TheBoyEllis Blog

Someone tries out the 'massive iPhone'

So, it’s called the iPad. After what was essentially months of mindless, pointless speculation, Steve Jobs this week unveiled Apple’s latest product: an iPhone OS-based tablet device.

We all knew it was going to be a tablet and we all knew it was intended to prove that netbooks, essentially, are crap. And that’s pretty much how Jobs started his presentation, proclaiming that the mini laptops which have taken the mobile computing market by storm are slow, uninventive and run useless operating systems (‘Windows’ to you and me). As dismissive and arrogant as always. Don’t you just love him.

During the run up to this week’s event, I commented on Apple’s mastery of marketing and their unique ability to leave the job of whipping up a storm of interest to their loyal – and not so loyal – following. Once again, with the announcement of the iPad, it worked brilliantly. We were all waiting with baited breath as Steve Jobs trudged onto the stage in his trademark black turtle neck and Primark stone-washed jeans.

I think they may have screwed up with this one, I’m afraid. Apple’s product line, almost without exception, is successful because of one common element – desire. We want everything they make. I have an iPhone. I don’t need it. Any phone will allow me to send texts and ring people. I use a Mac in my music studio. I don’t need it; a decently specced PC running Cubase would do the job just as well and at half the cost. However, I parted with hard earned for both of these things simply because they were desirable.

Look at the entire Apple range – iPods, laptops, all-in-one computers… even their keyboards are sights to behold and use. Expensive they may be, but for a company that can claim a worth of around $50bn, it doesn’t seem to matter.

The problem with the iPad is that I just don’t think the desire will be there. It is a very odd product which simply doesn’t seem to fit any gap anywhere. ‘Pick up the iPad laying in the kitchen’ said Jobs as he idly flicked through the NY Times website during the demonstration. Indeed, at times, he seemed to be nodding off; hardly a ringing endorsement for a product he has labelled ‘one of the most important things we’ve done’.

It remains to be seen how it will fare once it’s thrown out into the wild. One thing it has on its side is price. It is, like few Apple products, genuinely affordable. That might just be enough to carry it through, but one question remains: are we going to want this enough for it to be a success? I’m not convinced.

...cue raucous laughter, applause and lots of whooping

It goes without saying that, as something of an Apple nut, I look forward to their ‘events’. These are essentially conferences held at key times during their financial calendar at which new products are announced, impressive figures are embelished upon and much back slapping is dealt.

On 27th January, Apple will be holding their latest event in San Francisco, unveiling their ‘latest creation’.

The rumour mill has been spinning for longer than usual on this one with many people citing the long-awaited tablet as the main focus of the conference, with further suggestions that iPhone OS 4.0 will be unveiled, along with the next version of  iLife. Apple Insider’s take on the latest rumours can be read here.

So, what’s Apple’s secret? How do they market these events so well and generate such a furore of interest? Its pretty easy, as far as I can tell. They do one thing, and that’s… nothing.

Granted, few companies are at the level of social revere as Apple, but their mastery of suspicion, rumour and the sheer weight of expectation is a sight to behold.

We’re told that they purposefully release incorrect information or ambiguous titbits for us all to apply our own theories to, but the truth is they really do very little. They don’t need to – we do the marketing for them.

None of us know what next Wednesday holds and you can guarantee 99% of the reported content will be wholely incorrect. That is irrelevent, though; interest is drummed up at such a rate of knots that by the time the event comes around, everyone is eagerly tuned to social media waiting for the spotlight to fall on Steve Jobs (or whichever minion he has summoned to do the job for him).

I don’t mind admitting I’m excited about this one. I’ll report back with my thoughts after the event…

We learn today that Apple has secured a deal with the UK mobile operator, Orange, to supply the iPhone later this year.

It was always clear the iPhone/O2 bubble would burst after a while.  It was, after all, excluding a massive proportion of UK mobile users from Apple’s seminal smart phone.

Oddly, this also stifled any attempt Apple may be unsuccessfully concealing for world domination.  I was surprised to learn that just 1million people have an iPhone in the UK.  I thought it would be a lot more.  Indeed it would be a lot more if more than one network were allowed to sell it.

So, great news.  Soon, there’ll be more people I can ‘bump’ my phone with to share stuff.  More people to help me bore everyone else at parties about how it has changed my life.  More people with which to share the short-lived joy of iFart.

But how else does this benefit the existing iPhone user?  Well, I, for one, have had my 3G for a while now and come end-of-contract-time, I’ll be looking for a better deal.  If O2 had continued to be the sole supplier of the iPhone, I’d have been stuck with them and consequently stuck with their somewhat rigid pricing structure.  With Orange on board, competition suddenly comes into play, and that is crucial if us consumers are to be treated fairly.

It’ll be interesting to see what Orange do with regards hardware and tariff pricing, although I predict it will be the latter where the real saving are to be made.  Let’s see…

Is the answer out there? Probably not.

Like a jockey tending a football goal, this blog’s web presence is fairly pathetic. Therefore, anyone having arrived here looking for a definitive answer to the question above must have literally trawled through the entire internet. Well, welcome to my take and congratulations on putting up with what must be one of the web’s all time most frustrating searches; every page hit inevitably turns into an entirely inconclusive slanging match between iPhone and Blackberry users. I can’t guarantee this will satisfy you any further, but I’ll try.

I have been in the (perhaps) fortunate position of having run both an iPhone 3G and a Blackberry Bold for the last few months. The latter is used exclusively for my day job, the former an exuberant take on the personal mobile. I say exuberant, as no one on this planet needs an iPhone. I don’t. I am, however, an unashamed member of the brainwashed majority Apple’s marketing leviathan has successfully captured and, via it’s frustratingly alluring e-shot and TV campaign, continued to kick seven bells out of.

So which one is better? Which one should you go out today and buy? Sorry, I’m not sure.

Let’s start with the all important function. Telephony. When all is said and done, these things are phones. They both allow you to make and receive calls and text messages. Sound quality on both is acceptable (why this is ever discussed, I’ll never know – I’ve never come across a phone I can’t hear the other person on and I certainly don’t expect to hear them in DTS Master-encoded 7.1 surround sound). They both store a practically limitless number of contacts with all the information you’ll ever need attached to them. The Blackberry even allows you to store their pager number – do they still exist?

Next: email. Now, any Blackberry aficionado will fall over themselves to tell you how it is the best platform in the universe for mobile email. It’s good, I’ll give them that. But we’re talking emails, here. Strings of text we send people. It’s not hard to get right. The iPhone is a good match for the Blackberry. Both offer integration with Exchange server and both will happily set themselves up with your Gmail or the majority of the other web-based email services. I honestly could use either device for email. Some may favour the Blackberry’s tactile ‘real’ keyboard, but the iPhone’s virtual one is surprisingly easy to get used to. Once again, email is such a simple area and I genuinely do not understand the fuss made over the way each device implements it. People who place significant importance on the ability to file emails, set up multiple redirects, and various other usually desktop-based routines, can’t have much to do while out and about. I receive, send and occasionally forward emails. Both devices meet this need.

Music. Right, we’re getting somewhere interesting now. Whether we like it or not – and I am one of the many who simply does not understand the youth of today’s obsession with playing music out loud from their phone while walking down the street – music is a significant element of mobile phones these days. And you can see why; it’s a great way to reduce the amount of technical paraphernalia you have to carry about with you. The iPhone wins this bout hands down. It’s also an iPod. Granted, iPod’s are only ‘good’ by default, but we’ve learned to live with that fact for years. I haven’t even bothered trying the music functionality of the Blackberry. I just don’t care.

‘Apps’. Yet another Apple-influenced phrase we must all adopt for the traditionally phrased: ‘applications’. As I have written in previous posts, the iPhone’s App Store is at times fascinating and genuinely useful. There is, however, an awful lot of guff you end up downloading and eventually deleting. I find several apps very useful for blogging, Twitter, Facebook and Ebay, but that’s about as far as it stems. Use your shiny iPhone to level up a sawdust-ridden shelf? No thanks.

Blackberry’s ‘App World’ has only recently emerged and I’ve literally had a go with it for about five minutes. Very intuitive from what I saw, and draws heavily on the iPhone equivalent (why wouldn’t it?).

So, in summary (if you’re still reading this, thanks), if you are an Apple addict like myself, want to get rid of the iPod/phone combo and aren’t too fussed about looking a little bit of a dick every time you put your phone to your ear, get the iPhone. If, however, you are put off by the iPhone’s uncanny ability to be mentioned in 95% of all conversations and music is of little interest to you while out and about, get the Blackberry.

So there you have it. Sorry. I can point you in the direction of Google for the next stage of your search for an answer, if you like. Try a different search term. You never know, there may be a blog out there less known than mine with the definitive answer on it.

iPhone 3.0 OS

From the whooping and hollering that followed every announcement, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the demonstrations Apple provided of the iPhone’s 3.0 OS were nothing short of revolutionary.

In reality, however, they were shockingly obvious.  Cut, copy and paste, MMS, landscape keyboards, SMS forwarding… any iPhone owner (and I am one of the 17 million on this planet) will know how those common mobile phone features have been ignorantly disregarded by Apple.  But fear no more, they’re coming this summer.  Great, but I simply had to pause the recording of the conference to write on here – how drastically embarrassing for them to have to backtrack and develop for the needs of the greater public.  Even more embarrassing given the ‘well, what’s new?’ nature of the majority of the demonstrated new features.

I have no doubt that the non-inclusion of said features was part of Apple’s nonsensical plan to influence our lifestyle habits.  Don’t get me wrong, I love Apple products but there is a certain amount of pretentiousness in the way the Jobs-led band of designers and programmers dictate the way we must use their devices.  Why MMS when you can email?  Why would you ever need to copy and paste text when our text input system is so clever it’ll take you half the time to retype whatever it was you wanted to quote?

So, what’s next for the iPhone?  They’ve no doubt set themselves back a stage now that they’ve had to spend valuable development time reinventing old, previously-expected features, and it is therefore hard to see what lies in store for the phone in the short term.  Sure, their new SDK should bring with it some interesting Apps but, as I’ve written in previous posts, I’ve been somewhat underwhelmed by the Apps currently on  offer, even after the initial ‘wow’ factor some induce.

Well done Apple, you’ve finally brought the iPhone into the 90s.  Now let’s see some real innovation.

I’ve just had an App cull.  Like many iPhone users out there, my device was clogged up with iRubbish I’d originally downloaded because it looked ‘cool’ or provoked me to comment ‘wow, that could be useful!’.

iLevel, for example.  Here is an App that claims to be a viable replacement for one of workmens’ most essential tools.  It’s not, I’m afraid.  Sure, it may be pretty accurate, but who in their right mind is going to place their shiny iPhone on a grubby work surface you’ve just spent three hours sawing and smashing with a hammer (granted, I’m not much of a DIY’er).

The cull has prompted me to question the relevance of many Apps.  The word ‘fad’ is perfect in this instance.  90% of the Apps I’ve downloaded have been very faddy.  iFart is funny, for about three minutes. iPity will make your mates laugh like girls at random Mr T comments and the old classic, iPint, never fails to impress at social gatherings.

Dont get me wrong, Apple have done a marvelous job with the iPhone 3G and the addition of Apps is at times genuinely rewarding.  ‘My Football’ for example, is a brilliant tool for quickly checking football scores.  The Facebook App is also very good, if a little too addictive.  The problem is, as I scroll through the few that are left, there aren’t any others that jump out at me.  In fact, I could probably have another cull…

Apple’s iLife ‘09 – brilliant, but does it offer too much?

Apple’s senior VP delivered an impressive keynote address earlier this week at the company’s annual Macworld event in San Francisco.

Aside from the headline-grabbing DRM-free iTunes tracks that are on the way, I was particularly impressed with their work on iLife ‘09. I love Apple products, even if they are biblically expensive and, in the iPhone 3G’s case at least, put together by children.

iLife includes some incredible features – photo organisation in iPhoto is iBloody incredible, supporting face recognition which, after you’ve told it the ugly mug on the screen is your cousin Dave, will run off and bring back all the photos it believes include Dave. You can also geographically tag your photos and it includes a map which pinpoints where each photo was taken. It even links to Facebook so that you can very quickly upload pictures to your profile, complete with name tags. And, if there’s someone within the photo who you don’t know (which is a common occurrence on drunken nights out), and someone tags them on your Facebook, that name tag is automatically sent back to iPhoto’s face recognition thing! …breath.

Brilliant!

iMovie now resembles something Spielberg would quite happily use. Honestly, the demo one of the developers gave was unbelievably slick. Within minutes he had completed a short safari film that wouldn’t look out of place on the BBC’s Planet Earth.

Garageband has been given a lift too and it now includes famous musicians teaching you how to play either the piano or guitar. I personally use Logic for all my music production, but I was instantly hooked once they demonstrated the user interface for this new teaching area.

All this stuff is incredible and so easy on the eye. There is one glaring issue, though. When on earth will any of us get the time to make use of it all?

True, iPhoto ‘09 can turn your photo collection into a wonderland of detailed statistical information and criss-crossed linkage to geographical reference points and face recognition’d family albums… but who has the time to do all this stuff, regardless of how simple it is? And when you have done it, what do you do with it exactly?

I once spent a truly friendless amount of time organising my iTunes music so that it was all properly categorised and had corresponding album artwork. It took too long and whilst it’s all very pretty now, I can’t really say I benefit from it in any way. All the music sounds the same after all.

All of these applications centre around one thing – our growing personal databases. Everything is interlinked – our email, Facebook, iTunes, photos, blogs – all tagged so that they mould into one being. Databases are essentially very simple entities – a group of fields that can be infinitely linked, but the possibilities currently available to all of us are just mind boggling.

Is there simply too much stuff to do? I certainly feel there is. All the tools Apple throw our way (after we’ve increased our credit card limit) are fabulous, but in reality does anyone really have the time to fully make use of them all?