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.

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.

If you haven't been living under a rock for the past few days you most likely noticed that HP, as in the biggest PC vendor in the world, has decided to dump its:

1. PC business
2. The smartphone and tablet business
3. Buy Autonomy for $10 Billion

What will happen to WebOS is unclear. It seem HP is looking to license it to OEM's.

The logic as explained by the CEO Leo Apotheker is that HP needs to get out of the low margin PC business to focus on the higher margin enterprise software market. The logic echoes the one used by IBM when Big Blue sold its PC business to the Lenovo Group. It is a result of the glut in the PC market and the impact of the iPad. I am specifically not saying tablets because let us be honest about it – there is no contender at the moment.

All of us who hoped HP could have a dog in the fight over the new computing in the form of the Touchpad with Palm's WebOS this is sad news. I personally always thought that WebOS is a platform that could give Apple a run for its money if only someone big would put big money behind it and a real strategy. Palm did not have the resources and when HP announced its acquisition of Palm my hopes went up. After all HP has an engineering history and has the wallet to support a big push. 

Unfortunately it seems HP lacks the balls. Only after a few months after the Touchpad entered the market – HP is waving the white flag. What did they expect? First of all if the product was not ready, they should have waited until they feel it is and then launch. And if they felt is was ready they should have soldiered on and learned from the feedback of the customers. One could make the contrast between the launch of the Touchpad and the launch of the original MacBook Air. When that machine launched the reviews called it underpowered, expensive, lacking features and so forth. The sales weren't any good. But did Apple pull the plug? No, because they believed in the vision of a thin super fast computer you could actually carry around. And so they went back and came with the killer laptop that is this generation of the MacBook Air. I think HP did not really have a vision or did not trust the vision of the few who did.

If you believe it is a strategically sound choice – then why did HP buy Palm in the first place? Did they really think they could get it right after only a few month? Apple spent years researching and developing what we today know as the iPhone and iPad. Why on Earth did HP think they could do it faster? I believe when HP decided to buy Palm they should have taken the time to formulate and setup a clear vision and strategy on how to compete with Apple and Android in the smartphone and tablet markets. They should have accepted that while they are buying an interesting platform they need to commit to supporting it in the longer-term. This way it was just a waste of shareholder money.

As many of you know, Google agreed to acquire Motorola Mobility (the mobile spin-off of Motorola) for $12.5 billion. What makes this move interesting is the fact that it is a supplier buying one of its vendors. Motorola has committed a few years back to a single OS strategy for its mobile products with Android being the OS. As such you can see that the company was already deep in the Android camp. Now why would a company like Google do this? Andy Rubin, the lead behind Android at Google, has said before that Google would never build phones but today it seems that is precisely what they are doing. What's up with that?

A few months ago I wrote a post on the strategic partnership Nokia and Microsoft entered into. My conclusion was that the move by Nokia was motivated by the fact that the competition between Android smartphone manufacturers was driving the ASPs down and that the only way to survive was to differentiate itself from he rest of the pack. Windows Phone 7 was that differentiation and gave Nokia the opportunity for relevance again. While the outcome of that is not yet known I stand by that assessment.

Google's acquisition of Motorola is in a sense similar. Motorola is struggling and while it did have some great phones (the Droid family) it has made losses in the past few quarters and was left behind by the likes of HTC or Samsung. I completely understand why they agreed to the acquisition – 40$ per share is more than anyone else would give for Motorola and is a great return for the shareholders – and it is pure cash.

The reason why Google invested one and a half years worth of net income into this deal is much more complex.

First of all there is the patent thing. The Android ecosystem is under attack for infringing on patents from all directions. Apple, Microsoft and Oracle are gearing up for more and will not relent easily so Google needs to build out its own arsenal of patents to defend it. While the jury is out there whether the infringements are real or not – I'll leave this to the experts – the fact is that Google's future platform may be in jeopardy. Because of lawsuits Samsung is unable to sell its Galaxy S phones and tablets in Australia and Europe and Oracle seems to be winning in the Java lawsuit where a victory by Oracle would shake the very foundation of Android. Motorola has quite a patent portfolio and while it will not stop the existing lawsuits it may help deter more of the cropping up.

The second reason for the acquisition is in my opinion the fragmentation of the Android ecosystem. There are currently numerous versions of Android out there, each having a different experience and none of them really being able to compete with the iPhone. Google wants a flagship device the likes of the Nexus series. But even the Nexus phones were still phones of partners. By acquiring Motorola Google gains the ability to build the one true Google Phone and replicate the vertically integrated experience of Apple.

Unfortunately I don't think it is a good move. First of all if Android does really infringe on the IP of other big players Google could have settled that before, but by dumping  the free OS on to the market without making deals before – it forced the hands of Apple, Microsoft and others. Motorola's patent portfolio will help in the defense but it will still be very costly, and with more lawsuits Android will become one hell of an expensive business. How many ads does Google have to sell to get that back?

Google wants to run Motorola as a separate business but I don't believe that can work very well. If they want to get this integrated experience they will need to work very closely together. And we all know how difficult post-M&A integration  is. Getting a real return on this investment will be very difficult. Some pundits mentioned that technically Google does not need to make Motorola profitable but again here I don't agree. What point is there to have a separate business to build the best of the best smartphones and not to have it to make money? If the flagship phones can not make money – which can?

And what will Samsung, LG and HTC do? They are the reason Android has been successful and they got royally screwed. Google just put them into the position of just another not-Googley Android phone manufacturer. While Google got statements from them saying how happy they are – is that reality or a PR stunt? Read them and you tell me. Microsoft is already opening their doors to all the manufacturers and stating they are the only open platform left. And after this move by Google – it may sound as an interesting proposition to the Asian OEMs.

Today I had an interesting discussion with professor Stijn Viaene regarding Apple in the enterprise. One of the points he made in the course (Value Added Enterprise IT) was that Apple is inherently not a company serving the enterprise. The issue at the core of his argument was that Apple does not have structures in place to support a large deployment of Macs, iPhones or iPads in a multinational enterprise. I must say – I agree.

Apple launched its business support service called Joint Venture a few weeks back and while it is a step in the right direction it is not enough. The service will provide dedicated support for anyone deploying Apple products on a larger scale with the initial package starting at $499 for 5 systems. The service will provide a dedicated Joint Venture website where customers can manage their interaction with Apple. Companies can order trainings, workshops and request support through the website and Apple will help them get started in one of the its retail stores. 

While the service is focused on business it seems to be more oriented on small companies with a limited amount of systems. I am not sure how it would scale with multiple hundreds of systems distributed over geographies – especially in places where Apple does not have direct presence. The service seems to cater to the same customers Apple was always popular with – creative studios, small time publishing, educational institutions and similar organizations. Stijn Viaene also mentioned another interesting point – Apple rarely does things without putting all of its might behind it. This seems like a reluctant move in a direction Apple has rarely wondered. 

Apple has always been a consumer focused company and it seems hard for them to enter the Enterprise IT environment. I suspect a part of the reluctance is that the company loves to interact with the end user of their products and does not like to sell to people who govern and not really use its technology and products. Steve Jobs once said about enterprise IT "..the people that make those (IT and purchasing ~ my comment) decisions sometimes are confused" meaning IT people making decisions and choices for equipment may not understand the user as Apple does. This is a fundamental issue of Apple – they do get the consumer or the end user very well – but they have to go through the IT department in the enterprise. Apple does not like middle men.

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?