I honestly feel that tomorrow is going to mirror the Macworld keynote. During that event Phil did an excellent job of introducing products that were, lets face it, boring. If Steve had been in full health I don't think he would've been able to make those announcements anymore exciting than Phil made them. Tomorrow's likely to be the same. Phil can introduce us to Snow Leopard and iPhone OS 3.0 without ever introducing a new piece of hardware. We've seen the iPhone OS and we've heard what's in Snow Leopard. I'm suspecting that this is what poor Phil is going to be stuck with tomorrow.

If I was in his position though I would ensure that I had one surprise, but what surprise could the Vice-President of Worldwide Marketing pull out of the bag that would get people talking? There are really two. The first would be a rehashed version of the iPhone hardware. Maybe it will have Video editing, larger memory and faster processor. It's Phil level exciting, I don't mean that as an offense to him of course I simply mean that due to the timing he's not going to get THE BIG announcement. He can announce that it will go on sale at the end of June.

His second announcement, and the real surprise, should involve Mr Jobs. Not his actual return at WWDC because it's not the right setting or timing. He needs to announce the next event. A "One More Thing." that is simply a date and a location on a black screen with the Apple logo above it. That will be Steve's return. That will be the new major hardware announcement, probably a totally new iPhone for Verizon and maybe just maybe the Tablet.

So don't expect too much tomorrow in the way of new products. Maybe a new iPhone but it'll be no more than a rehash of the current one. The big announcement is going to be the return of Steve at the end of the month. In that keynote we will expect something major. I must say though that personally it will be great to see Steve return and I'm really happy that if this is a sign that his health issues have been sorted out. The Tech industry is a much better place when Steve's around than when he isn't.

Labels: Apple, iPhone, Phil Schiller, Steve Jobs, WWDC 2009

Downloading the SDK for version 6.1 is nice and easy from Microsoft.com but the problem emerges when you start looking for a supported environment. Android and BlackBerry use Eclipse plug-ins which are free to download as is Eclipse itself. If you own a Mac you will get Xcode when you download the iPhone SDK and once again these are free. Microsoft’s free Visual Studio Express environments are not actually supported for mobile development. You have to go out and purchase a copy of Visual Studio before you can develop for the Windows Mobile platform. To me this is a massive flaw in the Microsoft model. Google, RIM and Apple are making the most of innovative developers who might think twice if they had to purchase the development environments.

Microsoft may be able to boast about the number of applications they have for Windows Mobile but many of them are pretty awful. I do feel that if Microsoft doesn’t want to get left behind in this field and lose developer support they must offer a Visual Studio Express version that hooks into the 6.1 SDK and allows developers to play and build apps for free. After that they can charge for distribution because everyone else basically does.

Image from msdn blogs

Labels: Android, Blackberry, iPhone, Palm, Visual Studio Express, Windows Mobile

Labels: Apple, Apple TV, iMac, iPhone, iPod Touch, Microsoft, Nintendo, Sega

N96, Samsung Tocco and Samsung Omnia. Does anyone know what these three phones have in common? Well I'll tell you, 02 have dropped them all. My contract with 02 is about to expire and I've been checking with them about availability. Now I got the Tocco from Vodafone and as you can see from my review I have had issues with it and I could believe the reason 02 gave for not carrying it, the phone had too many issues. However 02 have said they won't carry the N96 because they are worried about how it will effect iPhone sales. I suspect this is the reason they are not carrying the Samsung Omnia either and I wonder if it influenced the decision to drop Tocco. It's this mistake that will mean that I'll probably be leaving 02 within the next month.

If 02 can't offer me a full range of quality handsets at this time because of iPhone why should I think that this is going to change any time soon. What about when Nokia release their first Touchscreen phone, at the moment called the Tube? I'm guessing we're not going to see it either. I don't want an iPhone. It's still not up to the standard of phone that I use and moving from N95 to iPhone feels like a downgrade. For those people who are feeling the same then I'm afraid 02 is not an option any longer.

Labels: 02, iPhone, N95, N96, Samsung Omnia, Samsung Tocco

Syncing contacts is the first major issue. If I sync with Windows Contacts then everything works perfectly and the contacts appear. If I use Outlook however OutlookSyncDevice crashes every single time. I'm going to hook in and debug it but I suspect it's linked to Outlook Connector and MobileMe not playing nice. I've no intention of turning off Outlook Connector so that could mean bye bye MobileMe.

Before I jump however lets look at the calendar. Well it's awful. I've tested multiple scenarios with it and so far I'm having no joy with Outlook. In this case I can't even test it with Windows Calendar because for some reason Apple won't support it. I'm now looking at Windows Live Calendar and the cost of using it seems to be perfectly justifiable compared with the cost of using a badly substandard MobileMe.

On a quick note what about the online applications? Well I first used them on OSX and found them pretty useful and responsive. There's nothing really new in what they offer but they are simple enough to use. Move over to Windows and again there's issues. The service doesn't work properly with IE7, I'm very interested to test it with IE8 to see how well it works. You even get an arrogant warning that blames this on IE7 but remember that if Google can develop for IE then you would expect Apple to be able to. So what are the services like on Firefox? Well they work but they're slow and if you're a Firefox user then I'm afraid you can't get your bookmarks synced even though it's one of the support Windows browsers. Weird? Well not really because there's a browser that happens to display the services and let you sync the bookmarks, guess which one? That's right the downright hideous Safari. MobileMe is not a good reason to use Safari, nothing is a good reason to use it in fact. So the online services aren't sitting well for Windows either even though they are meant to be platform independent, kinda the point of the "cloud" concept I would've thought.

The final scenario and the realisation I had was that if I wanted MobileMe to work even a little on the Windows side then I would probably have to abandon my current email accounts and make sure that Outlook is only hooked up MobileMe. I'm not doing it. I've no interest in doing it. I'm sticking with my Windows Live address and services so I'm guessing it's going to have to be goodbye to MobileMe. Let's face it Live Mesh offers a great online storage option along with Office Live Workspace and SkyDrive. There's nothing at all wrong with Live Mail and if I ever decide to sign up to MSN Premium account I'll get calendar sync but lets face it, is it really that important? What about push? Well since it's on a 15 minute delay I can get my Live Mail forwarded to my GMail account and get my N95 to sync every 15 minutes for free. That's a Microsoft flaw however. I shouldn't have to. Live Mail needs IMAP or POP asap.

So what's the lesson from all this? Well I think it's pretty obvious. Computers are still not even close to being user friendly. There's so much infighting and "nerdy" arguments between Microsoft and Apple users, to name but two, that we can't simply get an integrated system that is user friendly. Users don't want to have to understand all the stuff that's going on under the hood. They simply want to be able to sign up to their email, select what they want to sync with and when they look at their Nokia phone they want the same contact list as their email account has and at the moment that is not being offered. It's not just Apple, Google and Microsoft that are to blame for this but they have a lot to answer for. There's room for more than one company in the technology world but only when the systems easily integrate. There's plenty of car companies making money why can't the same be true for IT? Imagine a world were there was a different driving test for each make of car. Then one company would dominate simply due to people not wanting the hassle. I want to see real system integration between the major companies because one will never win out over the rest and the bitter cat fighting is just hurting the consumer. Also lets face it people are sticking to Microsoft because it's familiar and that's a hard habit to break. It's no coincidence that Apple released Boot Camp and Apple hardware sales really started to rise. MobileMe was in the position to really breakdown a few barriers and show that Apple can develop quality software for a different platform in the same way as Microsoft have built Office and Messenger for Mac. I'm not sure they actually can. iTunes is weak as is MobileMe. Lets see something better guys because I'm getting fed up waiting around for you.

Labels: Apple, iPhone, iPod Touch, iTunes, Live Mesh, Mac OS X, Microsoft, Mobile Me, N95, Nokia, Office Live, Windows Live, Windows Vista

An article in Arstechnica highlights how slow Apple can be when patching security flaws.

Although Apple didn't make a big deal about it, one of the security fixes included in the recent iPhone/iPod touch 2.0 firmware is a fix for a fairly high-profile WebKit bug that was used to hack a MacBook Air back in March. People immediately began asking why the bug took so long to fix on the iPhone. Now, the researcher who discovered it, Charlie Miller, has called Apple out over its iPhone patching practices in a recent Computerworld piece, saying that the company "messed up."

When the bug was originally disclosed to Apple, the company asked Miller if Mobile Safari was also affected, and he suggested that it probably was. Unfortunately, he wasn't able to confirm his assertion at the time, and left it up to Apple (which had all of the details) to test the exploit on the iPhone itself. It turned out that the exploit code needed to be tweaked slightly to do anything malicious on an iPhone, but Apple apparently closed the case after the OS X exploit failed to do anything nasty.

Further research revealed that if the actual JavaScript regular expression exploit code was run, bad things would still happen. Apple seemed to have corrected the bug pretty quickly after that. However, the mere fact that it took Apple so long to patch an iPhone WebKit bug has brought up the question: how well will Apple be able to manage two OS versions? Miller has pointed out that most WebKit bugs found on OS X will also occur on the iPhone and iPod touch, so Apple could theoretically patch both at the same time. Whether that will ever actually happen remains to be seen.

Labels: Apple, iPhone, iPod Touch

Labels: Apple, iPhone, Microsoft, Paul Thurrott

Labels: iPhone, iPod Touch, N95, N96, Nokia

I got a very interesting email from Carphone Warehouse today informing me that they had officially sold out of iPhones.

Thanks to the most phenomenal response to the promotion, The Carphone Warehouse is now out of stock on the Apple iPhone.

...

Carphone do not expect to receive any additional stock at this time.

It's not the sales that surprise me it's the expectation that no additional stock will be received. I wonder does this mean the 8Gb is disappearing and the 3G one is on the way. Time will tell I suppose.

Labels: Apple, Carphone Warehouse, iPhone

The Times of London is reporting that Apple has placed an order with it's suppliers for 200,000 of the new 3G iPhones by the end of May. According to reports the new iPhone will be different to the current device. The possibilities given are a flip version giving the user a larger screen and sliding version which would have a fully functioning QWERTY keyboard rather than a touchscreen keyboard.

The most likely outcome is that we will see all three versions of the device released. This would give the touchscreen version for users who want music and videos, the flip version for those who want Internet browsing on a larger screen and I would also say easier use of enterprise software and the slide for the average user and the Blackberry users who want a device similar to the one they are using.

The release of these three products could catapult Apple into a dominant position in the handheld market and bump RIM into second place. The timing should also guarantee an excellent quarter 2 for Apple. The image above shows the next Blackberry which RIM hope will be the iPhone killer, I doubt it though,

Labels: 3G iPhone, Apple, Blackberry, iPhone

Carphone Warehouse have announced today that the price of the 8Gb iPhone has gone from £269 to £169. You still have to take a contract but with 600 minutes, 500 texts and unlimited Internet for £35 pounds a month the iPhone is now looking like a viable option. However the question now has to be asked, is the 3G iPhone a short time away and are we better off waiting?

For those people who have just bought an iPhone for £269 don't worry Carphone Warehouse are giving you the £100 back.

Labels: Carphone Warehouse, iPhone

Silicon Alley Insider is reporting that Microsoft are currently looking at the iPhone SDK and deciding what to build. The likeliest application suite to be built is Microsoft Office and in my opinion a version of the Windows Live suite is just as likely and this option would put Microsoft into direct competition with Google on the platform.

Microsoft is checking out the new iPhone software developers kit and is deciding what, if anything, they want to build for it, exec Tom Gibbons tells Fortune. One obvious possibility: A mobile version of Office, which Microsoft (MSFT) already offers for devices running its Windows Mobile operating system.

And unlike Office for Macs, the iPhone version might be a leader. Word and Excel for Apple's (AAPL) Macs have always trailed the Windows editions in features and usefulness. But because the iPhone's hardware and operating system are miles ahead of any phone Microsoft offers, Office for the iPhone could conceivably become the model for future Windows Mobile editions. Imagine that.

Labels: iPhone, Microsoft

Could the peace between Apple and Google be coming to an end. In this quote from an interview Steve Jobs gave, it looks as if he's making the first threat that the war is approaching.

"I actually think Google has achieved their goal without Android, and I now think Android hurts them more than it helps them. It's just going to divide them and people who want to be their partners."

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/15/the-passion-of-steve-jobs/index.html?ex=1358226000&en=dc35254b0fcd5490&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

Would you regard Apple and Google as virtually partners at the moment because I would.

Labels: Android, Apple, Google, iPhone, Steve Jobs

Lotus Notes on the iPhone will allow the iPhone to compete directly with the Blackberry in the business market. Bringing these two major Microsoft competitors together could mean that we're looking at a full on assault on the business community. New XServer, Lotus Notes connectivity and Lotus Symphony does make a good foundation to build on.

IBM to add software for Apple devices

By BRIAN BERGSTEIN - AP Technology Writer

E-mail software from IBM Corp. will be available on Apple Inc. iPhones and iPod Touch devices under a new partnership that brings together two big rivals of Microsoft Corp.

IBM plans a formal announcement of the Lotus Notes e-mail package for Apple's portable devices at its Lotusphere conference in Orlando, Fla., next week. The software, which requires use of IBM's Domino e-mail server program, will be free for users who already have a Lotus Web-access license and start at $39 per year for new users.

IBM also plans to release Lotus Notes and the free Lotus Symphony "productivity" package - which includes documents, spreadsheets and other Microsoft Office-like software - for Apple's Macintosh computers.

http://www.thestate.com/technology-wire/story/285949.html

Labels: Apple, IBM, iPhone, Lotus Notes, Lotus Symphony, XServe

SDK due in February and an update for iPhone coming today. Multiple person SMS, Customize Home Screen, Lyrics support, videos with chapters and subtitles, Webclips, iPhone knows where your location is and can give you location specific directions thru maps. All available today.

Add web pages to your home screen. Basically like favourites except it adds an iCon to your home screen that takes you to the site. A nice touch, pardon the pun, I suppose.

iPod Touch is getting Mail, Maps, Stocks, Notes, Customizable Home Screen, Webclips and Weather. At bloody last. However that update is actually $20. Why do I have to pay that while iPhone users get the same for free?

Labels: Apple, iPhone, iPod, Keynote, Macworld 2008

Here are my predictions for what is going to be announced in today's keynote.

1. Apple TV2

2. Movies on iTunes

3. iPhone SDK

4. Slimmer Notebooks/Tablets

5. Takeover of Adobe (hence the Air reference).

6. Best sales figures ever

7. Number of iTunes downloads/iPhone users/iPod users

8. Apple takeover by Google (probably not but live in hope)!

Labels: Apple, Google, iPhone, iPod, iTunes, Macworld 2008, Steve Jobs