The Windows era is ending.
Why?  The diversity of mobile OS’s.  Apple, Google, HP, and the other smartphone and mobile companies have destroyed Windows in the mobile market.  Their mobile OS’s integrate with Windows desktop leaving little reason for users to switch to a Windows mobile OS.  As the computing industry moves toward mobility and the cloud it will mean most people will use the web and cloud on non-windows systems for their phone.   The largest computing market in the world are the developing countries.  These people will be using their phones not desktops and laptops.  I am not alone in this opinion, a good read is the article at Gigaom from a Mary Meeker presentation.

But that is not the worst for Windows.  Five years ago I would bet only 10 in 100 people could give you the name of another operating system of any kind desktop or mobile.  Microsoft owned the OS market name.  Computers were Microsoft.  Not anymore.  Android, iOS, Symbian, Linux, and others are known by the majority of people.  Software companies long since loyal to Windows are going to diversify.  They want some of the money from the iPad, Android, Chrome, and Palm branches.  The web is going to make it easy.  Put their software on the web and it’s over.  Further, enter the influence of social media.  Windows used to mean computers.  Now Facebook and Twitter mean computing.  Whatever can get a user to those locations is what is important.  Can you hear the old barn creaking?  Can you see the new buildings being built?  It is like the end of an era on the old farm.

None of this is to say that Microsoft is going to crash or stop making a profit.  I simply believe they are not going to be taking the growth of the new market.  They will continue but other companies are going to take the new market of computing.  The era is ending.

One month with iOS 4

Apple, Information, iPhone

It has been one month using the iOS 4 on my iPhone 3GS.  Without going back to the feature list again I wanted to list the features that have stuck in my brain and that I use.

  1. Wallpaper – I love being able to change the appearance.
  2. Folders – A great way to organize so many apps.  At first I arranged all my apps into folders leaving only the home page with content.   For me that meant about six folders and and 6 apps to see on opening.  I didn’t like at the aesthetic appearance of the folder icons compared to a normal app.  Why not allow some custom icons for folders?  Secondly, folders didn’t save me much time as the taps and swipes were about equal.  Then I read a blog post at MacSparky.com about the home screen of Jeff Gamet.  He put his favorite apps on the front page and then the folders on the second.  It took me a week or so, but now I love it.  My home page is clean and sharp containing the apps I use for 85% of my interaction.  The folders are wonderful on the second page for everything else.  Now just to memorize my own filing system.
  3. Background tasks – Love them, and will even more when a few of my apps update to include it.  Really nice.
  4. Quick switching – Overall this is a fail for me.  The positive?  I like the increased ability of the apps to remember where they were at before I stopped.  The negative?  Because of my home page layout it didn’t save me any touch interaction.  Follow me for a moment.  I am in Twitter and want to switch back to Facebook.  I double click the home button and then touch on Facebook in the quick switch tray.  That means three actions.  Without quick switching I click the home button once and ince FB is on my home page the FB icon.  Done in two.  Additionally, if I have used the browser, email, and calculator since FB, when I double click for the quick switch tray FB isn’t there and I have to flick the quick swith tray to the next page before finding it.  Done in 4 actions.  My final complaint about the quick switching is that it doesn’t automatically clean out the tray.  Currently I have 9, yes 9, switch trays full.  How is that supposed to be helpful and save time?  To clean it out I have to take them out one by one.  They should have an hourly clean out of that cache so that only the last 4 remain in the que.
  5. Mail Unified Inbox: Finally and well done.
  6. iBooks: Read my first book on it and overall prefer it to the Kindle app for reading.  There are some negatives, but I will write an entire article on the comparison.
  7. SMS App: Still missing bulk delete option.  Drives me crazy that it is not easily available in the app.  Why is there no sent or received folders to quickly find messages?  The conversation thread for each person is great, but I still struggle finding a certain messages.
  8. Stability: I have about 2 or 3 crashes a day.  By crash I mean I will be writing a text or browsing a page and then suddenly I am back at the home screen.  Poof.  Just like that.  Safari is the worst.  It seems to not update it’s cache properly as well.  For example, I am on a news site and then browse to an article.  When I hit the back button to return it will often give me the home page from a day or two prior.  Really weird.  Never had that with the previous iOS.  The problem began immediately upon upgrading before any new apps were added.  Right now it is an annoyance but if the update doesn’t fix it, I may get really annoyed.  On iOS 3 I did have a weird display issue with the app icons on occasion and that hasn’t happened with the upgrade.

That is about all that comes to mind, and as this is supposed to be my initial observations, I will stop.  Overall, I love the iOS 4 even with it’s glitches.  Using my wife’s 1st generation Touch is painful now in so many ways.  There are so many improvements to the iOS I know, these are just the main visible things that come from the mind of an average user.   There is definite room for improvement even before the developers start taking full creative advantage of all the new API’s and features.  It seems that Apple had some uncharacteristic upgrade problems with their OS and Phones this year.

Ebooks and Education

amazon, ebook, IPAD

I love ebooks.  They could become an invaluable part of everyones life, especially for the student.   Can you imagine being a student where you could search your text books, copy and paste for your study notes or a term paper?  The program integrates with the word processor for automatic documentation and crediting.  The reader searches the books in your library providing and making links to other books that have something to say on the topic?  The technology is already there.  I use a program that does it in my field already.  The program has put 700 books at my disposal.  The interaction is wonderful.

So what are the current problems limiting the e-book explosion in education?

  1. Copyright fears of the publishers. They are scared to death of losing their royalties and credit either through pirating or lack of proper documentation.  Here is the breaking news, you can’t stop the pirating of entire books.  More breaking news, preventing copy and paste only adds the time of copying by typing.  It doesn’t stop people copying portions of your book.  Why not jump in and make it easy to use and through integration improve your chance of being credited.  If publishers think they will fight it and win then they need to look at the music industry.  After traveling abroad it makes the fight in the U.S. look like a drop in the bucket of the actual pirating.  I’m not sure even 10% of the movies and music around the world is legit.
  2. The e-book sales and rental model. I completely understand the relatively small amount of money that the physical printing of each book represents.   I understand that the larger cost is marketing, preparation, distribution, etc.  I recently read an article in an Indian paper that was titled “Billionaires by pennies.”  It identified how the mobile industry is a billion dollar business built on pennies for calls.  People here can’t afford rates any higher.  They made their fortune one penny at time.  Google is a good example in the U.S.  So why doesn’t the publishing industry adopt a similar model.  For the industry to expand it will have to think differently it seems.
  3. The fragility and cost of the devices. I love the iPad from a distance but the glass front frightens me.  They need to be durable for education.  The price may be easy for some, but for e-books to take over the world the readers need to be affordable to most of the world.  What type of arrangement could the publishers and technology companies make to reduce price and yet bring in revenue?  An Apple and ATT&T model of some kind?

As with every opinion piece it is just opinion.  Mine, at the moment, is influenced by living in a developing country.  I see the potential to change the education of a billion people.  It could happen quickly.  Don’t believe me?  Investigate the difference in how many people had mobile phones 10, 5, and 2 years ago.   TweetDeck CEO, Iain Dodsworth, tweeted last week – “70% of young Kenyans use Social Media, 80% have mobile phones – only 50% have an indoor toilet.”  Things are changing.

Technology leap frog – Developing countries are skipping the PC

Geek Culture, internet, Operating Systems

leapfrogI have spent the last 10 months in the developing country of India.  You see a combination of 1st and 3rd world lifestyles here.  However the most amazing sight is the technology leapfrog you witness.  Let me explain.  Two years ago I visited here and was amazed at the number of cell phones.  A person could be on an ox-driven cart transporting wood. . . and talking on the cell phone.  On that trip two years ago, the paper ran an article describing the leapfrog.  It detailed a village without power or generators.  The people took turns every few nights walking the 10 kilometers to a neighboring village to charge the mobiles.  Amazing leapfrog.  Never had a land line, television, maybe even radio.  Straight to the cell phone.

Recently at the All Things Digital Conference, Steve Jobs talked of how traditional PC makers, including himself, had to face the uncomfortable truth that the world is going mobile.  For the developed countries that is just the next step.  For most of the world it is giant leapfrog.  In India people still live on $3/day.  They have a cell, but they will never own a computer.  The internet is growing in India, and most of it is on the mobile phone.  Many, perhaps most of the world, will access the internet only on their phones.  They are skipping the PC and not even blinking or thinking twice.

So how important is the mobile OS market?  It will rule the digital world sooner than you think.

Apple’s Customer Service Tested with iPhone4

Apple, iPhone

This is where the rubber meets the road. The top tech company has a quality/design problem despite it’s rigorous testing and Steve Jobs micro-managing. How will the vaunted customer service respond? It’s well-known that Apple weeds out posts from it’s forum if they are too blunt about a weakness. And it is also widely known that Apple is ranked first for quality and warranty response. How is all of this going to come together?

iPhone 4An easy fix for the problem, according to Appleinsider and probably Apple themselves, appears to be the rubber bumper casing. This is something Apple could design, build, and give away for pennies + shipping.  The first problem? Having to admit the mistake. Apple hates to admit anything we all know.  How do you confess to 1.5 million new owners their unit has a fixable problem? The other problem, it would ruin Steve’s perfect industrial design and the phone’s appearance. Dilemma time in Apple offices. Bulk mineral water time in Steve’s office.  Seriously it is action and opportunity time in the Apple offices.

Come on Steve, put on the black mock-turtle neck and show the sadness and humility that the color deserves.  Apologize, give away the bumpers, redesign the casing a bit and start releasing the slightly updated iPhone 4. It hurts the pride, but really this is an opportunity to set your company even further apart from the competitors.  What are the odds?  Whatever you do please don’t fix it by covering the sides in glass as well.  That would be like carrying your grandmothers urn around.  Scary.

iPhone and Android OS Updates

Android, Apple, google, Information, IPAD, iPhone

Apple introduced the new iPhone and iPad OS 4 to be released this summer and fall.  In January Google released Android 2.1.  Now this week at it’s own conference it will introduce 2.2.  What’s the difference?   How soon it will make it to the phones.

Because of the open nature of Android each manufacturer is tweaking or establishing a cover interface.  And now 3 months after the release it is just now making its way to the phones.  This isn’t an OS comparison piece.  Android is an incredible mobile platform.  It will probably carry the majority world wide before long.  It will have multiple features I will wish my iPhone possessed.  However it seems it could face a road block similar to the Windows OS.

In another year we will have 100’s of Android models on the market.  This “one” is still on 2.1 and can’t upgrade to 2.2 or 2.3.  This “one” can but the manufacturer is late in getting the upgrade out and it is filled with bugs.  Could this not lead to market confusion or OS instability?  I am aware that the iPhone 4 software will only work on the 3GS and above but there are significantly fewer models for confusion.

Apple has a closed app store with some inconsistent policies.  Apple frustrates me with it’s seemingly anti-competitive stance on some apps that provide competition to their own.  However, Apple makes my phone really easy to update, use, maintain, and service.  I love only going to one store for all my shopping.  I like the easy button I guess. I may be naive or foolish, but I do believe that by staying with the iPhone it will remain easy, cutting edge, and of course overpriced.  Eventually I would love to try out an Android phone for a while.  I think the system totally rocks and I love open source.  I’m just concerned that with it “easy” disappears.

Since I bought my iPhone

Apple, Facebook, google, Information

I was late to the iPhone game. Having lived in an AT&T free region of the U.S.A., it was out of reach until I moved abroad to do some teaching.  I really thought I was satisfied with my iPod Touch 1st generation. Except that is was slow in running the updated operating system, didn’t have a camera, etc. Matter of fact if the last iPod Touch update would have had a camera I would probably have bought it and still would be without an iPhone.  However, on a trip to Thailand I saw my friend’s wife’s iPhone, I was bitten not to recover.  And so I purchased an unlocked iPhone in Thailand for way to much money! What has changed for me since I, a normal computer user, bought my iPhone? I have been surprised.

  1. I leave the laptop at the office and browse on my phone. That is not to say that I browse as much on the iPhone as I did on the laptop.  I do use the iPhone to browse the news and GNC links and such.  It has probably helped me reduce my browsing, time wasting, computer time.  It’s browsing is nice enough, and quick enough, to be enjoyable but also tiring enough to get me off to more productive things.
  2. I do all of my of my Twitter reading on Tweetie for the iPhone. All of it.  Again I’m not a heavy user but it works really well and simply for what I need.  For certain, it has increased my Twitter activity since my other phone really struggled with it.
  3. I handle 75% of my Facebook activity on it. I use it to upload quick fun photo’s, add status updates, and comment all the time. LIke browsing it’s not as easy as a laptop so maybe twice a week I use the laptop to do a bit more thorough connecting with friends.
  4. I am amazed at the speed. Because of the speed boost I am using several different programs that just would have been painful on the first gen Touch. Awesome Note, Documents to Go, and PS Mobile are wonderful.
  5. The camera has been wonderful both for stills and videos. I’m not looking for HD just for a way to capture daily happenings. For that Reel Director and PS Mobile are very cool.
  6. Living abroad I have a Google Voice workaround that connects to my foreign cell phone for a total of 1.6cents/minute. The Google Voice App was really buggy and wouldn’t work for me. Enter Voice Central by Black Swan (I think anyway). It has worked superbly! Now I enter Voice Central and make my call.  Soon my iPhone rings then the U.S.A. number I dialed rings. International magic.

The phone isn’t perfect, and the price is way to high in my opinion.  That said, I’m incredibly happy. It has really helped my productivity, ability to connect, and my mobile enjoyment. Of course I’m just a normal user with an opinion in the flooded blogging world.  Did I mention my total mobile bill is about $9/month? Nice.