RACONTEUR

Entries in apple (3)

Wednesday
Oct052011

#ThankYouSteve

Wonderful tribute by Boing Boing with the link to the statement from Apple’s Board of Directors.
Tuesday
Oct042011

iGrumble

The Reveal

The long awaited announcement from Apple about its next generation iPhone happened today.  Prior to this morning’s conference at the Cupertino offices, pundits and fanboys alike had been whipping the mobile population into a froth with the feature speculations, design assumptions and capabilities wish lists.  It was almost impossible not to hear or read about ‘the latest iPhone rumor’.

In short, the run up to the day of reveal was exhausting.

Unfortunately it is rare when the dream matches up to reality.  So it seems there is a lot of grumbling and unhappy mobile customers riffing about the shortfalls of the launch.

I don’t understand why – there are some fantastic features that I have to say I’m pretty satisfied with.


 

What am I excited about?

 

WORLD PHONE!

I have been holding on to my dear old BlackBerry Tour 9630 because it is a world phone.  How great it is to have both a GSM and a CDMA radio inside.  Since I’m a Verizon customer I can roam seamlessly on Vodafone when I’m outside the U.S.  The new iPhone is also a world phone and this multi network roaming capability removes the last of my ties to BlackBerry.

Sweet. 

SIRI

I have been working with ML technologies similar to those that power SIRI and am really happy to see AI making it into mainstream products.  I think SIRI has a lot of promise and I’m looking forward to seeing it mature.

New Camera

8-megapixel camera that supports HD (1080p) video recording, up to 30 frames per second with audio.  

I find that there are so many spontaneous situations in which I want to use my phone’s camera; having 8-megapixels will provide me just that much more richness of detail.  Who needs a digtial camera anymore?

1080p HD video.  What else is there to say?  

iMessage

I use BlackBerry Messenger everyday.  It’s a fantastic tool for communicating and sharing.  Well, now I have the equivalent functionality and more with iMessage.  I can see who’s reading the messages I have sent, do group chat, send pictures and videos.  Everything I loved about BBM is now present with iMessage. 

 

The comments about ‘what happened to iPhone 5’ will surely continue to bounce and tweet over the coming days.  Guess that means there will be less of a preorder queue for me.  :)

 

Tuesday
Jun072011

Welcome (back) to the Cloud

What’s Old Is New Again 

There is a lot of talk about the revolution of The Cloud, HTML5 and the ubiquity of access to Your Stuff.  Indeed, it looks like Google is launching a new laptop (Chromebook), which is designed from inception to blend these three technologies into a single hardware platform.  Chromebook will do away with hard drives and will more or less be a browser-based machine.  All of the significant computing and data storage will take place in the Google Cloud.  Users will be able to effectively log into any Chromebook and have Their desktop, apps and data just as they left it from the last user session. 

Revolutionary right?  Kinda.

The Cloud movement makes me think about the days when IBM was king and the Mainframe was its dominion.  Back then, users could log onto any Dumb Terminal within the corporate connected infrastructure and would have access to their own stuff right where they left off.  It wasn’t pretty for sure but users had ubiquity of data and apps.  They never worried about backup strategies, upgrades or compatibility.  Everything just magically worked – in The Ether. 

Strangely enough it seems like the concept of centralized configuration management, data storage, security and data persistence is having a rebirth of sorts; albeit the hard lines to the machines can now be missing.  Employing a small amount of literary license; Chromebook becomes the new Dumb Terminal and the Cloud becomes the new Mainframe.

The iCloud Cometh

Back in the late 80’s and early 90’s, a movement away from the Mainframe environment was all the rage.  Client-server or distributed computing was what all the cool kids were doing.  The goal was to move the data out to a client (PC), which had its own fast processor.  No longer would users have to compete with each other to share processing or schedule jobs on a Mainframe. Now users were independent and could work on said data against their own timeframe and on their own terms.  Freedom!  Prodigious Processing Panacea!

Fast forward to the Connected Age and computing ubiquity.  Now what was once desktop class processing power has been moved into the palm of your hand.  Storage is now cheap whilst bandwidth evolved to become more copious and omnipresent.

Now it seems that having an isolated machine isn’t such a great idea.  I want to access My Stuff from whatever device I happen to be using, wherever I happen to be.  I don’t want it to be trapped in the silo of my personal computing device.  How can I be saved? 

 

Welcome (back) to the cloud.