Mobile – Page 4 – ɔimoɈɒ

iPhone. 4.

It cannot be doubted that the new design for the iPhone is lovely. While some may prefer the curved aesthetics of the 3G/3GS, I preferred the flat back of the original iPhone and the iPhone 4 seems to hark back to that instantly recognisable design. The buttons are a welcome change from the rocker though I have to wonder who the + and – sign will appeal to (but more on that later). The fact the unit is thinner is not quite as amazing as some might make out – the 3Gs was curved and tapered towards the edges. When you eliminate some of that curve, then it’s not a considerable amount of space being removed – pretty standard for a year’s worth of development.

It’s a lovely design, surprisingly small and explains why the iPad fits so much battery into it’s design as they are, for the most part, the same hardware.

FaceTime is a curious beast. It runs over a normal cell call while (currently) routing the video data over WiFi which means that video-conference call over any distance will end up being pretty much the same as a normal voice call. Hopefully it will use your free minutes locally but it will also not be cheap calling internationally. I would hope that someone will take the FaceTime specification and make a compatible app that permits data-only calls. I have a feeling that with the reductions in cellular download limits and the statement from Skype that they’re going to be charging for Skype-Skype calls over 3G, we’re being nickel-and-dimed by our carriers and services.

Will I use FaceTime? It’s looking unlikely as I’m no longer sure who will have an iPhone 4 that I also want to have “face time” with?

This will be welcome as I do use my iPhone for reading eBooks – something I have not used the iPad for (bizarrely). Anything that improves the quality of the text is welcome but I’m also not going to stress out about it. It’s not what I’d consider a killer feature. The unit allegedly has a better graphics chip which is going to be needed to push those extra pixels and it shows that ‘iOS’ is moving towards resolution independence faster than the Mac.

One of the most demanded features and remaining one of the most controversial. Proper multi-tasking is only going to be enabled for Voice Over IP, Music Streaming Services and Location Service updates. While these are indeed awesome, I would have also included a voice recording option as well. Being able to record a meeting while doing something else is an extremely useful feature and some apps, like Audiotorium, really need it – I would assume there are some VoIP supporting features which could enable this. The other multitasking bits and pieces, like local notifications and ‘background task completion’ offer 95% of what people really want with multi-tasking.

All in all, I welcome our new multi-tasking masters.

The camera in the iPhone 4 is meant to be much better but I still have one serious issue with the camera in the iPhone and that’s the soft-button for taking pictures. This is a pain in the butt especially when there are three buttons on the device in almost the right place which are all unused when taking pictures.

Would it be too much to ask that while the Camera app is running to make those useless buttons actually do something? Like control zoom or maybe take the picture? At the moment I feel like I need three hands to work the iPhone camera – two to hold it, one to actually take the shot. And god forbid you should want to take a picture of yourself (while in a bar, late at night, with drunk friends), it just makes life difficult managing that soft-button.

What else is notable?

The storage is the same as the 3GS. 16 or 32 GB versions. It seems odd they didn’t upgrade to 64 GB but I think it’s because they’re finding that in iPod touch and iPad, people are trending towards the 32 GB version anyway. It seems to be some sort of in-pocket-storage sweet spot. Google and HTC should take note.

It’s rumoured that the iPhone 4 has 512 MB RAM rather than the 256 MB RAM found in the 3GS and iPad. That’s going to make a difference for Safari which often has a forced reload when using some memory-hungry pages.

Also, the range of acceptable frequencies is interesting. Compare the 3GS to the iPhone 4. I have no idea what this means (though I entertained the idea that the iPhone 4 would support 3G service on T-Mobile USA opening the door to another GSM carrier in the US but it seems to be more related to Band VIII (W-CDMA 900) in Europe, Asia, Australia, New Zealand and Venezuela. I’m no specialist when it comes to mobile telecoms obviously but that one little item of difference looks like it’s been added to increase worldwide compatibility. I can’t see the iPhone breaking away from AT&T soon (and it’s been said many times that Sprint/Verizon would not have such a good network with 20 million iPhone users on it).

	iPhone 3GS	iPhone 4
UMTS/HSDPA	850, 1900, 2100 MHz	850, 900, 1900, 2100 MHz
GSM/EDGE	850, 900, 1800, 1900 MHz	850, 900, 1800, 1900 MHz

There’s some more stuff but it’s all NDA’ed at the moment and I’ve not seen anyone else talking about it. So I won’t.

Pre-order starts today for the iPhone 4 but rumours indicate that the white model is going to be severely constrained. As I leave in three days for my family holiday and won’t be back until July, I won’t be pre-ordering even though I do see an iPhone 4 in my future. Arlene, in contrast, doesn’t find it desirable – but this is something she has dithered about over the previous 3 generations on iPhone and I reckon this will be the same. It’s a solid upgrade and it’s interesting what they chose to concentrate on. There’s no real difference in the hardware ‘features’ and someone will always think another phone is better because it has an FM radio or a built-in TV receiver but those sorts of niche features don’t remotely interest me.

Are you planning to get the new iPhone 4?

Why the iPhone still is #1 for business

At DevDays last week, Dermot Daly replied to a question about ‘other mobile platforms’ by saying that the amount of money changing hands on iPhone is enough for most people to consider but the important point is that the falloff in money when you go to other platforms is so severe that they’re not work … Continue reading “Why the iPhone still is #1 for business”

At DevDays last week, Dermot Daly replied to a question about ‘other mobile platforms’ by saying that the amount of money changing hands on iPhone is enough for most people to consider but the important point is that the falloff in money when you go to other platforms is so severe that they’re not work considering yet unless you already have a customer who’s willing to pay for the effort i.e. if there’s not enough money in iPhone then there’s definitely not enough money in any other platform.

But you also have to look at the engagement. Hyper-local review site Yelp state they have 32 million unique visitors from all sources and only 1.4 million of them were iPhone users which sounds tiny. But those 1.4 million users were responsible for 27% of Yelp searches, they make calls to businesses once every 5 seconds and nearly a million people used Yelp’s iPhone app to find directions to businesses in May.

So aim for deep engagement, aim for people to carry you around in their pocket, make it easy for people to use you and they will use you.

They Make Games

Of course, they don’t make any yet, but they will. And I went for the retro Battlezone-type graphics because I have zero skill with Photoshop and Illustrator any more (never mind not having a copy that would run on Snow Leopard) so my varied tweets last night are generally about finding folk who can put … Continue reading “They Make Games”

The aim of the company (as you can tell from the Twitter profile) is to apply game-like experiences in mobile, mhealth and e-learning. I’ve a heap of ideas in this and my next steps will be to start to put together people who will be important to the development of the company.

Alien Salvage will be contributing to the Digital Circle-initiatived BLOC54 collaborative network focussing on the Games Development Industry in Northern Ireland.

30 day Tariffs for iPad in UK

I don’t consider any of the daily or 7 day plans to be worth writing about so if you’re interested in them, go look them up. This is a comparison of the 30 day plans available from the 4 UK carriers who have announced support for the iPad 3G. Click on the Corporate Logos to … Continue reading “30 day Tariffs for iPad in UK”

Click on the Corporate Logos to be taken to their respective pages.

Cost £	Data included	Notes
7.50	1 GB
10	1 GB	and Cloud, BTOpenZone
10	1 GB
15	10 GB
15	3 GB	and Cloud, BTOpenZone
15	3 GB	and BTOpenZone
15	3 GB
25	10 GB	and BTOpenZone
25	5 GB

So how do you choose which to buy?

The table above is sorted on Increasing Cost, Decreasing Data, Decreasing ‘additional’ benefits. You should be able to quickly discern which are the best plans.

If you want to keep your costs low, then look at the tariffs from Three. They’re certainly the cheapest and you get heaps of data inclusive.

If coverage matters then you should probably look at Orange as they have the widest coverage in the UK.

If you want fast access and tend to be around urban areas, then having ready access to BTOpenzone when you need it (and the Cloud I suppose), would mean O2 is a good option.

If you plan to travel with your iPad and can’t get a local SIM, Vodafone’s roaming rates are a fraction of the costs of other networks.

See Me, See Her

(See Me, See Her refers to the 1978 book by John Pepper, a man who spent years trying to decode the Ulster dialect for the good of it’s people) For a couple of years I had a Sony Ericsson K800i on the Orange network. I used it as a phone, as a camera, I used … Continue reading “See Me, See Her”

(See Me, See Her refers to the 1978 book by John Pepper, a man who spent years trying to decode the Ulster dialect for the good of it’s people)

For a couple of years I had a Sony Ericsson K800i on the Orange network. I used it as a phone, as a camera, I used it for email, I tethered it over Bluetooth to my laptop as well as to my Nokia N800 proving internet access where there was no internet access and I very seldom surfed on it because the experience was so painful. I also didn’t buy any apps though I did download one.

The camera, though only 3.2 Mpixel, was excellent but the K800i had two cameras – the second was front facing and while I may have launched the app which controlled it a couple of times, I never once used it for it’s actual purpose – video calling.

Now, by all accounts, the next iPhone will have a front-facing camera which will enable all sorts of video-calling shenanigens. This is based on some leaked photos and the appearance of a lense and CCD just beside the ear-piece. On top of the video calling rumours is the rumour that iChat, long the province of the Mac, will finally make it to Windows as well.

Some folk reckon this will go the way of past efforts in video-calling and there’s a chance they are right. But the difference I foresee is that when I had a K800i, I didn’t know anyone else with a K800i. I had no idea if the video-calling feature would work with any other phones. No-one had a data package or a calling package that included any reasonable amount of video-calling minutes.

That’s not the case now. We all have unlimited “fair use” data plans with monthly limits measured in the hundreds of megabytes. And nearly everyone I know, bar a couple of holdouts, has an iPhone. I mean, iPhone, despite having a low market share, is one of the easiest to recognise and most widely used phone models. And the video-calling software included with the iPhone v4 will be typically easy to use. It’ll tap into iChat (possibly, AIM), Game Center (definitely) and likely allow you to call home to your MobileMe-connected Mac. These factors will, I believe, fuel future adoption of video-calling.

Here Be Morons

Kevin Tofel at GigaOm reports on a curious trend. U.S. owners of Symbian-based handsets click 2.7 times more mobile ads than those with iPhones, according to April data due to be released by mobile ad company Smaato on Monday. And this is in a country where, relatively speaking, Symbian phones have very little presence. You … Continue reading “Here Be Morons”

Kevin Tofel at GigaOm reports on a curious trend.

U.S. owners of Symbian-based handsets click 2.7 times more mobile ads than those with iPhones, according to April data due to be released by mobile ad company Smaato on Monday. And this is in a country where, relatively speaking, Symbian phones have very little presence.

You can interpret these results in several ways. My own recollection of using Symbian was that every aspect of it, from specially optimised mobile sites to expensive apps was that there were ads everywhere. It was an advertisers dream – companies would let you put ads on every screen, cluttering an already ugly interface and squeezing out the actual content.

The Symbian Foundation didn’t really encourage anything better and it is really confusing that a company like Nokia would bet the farm on something so primitive and evidently so unsuited to modern markets.

But I guess the reality is much simpler. When you’ve got iPhones, Android, Palm and Blackberry out there, staying on Symbian just indicates a lack of awareness. People still on Symbian in 2010 are morons.

Adobe is trying to bring in the Feds

From Bloomberg.com U.S. antitrust enforcers are considering an investigation of Apple Inc. following a complaint from Adobe Systems Inc., according to people familiar with the matter. Adobe says Apple is stifling competition by barring developers from using Adobe’s products to create applications for iPhones and iPads, said the people who spoke on condition of anonymity … Continue reading “Adobe is trying to bring in the Feds”

From Bloomberg.com

U.S. antitrust enforcers are considering an investigation of Apple Inc. following a complaint from Adobe Systems Inc., according to people familiar with the matter.

Adobe says Apple is stifling competition by barring developers from using Adobe’s products to create applications for iPhones and iPads, said the people who spoke on condition of anonymity because they aren’t authorized to discuss the case.

The complaint triggered discussions between the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission over which agency should review the allegations of anticompetitive behavior, the people said. Neither agency has decided whether it would open an investigation, one person said.

The problem in Adobe’s plea is that Adobe’s products can certainly be used to develop for iPhone and iPad. Photoshop, Dreamweaver, even Premiere, can be used to create compelling content for iPhone and iPads. Acrobat’s PDF format has long been a first class citizen on the iPhone platform and comes into it’s own on the iPad.

Just not Flash.

And for those of us who choose to use Click2Flash, we can see why. As Adobe have failed to deliver a good experience of Flash on Mac OS X and has no plans to enable Flash on iPhone (note their project was for a cross-compiler, not something that would make Flash on iPhone just work).

This is all about control. It’s Apple’s platform, not Adobe’s. Adobe wants to be everywhere and they’ve asked the Feds to force Apple’s hand here.

The Internet without Flash

Is better than you think. Fewer ads to put a buzzing sound through your speakers, fewer jarring UI clashes, fewer weird pop-ups which obscure the content. With ClickToFlash, it’s like being able to wander through a dodgy neighbourhood but feel safe which is why the trap line for the plug-n is “your web browsing prophylactic”. … Continue reading “The Internet without Flash”

So in all I’m supportive that Flash ain’t coming to the iPhone at all. And I’m confident that we won’t lose Unity, Cocos or other useful frameworks out there.

ADBE vs AAPL

Eighteen months ago, John Paczkowski speculated that Apple may want to use their considerable war chest of cash to buy Adobe. Adobe is currently worth around $18 Bn and Apple has around $30-35 Bn in the bank (Apple themselves are, at the time of this writing, worth $215 Bn. This is why I think Apple … Continue reading “ADBE vs AAPL”

This is why I think Apple has been maintaining such a strong position against Adobe over the last two years. They’re trying to reduce the stock price (as well as maintain control over a platform).

Adobe made less than half a million dollars in income last year and has been increasing it’s debt. We know in comparison that Apple has no debt at all and reported $3.38 billion in profits last quarter (Apple will release their next quarterly results in about two weeks).

[UPDATE: The figures are in thousands so I’m out there. But it means the debt is in thousands as well which puts them about a billion in debt.]

@webtwozero writes:

@cimota why would apple buy adobe? they don’t like flash, which pretty much rules out director too, they after photoshop, and premiere?

They’re after Photoshop, to adopt it in. They’re also after Premiere and Lightroom, with a view to either enhancing or replacing Final Cut Pro and Aperture. I think they’re also after Acrobat, Flex, Flash I reckon they have no good intentions towards them.

GodsWearHats writes:

@cimota AAPL vs ADBE: I don’t think Apple wants them, tbh. Doesn’t strike me as Steve’s style.

They’d already done something similar to the music sector when they purchased eMagic and made Logic Mac-only. And they did the same with Nothing Real and Shake.

Lomifeh writes:

@cimota I don’t really want them to buy adobe. The companies seem too dissimilar in philosophy. I’d prefer them forcing adobe to act right

To my mind, Adobe made their bed when they stopped feature parity on the Mac with the Windows version. They still haven’t rectified this and as a result Apple and Mac users have been treated like second class citizens. On top of that, the use of Flash in video undermined QuickTime, Lightroom undermines Aperture and it’s possible they see Premiere as a competitor to Final Cut Pro.

Adobe has also dragged it’s feet on the releasing apps which take advantage of Mac OS X technologies and there’s no way that Apple would permit Adobe to control access to their OS features the way they already have manipulated the market with Flash. Adobe was one of the major reasons for Carbon due to their reluctance to rewrite their application portfolio in Cocoa – something which still hasn’t been done after ten years of Mac OS X.

If Flash is the real bone of contention here then I’ll be very surprised. Flash video has always been little more than a hack – a compatibility layer that locks video into a proprietary format for later display. the poor performance of Flash on Mac hardware underlines the need for Apple to react. While I may lament the loss of many excellent education and entertainment games which have been developed in Flash, the truth is that many of these games simply will not work with a touch-based interface. They use a lot of facilities such as ‘hover’ which is possible with a virtual cursor but not possible with a touch interface. As a result, running Flash-based games and education tools on the iPad or iPhone would result in a substandard experience with poor performance and in both cases Apple would shoulder the blame.

Is it any wonder that Apple now feels they have to take a strong position.

That said, I feel that last night’s presentation on iPhone OS 4 was a rush-job, meant to try and stop a drama from turning into a crisis. If Adobe had announced CS5 officially and then demonstrated it and Apple had refused to stock the apps in the AppStore, then it would have been bad for both. I do think, on the other hand, that Apple is being curiously heavy handed here.

One thing at a time is at an end.

iPhone OS 4’s big deal yesterday was multitasking. They announced Seven Services which provide multi-tasking components to developers. This fulfils pretty much what I was looking for in the iPhone OS: pull and background and goes even further than I had intended. It permits the backgrounding of music apps, VoIP apps, location-based apps and timers … Continue reading “One thing at a time is at an end.”

iPhone OS 4’s big deal yesterday was multitasking. They announced Seven Services which provide multi-tasking components to developers.

This fulfils pretty much what I was looking for in the iPhone OS: pull and background and goes even further than I had intended. It permits the backgrounding of music apps, VoIP apps, location-based apps and timers (local notifications). It permits apps which have longer processing to background their processing and permit the user to move on to do something else. To be honest, I’ve got everything I wanted.

David Kirk writes:

Following the Apple OS4 announcement today that the iPhone and iPad would be “multitasking” a lively discussion sprang up on Twitter. 140 characters is woefully inadequate for that discussion so hopefully @cimota will post this on his (soon to be) award winning blog.

First let me define my terms and concepts so we can get agreement on our vocabulary. And multitasking and multi-threading need agreement.

A general purpose computer is a collection of processors dedicated to specific functions [program execution graphics, I/O, communications, etc.]

Processors execute [we’ll not get into instruction fetch, operations, etc.] only one instruction at a time, and do so until they issue an instruction that causes the processor to “wait” for the specific completion of some other task (e.g. read / write to complete, packet received on communications line, timer to pop, etc.). If there are no other tasks ready to execute, then the processor itself will wait until it receives an interrupt from the processor handling the I/O or communications or timer. Then the operating system will “awaken” the waiting task, restore its context, and schedule the next instruction. Even non-multitasking OS’s need interrupts (DOS).

Multitasking was designed to take vantage of all those “waits” by scheduling other tasks – that are ready to execute. A multitasking OS, once one task “waits”, will restore the context of another task that is ready, and schedule it for execution. Of course if there are no other tasks ready for execution, the processor will itself wait.
One other wrinkle. Many multitasking OS’s have a priority schedule, whereby certain tasks get priority over others. For example, if a task is receiving bytes from a communications line into a buffer, its probably needs priority to empty the buffer before the next packet comes in else the buffer will be overwritten – so that task may need “priority”. This is implemented in the OS. Once an interrupt occurs, the OS decides if the task running is the highest priority task that is “ready to run”. If not the OS will store the tasks context and schedule the task which is the highest priority.
So, multitasking requires hardware interrupts and a multitasking OS that manages context and administers priority [for all compsc geeks, including the old timers, yes that is a GROSS simplification}.

Multi-threading is a concept that simplifies programming in software systems that support multiple users concurrently. In essence its performs psuedo multitasking between its own threads, but never “waits” or gets interrupted from the OS. An application that performs multi-threading can its – without awareness – be multitasked.

Finally, and to the point of the OS4, the act of multi-tasking (whether or not these are multi-threading or non-multithreading applications, is transparent to the application.

David is right, right down the last sentence. Users don’t care how multitasking is implemented. They really don’t. Back in the olden days on the Mac, people were happy with the simple ‘co-operative multitasking’ that was presented by the Mac and Windows 95 and didn’t cream out for pre-emptive multitasking which came with the Windows NT kernel and (eventually) Mac OS X. They just didn’t care. They cared about the symptoms – that under the co-operative model a single application could block the whole machine and they cared about the lack of protected memory on some of these operating systems insofar as one wrong write to memory could crash the device but in the scale of things they didn’t care. The system appeared to multi-task and that’s what was important. And it’s still what’s important.

Jeff LaMarche writes on the iPhone OS4 multitasking:

I’ve used Android’s “multitasking”, and I think that Apple has been 100% right not to just port the workstation model of “multitasking” to the phone. It’s hard to say how well these new “multitasking” APIs will meet our needs as developers, but the best that I can tell from the presentation, Apple seems to have struck a good balance. Battery life can really suffer with a traditional “multitasking” approach, as I’ve discovered using my Nexus One.

I think this is very valid. We don’t need a repeat of the desktop model on mobile. As long as multi-tasking is transparent to the user, it doesn’t matter which way it is done. And if these measures mean pausing apps which are not currently being used, permitting audio, VOIP services and location services and allowing longer-timed processing to continue, what else is needed?

Related posts:

Related posts:

Related posts:

So how do you choose which to buy?

Related posts:

Related posts:

Related posts:

Related posts:

Related posts:

Related posts:

Related posts: