Over the past couple of weeks I’ve watched in utter amazement the utterly poor response by Apple to the technical design flaws in the iPhone 4 Antennae. Basically if you hold the iPhone with your left hand you run a high risk of dropped calls. When Steve Job’s was confronted by Rory Sinclair about the issue Steve Jobs responded to Rory “Just don’t hold it that way.” Come on let’s get realistic! It reminds me of the old joke. A man says to the doctor, “It hurts when I do this!” The doctor says, “Don’t do that.” Apple’s latest response is for customers to purchase a bumper for $29.00 to protect you hand interfering from with the device. Wow! Now I feel like the patient in the old joke only now the the doctor response “Don’t do that and pay the receptionist $150 on the way out”. Why doesn’t Apple just give the bumpers away while they fix the problem? Don’t they realize the positive press and customer respect they would gain?
Sooner or later, every person reaches a point in life when s/he has to make a decision: iPhone or HTC. I’ve arrived to this destination, and the road forks. In early 21st Century people would just Google it up to find the facts, figures and comparison charts. Unfortunately, the noise-to-signal ratio is getting so high on Google, that it makes it pretty much useless in a decision-making situation. More advanced consumers discovered Amazon.com to be a great helper when it comes to make a purchase decision – their rating systems and almost unbiased user comments will help you to decide faster.
Barclays Capital has cut back on the number of PCs it thinks will ultimately move this year on the theory that the iPad and its ilk will eat into PC volumes. It thinks that 15 million tablets will be sold this year – and with Europe stalling – PC growth will drop from 21% to 19%, with notebooks making the sacrifice. It’s figuring a 30%–40% cannibalization rate in netbooks and low-end notebooks and giving Apple 70% market share at the expense of Microsoft and Windows. Intel is also supposed to lose business to ARM and its followers.
IT has a number of options to enable remote access for employees wanting mobile access to email and work applications from their iPads. There are however pros and cons for each option as well as some prerequisite questions to consider. Company iPads - For company owned iPads a likely scenario is to treat iPads similar to mobile phones. If company apps or email are allowed to run native on the iPad then Mobile Device Management ( MDM ) software may be necessary to assure corporate security policy is enforced. BES servers may be in place already for Blackberry's, this type of control may be need to be duplicated for company iPads as well. The forth coming improvements in iOS4 will help with email however additional applications will still require management. If however company data is not allowed to reach the iPad as discussed below, then the management costs and administration could be significantly reduced.
If Apple's recent patent application tells you anything, its that the giant technology firm is working on further entry into the fitness space. That's something the fitness industry better pay close attention to. As the patent illustration shows on the left, the application includes an extensive interface running on the iPhone. The black and white images show the iPhone interface controlling and monitoring all details, from starting a treadmill to managing the number of curls you perform as part of a workout.
I'm a long-time fan of Apple products. I've owned Macs for 20 years and an iPhone for the last 2. I also own a Motorola Droid, and a Google Nexus One phone. Over the years I've seen a lot of people convert to Mac, and even more convert to the iPhone. I've also watched as bloggers and the tech media drank concentrated Apple Kool Aid by the gallon in the last 2 years. These guys, along with the legions of Apple "fans", seem to have lost most measures of objectivity about the the iPhone and the iPad. So I thought I'd give business owners and managers trying to decide whether to buy iPhones or Android phones some of the major reasons to go with each of the platforms.
A few weeks ago, I was lucky enough to head out to San Francisco, CA for Apple's WWDC and I decided to, in parallel, test one of my recent Tweets (Twitter: @ithain) which posed the question… "Can you rely on an iPad for a business trip?". OK, I did slightly move the goal posts, by adding… "and my iPhone", but that is a necessity that I would even have with my MacBook. My iPad is a 64GB WiFi version and before the trip it was loaded with training videos, apps and my music collection… everything that a fresh faced business traveler could foresee.
Oh no! An iPhone that tells you how to drive. That's all I need. The application is called DriveGain and it gives a range of visual and audio feedback on what changes are required by the driver to burn less fuel. I wonder if it uses my father's voice? It works with any petrol or diesel car with a manual transmission and features a database of over 8,400 European and 8,500 North American cars to choose from.
There is something very disturbing about the success of Apple. Many a management guru has talked about the importance of openness, listening to customer and building partnership in fostering innovation. Here are three strongly held beliefs which Apple had been ignoring with impunity. So … Is their success “because of” or “in spite of” these actions? It depends on what you define as success. Though there is lot of commotion in the internet about Apple overtaking Microsoft on market cap, if you take a dispassionate look their financial success is not really spectacular.
Adobe should cut its losses with Apple and target its flagship Flash Player at telecoms carriers, independent analyst Ovum has claimed in a new report*. With the spat over Apple's refusal to support the Adobe Flash technology on its iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch devices continuing to generate column inches, Ovum believes it is time for Adobe to turn the tables by courting new sponsors of its technology in the shape of telecoms operators. The report states that Adobe and telecoms carriers are faced with similar threats and share similar goals in relation to value-added applications and content, and that carriers should therefore seek an industry-wide partnership with Adobe to use Flash as the basis of their own multi-screen device, development, delivery, and distribution systems.
Another of the great new features of Xcode is the concept of application archives. In the build menu of Xcode 3.2.3, you should see a new option called "Build and Archive". When you build and archive an application, the application archive will show up in Organizer like you see in the image below:
Unfortunately we can't label or rename the individual archived builds of each application, but I love the fact that I have a nice historical timeline of archived builds. Presumably you would use this feature to archive every time you're going to try and submit something to the AppStore. These archives can be used to match up against crash logs so that you can track down bugs that are being experienced by your users "in the wild" that you might not necessarily be able to reproduce in your lab.
As you can see, there are 3 options available for each of the archived builds: Validate, Share, and Submit. Validate will run your application through a battery of tests and checks. These tests and checks are very similar (don't know if it's identical) to the checks and tests that are run by Apple engineers when your app is actually submitted to the AppStore. This is incredibly helpful in that it can alert you to some potential reasons for rejection immediately without you having to wait a week to find out why the app got rejected. Likewise, once you've validated your application you can submit it to iTunes connect right from here, you don't need to use the application loader tool anymore.
If you click on Validate or Submit without having first gone to iTunes connect and created a new application version and chosen the "upload binary later" option, then these buttons will do ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. These buttons only work when there is an application version defined in iTunes connect that is awaiting a binary!
That said, one of my favorite features of the application archives is that you can now share them easily.
As you can see from the preceding dialog, all you need to do is highlight a particular archive and you can save the app to disk, distribute it to an enterprise (this is HUGE people... HUGE) and you can even e-mail the application to other people for ad hoc distribution so you can involve some beta testers in your application before submitting it to the App Store.
I can't tell you folks how much the features in Xcode 3.2.3 has changed the way I feel when writing iPhone apps. Lately it has become very tedious and cumbersome but with Xcode 3.2.3, I feel like I can finally relax and worry about the code and the features of the app and all the other crap like distribution and certification and AppStore submission is all taken care of.
Apple’s new iPhone 4 went on sale Thursday in the US, UK, France, Germany and Japan and the punters are expecting hear that a million of them sold and are thinking maybe 10 million by the end of September. Like the old Model T, you can have any color you want so long as it’s black. Apple’s got some production glitch or another with the white one. It’s delayed until the middle of July. AT&T, its sole carrier, won’t be selling the thing until next week because its inventory is already depleted by the pre-orders that crashed its provisioning system. Verizon Wireless is expected to crack AT&T monopoly next year.
So it was only two weeks ago in San Francisco, at Apple's WWDC, that the iPhone 4's launch date of June 24 was set in front of 5,200 Worldwide Developers (from 57 countries) and the World's Press, I was lucky enough to be their and take it from me, there was a very large throng of reporters and camera OB crews. For most of the countries able to launch today, the initial pre-order stock were exhausted in a matter of hours.
AT&T has pre-sold 600,000 iPhone 4 devices - in fact they suspended pre-orders after one day due to overwhelming demand. With the massive interest in the iPhone, we know that new phones will be in enterprises in a matter of weeks. In addition, the number of current iPhone users who already use their devices in the Enterprise, that will upgrade the OS on their current device will be very significant.
Sybase on Tuesday announced the results of a survey gauging consumer opinion on the forthcoming iPhone 4 and iOS 4 software, finding that many of the new features are expected to increase the use of iPhone as a business tool. Over half of respondents who currently own an iPhone said that the new features of iOS 4 will cause them to use their iPhone for work purposes more often. More than a third of respondents who don’t own an iPhone said they would consider purchasing one for work purposes based on the new features of both iOS 4 and iPhone 4. Over 2,000 Americans were polled in the Sybase commissioned study, conducted by Zogby International, that explored increasing demand for iPhones in the workplace, most anticipated iPhone and iOS features for conducting work, and work-related usage habits between iPhone users and non-iPhone users.
In another remarkable surge, Apple said Tuesday that it had sold another million iPads in the last 20 days. That makes three million since the widget went on sale in the US 80 days ago, 375,000 a day. Currently available in America, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy and Japan, iPad sales will expand to another nine countries next month.
Sybase has expanded its support for Apple devices with a full mobile device management and security solution for iOS 4. The release of Sybase Afaria delivers proven, market-leading functionality to empower enterprise IT to effectively manage the proliferation of personally and corporate-liable iPhones, while providing a high degree of security to meet the strictest corporate standards. “The increasing diversity of platforms being incorporated into enterprise environments, such as iPhone 4, have companies scrambling to enable the use of such high user-demand devices while maintaining corporate security policies,” said Jack Gold, President of J.Gold Associates, LLC. “Third party management and security applications like those from Sybase enable companies to augment these devices’ capabilities by keeping corporate data assets safe and separate from the private user sections of these devices. When such enhancements are deployed, these consumer devices can become capable business productivity tools connected to a corporate environment.”
After using the iPad for a few weeks, I am totally and utterly fixated by the device. What I am not 100% happy with are the iPhone Apps that it can run and I think that iPhone Apps just fall short on the iPad. I am no way suggesting that the wealth of iPhone apps already on the App Store are no good. Quite the contrary, I have a number of them on my iPhone and use them all daily, they really make my Mobile Lifestyle easy. The point really comes down to the screen real estate.
It seems nowadays, that all large companies have an presence on the App Store with their own iPhone Applications. Sybase already has the iAnywhere Mobile Office as well as the SAP Mobile Sales & Workflow Apps, but thanks to Sybase Employee Marcelo Palermo, we will soon have the Sybase Blogs Application, which will allow you to keep in touch with all news from Sybase, the industry leader in delivering mobile solutions.
I have been working on this concept of Modern Mobile Architectures for about two years now. Modern Mobile Architectures are architectures that support mobile device applications connected to decentralized infrastructure. Modern Mobile Architectures combine mobile technology and cloud computing. We have clients who do not have a web server or internal infrastructure, but who connect smart mobile devices to the cloud and then leverage the cloud-based information as a product. This is one of the most exciting changes I have seen in computing in my lifetime. The biggest challenge in both cloud and mobile technologies right now is security; combine the two technologies and we have a security wormhole. In this article, we will look at the current state of mobile-cloud authentication technology and cover some of the technologies in the emerging space.
Apple has picked another fight and the Financial Times says it will draw fire from the antitrust police for barring third-party ad networks that aren’t independent or are affiliated with competitive mobile widgetry – like, oh, say, Microsoft and Google’s recently acquired AdMob – from using analytical data from ads on its iPhones and iPads. Only companies whose “primary business is serving mobile ads” qualify. That pretty much shuts AdMob out. Google squeals that the new license policy, which favors Apple’s own iAds program, shortchanges developers. Google outbid Apple for AdMob and Apple had to settle for Quattro Wireless, which then encouraged the antitrust police to let Google’s acquisition of AdMob go through. Evidently this isn’t business. This is personal.
Gizmodo, the blog that screwed with the grand unveiling of Apple’s fourth-generation iPhone by buying a rogue prototype and writing about it, was noticeably absent from Apple’s developer conference this week, evidently banned and reduced to linking to other people’s reports and feeds from volunteers. Editorial director Brian Lam told the Wall Street Journal that “People ask it was still worth it to run the iPhone story despite it costing us access. My opinion is that commodity news is not anything to get worried about losing touch with.” A court-appointed special master is currently searching its blogger’s computers for evidence of a crime.
AT&T, iPad’s sole US carrier, admitted Wednesday that hackers were able to exploit a security hole in its system and download the e-mail addresses and iPad IDs (ICC-IDs) of 114,067 iPad owners, including military folk, public figures and prominent business types. Supposedly it was nothing more than that.
Steve Jobs said that Apple started work on the iPad months before it started developing the iPhone, but shelved it to chase the bigger phone market. The disclosure came during a nearly two-hour Q&A with the Wall Street Journal’s All Things Digital Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher at the D8 confab in California Tuesday night. Evidently the iPhone touch screen and inertial scrolling derives from Apple’s original tablet work and Jobs’ own personal vision. He also said that when he came back to run the place Apple was about 90 days away from going bankrupt, in worse shape than he expected. That explains why Apple had to take an investment from Microsoft and makes the fact that Apple’s market cap passed Microsoft’s last week all the more “surreal,” as Jobs put it.
By court order a special master, whose identity is also shrouded by court order, is examining the computers and electronic gear that the cops seized from Gizmodo writer Jason Chen in chasing down the now-famous missing iPhone prototype. It appears there’s no absolutely definitive ruling on whether the seizure was legal or if the blogger was somehow protected by First Amendment shield laws, because according to CNET a deal was struck between Chen’s lawyer and the authorities that ushered the special master in. The cops seem to have been well within their rights considering they were investigating an alleged felony. Shield laws are no protection there.