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.

I love reading good quality news and reports online. I haven't bought a newspaper in a long time and even on the Vlerick campus – where the Herald Tribune, Wall St. Journal and the Financial Times are available for free – I rarely touched them. On the other hand I pay for FT.com and read it religiously. For a long time newspapers did not get how people consume content online. But that is changing quickly. 2 cases in point:

1. The New York Times – Skimmer version – http://www.nytimes.com/skimmer/ - for the Desktop

This app is perfect for skimming through the news quickly. The basic view has a very clear and perfectly readable layout with high quality text. The user interface is very easy to use and straightforward. I love it.

2. The Financial TImes web app for Mobile http://app.ft.com

The Financial Times decided – in light of the new rules set by Apple for publishers – to use a web app to deliver content to mobile devices. The app is simple to use, syncs all current edition articles for offline viewing and is easy to navigate. A pleasure to use on the iPhone.

So my point? If you are a newspaper you better have a great reading experience online – desktop, tablet and mobile. If you do – I and many others are willing to pay premium.

I am a very big fan of Mozilla’s open source browser Firefox. As I mentioned in previous posts and as I maintain on the about page Firefox has been my constant companion and main browser like forever. It has served me well with it’s great addons, speed and great inline search. With it’s latest iteration (3.0) Mozilla introduced some great features – the Awesome Bar, smart bookmarks and the amazing speed enhancements that solved most of the issues I had with version 2. As I am rather new to the Mac (4 Month) I didn’t think I would ever touch Safari – I obviously didn’t use it on Windows although I had it installed. It does not have the extensibility of Firefox and you need to hold down the command key to open a link in a new tab and not in a new browser window (!!). So when I heard Leo Laporte talk about using it himself on the Mac as his main browser I wondered what in the world would make anyone use it? In fact Leo uses the open source browser Webkit that is the core of Apples Safari and it’s single most important feature was supposedly performance. This brought me to consider Safari/Webkit again as I do occasionally experience performance problems with Firefox 3 – it still does sometime eat a lot of memory, slows down or die on me. So recently I started regularly downloading the Webkit nightly builds and using them on my MacBook Pro in tandem with Firefox and I installed the Windows version of Safari on my Thinkpad at work.

On the Mac

With the MacBook Pro the difference in performance is noticeable but not to a degree that would make me completely abandon Firefox. The thing is – Firefox usability features save a lot of time and the addons add functionality that is not available in Webkit/Safari. So although Webkit is generally faster when rendering Javascript heavy applications like Gmail, Firefox compensates by it’s features. I will use both for the foreseeable future on my Mac and I can recommend Safari as a decent main browser to anyone in need of a simple browser.

On the PC

At work I found one massive advantage to Safari as a second browser. Similarly to the Mac experience it is indeed faster then Firefox and I make heavy use of that on the Thinkpad. The thing is that I use a lot of corporate javascript based apps at work and their performance in Safari is astounding. No waiting, just click, click, click and go. I hate waiting for forms to validate or content loading CMS systems and with Safari my pain has been eased. I still use Firefox as the main browser but Safari on Windows has become a part of my daily work computing.

Thoughts

1. Yes I know – we got Google Chrome now – also based on Webkit, lightning fast and also PC only and unstable. Until it’s reliability is on the level of Webkits nightly builds – no thanks.
2. Firefox also has an early 3.1 b1(and 2 actually) build that Mozilla calls Minefield. It has a greatly improved really fast javascript engine so it’s performance exceeds that of Webkit according to benchmarks. Unfortunately it isn’t reliable yet for everyday use and therefore it’s a no-no for me in the same way as Chrome

If you are on a Mac and for some reason want to skip Firefox – Safari is a great browser. Do not fear using it – I don’t.

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?

Although technically we are not yet in a real recession (definitely not here in Slovakia) the global media has been spinning the story of the crisis on the financial markets in this direction. What this means is that most common folks are already freaked out and are probably lowering their spending. This results into less revenue for companies and adds to all the recession worries.

In large companies the expected lower revenues often lead to cuts in jobs and and lowering investments and the earlier a company cuts back, prepares for the worst – the higher is the chance for it to weather this storm. Suns CEO Jonathan Schwartz posted and interesting post on his blog where he cites an email he sent out to the upper management. He makes the case that the current situation actually plays into the hands of Sun as a lot of companies will try to leverage technology and automation to compensate for head count cuts and to increase efficiency. When is the best time for a company like Sun to approach customers and offer assistance with making processes leaner and more efficient using tech solutions?

I see a lot of people in corporate IT hanging down their heads, complaining about the lowering of head count, reducing investment while opportunities slip by. I think Schwartz has a point and it is not only tech companies like Sun that can leverage the current situation. Even internal IT departments, CIOs, should approach their business and offer help. More often then not assistance like this can make a big difference while making the IT department much more valuable.  In a crisis situation like this I think the most important thing is to keep your head up high and be proactive – it is "opportunity" season!

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

I really don’t know how to put this… Yahoo is dying and dying fast.

During this week a number of top executives have announced that they are leaving the company. Among them are some execs from Yahoo’s more successful acquisitions like the founder of del.icio.us or both co-founders of Flickr. With the drain I think the top management structure is really starting to crumble and the people who are left will face the wrath of Yahoo’s shareholders. Expect a major down-swing of the Yahoo’s stock price and more people jumping ship in the days to come.

I still consider Yahoo to be one of the greatest internet companies but for some reason the whole Mircosoft vs Google vs Yahoo war is moving forward and Yahoo seems to be the first casualty…

Techcrunch.com has an interesting list of ex-Yahoo executives and where they landed post Yahoo.