Google develops the Android operating system and gives it away for free as an open source project. Manufacturers have to meet certain standards in order to get the official Google apps like GMail and the Google Play store (formerly Android Marketplace), but those standards don't involve fees.
Google makes money via taking a cut of paid apps and running an advertising platform that developers can use. According to documents that have come out thanks to Oracle's lawsuit against Google, from 2009-11 Android made $543 million for the company that develops it. The Guardian estimates based on the rough numbers of activations Google has released that it comes out to a little over $10 per device. By comparison, Microsoft makes at least $5 per device on 70% over Androids out there thanks to patent royalties.
So is Android a business failure? It's still difficult to say even when you compare that $543 million over three years to the $38 billion of revenue the company brought in during 2011 alone (and consider that it's probably not the full amount of direct revenue anyway).
Google is not like most companies. It doesn't make most of its money by producing products and services and then selling them for more than they cost to make. It is perfectly content to pour money into products that it doesn't charge for so long as it can collect information about users and their habits and sometimes serve ads on them. It then uses that information to tune its advertising algorithms, the real core of the company. Serving up the most relevant ads possible to its users increases the likelihood of people clicking on them, which then maximizes revenue on the ads.
Android is a both an offensive and defensive play for the company. It's offensive in that Google can get information about users to use in its ad algorithms on top of the app and ad income. It's also a defensive play because Google wants to make sure there's a major mobile OS out there that won't shut out its services.
Google bought Android in 2005, well before the iPhone in a time when Windows Mobile was rapidly growing in the smartphone space. Google probably could envision a future where Windows Mobile dominated smartphones like regular Windows did on PCs, and the default search setting on there would be Microsoft's competing search engine. With mobile the future of computing, such a future would hurt Google's growth prospects drastically.
Windows Mobile obviously tanked and Windows Phone 7 is out there to replace it, but Apple is the big rival on mobile now. Apple does use Google Maps in iOS, but that may not last for too much longer. It also uses Google as the default search engine in Mobile Safari, but there's no guarantee that will last. It was even rumored heavily a couple years ago that Bing would replace Google as the search default.
I really wonder how long a play Android is for Google. I really think the company has already shown us what it wants the future of computing to be with Chrome OS: everything is on the web where Google can track users and serve up ads. If everything does become a web page or app, it doesn't matter which hardware or OS you use because Google could still track and serve ads to everyone. That vision can't come to fruition yet because web technologies can't match the functionality or speed of native code yet, so the company must develop Android in the meantime.
In any event, Android may have indirectly provided the company more revenue than was reported in the court documents thanks to information from tracked Android users helping to hone the ad algorithms. It might also have kept the company from losing revenue. RIM's Blackberry would probably be No. 2 behind iOS absent Android and, for instance, the Blackberry Bold I have for work has Bing as the default search provider.
Google is probably content not to include such considerations when it comes to how much it might have to pay to Oracle in royalties for Java patents, but it does go into the consideration for the value proposition of Android to the company. Because Android provides some sense of security for the company's core business in the fast-changing and uncertain mobile computing market, its value to Google cannot be distilled down to a single number.
Thursday, March 29, 2012
Tuesday, March 27, 2012
A Sign of the Times
I was reading an article on PCMag.com this morning about a comparison of iPad and Android tablets. I noticed something interesting at the bottom of the page:
Let's see, we've got a MacBook Air, the Office for Mac icons, iPhone app recommendations, and the Editor's Choice iPad. I notice a pattern here.
Perhaps these were simply the recommendations because it was an article partially about the iPad, so I went to some others. No matter which articles I went to, from Windows Phone to Google Play to MegaUpload, these were the same article recommendations.
You'll also notice that, at the very top of the page, among standard, black-colored links like "REVIEWS" and "DOWNLOADS" is an attention-grabbing red link that says "APPLE IPAD". Time have really changed for PC Magazine, huh?
Let's see, we've got a MacBook Air, the Office for Mac icons, iPhone app recommendations, and the Editor's Choice iPad. I notice a pattern here.
Perhaps these were simply the recommendations because it was an article partially about the iPad, so I went to some others. No matter which articles I went to, from Windows Phone to Google Play to MegaUpload, these were the same article recommendations.
You'll also notice that, at the very top of the page, among standard, black-colored links like "REVIEWS" and "DOWNLOADS" is an attention-grabbing red link that says "APPLE IPAD". Time have really changed for PC Magazine, huh?
Thursday, March 22, 2012
Two Reasons a 4.6-Inch iPhone is Unlikely
Reuters has picked up a story about how there supposedly will be a 4.6-inch iPhone coming out this year. It attributes the rumor to a South Korean publication called the Maeli Business Newspaper, which itself heard this from an "unnamed industry source". Nothing like third-hand information to get everyone going on a Thursday.
The kernel of truth to this that makes it worth considering is that the South Korea-based Samsung is the supplier for the third-gen iPad Retina displays. It's a major supplier of components to Apple, so there are, in fact, some people in South Korea who are familiar with Apple's future roadmap.
There are two big reasons why I am very skeptical of this rumor. One is complicated, while the other is simple.
Let's start with the complicated one. The iPhone screen has always used a 3:2 aspect ratio, first at 480x320 and then at 960x640. The reason why Apple used the same ratio when going to a Retina display is that it wouldn't require developers to re-code their apps. Everything would just scale up 2X, and that would do nicely until developers double the size of all of their raster image resources.
Using a different aspect ratio for the screen would have added a lot of headaches for developers as the layout would have to be tweaked. That is part of the fragmentation problem with Android; it's not just about a wide range of OS versions in the wild but also different screen sizes. The screen dimensions matter greatly when all apps are full-screen apps. Apple took the same tack with the third-gen iPad's Retina display, as it is double the resolution of the first two iPads' displays.
When Apple introduced the "Retina display" term for the iPhone 4, it claimed that for the distance that phones are typically held from the eye, the screen must have 300ppi to qualify for the "Retina" title. A 4.6-inch screen at 960x640 computes to about 251ppi. In order for this mythical, monstrous iPhone to keep the Retina designation and maintain the same aspect ratio as previous models, the resolution would have to be doubled again to 1920x1280. That comes out to a ridiculous 502ppi, clearing the "retina" bar with ease.
While the A5X is certainly capable of driving that many pixels, as the third-gen iPad has more than that, I don't know if it could do it in a phone form factor without draining the battery too quickly. Let's imagine that it could though, granting that the larger frame of the phone would give more room for a sufficiently large battery.
App developers would have to put three different sizes of their images in their packages, one for the iPhone 3GS's 480x320 screen, one for the iPhone 4/4S's 960x640 resolution, and yet another for the new 1920x1280 screen. Not only would that be a pain for developers, but each app would take up a lot more room (especially photo-heavy apps). The 3GS and 4 models still on sale only have 8 GB of flash memory on them, and the 4S starts at 16 GB. Storage space is a significant constraint, and forcing apps to have three different sizes of images would be untenable.
So that's the complicated reason. The simple one is that a 4.6-inch phone is simply too big for most people.
The iPhone's 3.5-inch screen wasn't chosen at random. It's roughly the biggest screen you can have where everything can be operated by a single, normal-sized adult hand. It's unlikely that anything will be out of your thumb's reach while holding an iPhone. On 4-inch and larger phones, it becomes difficult to impossible to operate one-handed, in particular being able to access both toolbars at the bottom of apps and the notification drawer at the top of the screen. That is the kind of detail that Apple considers when building these things.
I'll never say never about a larger iPhone in the future, but jumping to a 4.6-inch display this year isn't likely. At the very least, such a jump would probably require that most of the non-Retina display and 8GB iPhone models be cycled out of use, and that won't happen for at least two years following 2012's new iPhone announcement.
For what it's worth, the largest a 960x640 screen can go while still being above 300dpi is 3.8 inches. That might still be small enough to operate in one hand, but it would feel like change for change's sake. Change for change's sake is not the sort of business Apple is in.
The kernel of truth to this that makes it worth considering is that the South Korea-based Samsung is the supplier for the third-gen iPad Retina displays. It's a major supplier of components to Apple, so there are, in fact, some people in South Korea who are familiar with Apple's future roadmap.
There are two big reasons why I am very skeptical of this rumor. One is complicated, while the other is simple.
Let's start with the complicated one. The iPhone screen has always used a 3:2 aspect ratio, first at 480x320 and then at 960x640. The reason why Apple used the same ratio when going to a Retina display is that it wouldn't require developers to re-code their apps. Everything would just scale up 2X, and that would do nicely until developers double the size of all of their raster image resources.
Using a different aspect ratio for the screen would have added a lot of headaches for developers as the layout would have to be tweaked. That is part of the fragmentation problem with Android; it's not just about a wide range of OS versions in the wild but also different screen sizes. The screen dimensions matter greatly when all apps are full-screen apps. Apple took the same tack with the third-gen iPad's Retina display, as it is double the resolution of the first two iPads' displays.
When Apple introduced the "Retina display" term for the iPhone 4, it claimed that for the distance that phones are typically held from the eye, the screen must have 300ppi to qualify for the "Retina" title. A 4.6-inch screen at 960x640 computes to about 251ppi. In order for this mythical, monstrous iPhone to keep the Retina designation and maintain the same aspect ratio as previous models, the resolution would have to be doubled again to 1920x1280. That comes out to a ridiculous 502ppi, clearing the "retina" bar with ease.
While the A5X is certainly capable of driving that many pixels, as the third-gen iPad has more than that, I don't know if it could do it in a phone form factor without draining the battery too quickly. Let's imagine that it could though, granting that the larger frame of the phone would give more room for a sufficiently large battery.
App developers would have to put three different sizes of their images in their packages, one for the iPhone 3GS's 480x320 screen, one for the iPhone 4/4S's 960x640 resolution, and yet another for the new 1920x1280 screen. Not only would that be a pain for developers, but each app would take up a lot more room (especially photo-heavy apps). The 3GS and 4 models still on sale only have 8 GB of flash memory on them, and the 4S starts at 16 GB. Storage space is a significant constraint, and forcing apps to have three different sizes of images would be untenable.
So that's the complicated reason. The simple one is that a 4.6-inch phone is simply too big for most people.
The iPhone's 3.5-inch screen wasn't chosen at random. It's roughly the biggest screen you can have where everything can be operated by a single, normal-sized adult hand. It's unlikely that anything will be out of your thumb's reach while holding an iPhone. On 4-inch and larger phones, it becomes difficult to impossible to operate one-handed, in particular being able to access both toolbars at the bottom of apps and the notification drawer at the top of the screen. That is the kind of detail that Apple considers when building these things.
I'll never say never about a larger iPhone in the future, but jumping to a 4.6-inch display this year isn't likely. At the very least, such a jump would probably require that most of the non-Retina display and 8GB iPhone models be cycled out of use, and that won't happen for at least two years following 2012's new iPhone announcement.
For what it's worth, the largest a 960x640 screen can go while still being above 300dpi is 3.8 inches. That might still be small enough to operate in one hand, but it would feel like change for change's sake. Change for change's sake is not the sort of business Apple is in.
Monday, March 19, 2012
Apple's Dividend and Its Future Opportunities
It's becoming clearer and clearer over time that for an outlet to have proper coverage of Apple as a company, it must assign someone to focus almost if not entirely exclusively on the firm. Apple has become an edge case where normal analytical rules either don't apply or require detailed knowledge to be applied properly.
For instance, consider this article about Apple's newly-announced dividend and stock buy-back program that was the biggest headline on Yahoo! Finance today. The main analysis comes from a "senior stock analyst" from Morningstar named Michael Holt. He's merely quoted as noting that Apple's cash (and cash equivalents) hoard had gotten to the "definitely excessive" figure of $100 billion and that the company needed to do something about that. A question I would ask is this: if $100 billion is excessive, what is $122 billion?
Apple added $38 billion in cash during calendar year 2011, including $16 billion in 2011's holiday quarter alone. The dividend and stock buy-back program will cost the company roughly $13.21 billion per year. If Apple's cash growth continues at 2011's pace, and it'll likely speed up as the company's sales continue to grow, Apple will finish 2012 with about $122 billion in cash. It had about $97.6 billion at the end of 2011, and adding another $38 billion minus the dividend and buy-back costs gets you to around $122 billion. Holt acts as though this new program solves the "problem" of having too much cash. Instead, it only slows the rate of cash growth. Apple's so-called war chest will just keep growing.
Or, consider this howler also from Yahoo! Finance. It's by a staff writer named Matt Nesto, and he promises five suggestings for how Apple could have better used its cash (though he only actually gives four). Never mind the merits of those ideas, which are opinions and are fine for him to have. He expresses anger at Apple for agreeing to part with 20% of its cash pile in an entirely conventional manner. He makes the same problem of ignoring the rate of cash growth. Apple isn't going to be giving up 20% of its cash; it's going to be parting with roughly one third of its annual cash growth based on 2011's figure. That percentage will fall with each subsequent year of course as sales continue to rise.
Apple already spends a lot of money each year. Its quarterly report divulges that its fiscal 2012 1Q (ended December 31, 2011) included a 32% year-over-year increase in R&D spending to $758 million for that quarter alone, and its spending on Selling, General & Administrative Expense rose $709 million year-over-year to $2.6 billion in the quarter largely due to opening new retail stores. It spent another $1.4 billion on property, plant and equipment. Among that spending is the solar farm for its recently completed North Carolina data center, which will soon be joined by another data center in Oregon and its upcoming new "spaceship" campus. It's also well known that the company pays big money up front for supplies of integral components like flash memory and high-quality displays.
Apple is already using its cash effectively, and it will keep accumulating more as long as its products keep selling at heavy profit margins. So what could possibly be next?
That question is one that Wired's Jon Phillips asks in his third generation iPad review. He wants to know what precisely Apple can do to improve on the iPad concept now that it has put a Retina display in it. I think this is a very poor approach. The iPad will not change much cosmetically because there's only so many ways you can do "just a big ol' touchscreen", but that doesn't matter too much. The iMac exterior hasn't changed except in materials since the iMac G5 introduction in 2004. The MacBook Pro has barely changed since the switch to unibody construction in 2008, and the MacBook Air is roughly the same as it was externally when introduced the very same year. The lack of external changes with both the iPhone 3GS and 4S versus the 3G and 4 did nothing to slow that product's growth.
We'll see if the long-rumored Apple television set comes out, but an area of differentiation with massive potential is one that the average stock analyst knows nothing about. It's one that Apple has been working on since the release of Snow Leopard: parallel computing.
Grand Central Dispatch is Apple's foray into helping developers make their applications better for multi-core environments. It doesn't solve the hard problems for you, but once you have solved the hard problems, it makes it easy to implement the solutions. If Apple can get all of its third party developers using GCD, and continue developing it to make it more and more friendly to those developers, then it will be a huge advantage for the OS X and iOS platforms. It's no big deal that the third-gen iPad doesn't have a quad-core CPU because most applications aren't multithreaded. However, it's been obvious for years that the future is more about a proliferation of cores than gigahertz increases. Having a truly developer-friendly and widely-used multithreading solution for best using that ever expanding number of cores would be a tremendous competitive advantage.
Beyond that, it's not hard to see where other growth areas are. Apple is only scratching the surface of what it can do with iCloud, which is understandable given that it only went live six months ago. Apple is modernizing under-the-hood aspects of Objective-C, but it's nowhere near finished there. At some point HFS+ will need to be replaced, and its successor could enable better and more efficient methods for backup and file versioning (to say nothing about data security). All of that has to do with software, and it's far more important than the cosmetic aspects of what has to be affixed behind a touchscreen to make a functioning device.
For as much room to grow in market share as Apple has, and Tim Cook likes to point out that it's quite a lot every time he gets a chance, it has plenty of room to grow technologically as well. We're nowhere near an end-of-history moment when it comes to personal computing, and everyone, not just Apple, has tremendous opportunities for improvement. The only way to come to the conclusion that Apple is out of ideas or is somehow done with big innovations is to know almost nothing about where the company is at.
This dividend and stock buy-back program is not a sign that the company is transitioning out of a high growth phase. It means that the company is executing at such a high level that it can part with an extra $13 billion a year and still stockpile over $20 billion a year in cash. As long as Apple's senior management doesn't rest on the laurels of its current product line, and it doesn't appear to be in the post-Jobs era, then there's no reason to think that returning some of its cash to shareholders has any deeper meaning than its mere face value.
For instance, consider this article about Apple's newly-announced dividend and stock buy-back program that was the biggest headline on Yahoo! Finance today. The main analysis comes from a "senior stock analyst" from Morningstar named Michael Holt. He's merely quoted as noting that Apple's cash (and cash equivalents) hoard had gotten to the "definitely excessive" figure of $100 billion and that the company needed to do something about that. A question I would ask is this: if $100 billion is excessive, what is $122 billion?
Apple added $38 billion in cash during calendar year 2011, including $16 billion in 2011's holiday quarter alone. The dividend and stock buy-back program will cost the company roughly $13.21 billion per year. If Apple's cash growth continues at 2011's pace, and it'll likely speed up as the company's sales continue to grow, Apple will finish 2012 with about $122 billion in cash. It had about $97.6 billion at the end of 2011, and adding another $38 billion minus the dividend and buy-back costs gets you to around $122 billion. Holt acts as though this new program solves the "problem" of having too much cash. Instead, it only slows the rate of cash growth. Apple's so-called war chest will just keep growing.
Or, consider this howler also from Yahoo! Finance. It's by a staff writer named Matt Nesto, and he promises five suggestings for how Apple could have better used its cash (though he only actually gives four). Never mind the merits of those ideas, which are opinions and are fine for him to have. He expresses anger at Apple for agreeing to part with 20% of its cash pile in an entirely conventional manner. He makes the same problem of ignoring the rate of cash growth. Apple isn't going to be giving up 20% of its cash; it's going to be parting with roughly one third of its annual cash growth based on 2011's figure. That percentage will fall with each subsequent year of course as sales continue to rise.
Apple already spends a lot of money each year. Its quarterly report divulges that its fiscal 2012 1Q (ended December 31, 2011) included a 32% year-over-year increase in R&D spending to $758 million for that quarter alone, and its spending on Selling, General & Administrative Expense rose $709 million year-over-year to $2.6 billion in the quarter largely due to opening new retail stores. It spent another $1.4 billion on property, plant and equipment. Among that spending is the solar farm for its recently completed North Carolina data center, which will soon be joined by another data center in Oregon and its upcoming new "spaceship" campus. It's also well known that the company pays big money up front for supplies of integral components like flash memory and high-quality displays.
Apple is already using its cash effectively, and it will keep accumulating more as long as its products keep selling at heavy profit margins. So what could possibly be next?
That question is one that Wired's Jon Phillips asks in his third generation iPad review. He wants to know what precisely Apple can do to improve on the iPad concept now that it has put a Retina display in it. I think this is a very poor approach. The iPad will not change much cosmetically because there's only so many ways you can do "just a big ol' touchscreen", but that doesn't matter too much. The iMac exterior hasn't changed except in materials since the iMac G5 introduction in 2004. The MacBook Pro has barely changed since the switch to unibody construction in 2008, and the MacBook Air is roughly the same as it was externally when introduced the very same year. The lack of external changes with both the iPhone 3GS and 4S versus the 3G and 4 did nothing to slow that product's growth.
We'll see if the long-rumored Apple television set comes out, but an area of differentiation with massive potential is one that the average stock analyst knows nothing about. It's one that Apple has been working on since the release of Snow Leopard: parallel computing.
Grand Central Dispatch is Apple's foray into helping developers make their applications better for multi-core environments. It doesn't solve the hard problems for you, but once you have solved the hard problems, it makes it easy to implement the solutions. If Apple can get all of its third party developers using GCD, and continue developing it to make it more and more friendly to those developers, then it will be a huge advantage for the OS X and iOS platforms. It's no big deal that the third-gen iPad doesn't have a quad-core CPU because most applications aren't multithreaded. However, it's been obvious for years that the future is more about a proliferation of cores than gigahertz increases. Having a truly developer-friendly and widely-used multithreading solution for best using that ever expanding number of cores would be a tremendous competitive advantage.
Beyond that, it's not hard to see where other growth areas are. Apple is only scratching the surface of what it can do with iCloud, which is understandable given that it only went live six months ago. Apple is modernizing under-the-hood aspects of Objective-C, but it's nowhere near finished there. At some point HFS+ will need to be replaced, and its successor could enable better and more efficient methods for backup and file versioning (to say nothing about data security). All of that has to do with software, and it's far more important than the cosmetic aspects of what has to be affixed behind a touchscreen to make a functioning device.
For as much room to grow in market share as Apple has, and Tim Cook likes to point out that it's quite a lot every time he gets a chance, it has plenty of room to grow technologically as well. We're nowhere near an end-of-history moment when it comes to personal computing, and everyone, not just Apple, has tremendous opportunities for improvement. The only way to come to the conclusion that Apple is out of ideas or is somehow done with big innovations is to know almost nothing about where the company is at.
This dividend and stock buy-back program is not a sign that the company is transitioning out of a high growth phase. It means that the company is executing at such a high level that it can part with an extra $13 billion a year and still stockpile over $20 billion a year in cash. As long as Apple's senior management doesn't rest on the laurels of its current product line, and it doesn't appear to be in the post-Jobs era, then there's no reason to think that returning some of its cash to shareholders has any deeper meaning than its mere face value.
Thursday, March 8, 2012
The new iPad vs. Android Tablets
There was a time not too long ago when I could give decent reasons as to why someone might want to get an Android tablet over an iPad 2. Many Android tablets have high definition screens, HD cameras, voice recognition software, and 4G cellular networking. I suppose all of that is still valid in a comparison with the iPad 2.
But the new iPad? It has all of those things and more. I can only think of two reasons why someone might buy an Android tablet over the third gen iPad: if having a widescreen display is absolutely, positively, unequivocally your top priority and nothing else is close, and if you have some kind of problem with Apple stylistically, philosophically, or what have you.
The gap in the software ecosystems is gigantic. I've heard good things about Ice Cream Sandwich, but it is nigh impossible to find in the wild. With as scattershot as Android updates are, there's no way of knowing when devices will get the upgrade to it as well. Honeycomb just isn't that good, and the third party software support for Android tablets is worse. Go into the Android Market (Google Play Store?) and hit the category of staff picks for tablets. It's impossible to determine which apps are actually tablet apps and which are just phone apps that happen to scale nicely. Dont worry about it though; any given app is more than likely to be a phone app.
The new iPhoto only increases the gap between the platforms. It's a tough case to be made that a single app is a big point of differentiation, but bear with me on this one. You can get a browser, email, and Angry Birds on anything these days. The iWork apps are nice to have, but I don't think an office suite is a make or break thing on tablets just yet. iMovie and Garage Band are impressive, but I don't know how many people do heavy video editing, and even fewer do much with audio recordings.
But photos? Everyone does photos. The new iPhoto is incredible, and people's iPhone pictures will be coming into it automatically via Photo Steam. If, as rumored, Microsoft Office ends up on iOS, then you might as well turn out the lights in the Android tablet development department.
Look, I think it's very generous for Verizon to have loaned me this Droid Xyboard 8.2 as a part of its ambassadors program. That it came with unlimited 4G and tethering only makes it more so. I like the hardware (except the button placement) and the network is incredibly fast. I want to like this thing. I even wrote this post using Google's Blogger app on it with only a little cleanup done later on my laptop.
The problem is that Android and its ecosystem let the hardware and network down. The process of writing this illustrated the problem perfectly. Blogger is one of Google's A+ properties, but the app for it is a phone app that only has extremely basic post composition and editing features. You can't use it to look at stats, manage comments, or adjust the blog layout. If the developer for Android itself is going to have a shabby app for one of its top services, then what does that say about the platform as a whole?
I cannot in good conscience recommend this device to anyone now. I was on the fence about it before this iPad announcement, but when this tablet is only $30 less than the new iPad off contract, forget it. I can recommend Verizon's 4G network for the new iPad if you go with a model with cellular connectivity, though. That is one part of the Droid Xyboard experience that has been anything but a disappointment.
![”Verizon]()
But the new iPad? It has all of those things and more. I can only think of two reasons why someone might buy an Android tablet over the third gen iPad: if having a widescreen display is absolutely, positively, unequivocally your top priority and nothing else is close, and if you have some kind of problem with Apple stylistically, philosophically, or what have you.
The gap in the software ecosystems is gigantic. I've heard good things about Ice Cream Sandwich, but it is nigh impossible to find in the wild. With as scattershot as Android updates are, there's no way of knowing when devices will get the upgrade to it as well. Honeycomb just isn't that good, and the third party software support for Android tablets is worse. Go into the Android Market (Google Play Store?) and hit the category of staff picks for tablets. It's impossible to determine which apps are actually tablet apps and which are just phone apps that happen to scale nicely. Dont worry about it though; any given app is more than likely to be a phone app.
The new iPhoto only increases the gap between the platforms. It's a tough case to be made that a single app is a big point of differentiation, but bear with me on this one. You can get a browser, email, and Angry Birds on anything these days. The iWork apps are nice to have, but I don't think an office suite is a make or break thing on tablets just yet. iMovie and Garage Band are impressive, but I don't know how many people do heavy video editing, and even fewer do much with audio recordings.
But photos? Everyone does photos. The new iPhoto is incredible, and people's iPhone pictures will be coming into it automatically via Photo Steam. If, as rumored, Microsoft Office ends up on iOS, then you might as well turn out the lights in the Android tablet development department.
Look, I think it's very generous for Verizon to have loaned me this Droid Xyboard 8.2 as a part of its ambassadors program. That it came with unlimited 4G and tethering only makes it more so. I like the hardware (except the button placement) and the network is incredibly fast. I want to like this thing. I even wrote this post using Google's Blogger app on it with only a little cleanup done later on my laptop.
The problem is that Android and its ecosystem let the hardware and network down. The process of writing this illustrated the problem perfectly. Blogger is one of Google's A+ properties, but the app for it is a phone app that only has extremely basic post composition and editing features. You can't use it to look at stats, manage comments, or adjust the blog layout. If the developer for Android itself is going to have a shabby app for one of its top services, then what does that say about the platform as a whole?
I cannot in good conscience recommend this device to anyone now. I was on the fence about it before this iPad announcement, but when this tablet is only $30 less than the new iPad off contract, forget it. I can recommend Verizon's 4G network for the new iPad if you go with a model with cellular connectivity, though. That is one part of the Droid Xyboard experience that has been anything but a disappointment.
Sunday, March 4, 2012
The iPad is Already in Its Final Form
In the run up to any Apple product announcement, rumors and linkbait abound like in few other situations. A number of articles and videos heading into Wesnesday's iPad 3 announcement are about what the thing will look like.
The answer is quite simple: a lot like what the iPad 2 looked like. The iPad 2 itself largely looked like the original iPad, with only the only drastic change being the introduction of a white face plate option. Unless more colors come down the pipeline, all future iPads will look roughly alike.
Think about it: the external iPad hardware is just a touchscreen with a home button and a couple of cameras. The models with cellular connectivity have an extra black stripe at the top of the back for the antennas. That's it, and that's all it's really ever going to be.
The iPhone has changed form several times, but it has far more constraints than the iPad does because of its smaller size. It will probably keep evolving over time as the company comes up with new ways to deal with those constraints. The iPad doesn't have those same constraints. Everything crucial can fit inside with plenty of room to spare for an enormous battery.
Other Apple products have hit the design wall, so to speak, in this same way. The iPod Classic hasn't changed since 2007. The fourth and fifth generation iPod Nanos were basically the same thing, and the seventh generation introduced in 2010 wasn't updated for 2011. The Mac Pro's external design basically hasn't changed since it was introduced as the Power Mac G5 in 2003.
The iMac was once the company's big showpiece for design. The original iMac G3 had a bulbous and translucent case. The iMac G4 was the famous sunflower design, a radical change from the G3. The iMac G5 was yet another big change, packing the whole computer behind the screen. The basic form hasn't changed since the G5's introduction 2004, except that it now is made of aluminum and glass instead of plastic and comes in different screen sizes.
While the iPods and Macs took time to hit their end-of-design phase, the iPad basically launched that way. When the product design is "just a big ol' screen", where do you go from there? Until and unless the aluminum backing gets replaced by another material (carbon fiber? liquidmetal?), it basically is what it is.
The iPad will continue to grow and evolve over time, but it won't be the external look and feel doing that changing.
The answer is quite simple: a lot like what the iPad 2 looked like. The iPad 2 itself largely looked like the original iPad, with only the only drastic change being the introduction of a white face plate option. Unless more colors come down the pipeline, all future iPads will look roughly alike.
Think about it: the external iPad hardware is just a touchscreen with a home button and a couple of cameras. The models with cellular connectivity have an extra black stripe at the top of the back for the antennas. That's it, and that's all it's really ever going to be.
The iPhone has changed form several times, but it has far more constraints than the iPad does because of its smaller size. It will probably keep evolving over time as the company comes up with new ways to deal with those constraints. The iPad doesn't have those same constraints. Everything crucial can fit inside with plenty of room to spare for an enormous battery.
Other Apple products have hit the design wall, so to speak, in this same way. The iPod Classic hasn't changed since 2007. The fourth and fifth generation iPod Nanos were basically the same thing, and the seventh generation introduced in 2010 wasn't updated for 2011. The Mac Pro's external design basically hasn't changed since it was introduced as the Power Mac G5 in 2003.
The iMac was once the company's big showpiece for design. The original iMac G3 had a bulbous and translucent case. The iMac G4 was the famous sunflower design, a radical change from the G3. The iMac G5 was yet another big change, packing the whole computer behind the screen. The basic form hasn't changed since the G5's introduction 2004, except that it now is made of aluminum and glass instead of plastic and comes in different screen sizes.
While the iPods and Macs took time to hit their end-of-design phase, the iPad basically launched that way. When the product design is "just a big ol' screen", where do you go from there? Until and unless the aluminum backing gets replaced by another material (carbon fiber? liquidmetal?), it basically is what it is.
The iPad will continue to grow and evolve over time, but it won't be the external look and feel doing that changing.
Thursday, March 1, 2012
Windows 8 Consumer Preview: The Non-Tablet Review
Almost every Windows 8 preview focuses entirely on the Metro interface and touch-centric tablet features. That makes good sense, considering that's the big new change.
However, reviews that start and end there are vastly incomplete. Why? Most computers that will run Windows 8 will not be tablets. Windows 8 will put Windows 7 into retirement, and soon every non-Mac PC will ship with it. Touch may be the future, but the mouse and keyboard aren't going away anytime soon. How this new OS works with a mouse and keyboard is as important as any other aspect of it.
In short, it's not a great experience. I can say that, missing Start menu aside, the desktop is almost identical to the one in Windows 7. It doesn't progress, but it doesn't regress either. There's not much to say about it.
With the Metro environment, on the other hand, it's painfully obvious that it wasn't designed for the mouse. Microsoft put up a sunny video showing that you can "rediscover your mouse and keyboard", but that's not what you're doing. You're discovering how to make this new thing work with input controls it wasn't really intended to have.
Take the Metro version of IE10:
This is what it looks like when you bring up the address bar/tab bar. How do you do that? By right clicking somewhere on the web page. Don't click on a page element, because you'll get a context menu for that element. You have to find an empty spot and then click. This is annoying.
Once the control bars appear, you see that they're far bigger than they need to be for a mouse. They have to be large, though, in order to function as touch targets. Being large enough to be a touch target is one of the biggest design considerations for Metro and rightfully so. But, it's unnecessary with a mouse.
The address bar at the bottom is particularly annoying. It comes and goes quite often and takes up a large amount of space when it shows up. People need to see the address bar any time they navigate to a new page to make sure they're not going to a scam site, so it's frequent appearances are justified. I'd much rather it work like any mobile device browser, though, where it appears at the top and scrolls away when you scroll down and reappears when you scroll up. The current behavior is too much movement.
The file browser, full control panel, and desktop IE10 are about all you can do on the desktop with a fresh install. Yes, even venerable Solitaire has been Metro-ized, and it hooks into Xbox Live too!
Every single time you launch it, you have to sit through a Solitaire splash screen and an ESRB notice (presumably a requirement for all Xbox Live-enabled games) before getting to play it. Once you get past that stuff, you find a game that doesn't perform well and cannot keep up with quick mouse motions. It's probably an issue with my five-year-old laptop having old graphics hardware, but this machine does meet the recommended requirements. It's also probably an issue with this being pre-release software, but either they need to do a lot more performance optimization or raise the bar the hardware requirements.
Solitaire being a dog performance-wise isn't the only rough edge I have found on this thing. For one thing, Firefox feels faster and snappier than either version of IE10. I'm even using the Aurora channel to make it pre-release apples versus pre-release apples, but Firefox leaves the IE10s in the dust.
I also decided to try out some apps from the Store. Cut the Rope is a popular game on a number of platforms and it's featured right there at the front of the store. I click install and... error. It can't be installed. I try again, and once again, no luck. I have to close and reopen the Store app to get it to install.
OK, fine. I go to the Top Free category and notice a podcast app called SlapDash. I listen to a lot of podcasts, so I download that one. Pull out the sad trombone, because it can't find any feeds the first couple of times I run it. A while later I try it again, and this time it works. I have no idea why or what the difference was. In addition, the built in Metro apps appear in the store and give you the option to install them. Even though they're already installed. Yeah.
The built in Metro apps are OK, but they're very under-featured. I realize that simplicity is a goal, but for instance, the Mail app can't even search a mailbox. The only one that stands out to me is Weather. It too had an issue with downloading things, in its case the conditions for the default location of Seattle. I was able to add my location no problem, but it still had issues getting the Seattle data. It's also not clear how to get rid of Seattle, which would be nice as I don't care about the weather there.
Still though, the layout is gorgeous and it has all the information you could want. The main screen shows the weekly forecast, followed by the hourly forecast, followed by a dozen different maps, finally followed by the historical information for your area. I can say this is the Metro app that works best with the mouse among those I've tried, principally because no clicking is involved. You just scroll from one view to the next.
Other annoyances:
Windows 8, by virtue of being Windows, will reach near-ubiquity at some point. However, it makes a very loud and very clear statement: the mouse and keyboard are second-class input methods in the Metro world. That's fine in a vacuum, as touch is likewise inferior in the Desktop world.
The problem is that there is no way to live in just the Desktop world on a traditional PC unless you cover the desktop and taskbar in application shortcuts. At the very least, you'll have to go into the Metro Start menu to launch anything that's not pinned to the taskbar or doesn't have a desktop shortcut.
Windows 8 was designed to combat the iPad, clearly, but it might be the best thing to happen to the Mac since the Windows Vista train wreck. OS X, even in the upcoming Mountain Lion update, is completely mouse-optimized. Only Launchpad feels like something touch-optimized, but it's completely optional. All of the touch enhancements to OS X have been in the way of trackpad gestures. It's getting to the point where it favors the trackpad over the mouse, but you can still get around just fine with a mouse for sure.
The Metro stuff is going to frustrate people who just want to use a mouse and keyboard, and there are plenty of those people. The 100% mouse-centric Mac will beckon from afar, and I'll bet a lot of people make the jump for just that reason.
However, reviews that start and end there are vastly incomplete. Why? Most computers that will run Windows 8 will not be tablets. Windows 8 will put Windows 7 into retirement, and soon every non-Mac PC will ship with it. Touch may be the future, but the mouse and keyboard aren't going away anytime soon. How this new OS works with a mouse and keyboard is as important as any other aspect of it.
In short, it's not a great experience. I can say that, missing Start menu aside, the desktop is almost identical to the one in Windows 7. It doesn't progress, but it doesn't regress either. There's not much to say about it.
With the Metro environment, on the other hand, it's painfully obvious that it wasn't designed for the mouse. Microsoft put up a sunny video showing that you can "rediscover your mouse and keyboard", but that's not what you're doing. You're discovering how to make this new thing work with input controls it wasn't really intended to have.
Take the Metro version of IE10:
This is what it looks like when you bring up the address bar/tab bar. How do you do that? By right clicking somewhere on the web page. Don't click on a page element, because you'll get a context menu for that element. You have to find an empty spot and then click. This is annoying.
Once the control bars appear, you see that they're far bigger than they need to be for a mouse. They have to be large, though, in order to function as touch targets. Being large enough to be a touch target is one of the biggest design considerations for Metro and rightfully so. But, it's unnecessary with a mouse.
The address bar at the bottom is particularly annoying. It comes and goes quite often and takes up a large amount of space when it shows up. People need to see the address bar any time they navigate to a new page to make sure they're not going to a scam site, so it's frequent appearances are justified. I'd much rather it work like any mobile device browser, though, where it appears at the top and scrolls away when you scroll down and reappears when you scroll up. The current behavior is too much movement.
The file browser, full control panel, and desktop IE10 are about all you can do on the desktop with a fresh install. Yes, even venerable Solitaire has been Metro-ized, and it hooks into Xbox Live too!
Every single time you launch it, you have to sit through a Solitaire splash screen and an ESRB notice (presumably a requirement for all Xbox Live-enabled games) before getting to play it. Once you get past that stuff, you find a game that doesn't perform well and cannot keep up with quick mouse motions. It's probably an issue with my five-year-old laptop having old graphics hardware, but this machine does meet the recommended requirements. It's also probably an issue with this being pre-release software, but either they need to do a lot more performance optimization or raise the bar the hardware requirements.
Solitaire being a dog performance-wise isn't the only rough edge I have found on this thing. For one thing, Firefox feels faster and snappier than either version of IE10. I'm even using the Aurora channel to make it pre-release apples versus pre-release apples, but Firefox leaves the IE10s in the dust.
I also decided to try out some apps from the Store. Cut the Rope is a popular game on a number of platforms and it's featured right there at the front of the store. I click install and... error. It can't be installed. I try again, and once again, no luck. I have to close and reopen the Store app to get it to install.
OK, fine. I go to the Top Free category and notice a podcast app called SlapDash. I listen to a lot of podcasts, so I download that one. Pull out the sad trombone, because it can't find any feeds the first couple of times I run it. A while later I try it again, and this time it works. I have no idea why or what the difference was. In addition, the built in Metro apps appear in the store and give you the option to install them. Even though they're already installed. Yeah.
The built in Metro apps are OK, but they're very under-featured. I realize that simplicity is a goal, but for instance, the Mail app can't even search a mailbox. The only one that stands out to me is Weather. It too had an issue with downloading things, in its case the conditions for the default location of Seattle. I was able to add my location no problem, but it still had issues getting the Seattle data. It's also not clear how to get rid of Seattle, which would be nice as I don't care about the weather there.
Still though, the layout is gorgeous and it has all the information you could want. The main screen shows the weekly forecast, followed by the hourly forecast, followed by a dozen different maps, finally followed by the historical information for your area. I can say this is the Metro app that works best with the mouse among those I've tried, principally because no clicking is involved. You just scroll from one view to the next.
Other annoyances:
- I keep expecting the Start menu/Metro home screen to appear on my Alt+Tab list. It feels like any other window in the system, so why not? Alas, it does not appear there and probably never will.
- In the Metro environment, you can't see a clock unless you mouse over to the top or bottom right corner of the screen and then move the mouse towards the middle to activate the charms. It should not be that difficult to check the freaking time. Why there isn't a clock on the Start menu, I have no idea. There's plenty of unused screen real estate to fit one in.
- Weather aside, there's nothing about many of Metro apps that's better than using their browser-based counterparts. Maps is not as good as Google or Bing Maps online. Mail is not better than any web-based email. The SkyDrive app isn't better than the SkyDrive web interface, and so on. Well, in some ways they're probably better if you've got a Windows 8 tablet as they're touch-optimized, but that's not what kind of review this is.
Windows 8, by virtue of being Windows, will reach near-ubiquity at some point. However, it makes a very loud and very clear statement: the mouse and keyboard are second-class input methods in the Metro world. That's fine in a vacuum, as touch is likewise inferior in the Desktop world.
The problem is that there is no way to live in just the Desktop world on a traditional PC unless you cover the desktop and taskbar in application shortcuts. At the very least, you'll have to go into the Metro Start menu to launch anything that's not pinned to the taskbar or doesn't have a desktop shortcut.
Windows 8 was designed to combat the iPad, clearly, but it might be the best thing to happen to the Mac since the Windows Vista train wreck. OS X, even in the upcoming Mountain Lion update, is completely mouse-optimized. Only Launchpad feels like something touch-optimized, but it's completely optional. All of the touch enhancements to OS X have been in the way of trackpad gestures. It's getting to the point where it favors the trackpad over the mouse, but you can still get around just fine with a mouse for sure.
The Metro stuff is going to frustrate people who just want to use a mouse and keyboard, and there are plenty of those people. The 100% mouse-centric Mac will beckon from afar, and I'll bet a lot of people make the jump for just that reason.
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