Libya

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I have been following the events in Libya in the past 24-48 hours. It sickens me how every 30 minutes BBC, CNN and others play the footage of a bloodied and dead Gaddafi. Don’t get me wrong I think the Libyans are better off with out him but a brutal death of someone is not something I take pleasure in.

There is another thing that caught my eye – after all the gore on TV the first thing that the politicians in the US, France and the UK are interested in is when will the output of oil from Libya get up to speed. When the protests started in Egypt I wrote a post called Is Oil the Spice of our world? In it I argued that as long as the oil flowed the west did not want to be involved in any turmoil. It reminded me of a book I read. I wrote:

 The parallels between the fictional world of Dune and countries in the Middle East are too numerous to count but what it boils down to is this: the cheap oil that we need to keep the price tag of our lifestyle low comes mostly from a world that is currently in turmoil. You can see the mixed feelings in the face of the western politicians – the uncertainity, the careful way with which they comment this subject. Until today few dared to speak out against the rule of Mubarak and others in the region although the issues have been there for a long time. I believe that while the western powers do want freedom and a higher quality of life for the Middle East, they want stability and a constant flow of cheap oil even more. In Dune the Fremen did gain control of their homeworld again and held the universe hostage with the Spice.

The death of Colonel Gaddafi completes what the Libyan people wanted to achieve. Now what? Will they indeed establish a stable country in North Africa that will follow the west? Will they go their own way? It is up to them to decide.

The dependence of the West on cheap oil from the Middle East and North Africa is going to come back and bite us in the ass. It is one more reason to move ahead with more sustainable solutions to our energy needs. 

iOS5

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Last week Apple released a number updates to its software platforms and applications. The release coincided with the release of the iPhone 4S, the next generation iPhone. I will try to give you an overview of what was released and what are my impressions so far. While I did install iOS5 on an iPhone 4 and an iPad 2, I have yet to hold an iPhone 4S in my hands. Nevertheless I will try to point out some important things about Cupertino’s mobile os.

Notifications are the first one that comes to my mind as they change the way you use your iPhone. Gone are the notification pop-ups that come and then forever disappear. Instead Apple took a lesson from Google’s book and one-up’ed Androids notification center with widget potential. While the only widget in there are Stocks – I believe there is a great opportunity for developers in the future to build amazing apps specifically taking advantage of the new UI. To look at your notifications just swipe top to bottom.

The second one I was looking forward to was iMessage. As I have been a Blackberry user for a long time I have always missed Blackberry Messenger. Now Apple remedied the situation with iMessage. Not only does the iOS messaging app now support texting and mms but also a messenger system between all iOS5 users including iPod Touch and iPad owners. BBM is officially getting its ass kicked. While it may take a while till everyone upgrades it will be much faster than you might expect. One downside of iMessage is that in its default settings Apple decided that if you don’t have a data connection at the time of writing an iMessage your message will instead be sent as a SMS. This has cost me some roaming messages but can be turned off in the settings. I would have preferred to have it off by default.

I have always considered the Lockscreen of the iPhone to be the most under utilized real-estate on the iPhone. We the changes to the notifications that changes as now the Lockscreen can display up to 10 last notifications which makes it immensely useful. Not only that – you can now switch to the Camera app directly from the Lockscreen as well as manage the music you are playing.

iCloud is kind of a disappointment to me. I have expected something fully baked from Apple but I kind of get where they are at. iCloud allows you to wirelessly sync purchased music, apps, pictures and backup your iPhone or iPad to the cloud. This is obviously cool but in this day and age nothing revolutionary. I was actually looking forward to Documents in the Could – a wireless solution that allows me to forget the file system. Don’t get me wrong it works exactly as advertised – on iPhone and iPad. Apparently Apple failed to mention that iWork for Mac is not yet ready for the wireless sync fest and as such the feature Documents in the Cloud is only useful when you are moving between iOS devices. The moment you want to use a Mac it is back to download => edit => upload to iCloud. I bet a new version of iWork with full support for iCloud is in the works as well as an API for developers but until then iCloud is not ready for prime.

Cutting the cord was also a feature I was looking forward to. Not only do I hate syncing via cable but the way Apple implemented wireless sync means I don’t need to explicitly say please sync or back up. When I open iTunes and have my iPhone on the network it will immediately show up and sync. And did I mention iOS updates are from now on incremental and OTA? Awesome.

These are basically the things I find interesting in iOS5. There is plenty more but I have reserved some features for a review of the iPhone 4S. I will try to get my hands on one asap so that I can try out Siri and the new camera. I think these two features alone and the bump in speed make the iPhone 4S a worthwhile upgrade. But that is for another time and another post.

Heroes…

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Since when I was a little kid I loved superheroes. Spiderman, The X-men and others have inspired me to look beyond my petty self and be a better person. I looked up to them and envied their ability to deal with tough challenges and keep faith and courage in difficult situations. They had cool powers too. Over time as I grew older and a bit more experienced I slowly started to move towards having real life heroes. My parents come to my mind but there were others.

At some point I learned about Apple, Steve Jobs and his keynotes. At first I was not an Apple fan, nor owned any of its products. I am from the generation of people who got to know Apple from the iPod. Once I owned one – I fell in love with it and started following the company. Over the years I came to learn more about Steve, his vision, his values and his darker side from stories I read online. I guess I fell for his reality distortion field. I treasured his no bullshit attitude, his righteous approach to dealing with things, his passion for technology and what it can do for the world. I started believing he does have super powers too. He became my hero.

The thing you have to know about Steve is that he had the uncanny skill to make this reality distortion field reality. He did not sit back and wait for his vision to come to him, he made it happen. There is a lesson to be learned from that. Truth be told – there are fewer and fewer like him around and now more than ever we could have used more of him.

Stay hungry, stay foolish. Thank you Steve!

Is Apple calling Samsung’s bluff?

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The relationship between the two tech titans Apple and Samsung is an interesting one. While they compete heavily in the smartphone and tablet markets with their flagship products, Samsung is also one of Apple’s key suppliers. In fact reports suggest that Apple planned to make component purchases of about $7.8 billion from the Korean giant in 2011.

Recently the companies have been engaged in suing each other. Apple maintains that Samsung’s Galaxy S phones and tablets infringe their patents and basically are a rip off of the iPhone and iPad. On the other hand Samsung is counter-suing Apple for similar reasons.

How did it come to this? Well this is purely my opinion but I think that Samsung gambled. You see the supplier – customer relationship between Samsung and Apple is deep because of the fact that Samsung can provide unbelievable amounts of memory and logic chips. Apple in fact constrained the NAND Flash market by buying up all the memory they could via bulk exclusive deals. The company prepaid a lot of money to get good prices on memory and chips for its iPods and later iPhones. I was working at a prominent semiconductor a few years ago and Apple was a customer as well. So I think the people at Samsung thought if they copy a bit (or a lot depending whom you ask) of the iPhones/iPads design Apple will not dare to sue them and even if they do the relationship and a perceived dependency on Samsung will force Apple to settle in a favorable way for Samsung.

If this is indeed what happened than it seems Samsung miscalculated. Apple is suing them in a number of jurisdictions and has successfully blocked the sale of the Samsung Galaxy S tablets in some of them. Samsung is countersuing and most likely would like to force Apple into settlement talks. But if you read the news you will see that Apple is fighting this war on another level. DigiTimes is reporting that Apple is shifting its memory purchasing away from Korea to Japan and processor manufacturing to Taiwan. The purpose is of course to reduce its reliance on the company on the other side of the lawsuits. It seems that Samsung could lose substantial business from Apple.

Samsung may have hoped that Apple would not call their bluff but historically Apple does not like to play games. Especially if partners screw them.

 

RIM lost a fan today

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I really loved the Blackberry. When I got my first iPhone – I switched within 2 weeks to a Blackberry Bold and for a time I was happy. These days I use an iPhone 4 (check out the What I use page) and while I believe it is the best smartphone currently available I remained a fan of the Canadian fruit company.

The Cosmic Girl is a Blackberry user and I got her a Blackberry Torch a while ago. She is most of the time happy with it. Yes the software is quirky, slow and crashes regularly but the keyboard, BBM and powerful email has kept her satisfied. She spends a lot of time using the phone and it keeps us well connected.

In recent days she had troubles with battery life and that by itself would not be that surprising. Few of today’s smartphones last more than a day. But I investigated and found a significant update was available for the phone. While she has purchased plenty of apps from RIM’s App World I thought based the experience with iPhones and Android phones that when you upgrade the OS or change the device you just login into the App World and get your apps back.

Well the experience was horrible. First of all  the whole software update thing is slow and works basically in the same way as 2-3 years ago. At some point during the installation it seemed as if the whole process has crashed or stalled. I was already considering restarting the device and trying again when it continued (the ticking clock icon makes me go nuts). After a while the OS upgrade was done and I logged into App World. Not only was the app update process slow and confusing (progress bars with some apps showed the status 110/100, wtf?) but when completed some apps had only trial licenses! Now she has to search through her email and find the license keys to re-register the apps.

This is just bad user experience and even for tech person like me – very frustrating. Not only is RIM releasing phones that are immediately obsolete (can’t be upgraded to the newest OS) but the experience on the flagship devices is CRAP. I love the keyboard, I love BBM but once you get over those (you can type fast on a touchscreen, iMessage – nuff said) it’s game over. RIM do something!