Unwire me, please.

Back when Tiger was news, Apple displayed these banners at WWDC. This was funny because Vista was still delayed and Microsoft seemed to be having difficulties getting the operating system out the door with a fraction of the features promised. How we laughed. Last week, Apple rejected the “WiFi Sync” app from the AppStore. This … Continue reading “Unwire me, please.”

Back when Tiger was news, Apple displayed these banners at WWDC. This was funny because Vista was still delayed and Microsoft seemed to be having difficulties getting the operating system out the door with a fraction of the features promised. How we laughed.

Tiger

Last week, Apple rejected the “WiFi Sync” app from the AppStore. This nifty app would reduce the need for us to plug our iPhones and iPads into our computers in order to get the piece of media we just bought onto all of our devices. This has been a frustration for me today – realising I needed to sync twice just to get Lisa Miskovsky’s excellent Still Alive onto both my iPad and iPhone. I can only assume that Apple intends to bake this functionality into a later release? We have iTunes Home Sharing which is part of a solution. We have the Apple TV. We have the iPad. All of these things are disconnected methods of sharing content. Why can’t my iPad truly be a remote for my Mac or an Apple TV. Why can’t we use BackToMyMac to access these things – why do we have to be on the same LAN or worse, connected by USB!

Just days later, Google gave us some hints about what they want to do with Android – some of the most interesting things being the ability to push data items between devices. For instance pushing a URL from phone to desktop because it will be easier to read on a bigger screen or pushing a call to the phone because it’s more sensible to take the call there. Apple has introduced Data Detectors into iPhone OS but

Add to that the strange necessity to plug in an iPad or iPhone at all into a computer to make it work and we can see that Apple has some work to do in catching up to the Joneses in these areas.

Apple has MobileMe which is a horrendously underused service. Why I can’t use my MobileMe space to sync my media to devices is beyond me. Or why can’t I use BackToMyMac to access files on my laptop at home when I’m out on the road. Why can I only download my songs once from iTunes when I can download Apps a dozen times or more?

Steve may say “You Won’t Be Disappointed” regarding what’s going to be announced at WWDC, but I wonder whether they’ll get the same coverage. This week Google demonstrated two things: Flash on Android and greater cloud integration. I suspect Apple will be showing off new hardware, a new operating system, a new video chat ecosystem (iChat for Windows included) and some other things that we haven’t even had hints of.

Will this be enough to dissuade the folk who reckon Google has leap-frogged Apple? I doubt it.

Apple has all of the pieces – all of the ingredients – it’s up to them to make something of them.

0 thoughts on “Unwire me, please.”

  1. I don’t know if you saw too much about the wireless app that was stopped from entering the app store, but user’s and blogs were claiming that the transfer speeds of wifi compared to usb were nothing short of horrendous.

    That most likely explains the reason behind stopping the app. That’s not to say I’m against wireless syncing – in fact I think it’s crucial to the next iteration of the iPhone and/or iPad. It will need to be a baked in feature – but I suspect that Apple are waiting for Wireless ‘N’ routers to become more prolific before releasing this feature.

  2. Hi Alex,
    Yes, USB at 480 Mbits is going to be much faster than WiFi. But that’s not a good reason for not including it. Especially seeing as Apple makes a series of N routers and they’re just about to release new hardware (which will likely have N compatibility – the 3GS is just B/G compatible).

    I don’t need WiFi syncing for syncing movies. But for getting a 4 MB AAC file I just bought from the store onto 3 devices? Yeah, I’d buy that.

  3. >>>But for getting a 4 MB AAC file I just bought from the store onto 3 devices?

    Or getting eBooks onto an iPad, which are smaller than 4MBs. And then there are PDFs … which can sometimes be svelte.

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