HTC has agreed to pay Microsoft a royalty when it sells a mobile phone running Google's Android operating system.
But why does Microsoft make money from Google's software? Android is based on open source software - and Microsoft has long raised fears that aspects of Linux may infringe on its patents.
...
Microsoft's bland eight-line statement makes no mention of which patents are covered. Hat tip to Ina Fried at CNET for joining the dots.
...
Mobile players like Nokia, Apple and RIM are in the midst of a patent lawsuit daisy chain.
The mobile phone wars got a more interesting late on Tuesday as Microsoft publicly asserted for the first time that Google's Android operating system infringes on its intellectual property.
Microsoft has taken the position, according to those close to the company, that Android infringes on the company's patented technology and that the infringement applies broadly in areas ranging from the user interface to the underlying operating system.
In a statement to CNET, Microsoft deputy general counsel Horacio Gutierrez said that, although Microsoft prefers to resolve intellectual property licensing issues without resorting to lawsuits, it has a responsibility to make sure that "competitors do not free ride on our innovations."
His comments came as Microsoft and HTC announced they have inked a new patent deal that specifically provides the Taiwanese cell phone maker with the right to use Microsoft's patented technologies in phones running Google's Android operating system. Microsoft said it has been in talks with other phone makers.
"We have also consistently taken a proactive approach to licensing to resolve IP infringement by other companies and have been talking with several device manufacturers to address our concerns relative to the Android mobile platform," Gutierrez said.
Although Microsoft and HTC did not disclose details of the financial terms of their agreement, they did note that "Microsoft will receive royalties from HTC." The deal covers all Android-based phones made by HTC, including the Nexus One, which Google sells directly.
"HTC and Microsoft have a long history of technical and commercial collaboration, and today's agreement is an example of how industry leaders can reach commercial arrangements that address intellectual property," Gutierrez said in a press release announcing the deal. "We are pleased to continue our collaboration with HTC."
My question is, why is Microsoft going after HTC for making an Android phone, and not Google? Why not Motorola who released the Droid in 2009? And why did HTC cave to MS?
As my previous post noted, Evan Williams was the Keynote Interview on Monday at South By Southwest Interactive at 2:00 pm (SXSWi). I stopped writing that post shortly after the one good quote that Evan made about openness because the wheels began to fall off of the wagon of the interview at that point
In 2007, Sarah Lacy famously crashed and burned when she interviewed Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, at SXSWi. Lacy was criticized for asking softball questions and generally getting too personal and seeming too comfortable with her interview subject. The Twitter backchannel, or conversation of audience members on Twitter while the interview was going on resembled a virtual pitchfork and torch mob who revolted in mid-interview. Things only got worse when Lacy turned over the interview to Q&A from the crowd when the crowd started to get audibly frustrated and hostile. It went down in history as the most notorious SXSWi Keynote Interview and many thought it's lessons would prevent anyone else from ever flopping an interview with a tech illuminati again.
That all ended today. One half-hour before the interview began, the room started to fill quickly. My wife and I arrived about 15 minutes before it began and had considerable trouble finding 2 seats next to one another near the back of the room on the left side. Several announcements were made for audience members to fill in seats and the interview started a bit late as more people tried to squeeze in. Many people were standing along the walls and near the back. And then it began
Umair Haque and Evan Williams walked onto the stage from the right. They quickly sat down and it took a minute or so for Umair to clear up a microphone issue he was having. At that point they briefly mentioned that Evan had an announcement to make about their new @anywhere feature they were rolling out soon. Evan breezed over this information rather quickly, showed a very short video demo, and they both moved past the news. I think many people were still contemplating this news, and wanting more info, when Umair started talking about anything and everything except what the audience wanted to hear from the interview. Within 20 minutes people started standing a leaving. I began to notice snarky tweets coming across my stream from people I follow noting that Umair kept talking about his own personal stories with twitter and his own blog posts. He would sometimes take 2 or 3 minutes to ask a question and then jump in quickly after only letting Evan talk for a short bit. His questions were uninteresting and boring. Consequently, whenever he allowed Evan to answer a question at length, his only response would be "Interesting." or "Fascinating". People started to make jokes on Twitter adding fascinating after their tweets mocking him.
Oh and during all of this? People were leaving. Now just a few people, but a LOT. 1/2 hour into the interview there was almost a line to get OUT of the Keynote because the volunteers weren't letting people leave through the rear doors, but instead, out of a set of large double doors on the side of the hall. This was because the hallway outside the keynote had already gotten so crowded from people leaving that people had no where to go once they got outside. My wife and I stuck it out until about 15 minutes before it was over. By the time we left at 3:00 (the interview ran until about 3:15 I think) there was a sea of empty chairs with a person or two every 2 or 3 empty chairs. I guess that about 60% (or more) had left at that point. You can check out some of these articles on other sites to see what people were saying on twitter. Look for yours truly in the Huffington Post one.
Shortly after the iPad was released, a few of my non-Apple using friends started asking me what I thought about it. Rather than present my arguments for it in 1 or 2 sentence bits over instant message, I promised them I would write a post, here, giving my reasons. Thus...
Let me first throw some facts at you:
iPhones and iPods Touch in use today: ~ 60 million (Apple has sold over 70 million, but I’m assuming that not every device sold is still in use).
iPhones sold in the first year (Q3-4, FY 2007): about 1.4 million. For most of this time, the price started at $499, but nearly everyone bought the $599 model.
iPhones sold in the second year (FY 2008): about 11.6 million, over half from Q4. Most sales in FY 2008 were the better, cheaper iPhone 3G.
When the Mac first came out, Newsweek asked me what I [thought] of it. I said: Well, it’s the first personal computer worth criticizing. So at the end of the presentation, Steve came up to me and said: Is the iPhone worth criticizing? And I said: Make the screen five inches by eight inches, and you’ll rule the world.
Before I go into my particular opinions on the topic, I wanted to list all of the articles that I drew from when writing this. As I am a horrible writer, you'll probably get much more from just reading all of these articles in full. Not all of the authors of these articles are in agreement, as many of these articles were written in response to previous articles by other authors this list. I know that not many of you will take the time to read them all, as it would take several hours, but I really think you should. It is worth it. In chronological order:
QGNRKXYiNBETyfcZkxra
Design is Important
When NASA built the Lunar lander, as Andy Ihnatkoquipped on MacBreak Weekly recently, there was this break-through moment when they were trying to figure out how to save weight. There were many design problems in the design when finally someone said, "Why don't we just take out the seats? "Wait," another responded, "We've got to have seats for this thing!" Well, no you don't. This isn't an aircraft we normally build, this is a spacecraft that operates in almost no gravity. As soon as they removed the seats, they realized almost all of their other problems went away. All because they were trying to design this thing to make it like every other thing ever built, without stopping to think, do we really need all of these things.
When Apple builds a product, they step back and ask themselves: what do we see as the need of the customer in which we want to fulfill with this product. Apple does not try to add more features to their products than their competitors so as they will have more bullet points in a chart on the back of the box. Apple also does not compete on price. They are unabashedly unapologetic about this. They think very carefully and very hard about who their products are designed, what features they have, and how they work. They do not, willy-nilly, throw features at a product when those same 'features' could detrimentally impact the user experience. Design is not just color, rounded corners and shiny metal - which is what most non-Apple people think of when they think of Apple products. Apple designs their products and then engineer their products to fit that design. Microsoft/Dell/HP/Acer/HTC, et al. engineer their products and then throw a bit of rudimentary design decision at those engineered products. If those designs have to change to fit the engineered product, then so be it. This results in convoluted UI, inconsistent UI from application to application, and design be committee which results in a horrible user experience for the end users. Geeks have figured out how to get around these issues because we tend to be the type of people who like figuring these things out; we're also smarter than the average bear (when it comes to things with chips in it). Please do not confuse this with good design.
Because, you know, the Creative Nomad has done so well.
The iPhone is a shrunken, stripped-down iPad
People who have actually held this thing in the demo room at the iPad event say that their opinion of this device, when seeing it on stage at the event - whether their initial impression was good or bad, changed positively when actually holding one in their hand and using it. People who have actually gotten their hands on this device say, you know, this is something different. In one of Marco Arment's pieces (and Marco was not at the event and has not actually seen a physical iPad yet) he wrote:
SyAOMJLnHwrw9wXuum2E
I thought this recent episode of the Charlie Rose Show on PBS with the technology columnist of the Wall Street Journal, Walt Mossberg, New York Times business reporter David Carr and TechCrunch's Michael Arrington was a fairly balanced coverage. Both Carr & Mossberg have actually held and used iPads.
A choice line that really stuck with me from this video that the New York Times's David Carr makes regarding the iPad:
SYxAPmulOFq3EDncoLT3
On the iPhone, and now the iPad too, once you have the device in your hands and begin to use it to do whatever-it-is-to-do-what-you-want-to-do you forget that you're holding a device in your hand at all. I cannot say that I would ever feel that with a blackberry, netbook (haha) or god help me, a windows mobile phone.
But it doesn't have a camera, or Flash, or an ice cream maker!?!?
Anytime something new comes out that we haven't had time with, we're past this prologue. We're always going to use the vocabulary and use cases of previous things. Remember when the iMac first came out and it didn't have a floppy and everyone flipped out about it? Strangely the world didn't end. People don't like change and most change is incremental. No matter what the change is, big or small, there is always a point when a lot of people collectively freak out. A lot of the arrows people are shooting at the iPad are falling way short. Either because it is not germane to the kind of audience that would use this or they're leaving out really important facts. RE: the Flash topic: Flash started out as this goofy thing for having little rich media applications on web pages. And then the next thing we knew, it had taken over the whole world and people started making whole sites out of it. It became a way for a designer to build a whole portfolio on the back of a company . People think Flash ==, right?. That Flash is the equivalent of streaming. Remember when Real Player used to be our only choice for streaming too? Do you see many pages that are using Real Player now? I sure as hell don't. If you look at things like Jilion's SublimeVideo HTML5 Video player that they posted two weeks ago, which uses proof of concept HTML5 & javascript, you'll see that it is possible to host videos while doing a lot of the rich stuff that you can't do with straight HTML and normally would use Flash for. [Update: When I first started writing this Jilion only supported Chrome or Safari (aka WebKit browsers). However, in the middle of writing this, they added Firefox support because Firefox doesn't fully support all of HTML5 yet. As for IE? It might support HTML5 in a few years when Microsoft finally concedes that Silverlight is gong to fail.] It just goes to show you that evolution happens. I'm so sick of this, Uh, so, this can't succeed, because, uh, Flash. You know, things come and go. And you know, Flash is like a giant bowl of cilantro. Why the hell would you ever want to eat an entire bowl of it? Why the hell would you want to build an entire site in Flash? And all of the other things you use Flash for can be replaced by other technologies...open technologies, can fulfill their functionality needs on the web as well.
Steve Jobs, took part in an open town hall event internally at Apple HQ two days after the iPad was released. While no reporters were in the room, Wired had several sources who reported what was said at the meeting. When one employee asked Steve about Adobe & Flash, Wired paraphrased Jobs' response as:
About Adobe: They are lazy, Jobs says. They have all this potential to do interesting things but they just refuse to do it. They don’t do anything with the approaches that Apple is taking, like Carbon. Apple does not support Flash because it is so buggy, he says. Whenever a Mac crashes more often than not it’s because of Flash. No one will be using Flash, he says. The world is moving to HTML5.
I want to make the point that geeks care about flash, non-geeks do not. Non-geeks who have iPhones are used to that already. People have forgotten that we've been here before with the iPod and the iPhone already. There was much gnashing of teeth when the iPhone was $499 in it's first year and it couldn't do things like copy & paste or run native apps (remember, the app store came out a year later, in 2008). Many people cited reasons such as this as to why no one would buy an iPhone. People flocked to the iPhone and iPod because of attention to detail and design. They didn't know that was the reason they loved these products. They loved these products because they were so easy to use and worked so well. That was the result of Apple's attention to detail and design. Marco Arment wrote a wonderful piece on this called "Feature checklist dysfunction". Remember in the heyday of the iPod when the Sansa had a much cheaper, and feature-filled product when compared to the iPhone? I do not recall ever having seen a Sansa being used by anyone in pubic. I couldn't walk 100 feet cross campus (I was still in college) without seeing a half-dozen iPods. Sansa had a product that was dramatically cheaper than an iPod and could do more than an iPod, yet the iPod sold better. Why? The total user experience of the iPod - from iTunes on your computer to walking around with one in your pocket, just worked. The Sansa was built by engineers for geeks. The iPod was not. And the geeks, by-in-large, still bought the iPod because they too enjoyed a product that emphasized working well over bullet-point feature lists on the back of their box.
Who Apple Is Targeting With The iPad
In the first year the iPad's release, your early adopters will buy it. People who bought iPods in the early part of the decade eventually graduated to Mac computers and iPhones. This is because they've grown to like Apple's attention to detail in their products from the hardware to their software. These people will also buy iPads for close loved ones (spouses, parent's and kids) or they will use them in public places such as coffee shops, work meetings, the subway, in class or in a plane. Non-iPad owners will see them and ask to try them out or perhaps venture into an Apple store to try one themselves. The iPad will spread virally, just like the iPod and iPhone did before it. I've been criticized by friends sometimes as a hypocrite for bashing Apple during the '90s, eventually buying an iPod and in 2006 switching to Macs. I would say that evolution, by definition, is hypocritical. If we all run our life by fear of hypocrisy then, really, how are we better than sea anemones or pine trees? We all have to learn and evolve. People who refuse to change so they can trumpet the fact that they aren't hypocrites are really missing out. Sometimes better things do exist, and sometimes things that used to not be so good, change into good things. The iPhone sold 1.75 million phones in it's first year. I predict the iPad will sell 750,000 - 1 million. The iPhone sold 11.6 million in its second year. Care to make some guesses as to what the iPad will do in it's second year?
This will be the perfect parent computer. I gave my Dad an iPod Touch in August of 2009. He had been interested in an iPhone for a while but due to crappy AT&T service where he and my Mom live, they were unable to get one. When I explained what the iPod was, and asked if he wanted one (Steff bought a new MacBook Pro and got a free iPod Touch with it) he was game. Since then, he's come to love his Touch and uses it for several hours a day. The UI is easy to use. It's intuitive. He's fairly computer illiterate. He loses icons off of his Dock on the Mac. He doesn't quite get the concept that little blue dots under icons on the Dock mean the application is running, etc, but the iPod touch is super easy for him to use. He browses iTunes and downloads tons of apps (the free ones, he still doesn't want to pay for any) but there are tens of thousands of free apps on the iTunes store. He loves it. He is, however, 56 years old. As he ages, he has a harder time of reading things on that small of a screen. After the iPad event, he called me to ask me about it and after I explained it would do everything his iPod Touch does + has a bigger screen + is faster and will hold more data because it's hardware is better, he immediately wanted to know when it would be available to buy. A lot of geeks write off the non-geek market as if it doesn't matter. We all get so caught up in reading Engadget, and Gizmodo, and Techmeme and we forget that, by-in-large, the tech community despite it's dominate web presence, is less than 20% of the population in the real world. Could this be the device that that other 80% buys because its inherently intuitive, maintenance free, and accessible? When my Dad wants to check the weather, he opens his iPod touch. He presses the Weather channel icon. He then presses 3-day, or weekend, etc. On a computer (Windows or Mac) he needs to open his browser. He needs to either do a Google search or go to a weather website. The then needs to type in his zip. Never mind the site is polluted with annoying flash ads, or has a horrible UI. My Dad is smart enough to do all of those things. But it is much easier for me (and him) to hand him a 500$ device (like when I handed him the 200$ iPod Touch) and tell him that, in about 10 minutes, you'll figure out how to use 80% of the features of this device on your own. You know what? He will be able to do just that. And I think most other people would be able to as well. That is killer.
The Designed Computing Experience
This could be the first truly modern computer. This could be the first truly modern OS ever released (if you discount the iPhone as not being a computer itself - which I think it is). The iPhone was Apple's putting it's toe in the water to see how this concept might fly with consumers. Everything else has started from a leftover OS design or leftover hardware design and built off of that. If the one feature Apple can sell the iPad on is: this is the computer that doesn't freeze, doesn't crash, you turn it on and it will work, it will do things you expect it to do and it doesn't expect things to be done like in the past 20 years just because that's the way we've always done it. One of the things on the iPad, now discovered in the publicly released SDK documentation, is you do not have direct access to the file system. However, every time you need a Word file, it will show you every Word file present on the entire system. You can then edit them, email them, or share them in other ways (on the iPhone you can SMS, email, or tweet, etc). That is a fundamental change in the computing experience. I think the computing experience with an iPad will be full of things like this. Oh no, I can't configure a new printer! Well...it will just sense the places that you can print to and configure it for you (OS X already does this with Bonjour on my Macs).
The practice of your tech illiterate co-workers or relatives coming to you because they "lost" that file they saved or downloaded (because the particular application they were using chose to either save it on the desktop, documents, or the previous folder that was browsed to depending on the developer of that app's preferences) will become a foreign concept (thank god). You want to work on a document? Open the document app and all of those documents types are available to you. Does it take features away from geeks who want complete control over every check box, radial button, or drop down menu they're used to? You bet your ass it does. But you know what? I don't care. I am sick and tired of dealing with the process of doing and not enough of the product once done. When I want to sit down with an iPad, I want to read a book, listen to a podcast or music, browse the web, write a blog post, check twitter, take notes in a meeting, play a game, update my Netflix queue, check my RSS feeds... I could go on all day with this list, but wait, these are all things I already do on my iPhone! But now I can do it on a larger screen when at home on the couch, in bed, at work in a meeting, in the coffee shop, on the subway....all places where I currently use my iPhone at but I sometimes wish I had a larger screen. If I want to do those more complex tasks? I have a desk at work with 2 computers on, and a desk at home with 3 computers. When I'm walking? or in the car? in the mall? I use my iPhone.
My point? Everyone who buys an iPad will buy one to solve a personal want or need that not necessarily everyone else who buys an iPad will also have. People should not assume that just because the iPad doesn't appeal to them, that it wont also appeal to everyone else. Remember that crazy 1st generation iPhone that couldn't run native apps, had no cut and paste, and didn't have 3g? News flash. It didn't fail. The iPad wont either.
For years we've all held to the belief that computing had to be made simpler for the 'average person'. I find it difficult to come to any conclusion other than that we have totally failed in this effort.
Secretly, I suspect, we technologists quite liked the idea that Normals would be dependent on us for our technological shamanism. Those incantations that only we can perform to heal their computers, those oracular proclamations that we make over the future and the blessings we bestow on purchasing choices.
The tech industry will be in paroxysms of future shock for some time to come. Many will cling to their January-26th notions of what it takes to get "real work" done; cling to the idea that the computer-based part of it is the "real work".
It's not. The Real Work is not formatting the margins, installing the printer driver, uploading the document, finishing the PowerPoint slides, running the software update or reinstalling the OS.
The Real Work is teaching the child, healing the patient, selling the house, logging the road defects, fixing the car at the roadside, capturing the table's order, designing the house and organising the party.
Think of the millions of hours of human effort spent on preventing and recovering from the problems caused by completely open computer systems. Think of the lengths that people have gone to in order to acquire skills that are orthogonal to their core interests and their job, just so they can get their job done.
If the iPad and its successor devices free these people to focus on what they do best, it will dramatically change people's perceptions of computing from something to fear to something to engage enthusiastically with. I find it hard to believe that the loss of background processing isn't a price worth paying to have a computer that isn't frightening anymore.
In the meantime, Adobe and Microsoft will continue to stamp their feet and whine.
For months the Apple rumor mill has been stirring, as usual, whenever there is a build-up to an official Apple event. Each year, there are a half dozen or so Apple events of significance, but two notable events come to mind, WWDC and Macworld. Alas, Apple announced last year that Macworld 2009 would be their last. It surprised very few people, however, when they announced they would do their own event on January 27, 2010.
Notable Apple forecasters and pundits have written several incredibly interesting articles about this upcoming event and just what Apple may release. I've been reading about this speculation for months and several notable posts come to mind. Before reading the rest of my post, I encourage you to read these:
After a year and a half of secret meetings, Jobs had finally negotiated terms with the wireless division of the telecom giant (Cingular at the time) to be the iPhone's carrier. In return for five years of exclusivity, roughly 10 percent of iPhone sales in AT&T stores, and a thin slice of Apple's iTunes revenue, AT&T had granted Jobs unprecedented power. He had cajoled AT&T into spending millions of dollars and thousands of man-hours to create a new feature, so-called visual voicemail, and to reinvent the time-consuming in-store sign-up process. He'd also wrangled a unique revenue-sharing arrangement, garnering roughly $10 a month from every iPhone customer's AT&T bill. On top of all that, Apple retained complete control over the design, manufacturing, and marketing of the iPhone. Jobs had done the unthinkable: squeezed a good deal out of one of the largest players in the entrenched wireless industry.
Steve Jobs gave AT&T just enough to make them happy in exchange for allowing him to make the iPhone the way he wanted it to be made. The iPhone was released and it was an enormous success. Once AT&T saw how much the world loved the iPhone. Apple's iPhone, not AT&T's, they were in a weaker negotiating position. Steve Jobs now had the upper hand over AT&T, which had become dependent on the iPhone as a product due to the enormous rate in which it has been able to sign on new customers for them. Steve Jobs was in a much stronger position. He had something he could take away from AT&T that they desperately wanted to keep and he had something all of the other carriers wanted. He used this new power over the wireless industry. Leslie Cauley of USA Today wrote on on July 31, 2008 that:
Under the original iPhone contract, Apple had the right to offer the device to other carriers beginning in 2009. If Apple exercised that clause, AT&T would have lost one of its biggest points of leverage with customers — exclusive access to the iPhone.
So AT&T caved to Apple's new price structure, which allowed Apple to account for most of the profit for an iPhone up front, rather than spreading it out over the 24 months of a customer's contract. Also...didn't she say a year ago that Apple had a 5 year deal? Didn't Wired report the same details in January of 2008? Something had changed. It appears that, either those two articles were wrong, and that it was a 3 year deal from the beginning, or Jobs managed to rewrite the deal before the iPhone 3GS launch. In either case, the Apple & AT&T marriage is due to expire in 2010. Once again, Leslie Cauley of USA Today backs up this line of thinking saying that:
Verizon (VZ) and Apple (AAPL) are discussing the possible development of an iPhone for Verizon, with the goal of introducing it next year, people familiar with the situation say....
...The New York-based telecom entered into "high-level" discussions with Apple management a few months ago, when CEO Steve Jobs was overseeing day-to-day business, these sources say. They declined to be named because they aren't authorized to speak publicly.
The original iPhone went on sale in June of 2007. It is reasonable to believe that Apple will therefore sell the iPhone on other carriers as early as June 2010, right after WWDC, when the new iPhone hardware is released. The New York Post backs this up, for what it's worth (I don't think very highly of the NY Post).
iPhone 4.0 Software and Hardware
I haven't seen as many leaks about upcoming features to the iPhone OS. The one credible post that I have seen recently was made by Boy Genius Report. In addition to providing a screenshot that looks like a validly leaked developer seed (2B13), they report there will be OS-wide multi-touch gestures. This would make sense if The Tablet is to run the same OS as the iPhone. They also report that Multitasking - running applications in the background - is coming. They hint at an improved home screen and new UI improvements for navigating through the OS. Other features such as new calendar and contact syncing (official Google support, not just using CalDAV?) seem believable as well. I think Steve will preview these new things on stage, releasing the 4.0 SDK to developers soon thereafter so they can get cranking on their apps to be ready to release updates come June/WWDC when the OS & new iPhone hardware is released.
iPhone hardware you say? I have no earthly idea exactly what they could add to this phone hardware-wise to make it better, other than more RAM, more storage, better camera and a faster processor. I'll be happy with just those improvements. I wouldn't put it past Apple to surprise all of us, however, with some new, yet-unthought-of, hardware feature.
The Tablet aka the Canvas
I don't think anyone, at this point, doesn't believe Apple is going to release a touch screen/tablet like device on Wednesday. Earlier today, during their Q4 earning conference call, Steve Jobs was quoted to say, "The new products we are planning to release this year are very strong, starting this week with a major new product that we’re really excited about." Later in the call, Tim Cook says, "I wouldn’t want to take away your joy of surprise on Wednesday when you see our latest creation." Additionally, MacRumors wrote on January 24, 2010 that:
We haven't heard this first hand, but we've heard it multiple times second and third hand from completely independent sources. Senior Apple execs and friends of Jobs are telling people that he's about as excited about the upcoming Apple Tablet as he's ever been.
I think this will be Apple's 4th biggest release within the last 10 years. Release 1 = iPod. Release 2 = Intel-based Macs. Release 3 = iPhone. Release 4 = Canvas. This release has the potential to be just as big, if not bigger, than the previous three.
I think Apple will finally drop the 'i' as a prefix to the name. Apple Canvas, or simply, Canvas. Take your pick. I've seen people throw about iTablet, iPad, iSlate, iCanvas, Apple Tablet, Apple Pad, Apple Slate, Apple Canvas. It could be any of these, or a yet unnamed one. I'm going with Canvas, simply because Apple has hinted at product names in event invitations before. At the event where Apple unveiled the MacBook Air, the invitation tagline was "Something is in the Air." The name was IN the tagline. This invitation? Scroll up and look at it. Doesn't that look like an something an artist might paint on a piece of canvas? Yes, thin reasoning, but I think it fits.
It will be running iPhone/iPod Touch OS 3.2 when he shows it off on stage, set to be running a newer version when it goes on sale in March and eventually 4.0 in June. Some of this is speculation on my part, but at least one mobile app analytics company claims to have seen evidence of this already in their user agent strings within their data.
Will Canvas be Wi-Fi only? Built-in 3G always on internet, sans contract (like the Kindle)? Purchased data-plan from a wireless carrier? Sources have been all over the place on this. Part of me wants to say it will be like the Kindle's Whispernet™, but realistically I think there will be 2 versions, one with Wi-Fi only and the other that you'll able to also purchase a data plan from a wireless carrier.
Will this be a Kindle killer? Well, yes, but not in the way you think. This product isn't aimed at just the Kindle. That's thinking too small. This product is aimed at being a do-everything-you-could-want-device-for-its-size, like the iPhone, that just happens to be able to do everything the Kindle does, but better. Also Apple has been working with book publishers to negotiate content distribution deals within iTunes. Rumors purport that Apple has been talking to publishers such as HarperCollins and McGraw-Hill, and say that Apple may even be working directly with Barnes & Noble. I also think Amazon's Kindle app will still be available to allow Kindle books on the device. Apple wants to kill the competing hardware off, but will allow other company's content to continue to work as well (through their respective apps). Remember Apple is a hardware business. iTunes exists only to support their hardware business. If Kindle and the Nook's books also work on the Canvas, so much the better. Perhaps the owners of those $249 devices will upgrade to a Canvas in 2011 when they tire of their e-ink readers. Having their 20-30 books they purchased through the Kindle or B&N store work on the Canvas go a long way to make the switch easier for them.
This week, the New York Times had a wonderful interactive map displaying the demographics of 10 major US cities in relation to their Netflix rental queues. This is awesome.
Holiday spending has seen sales of Apple’s Magic Mouse soar. According to a report by NPD and covered today by AppleInsider, last month saw a twofold increase in Apple’s share of domestic mice sales. By the end of November, Apple had captured 10 percent of the market.
NPD analyst Stephen Baker told AppleInsider:
Sales in November were through the roof. The Magic Mouse had the best month for a mouse product from Apple that we’ve ever seen.
It’s the first time Apple’s share of the domestic mouse market has ever reached double digits, and even more impressive considering the data was compiled from standalone sales. Units sold with new iMacs were not counted.
While that’s fantastic news for Apple, I find myself wondering whether those new Magic Mouse owners aren’t going to be feeling somewhat disappointed because, despite its name, the Magic Mouse is anything but magical. For a company that gets so much of its user experience spot-on, it does keep missing the target with its pointing devices.
I can’t think of a single good Apple mouse released this millennium. Ideologically, they’ve all been covered with spray-glitter and rainbow stickers.
When I got my Magic Mouse I admired its diminutive form factor and minimalist lines but it was clearly not an ergonomic design. That super slimline, ground-hugging shape took some getting used to. But aesthetic and ergonomic matters aside, I think the thorniest issue isn’t with the hardware at all. The problem, as I see it, is one of user perception.
You see, users accustomed to the touchy-goodness of an iPhone or MacBook trackpad lament the lack of similar functionality in their supposedly ‘magic’ mouse. The major criticism is usually expressed in the form of common questions, like, Why is there no pinch to zoom functionality? Why do we have to click, when we could tap? Why aren’t more swipe-gestures supported?
‘It’s just a software fix,’ reviewers on popular Apple tech sites have concluded, ‘Apple will likely add that functionality later in a software update.’
Well, I don’t think so. In fact, I think Apple will intentionally avoid adding further touch functionality to this mouse, and I think I know why.
Be Careful What You Wish For
In the relatively short time since the Magic Mouse was released in late October, several third-party applications have appeared, both free and paid, that (ahem) ‘tap’ into the Magic Mouse software and foist upon the device all that pinching, swiping, multi-touch functionality people think they want. Well, I also thought I wanted those things…until I got them.
Remember how, with the Mighty Mouse, you had to handle it with care because those side-buttons could be way too sensitive? They were so sensitive, in fact, many people disabled those buttons entirely because they proved such a nuisance. Turns out, having multifunctional touch-sensitive controls all across the surface of the Magic Mouse turns the thing into a far greater nuisance than its ‘mighty’ predecessor ever was.
I swiftly discovered that controls I wanted to trigger (say, a three-finger-tap) often wouldn’t register. I’d spend an inordinate amount of time obsessive-compulsively tapping the mouse with minimal success. Pinching and zooming was literally painful, transforming my hand into a deformed claw of knotted knuckles and cramp. Yet, for all my efforts, it still never zoomed in a controlled, predictable manner.
Worse still, functions I didn’t intentionally invoke would trigger while I was doing something else entirely. It got to the point where simply moving the pointer across the screen — an action so natural and normal I normally give it no conscious thought — was now an event demanding deliberate care and attention. I triedtwo of the most popular apps and got the same results each time.
In short , it’s not a software problem, but rather, a limitation imposed by the very form factor of the mouse. As long as Apple wants its flagship pointing device to be small, svelte and sexy, it’s just not going to be the right shape and size for full-fledged multi-touch controls.
Software like MagicPrefs introduces hugely varied additional functionality
Apple, I’m sure, did a lot of R&D to determine what were the most appropriate default touch controls for the Magic Mouse. Therefore, a feature’s absence is a deliberate choice. It makes perfect sense. One of the most celebrated aspects of Apple’s user-experience is its consistency; across all Macs the user experience is predictable and dependable. There are rarely unexpected (or unwelcome) surprises. Much of the time, that’s made possible by Apple’s minimalist, ‘less-is-more’ approach to interface design.
That is why so many people disliked the Mighty Mouse. In trying to do so much it was just too unpredictable and ruined the user experience. And that is why the Magic Mouse is so limited. It’s better this way.
I just wonder if all those new Magic Mouse owners will agree?
