Thanks.

Thanks for Google Search.
Thanks for Google Maps.
Thanks for Gmail.
Thanks for YouTube.
Thanks for Google Calendar.
Thanks for Google Chrome.

I use these services every day and they are awesome.

I am almost 30 and remember when web-based email was a joke. I remember when we didn’t need thumbnails for our online videos because the online videos were thumbnails. I remember when the idea of using an online map seemed ridiculous. I remember when searching was, literally, an exercise in futility.

I am under no illusion that these services are free. I realise there’s a transaction going on.

Some people seem to think that if your business model revolves around advertising then you’ll never have my best interests first and foremost. I tend to think every business cares about itself first and foremost. What I’d like is honesty. I think this becomes more difficult as the relationship involves more people. But it is not impossible.

I’ll certainly admit I’m disappointed in you from time to time. More so recently than before. Most of the time it’s because I think you’re worrying about the wrong things. Please don’t worry about Facebook. Or Apple. Or Amazon. Or whoever is really successful next week.

Worry about solving problems. You’re pretty good at that.

I imagine that I use my iPhone home screen differently to most people. Here’s a screenshot:

As is quickly evident, I keep the home screen basically filled with Apple’s default apps. The third party apps I use the most are actually on screen two:

Why this setup? There are two reasons.

The first is that I have a thing for things being in ‘factory condition’. I don’t take it to the extreme of leaving my living room furniture in plastic wrap, but I get close. When I was a child, I would not play very much with my toys in the traditional manner, preferring instead to construct diaromas where the toys were put into their ’natural state’ and left to be admired.

The second, and more practical, reason is that having my second screen be my ’real home screen’ means I have 27 ’icon slots’ of iPhone real estate within a single swipe (31 if you count the four slots in the iPhone’s dock). This is because if I go left to the first home screen, I have nine slots and if I go right to the third home screen, I have nine slots. These together with the nine on the second screen equal 27. This compare with just 18 if you do things the traditional way.

I imagine for many people this might seem silly. Why not just use folders if you’re so worried about the number of icons you can fit on a single screen? Well, the problem is that I much prefer the look of an icon rather than a collection of folders. I am often aghast when I pick up someone’s iPhone only to find row after row of folders.¹

I’ve yet to meet anyone that uses their home screens like this but figure there probably are some other second screen weirdos out there.² But what about you? How do you use your smart phone home screen?

First, the screen. My thoughts on the screen differ from most of what’s likely out there and I feel it’s necessary to put them into the appropriate context.

The first iOS device I ever owned was an iPhone 4. While I had seen, and briefly used, iPhones and iPod Touches prior to this, the 4 was my first real experience using iOS. Furthermore, I bought it in October of 2010, by which time every app that I could find had been updated to use Retina display graphics.

As such, the Retina display that Apple first shipped on the iPhone 4 is my baseline and it’s what I’ve measured all screens against since. Other screens have not fared well, and this includes the iPad 2.

This is not to say that I haven’t enjoyed using the iPad 2. I certainly have. I used it on average once a day for at least 30 minutes or so (and often far longer). It has travelled with me to other countries, been a tool I use at work and entertained me with video, text and more.

But the screen has always been a disappointment. Nowhere is this more apparent for me than with the loupe tool that’s used when you want precise placement of the cursor in a text field. Sometimes it feels as if this tool was created especially to demonstrate just how low the resolution is.

The new iPad fixes this problem. The screen is brilliant (in the literal sense of the word). However, I will admit that I wasn’t blown away by it as others sound like they were. For me, the screen is not so much a revolution as the fulfilment of the iPad’s promise. It is what I have always wanted the iPad’s screen to be. I am happy that it has reached that point but I would not call it a life-changing event.

The second thought is about Internet connectivity. While I purchased the ’4G’ model, I’m not referring to the download speeds or the antenna or whether the lower left corner gets hot through use. What I’m talking about is the ability to get on the Internet.

Much has been made of the differences between post-PC devices and traditional PCs (both laptops and desktops). Post-PC devices emphasise touch over other forms of user interaction, they generally enforce a simpler conceptual model of an application, they abstract away the file system.

But I think there is another important difference between post-PC devices and traditional computers that I didn’t fully appreciate until using the new iPad: post-PC devices need to be on the Internet.

Again, some context. I purchased the 16 GB Wi-Fi only model of the iPad 2 thinking that, while I obviously wouldn’t be able to use the Internet everywhere I went, I’d at least be able to use it in places that had public Wi-Fi. Before I had this thought, I should have considered more carefully where I live. Japan, for all its reputation as a technological wonderland, has not jumped on the free public Wi-Fi train with gay abandon. Or, indeed, any abandon. I have seen free public Wi-Fi spots in select places but it’s really been in very, very select places.

Private Wi-Fi networks, however, are everywhere. Mostly these are deployed by the mobile phone carriers. I’m not sure exactly why this is although I assume it’s to offload some of the capacity from the cellular networks. Whatever the reason, it means that, while there’s plenty of Wi-Fi around, if you don’t have an account with one of the carriers, it may as well not exist.

There is perhaps no more frustrating (#firstworld) problem than trying desperately to maintain a connection to the free public Wi-Fi network in Kansai International Airport before you get on your plane so you can download a book from Amazon to read on the flight. Well, no there is. It’s trying to desperately to maintain that connection while your phone happily jumps on SoftBank’s Wi-Fi network at McDonald’s. And Starbucks. And the airport’s train station. And numerous other locations.¹

When the time came to purchase the new iPad, I knew that this time I didn’t want to have that experience again. So I purchased the iPad through SoftBank and, in return for a small monthly fee, I now have access to their very extensive network of wireless hot spots. And it is glorious. It is easily my favourite part of the new device (even ahead of the screen). Again, having Internet connectivity is not so much a revolution as it is a step closer towards the perfect iPad. It feels silly to talk about iterations of the iPad as a progression towards some Platonic ideal but, well, I just spent $680 on the new iPad when I already own the previous model so let’s not get into semantics about what is and isn’t absurd.

Which brings me to the third thing. The New Yorker app on the iPad sucks ass. To be sure, 1) it has always sucked ass; and 2) this is not Apple’s fault. But these are my impressions and this left something of an impression on me.

For reasons that one presumes can only make sense to people that never actually use the app, the New Yorker on the iPad does not display content by getting the iPad to do the relatively straightforward task of rendering text on the screen (that’s exactly what they’d expect us to do!).² No, instead the kooks at Condé Nast have decided that they’ll serve the New Yorker to you as a gigantic series of compressed images. This bloats each issue out to 110 MB, an absurd amount for a publication that is mostly just words on a screen.

The decision to do this is bone-headed for any number of reasons (you can’t adjust the text size, you can’t select text) but the stupidity really comes into its own on the glossy 9.7″ Retina display. Unfortunately (for paying customers), the Retina display and its crazy high resolution doesn’t do the New Yorker’s flat images any favours. They’re blown up to fill the screen and, although the pixels on the Retina display are too small to create the pixelated effect you sometimes see on PCs, it nevertheless results in an image that, well, sucks ass.

I want to make clear that I love the New Yorker. It is literally my favourite publication and I think one of the three or four most important English-language periodicals in the world today. But fucking BusinessWeek has an app that doesn’t have this problem. BusinessWeek. The (rich) poor man’s Economist.

Please, for the love of God, I know you aren’t part of management, but Jason Schwartzman, you star in that delightful video telling us all how to use the New Yorker on our iPad. Please use your magic powers to solve this problem once and for all.³ I am begging you.

(via One Thing Well.)

Growing up as a gadget nerd in the 1990s, there was no brand as exciting as Sony. Yes, Apple made great computers, and that’s what we used. But almost everything else, I wanted from Sony.

I wasn’t even an Apple nerd in the 90s, so for me it was all Sony, all the way. The mighty have indeed fallen.

Jim Dalrymple is also not a smart phone analyst. He is also not a technology analyst. He is a professional blogger, focusing on Apple. I think he does a good job when he writes about Apple but he shows his ignorance in this post about what RIM did wrong.

Dalrymple suggests that RIM’s problem was that they didn’t ‘innovate’. This is wrong. RIM’s problem was that their product was dependent on a network for its value and they didn’t control the network. I had a BlackBerry and it was great. It was particularly great at email. You know who really cares about email? Business people. Business people live and breathe email. The BlackBerry cleaned up in that market.

You know who else really loves email? Everybody. The problem for RIM is that while business people could get BlackBerries, safe in the knowledge that the office was going to cover that data charge, consumers couldn’t. Consumers were left to fret over how much it would cost (surely too much) and what the pay off would be in additional convenience (surely not enough).

RIM tried to create consumer phones but they couldn’t get the interest of a public that had been taught to fear data charges. The original iPhone didn’t have this problem because: a) Apple negotiated a sweet deal for customers with AT&T; and b) even if you had just used your iPhone like your Nokia 6100, it at least got rid of needing to carry around an iPod and a phone.

So RIM’s problem wasn’t innovation. RIM’s problem was that it didn’t control the part of its business where the value came from.

As it is, we now live in a world where this is the reality. RIM has to beat not only that but Samsung, Motorola, HTC, Google and Microsoft. They have no hope.

Calderón said he agreed to a search after being told the police could return with a warrant, though the search turned up nothing. Apparently members of Apple’s security team also went through Calderón’s computer to look for evidence that the device had been plugged in. Those same Apple investigators—one of which was later identified as retired San Jose Police sergeant Anthony Colon—offered money for the device and even made veiled threats about contacting the Immigration & Naturalization Service (INS) when the search turned up nothing. “One of the officers is like, ‘Is everyone in this house an American citizen?’ They said we were all going to get into trouble,’” Calderón said.

This is an atrocious story if true.

It sounds as if Apple security and the San Francisco Police Department may have acted within the letter of the law but certainly not the spirit. Police officers should not accompany private investigators searching someone’s house unless they make clear that the persons conducting the search are not police officers.

In order to answer these questions it seems to me we need to first understand why people want these devices in the first place. It’s when we understand the tasks that someone is trying to achieve that we’re able to understand which device (or devices) is likely to fit the bill.

Let’s consider the original iPod. What do (or did) people want to do with a portable music device? It’s tempting to reply just ‘Listen to music.’ But listening to music is a deceptively simple response that masks the fact a number of different tasks need to be accomplished. I’d argue there are actually three different task people want to do when they say ‘Listen to music’:

1. manage music (both on the central repository and on the portable device);
2. transfer music between the central repository and the portable device; and
3. play music (both on the central repository and the portable device).

It’s not uncommon to refer to Apple’s products in an almost derogatory way as ‘fashionable’. But Apple’s products are first and foremost ‘usable’.¹ What made the iPod so universally popular is that (together with iTunes) it was the first, and for most of its run about the only, portable music player that did all three of the aforementioned tasks well.²

Turn now to the iPhone. What do people want to do with a smartphone? I’d argue they want to do at least seven things:

1. make and receive phone calls;
2. send and receive text messages;
3. access email;
4. use mapping software;
5. access the web;
6. play media (including photos); and
7. run apps.

When laid out like this isn’t not hard to see why Android is able to be successful in the phone space. Android is arguably as good as the iPhone (if not better in some cases)³ at the first five of those tasks. The fact that it’s not very good for media playback⁴ or running apps⁵ is not a problem for a number of Android users because it does basically what they want.⁶

So let’s turn to the iPad. What do people want to do with a tablet? I think there are four tasks:

1. access email;
2. access the web;
3. play media; and
4. run apps.

The problem is that Android tablets are good at only two of these four tasks. But the problem is worse than it may at first appear. On a phone, the importance which people attach to the tasks they’re trying to accomplish is far more pronounced. Being able to make and receive calls is not a little bit more important than being able to run apps; it is critical. On a tablet, the ability to access email is important, but it’s not that much more important than being able to play media or run apps.⁷

This is why Android can be successful as a phone but not as a tablet. It’s also why, for a serious tablet competitor to emerge, companies have to start making tablets that either do all of these tasks at least as well as the iPad or do one of these tasks so much better that it redefines the importance which people attach to that task.

Surveying the tablet landscape, it doesn’t appear as if anything that’s out there really meets that criteria. It’s also why a tablet from Amazon is the biggest threat to the iPad. Of all the companies making (or, in Amazon’s case, suspected of making) tablets, Amazon seems the one most likely to be able to produce a tablet that can play media and run apps as well as the iPad.