Not sure whether you noticed but yesterday the Swedish authorities attempted to take down The Pirate Bay. I don’t want to go into details of what happened – you can read all about it here, here and here (actually on most of the internet) – suffice to say the page was back up in 3 hours due to the fact the TPB crew was ready for a move like this.

Today I don’t want to talk about whether pirating music/movies is morally ok or not.

What I want to talk about is the fact that the music labels and studios still don’t get their own customer.  Why do people pirate music/movies? The RIAA and MPAA would like you to believe that it’s because it’s easier to pirate than to buy CDs and DVDs. And you know what? They are RIGHT.

But it’s not easier because pirating enables you to get music/movies for free but because the user experience is much better when pirating.  Imagine until the arrival of the Apple iTunes store and later the Amazon MP3 store the only legal option to get media was to buy it on a CD/DVD. If you heard a great tune somewhere on the radio there was no way for you to get it immediately. You had to jump in your car, drive to a mall and get a CD. Same goes for movies.

The arrival of iTunes a few years back should have been a wake-up call. On every Apple keynote (WWDC or Macworld) Steve Jobs reminded everyone how well the music store was doing. With each passing keynote we saw the rise iTunes on the list of top sellers of music in the US. Did the labels/studios get it? No way. They put pressure on Apple to have all the music DRMed just so none of that music would get pirated. They got the chance to get it again when iTunes introduced movies or when Amazon started it’s own MP3 store but they still didn’t get it. The final straw came when iTunes became the top seller of music in the US.

Pirating is the best competition for the distributors of CDs/DVDs – the user experience is much better. You think of a song and in minutes you can have it with little effort and free.

So why is iTunes successful?

Because the user experience is much better than to go and buy a CD or to pirate music. It’s just that simple. If you think pirating music is easier than to buy stuff of the iTunes store just try it. You have to install a torrent download application. Find the right file that is not compromised by a virus and that contains what you want, you have to hope you got enough seeds for you to download at a reasonable speed and you have the thought in the back of your mind that you are doing something illegal.  Yes you are getting the song/album for free but is it worth the effort compared to the 5-10 $ you would pay for the high quality song/album from iTunes? I don’t think so. 

My point is the RIAA and MPAA should treat TPB as a competitor to the distributors of music. They should step-up their effort in online distribution and try to create space in the online music/movie retail market for an iTunes/Amazon competitor. They should help Apple and Amazon setup licensing of music/movies in Europe so that these companies can make their services available in more countries. I understand that a better service will never kill pirating – there will always be pirates – but the music/movie industry can go a long way of getting a much bigger piece of the music/movies downloads pie and even get paid for it. Isn’t it all about money in the end?

I have my iPhone for a week now and am starting to actually like it. Not only that it’s a great mobile media device but also the connectivity and productive applications that make your life easier. The one great disadvantage to it is obviously battery life but I have learned how to manage it’s usage when on the road and am so far capable to get around a day and a bit out of it. My Blackberry Pearl 8120 could last 2-4 days with push email so I will need to adjust to this new reality.

Initially I wasn’t sure what my setup (PIM) would be like on this device. I know that you can use the iPhone to it’s full potential using Mobile Me and although I do have an account there my main mail, calendaring, contacts stuff is Google. Switching from one to the other makes currently no sense to me – I am not using a personaliized domain and Mobile Me does not even support this. With that I decided I would setup both the Google stuff and Mobile Me and just see how it goes.

Gmail

Setting up Gmail is easy – you can either do it using the prepared interface or do it manually (selecting other and filling in the IMAP server information). I don’t see any difference in the result of both of these approaches so I would currently go with the prepared interface. Gmail works like a charm in the iPhone email client (much better then in Mail.app on the Mac – no dual unread message alerts…) and I use that mainly for my email needs. One small thing – as you can’t currently use the iPhone mail client in landscape mode I experimented with the Gmails web interface using Safari and bookmarking it to my homescreen. This works great and typing is amazing in this way with the only downside being it’s slower and you don’t get new message alerts. I will be testing both the mail client and the web approach and post about it a bit later.

Google Calendar

I am a heavy user of Google Calendar. I share calendars with my familly, subscribe to public calendars (holidays, Twit.tv,…) and intergrate with Remember The Milk (more about that later). Therefore having the iPhone calendar synced correctly to my Google Calendar is of great importance to me. For this I use a new experimental service called Nuevasync.com. What I presume they do is they setup an Exchange server, you create an account and they access your Google Calendar and sync it to your Nuevasync account. Then you can access this through the Exchange features of the iPhone.The syncing works well but currently I didn’t find anyway to sync my other calendar subscriptions. Again Google has a mobile version of the Google Calendar webapp which is nice but offers only a list view which isn’t exactly the best option. Nevertheless it’s still a viable option to view your calendar in the most current state.

Google Contacts

Similar to Google Calendar contacts can be synced via Nuevasync.com. This has one major disadvantage – you get all of the junk contacts. On the other hand you get it all and hey – there is a nice search feature in the Contacts app on the iPhone so it’s ok. And additionally it give you incentive to sort out your contacts and to put some effort into maintaining them.

Task Management

In my general effort to be a bit more productive I maintain to-do lists and try to get the hang out of GTD. It’s not like I worship this uber personal productivity movement but I see some things that really help me. With this in mind I have a cool setup of Task Management on RememberTheMilk.com. There is a great write-up about this somewhere on the web – look it up, worth the time. So anyway they have a great iPhone webapp and so I use this setup via a shortcut on my homescreen.

Mobile Me

Mobile Me was obviously an easy thing to setup and works nice. The best thing about it is obivously the seemless integration and push capabilities. My problem – I don’t use it. If I were to switch to Mobile Me – I would lose the calendar sharing capabilities and would have to change my email address. Although I consider Mobile Me to be a compelling product – to be as good as the competition won’t make anyone switch.

Yahoo

I also have a Yahoo email account and use that on the iPhone aswell. I haven’t tested it much yet but it seems to be working fine.

Final thoughts

So in general the iPhone is a great mobile media and PIM device. If you got the patience to set everything up the way you like it then you should be fine. Although I still miss my push email from my Blackberry – I hope this functionality will be added by Apple as Steve said at WWDC 2008 by opening the push API to developers. Also yes the keyboard sucks compared to almost anything – not a showstopper but well…

 I have been resisting the iPhone hype for quite sometime now waiting for the Blackberry Bold to come out here in Slovakia. Even my contract with T-Mobile expired a few month ago and so the carrier has been bombarding me with new service offers and loads of perks. I remained steady and refused a lot of their offers until today.

Today they made me an offer that greatly lowers the price of the 16GB iPhone for me, introduces a lot of nice perks and savings into my plan and adds the necessary data plan that I wanted. So I caved in and took it… I still want a Blackberry as I think it’s a superior device with great battery life, email and multimedia capabilities. On the other hand I am looking forward to playing around with the iPhone and maybe, just maybe, I’ll even like it. 

And one additional post in regards to the new MacBooks / MacBook Pros. I’m not sure if people who didn’t follow the announcement noticed this but in the Q&A session Steve Jobs answered a question regarding Blu-Ray  and let me quote him:

"Blu-Ray is a bag of hurt."

What he basically elaborated on is the fact that licensing is a huge issue with the new format and currently it is a chaotic situation. In fact the new Nvidia chipsets support Blu-Ray and therefore it seems it is really not a technical issue. I personally think that Hollywood asked for some crazy fees if Apple would put Blu-Ray drives into their new MacBooks and Jobs just felt it wasn’t worth it yet. The moment the studios become reasonable I think we will see upgrade options for Blu-ray superdrives.

My girlfriend is a professional translator and interpreter (if anyone needs one – I can supply a contact) and she uses a 2005 (!!) Acer Travelmate 3012 WTMI as her main computer. Now I know what the common opinion is regarding Acers product lines but I must say it served her quite well. It has a nice build, decent performance (2005 context) and is quite small/light (12"). The problem is obvious – it’s old and needs to be replaced by something a bit more – well current. As I am a recent convert to the Mac platform and Apple just released a new portfolio of great notebooks I’m thinking a beautiful new MacBook would be the best choice for her.

We all know this situation – me a tech guy, recently jumped the Windows ship and am happily swimming in the Mac sea – am trying to persuade my girlfriend that this new 1300 $  MacBook is a perfect solution to her problems. Smell bias? Normally I would say she absolutely does not care about tech – she just needs to get her work done – but these new Macbooks have really penetrated the ignorance aura of a completely un-techie person. This means two important things:

1. I think I can get her to buy it:)
2. Apple did hit a cord with the non-ethusiast consumer with the new Macbooks

As I mentioned in the earlier post – the decision made by Apple not to go to the low-cost notebook market seems to have a decent chance of paying of. The new Macbooks are really polished, beautiful looking and powerful which does not only justify the higher price but also gives you the feeling your main tool for work is not some grey box but a work of art made by people that enjoy their work.

It will be perfect for her. Or is that just the Mac-Convert effect?

Anyway I still have to get all her stuff running under OS X – especially dictionaries. Anyone got experience?

The Apple Blog has posted a short info that the MacBooks and MacBook Pros are being sold out in major flagship stores around the world (San Francisco, Toronto, Manchester) which I cannot verify at the moment. If true it would confirm Apple in its strategy not to enter the low cost notebook market and instead rather bring pro features to consumer markets. It is very easy to credit Jobs with such a move as he is known to have made some drastic moves within Apple (You did notice Apple makes phones now right?) but I am thinking this could have been driven by others as well. With Tim Cook and Jony Ive getting some spotlight time at the notebook event and just seeing how passionate Ive was about his new babies I really think investors are dumb to be scared of Jobs leaving the company. He did build a culture within the company that some say is molded around him but you cannot deny the passion Apples employees have for their products. And if Ive, Cook, Schiller and others are a sign of things to come – Apple has nothing to fear.

Smart move Apple, if only I hadn’t bought the February 2008 MacBook Pro