Laptops, Netbooks & Handsets

What's the best way to scoop the review of a much heralded new piece of geek bling? One option is to borrow it from a bloke in a bar, though that brings its own problems. Another is to review it before its even been released, and give it a foul review, as the Torygraph did last week for the Apple iPhone 4G, due to be outed today. Here are their 10 main points:

1) It’s expensive: Buy the top-of-the-range Blackberry or Android handset and you will still pay a lot less than the extortionate prices Apple charge. If the iPhone weren’t made by Apple, networks would have had to start giving it away on £30 a month tariffs years ago.

2) It’s anti-technology: When the iPhone launched it was cutting edge – now as other manufacturers announce, for instance, that you can use their phones as shareable wifi hot spots, Apple says no. Not because of some spurious “user experience” argument, but because of economics. When will they learn that it’s customers – supply and demand – that should dictate feature availability?

3) No Flash: The iPhone, the phone that promised to put the web into everybody’s pockets, can’t even show you most of it, because it can’t handle Flash graphics. Google Android can, in the latest version (OS 2.2), and it’s going to be available free on a lot of budget tariffs.

4) No multitasking: Tried instant messaging on an iPhone? Oh yes, you have to open the app to see if you’ve got a message. Genius. If Apple announces multitasking next it will be an improvement – but there’ll be no apology for the way it’s treated customers in the past, and no guarantee it won’t behave similarly shoddily in the future.

5) Its battery life is terrible: This isn’t a problem unique to Apple, but look at phones by companies such as HTC – multitasking, better cameras, better screens, all draining their batteries far more – and yet the iPhone, with its undemanding technology, still only offers equal performance.

6) Developing apps for it is costing you money: The special version of the BBC iPlayer, of Natwest Phone Banking, of Eon’s meter reader – developing all of these came out of money that could have been channelled away from a self-important minority and towards more generally useful ideas.

7) It comes with offensively bad headphones: Sit next to somebody using the original iPhone or iPod headphones and you can hear everything they can. It’s another example of Apple charging premium prices, but delivering a dressed up, budget product.

8 ) It’s not very well designed: Use the iPhone as a phone and it’s not got great reception, nor is it particularly comfortable to use for long periods. It’s a computer that happens to have a phone bolted on – jack of two trades, but master of neither.

9) It charges for satnav: In an age when Nokia and Google Android provide completely free mapping and satnav facilities, the cheapest way you can turn your overpriced iPhone into a satnav is with a £19.99 app. Bargain.

10) Those iPod docks are holding back better technologies: As every hotel increasingly thinks it should provide iPod docks, the momentum behind this technology is only growing. But if it wasn’t for the iPod and iPhone’s ubiquity, there’d be more wifi radios, more new technologies and a range of different options, competing and driving innovation.

They then committed the ultimate sin in blogging, by moderating the comments to remove all the fanbois arriving with their burning digital pitchforks, so that (allegedly anyway) only those who agree with them saw the the bloggy dawn light. There has been Lots of Harrumphing about this (probably because a lot of people wished they'd thought of it first, I'll warrant) and of cours e- from a fanboi point of view - its all wrong, wrong, wrong.

Or is it? Lets just go through those points:

1) It’s expensive: Buy the top-of-the-range Blackberry or Android handset and you will still pay a lot less than the extortionate prices Apple charge

Leaving aside that no-one knows the exact pricing, overcharging for stuff has always been Apple's schtick - they have charged more for the same (but beautifully branded) stuff for 40 years now, and about 15% of any market love them for it. Next...

2) It’s anti-technology: When the iPhone launched it was cutting edge – now as other manufacturers announce, for instance, that you can use their phones as shareable wifi hot spots, Apple says no.

Well, its 4G, with a new OS, so thats a bit disingenuous never mind disingenerous

3) No Flash: The iPhone, the phone that promised to put the web into everybody’s pockets, can’t even show you most of it, because it can’t handle Flash graphics.

Actually, very few mobiles (as a % of total usage) today can use Flash (but as Benjamin Ellis comments that quite a few of the non-Apple ones coming along will, however). Let's see what Apple does over the next 6 months.

4) No multitasking: Tried instant messaging on an iPhone? Oh yes, you have to open the app to see if you’ve got a message.

Well, in theory that is half the point - a new OS that is multitasking

5) Its battery life is terrible

It's a smartphone. Next..... (OK, OK its not the best battery, but all the powerful smartphones are pretty big battery chewers)

6) Developing apps for it is costing you money: The special version of the BBC iPlayer, of Natwest Phone Banking, of Eon’s meter reader – developing all of these came out of money that could have been channelled away from a self-important minority and towards more generally useful ideas.

Nah, those geeks in garrets and garages actually develop all this stuff in the belief they will be paid in user uptake and subscriptions. Virtually no one makes any money though - in fact its a marvellous system as its all the creators paying to create stuff we largely use for free. Fools.

7) It comes with offensively bad headphones

They all do. But its the offensively bad music they play that really causes the problems. Next....

8 ) It’s not very well designed

'Course not - its an Apple. They deliberately design ugly stuff so that they can sell it at a lower price than anyone else. Not.

9) It charges for satnav: In an age when Nokia and Google Android provide completely free mapping and satnav facilities

It does indeed - les autres are subsidising this in an attempt to lure people away from Apple.

10) Those iPod docks are holding back better technologies

Much like Betamax, Wankel engines and countless other marvellous technologies that were held back by the sheer popularity of existing stuff that basically did what its users wanted.

We are anything but Apple fanbois (just type in "Apple" in the blog search) and tend to cleave somewhat to the view in "Stuff White People Like" that Apple is largely bought by people who need to feel they are creative etc, but I must say if you were doing a Pre-Review based on zero knowledge of the pre-released product you could do a better extrapolation of what Apple is likely to do, and where the pros and cons are.

In short I'd say the Torygraph review scores about 2/10 tops in accuracy, but 8/10 in linkbaiting. Which was the point, after all, I suspect - they don't make their money from flogging 'phones.

Nor, as some wags would suggest, from accurate reporting

This review is in 3 parts. Firstly, technically, we can say that the iPad is:

- a tablet computer
- that plays TV
- it works like an iPhone except it won't make phone calls.
- it's bloody expensive for what it is
- you just know the next generation will be much cheaper, with all the slots, a keyboard, and be able to access the whole internet, and change the battery or anything else that needs replacing. They will be called lapphones or smartbooks or something like that

Thats all you need to know about it technically. Now, let us look at it socio-behaviourally, because this thing is not about the Technology. It's about belonging to the faith (aka being able to show the length of your fanboi d*ck). Consider the behaviour traits:

- You can walk into PC World and just buy one, but instead why not queue for 12 hours outside the Apple store?
- The demographic early owner is 92 % men
- Of the 92 per cent men in the queue 16 per cent had beards.
- 36 per cent were aged 26 – 39. 18 – 25s were the next largest group with 26 per cent. 11 per cent were older than Steve Jobs at 56 or over.
- 44 per cent in the queue had ever tried an iPad before. The majority – 56 per cent were buying the product based on reviews, international success and a blind faith in Apple products.

Most people said they would use it for browsing the internet, or reading, or work etc but its really just so they can tell other people that they have one on Twitter, and say existentialist things like:

The question is not—and never has been—do you need an iPad. The question is after you've had one, would you miss it. The answer is yes.

The third part of this review is to explain this phenomenon of the pathos of geek love, and how a closed, branded product makes right-on people who during the week opine for Open Source and Anti Capitalism etc etc go weak at their trembling knees for a bit of fluffy overhyped locked up tech bling. I turn to the Metrosexual Poseur's Gospel, "Stuff White People Like", Verse 20, "Apple Products":

Plain and simple, white people don’t just like Apple, they love and need Apple to operate.

On the surface, you would ask yourself, how is that white people love a multi-billion dollar company with manufacturing plants in China, mass production, and that contributes to global pollution through the manufacture of consumer electronic devices?

Simple answer: Apple products tell the world you are creative and unique. They are an exclusive product line only used by every white college student, designer, writer, English teacher, and hipster on the planet.

It is also important that white people are reminded of their creativity, and remember you need a Mac to creatively check email, creatively check websites, and creatively watch DVDs on planes.

White people also need iPods, iPhones, Apple TV, AirPort Express stations, and anything else that Apple will produce. Because you need to express your uniqueness by purchasing everything that a publicly traded company produces.

Here endeth the lesson. And that'll be £600 please - I need to get mine too

Article by Paul Carr on the iPad as a reading device:

The iPad is emphatically not a serious readers’ device: the only people who would genuinely consider it a Kindle killer are those for whom the idea of reading for pleasure died years ago; if it was ever alive. The people who will spout bullshit like “I read on screen all day” when what they really mean is “I read the first three paragraphs of the New York Times article I saw linked on Twitter before retweeting it; and then I repeat that process for the next eight hours while pretending to work.” That’s reading in the way that rubbing against women on the subway is sex.

I think the dynamics are wrong - if anything Twitter, with all those minds constantly rubbing along against each other, is more like mental frotting than an iPad is. Anyway, it hopefully gives me a salacious linkbait eadline

But back to his main point, that the demographic that buys e-Readers is the same as that which will but ipads, and why have the single function when you can have it all?. His other point is that the reading experience of an iPad is far less pleasant than a dedicated eReader so that if the ipad wins out vs eReaders, then reading real, long form books will disappear as a pursuit.

I think he's a tad off beam as he is describing a perturbation in the market and extrapolating it to be the norm. I think two things will happen:

(i) The need to read long form media will remain for some considerable time - for business and pleasure

(ii) iPad and similar screens will continue to improve, to e-Reader standards

I'd predict that people will continue to use paper for quite a while yet, that e-Readers will keep a market segment for those that ave to do a lot of reading on the move, and that over time eBooks will increase as a market.

Yup, its not just big media that are licking their lips:

iPad users will also soon have access to plenty of porn optimized for Apple’s touch-screen device, thanks to a number of studios working feverishly on converting their catalogs over and optimizing existing mobile offerings.

Studios like Vivid (please note that this link, as many others in this article, is not safe for work) and distributors like AEBN do face some hurdles in targeting the device, however. Apple has been exercising a zero-tolerance policy for adult content on the iTunes App Store, making it impossible to distribute even slightly R-rated material, much less triple-X fare. Add to this the absence of Flash on the iPad, and you have a situation in which adult publishers are forced to out-innovate their mainstream competition.

Now there is a surprise......predictable or what

Video of "The Internet is for Porn" courtesy "Avenue Q"

There was an article by Cory Doctorow on Boing Boing about why he wouldn't buy an iPad:

I believe — really believe — in the stirring words of the Maker Manifesto: if you can’t open it, you don’t own it. Screws not glue. The original Apple ][+ came with schematics for the circuit boards, and birthed a generation of hardware and software hackers who upended the world for the better. If you wanted your kid to grow up to be a confident, entrepreneurial, and firmly in the camp that believes that you should forever be rearranging the world to make it better, you bought her an Apple II +.

In essence the argument is that by locking it down and being unable to tinker, this iPad device is letting the next generation of wannabe geeks down.

The response on Daring Fireball is something like "This is the Way now, get over it":

Such is the march of progress. 40 years ago you could open the hood of your car and see and touch just about every component in there. And you had to, because many of those components required frequent maintenance. To properly own a car required, to some degree, that you understood how a car worked. Today, you open the hood of your car and you see a big sealed block and a basin for the windshield washer fluid. You can buy a new car, drive it for years, and never once open the hood yourself.

That’s the iPad.

My own take on this is that they are both right, and wrong.

Firstly, the iPad is not the sort of device that will help the next generation of tinkerers. But this generation of tinkerers are not tinkering with the iPad and most other Apple stuff anyway. On the PC front they are mainly playing with WinTel devices, overclocking them, building their own gaming machines etc etc. They are also tinkering with mobile devices and mobile applications. To the extent that the iPad allows apps they will tinker with it, but thats it. Geeks love Android for that reason.

Secondly, the iPad demographic - in fact all of Apple's recent product's demographic - are not "real" geeks. Apple stuff is aimed at faux-geeks - the sort of people sent up so well in the "Stuff White People Like" blog:

Plain and simple, white people don’t just like Apple, they love and need Apple to operate.

On the surface, you would ask yourself, how is that white people love a multi-billion dollar company with manufacturing plants in China, mass production, and that contributes to global pollution through the manufacture of consumer electronic devices?

Simple answer: Apple products tell the world you are creative and unique. They are an exclusive product line only used by every white college student, designer, writer, English teacher, and hipster on the planet.

You see, you don't actually need to be very geeky to operate Apple stuff. By locking it all up you can't f*ck with it:

When you ask white people about Mac’s they will say “oh, it’s so much better than Windows,” “it’s just easier to use,” “they are so cutting edge,” and so forth. What’s amazing is that white people NEED to meet people who use Windows to justify themselves spending an extra $500 for a pretty looking machine.

It is also important that white people are reminded of their creativity, and remember you need a Mac to creatively check email, creatively check websites, and creatively watch DVDs on planes.

An Apple device will by and large not embarrass you in public by requiring you to know how to dig into it and make it work. And for a mainstream adoption market this is essential for business success, and Apple does a brilliant job of selling to the (high margin) upper middle classes who want to feel that they are tres geeky.

But don't be fooled into thinking this is where today's real geeks are to be found, they will be wherever you can open stuff up and tinker with it....

As to the iPad taking off outside the fanboi/tech journo/road warrior market, we are yet to be convinced that its ergonomics work but its still very early days.

By the way, it has come to my notice that some Apple owners may be grumpy with me for the above, to which I must add that (i) Yes, I have an iPhone, and thus can creativley check my emails and (ii) White People Love to Be Offended

Update - Fake Steve Jobs does almost good a job as me on taking the p*ss on iPad Hype :

Indeed, even those of you are lining up and standing outside stores may be wondering, Why am I doing this? Why am I lining up like a zombie for an expensive piece of consumer electronics, a product for which there is no shortage and which, let’s face it, nobody really needs? Back in the early days of our design process, Jonny Ive came in to see me and we spent a long time trying to decide where on Mazlow’s triangle this product would sit. Because we knew if we couldn’t be way up above the very top of that pyramid, floating above it, totally outside the needs it describes, then this wouldn’t be a product we wanted to make. Some of our early iterations, in fact, had to be tossed out because when we looked at them we realized that parts of them were too, well, necessary. Don’t get me wrong. That’s fine for other companies. It’s just not what we do here at Apple.

....

The truth is, this is all about spiritual emptiness. That is why you’re standing in line. Except for Scoble, who is an attention whore and just doing it to get attention.

Price of iPad - $500. Value of the marvellous p*sstaking it is driving - Priceless

There is a lot of hype about the iPad right now, but today news has reached us that Google is in the process of building its own iPad killer.

Google is clearly set on a new strategic initiative. They have clearly worked out that, in the future markets being able to aggregate content and sell ads against it is not enough. As Apple has shown, to really make money you need to own the end device as well. That way, you get the benefit of an end to end - and most importantly, closed - supply chain.

This is clearly very hard to do in the existing PC/Internet ecosystem, as to go up against WinTel, HP, Sony, Apple etc would be very expensive, even by Google standards. But to penetrate new end device markets as they emerge is a different story, as Google can then become an early player and influence the market. So for Google, the key is to identify new device driven end-to-end markets

Take Smartphones, for example. Planet Mobile was caught with one finger in its navel and the other up its *rse with the arrival of smartphones, allowing first RIM, then Apple to enter and take it away. Google has now started to execute it's strategy in Smartphones with the Android system. Its a classic "fast follower" strategy, but with limited success to date. Maybe they got in too late, maybe Mobile is one step too far for a company with PC/Internet DNA - time will tell.

But the iPad market is a different game, its far more of a PC derivative with tones of e-Readership. Google has already been bludgeoning the book industry to get all its content online, so what better than a Google device that optimises the reading experience and curation of the Ad serving against it, page by page?

In fact, owning the end user device gives Google an exciting extra amount of your data to mine:

- Your location - a Google device can constantly tell Goggle where you are, and even better, where all your friends are - all it has to do is parse the social graphs on the apps on your Google tablet
- What you are doing when you are not using Google on the device
- All your stored documents - no need to put them in the Googlecloud anymore
- We understand the device will allow integrated e-Commerce, so Google wil also be able to see something it hitherto has not, ie your credit card and other spending activity

It will automatically serve targeted Ads against all content, and of course by owning teh OS Google ensures that users cannot use ad blockers etc. We understand that it will run under an expanded implementation of Android, and be mainly wizard driven (for the largely dumber mass market audience). The new OS is code named gWIZ (though Googlewags call it AlterVista)

Google is staying very quiet about the device right now, but all the signs are there that this is a serious play, and like Google Wave it is being developed by a large team somewhere out-US that is warm and near the beach. Cape Town and Rio de Janiero have been mentioned. The design of the device is said to be similar to the iPad, but also (to quote) "far more awesomer".

We also understand that the device is to be manufactured in Taiwan - rumours that the Chinese fracas was driven by their state-run firms losing the contract are apparently totally untrue.We are also told it now has its own project name code, OCULO (it sees everything) but may be called the gPad in the market.

We wonder if it will hit the gSpot?

Well, that was predictable - no sooner does Apple announce an iPad than a plethora of others break out of the long grass - Forbes:

Asus is about to roll out its own iPad rivals. In an interview with Forbes, Shih revealed that Asus is planning to release "at least two" tablet PCs in the coming months. The Computex trade show in June is a good bet for the debut. Asus has long used the Taipei conference to unveil significant new products, including its original Eee PC netbook in 2007.

I doubt they will be the only ones.

There are 2 main strategic questions for the iPad, firstly Economic:

(i) Does Apple's end to end proprietary supply chain game that has served it so well for iPod and iPhone work here - ie the iPad is closer to a Web device so can access far more open content and services, so clones get a lot more content from the get go.

(ii) Does it capture a market big enough to justify its existence at a mass market price - the Fanboi's will buy, but will this jump the chasm - plenty of "good enoughs" surround it - netbooks, e-Readers, smartphones.

Secondly, it may well be let down on comparative ergonomics, never mind economics. I was kicking this around yesterday with a friend from the BBC who asked some good questions:

- how do you actually use one? You can't type on it like a laptop, you can't hold it in one hand like a smartphone, and holding it all the time will be fatguing

- its not light like a smartphone, but hasn't got the ooomph of a laptop or even a netbook. The standard behaviour today is that the smartphone handles email, web and social media monitoring but you carry a small laptop for the heavy lifting, You can't drop the laptop (yet), nor the smartphone (its a phone too remember), so will Joe or Joanne Average you really lug an expensive 3rd piece of kit around?

Moore's Law solves all these things, but over time - which implies that devices coming in a year, 2 years later may be much better and make it hard for the first mover to gain advantage.

If it were anyone else but Apple I'd say the fast followers will win in a 3 year horizon, but this is the one consumer gadget company that can possibly carry it off.

Update - typical of the hype spiel is this post from Walt Mossberg. First, the standard "iPad is a laptop Killer" schtick from the fanboi glossies:

For the past week or so, I have been testing a sleek, light, silver-and-black tablet computer called an iPad. After spending hours and hours with it, I believe this beautiful new touch-screen device from Apple has the potential to change portable computing profoundly, and to challenge the primacy of the laptop. It could even help, eventually, to propel the finger-driven, multitouch user interface ahead of the mouse-driven interface that has prevailed for decades.

Fainting with damning praise Give him his due, though - he also sees some of the issues we do too:

But first, it will have to prove that it really can replace the laptop or netbook for enough common tasks, enough of the time, to make it a viable alternative. And that may not be easy, because previous tablet computers have failed to catch on in the mass market, and the iPad lacks some of the features—such as a physical keyboard, a Webcam, USB ports and multitasking—that most laptop or netbook users have come to expect.

If people see the iPad mainly as an extra device to carry around, it will likely have limited appeal. If, however, they see it as a way to replace heavier, bulkier computers much of the time—for Web surfing, email, social-networking, video- and photo-viewing, gaming, music and even some light content creation—it could be a game changer the way Apple’s iPhone has been.

As discussed above, I think this is a bigger "if" than Walt (and the rest of the Breathless Club) do in the short term.

Admob reports on where the growth in mobile traffic is coming from:

- Smartphones accounted for 48% of AdMob’s worldwide traffic, up from 35% in February 2009, fueled by heavy application usage on iPhone and Android devices.

- Although the share of feature phone traffic in AdMob’s network declined from 58% to 35%, the absolute traffic from feature phones still grew 31%. This means that while the overall traffic from feature phones is growing, traffic from smartphones and mobile Internet devices is growing faster.

- The mobile Internet device category experienced the strongest growth of the three, increasing to account for 17% of traffic in AdMob’s network in February 2010. Although the vast majority of traffic in this category comes from the iPod touch, the category also includes devices like the Sony PSP and Nintendo DSi.

The full report PDF file is over here.

Given that the world and its wife are now building Location based services for Smartphones (hype grows eternal in the human breast) or iPhone and Android apps, this is surely another argument for a bit of contrarian thinking?

Useful map of smartphone adoption by type and country (larger original is here). iPhone is triumphant, except for China which is mainly Nokia.

Today we read with some amusement that Google is stating that the desktop is dead (again):

Google believes that in three or so years desktops will give way to mobile as the primary screen from which most people will consume information and entertainment. That’s according to Google Europe boss John Herlihy who said that smart phones enhance Google’s mission to make information universal.

Speaking at the Digital Landscapes conference at UCD, Herlihy said that the cloud-computing opportunity will make sure that every mobile device will be capable of doing rapid-scale applications.

“In three years time, desktops will be irrelevant. In Japan, most research is done today on smart phones, not PCs,” Herlihy told a baffled audience, echoing comments by Google CEO Eric Schmidt at the recent GSM Association Mobile World Congress 2010 that everything the company will do going forward will be via a mobile lens, centring on the cloud, computing and connectivity.

This of course was predictable, as the above chart shows. The "Network is the PC" meme comes around regularly every 10 years. Its one of the best examples of a perpetually reccurring hype cycle that we know of. To recap:

The IBM Network PC wave

In 1988 or so and to regain its position (and play to its overall strengths) IBM brought out the Network PC, essentially a dumbed down device that would serve its client faithfully on these new fangled Client-Server Local Area Networks. It failed of course, as (i) The network wasn't reliable enough, (ii) the users liked the standalone capability and control and (iii) the kit wasn't good enough to replace the desktop at that point

The Sun "Network is the Computer" Wave

Cometh the Internet, and Sun has a problem - its tins are in the server farms but not on the desktops. Clearly, the world needs to move towards this new fangled Internet thingy, and put all its data in the (I forget, I think it was called The Cloud at that time too). It failed of course, as (i) The network wasn't reliable enough, (ii) the users liked the standalone capability and control and (iii) the kit wasn't good enough to replace the desktop at that point

The Google "It will be in the Cloud" Cycle

Cometh Big Broadband, and Google has a problem - too many customers are irresponsibly sticking to their desktops rather than sticking all their data into the big GoogleMine. Hence the call for The Cloud rings out clarion like across the Valley. It will fail of course, as......

Why Ten Years? Our hypothesis is that that is the time it takes the Corporate Memory to wane to a level where the Bright New Things can haul the Network PC punt out again without some grizzled and wise old hand reminding them of the phenomenal waste of time and money the last cycle had been. Its also interesting that Eric Schmidt's company (Sun, now Google) has been the major proponent of these last two cycles.

What's interesting about the Googleshot is that this is almost a double top, in that they've tried the "netbook data in the cloud" gambit - which hasn't crossed the chasm - and now its a smartphone gambit. A sign of desperation surely, as if the netbook didn't work its a lot less clear that todays' (even less capable) smartphones will - which is why we think its a sign that this cycle is already on the wane.

Here, as they say, endeth the lesson.

Update - well, not quite endeth - as my learned commentators have pointed out:

(i) There has always been a (shifting) balance between client side and server side, its juts that companies (and bloggers) always push the edges for their own ends

(ii) Each wave does result in a new layer of cloud service usage - networked data, web services etc.

But we suspect static services will be around for a long, long time as (i) people are largely static and (ii) they too improve over time. Th high power workstation with 2 large screens has attractions all of its own.