personal tobias

iPad: A New Hope or The Empire Strikes Back?

2010-02-02T12:22:09Z

After have followed the keynote this week, the real insight and information about the new Apple iPad comes in the couple of days afterwards. Almost any blogger and her uncle have made a post with their thoughts on the iPad so why shouldn’t I.

Technological Perspective

There are two ways of looking at this new product. From a technical perspective it really is just a large iPhone or iPod Touch. It really doesn’t have any technical features over the iPhone. David Pogue, technology writer for the New York Times, introduced the three phases of a new Apple product category.

Phase 1 of the standard Apple new-category roll-out: months of feverish speculation and hype online, without any official indication by Apple that the product even exists.

Now Phase 2 can begin: the bashing by the bloggers who’ve never even tried it: “No physical keyboard!” “No removable battery!” “Way too expensive!” “Doesn’t multitask!” “No memory-card slot!”

That will last until the iPad actually goes on sale in April. Then, if history is any guide, Phase 3 will begin: positive reviews, people lining up to buy the thing, and the mysterious disappearance of the basher-bloggers.

Summing up all the technological shortcomings is part of the current phase two. Most bloggers and people on twitter were “underwhelmed” and “disappointed” during or right after the keynote speech. In the first day afterwards articles appeared such as Ten Things Missing From The iPad – Wired Gadget Lab The Anti-Hype: Why Apple’s iPad Disappoints – Mashable and What’s Missing from the Apple iPad? – Mashable. These articles are focusing mostly on the missing camera, usb ports, SD card, flash support, HD playback or HDMI connectivity and multitasking.

Possibilities of Use

The second way of looking at the iPad is not from a technical perspective but by looking at the possibilities of use. When I thought of a web tablet before the product launch, such as this Apple tablet or perhaps the CrunchPad (similar to the iPad but with only a browser) I couldn’t think of any reason the buy one when you already have a smartphone and laptop. Then I realized I own and love an iPod Touch and use that a lot. I use it for surfing, reading e-books and articles, twittering and games and of course use some other apps. I use it quite a lot at home, because it’s connected online via wifi and about the only place with available wifi that you can use is at home. So the only thing missing from my iTouch actually is 3G connectivity.

If you look at possibilities instead of shortcomings you see what Apple has created is really a clean “slate”. An empty vessel for developers of apps and websites to create content on. As heard quite often from tech pundits and journalists it’s the ideal content consumption device. E-books, e-magazines, videos, websites, music, it can all be consumed while comfortably sitting on a couch holding the sleek 700 gram device. Just look at what Sports Illustrated envisioned before the launch of iPad:

Comedian Stephen Fry, who was present at the keynote said the iPad had to be experienced to be judged fairly and that you’d be amazed by the speed and simplicity of the interface (link – it’s a long but good read, you can always spot the real writers between the bloggers). Below is a video of a demo where you can really see how beautiful it looks and how fast and responsive the graphical user interface is.

So if iPad is supposed to be a consumption device, an open playground for developers, then it’s especially disappointing it’s still a closed system. As Alex Payne writes the iPhone can get away with having a closed system where you can only install Apple approved apps and are not able to tinker with most of the settings, because it’s quite a step ahead from the older “smartphones” where it’s really difficult to install apps. A device between a smartphone and a laptop however can be much more open and “Apple’s decision to make the iPad a closed device is an artificial one”.

So I think Apple has shown us the future. I’m very interested to see if will be massively adopted like the iPhone or that for the average consumer there’s just no point in having an extra device. As @breun said: “It would be great if your iPhone turned into an iPad when you get home”. Regarding the openness, I’m waiting for the other device manufacturers to launch their tablets. Would be great to see a similar device with Android or even Chrome OS where you can install android apps and have the freedom of these operating systems.

The iPad does stimulate ones imagination about possibilities and the future of connectivity to the web and media consumption. Now let’s hope it also stimulates the imagination of the competitors. Are you already saving money for the first iPad or would you rather wait for a later version? Or don’t you feel the need for such a device or are you looking at other devices?

iPad: Following An Event On The Other Side Of The World

2010-02-02T12:22:10Z

I’ve gone and tried to follow the Apple launching event yesterday. Robert Scoble posted earlier his reasons for not going while he had a ticket, mainly because he had way better access to the backchannel, video, photos and opinions from everyone who did go by staying home. Since I obviously had no possibility to be there I felt myself a little on par with him by following it online :-)

I started with firing up Seesmic Web, an online twitter client. I wanted to open some columns with my followers, some twitter lists of people who were going to be there and a search query on “Apple” or “Tablet”. Unfortunately the web app is quite the memory hog and my computer grinded to a full halt when I opened more than four columns. I then opened the same things in tabs of Firefox and that worked very smoothly. I also opened the live coverage of GDGT, Engadget and Gizmodo. GDGT had the fastest and most complete coverage (including images) and Gizmodo the funniest, so I soon dropped Engadget. Twitter was predicted by many to cave under the pressures of the event. Although this didn’t happen they did shut down the list features altogether, which was a real shame because now I had to miss out on local commentary. Best video and audio stream was provided by Leo Laporte’s TWiT.tv, but I found the website hard to reach and when I did manage to connect the video needed a lot of buffering and lacked in quality. I preferred the images of GDGT.

Alright, that sums up how I followed the event live. I’ll let you know what I thought of the iPad soon in a new post. I’m confident I didn’t miss out on any information during the keynote speech, getting my information from both GDGT and Gizmodo. To be perfectly honest I don’t think it really adds much to follow the event live, over reading about on blogs afterwards. One advantage is that you can place comments in perspective, but with Twitter’s lists down that didn’t work anyway. It does make sense if you just want to know everything first and it was a nice experiment to see how much information you can get online. Have you followed it online or do you think it doesn’t add anything to follow it real-time?

Image source: GDGT

Some Thoughts on Avatar and Innovation

2010-02-02T12:22:10Z

I finally saw Avatar this week. I thought I’d be one of the last to see it, but after a couple of weeks the huge IMAX theatre was still filled all the way. First about the movie. I’d never seen a movie in IMAX and also not with this kind of 3D technology. I was pretty impressed by it all, but I think the movie itself would have been great without all the effects. In advance I thought it would’ve been more of a tech demo showing off the 3D possibilities, without any real story. While that surely wasn’t true, I’d expect many of the people that were going to see the movie were going for the 3D experience.

And boy, were there many people who went and saw it. It’s a regular box office success. It grossed over $1 billion worldwide in the first month and people have paid $1.6 bln up until today to get in. To put that in perspective, it’s the number two in the list with highest grossing movies ever, behind James Cameron’s previous movie, Titanic, which was released 12 years ago and has turned over $1.8 bln. Another interested statistic is that the whole of the movie industry has resulted in about $10.5 bln in 2009. So Avatar (released December 19th) makes up almost 10% of that. (source Boxofficemojo)

James Cameron has been developing this movie for 12 years. In this period he has seen the movie industry changing and struggling with internet phenomena such as piracy. The revenues have been steadily rising, but still people worried. Then he and others wondered how to get people away from their computer screens and living rooms, into the movie theatres. 3D movies seemed like the answer and heavy investments were made in developing a whole new way of filming. Would these investments have been made if the threat of people watching movies at home hadn’t existed? I doubt it.

Now of course of of the biggest hits of Consumer Electronics Show of this January in Las Vegas was the 3D television, so people can watch 3D movies at home. No doubt 3D movies will get pirated. This doesn’t mean this development has been for nothing. It’s just another step in innovative progress.

The New Retweet Feature, Close But Not Perfect

2010-02-02T12:22:10Z

After the initial years for Twitter in which they wanted to keep their service as pure or spartan as possible, they have included three big changes in the last couple of months. The first one is lists, which they implemented differently than I expected (I expected a similar way as Friendfeed or Facebook, but the ability to share your lists is pretty nice).

The second one are the retweets and the last one is the geolocation data attached to tweets. It was always possible to add a location to your account and change that information with some Twitter applications, but the new thing is that now you can attach a locaton to any tweet. I don’t immediately use this myself, but it is very interesting for third party apps and services. See my blog post on communicating in real life like the way you do on the internet and in games from April 2008 to see what I mean. This is a Google translated page, but I hope it’s readable.

I’ve said before that the three things I’d like to see added to twitter were comments (or threaded replies), likes and lists (basically I just want Friendfeed with the community of twitter). So I guess two out of those three have been fulfilled. Let me explain. Lists are obviously in place, but I believe the new retweet function are similar to likes. All it does is share it to your followers, without you being able to add anything to it. I think it’s wise to take the “retweeted by” out of the 140 character since that is way to short anyway and we can agree it’s not really primarily a service for text messages anymore.

Some people are confused by the fact that other people’s avatars and tweets whom they aren’t following are now in their timeline, but if you think about before the change other people tweets came into your timeline too. My newspaper, which prints a daily tweet had to rectify yesterday’s tweet because they had the author wrong. Apparently they have trouble figuring it out too.

One other cool thing about the retweets is, when you see them as likes, you can take a look at the most liked ones. And believe it or not, Twitter has already added that to the web interface. Just click on retweets on the right in the menu and you’ll be taken to the tweets that are most retweeted and your retweets and you tweets retweeted by others. The algorithm behind the most retweeted is just not really clear to me yet and it would be nice to have a best of day/week or something.Well, this ’short’ blogpost became way too long again, but I’m very curious what you think of the new features and the retweet feature in particular. What other addition would you like to see by Twitter? Oh and don’t forget to retweet this post by clicking the button in the top right :-)

Selling Secondhand Media in the Digital World

2010-02-02T12:22:10Z

A couple of days ago a question was raised on Friendfeed. The issue was what would happen to the pre-owned market of media such as movies, games and music when they are all digital in the future. This is of course assuming that digital downloads will replace all physical media.

First of all I don’t think all physical media will disappear, just as much as there are still vinyl records being sold and retro videogames. Collectors always want to have the physical product to have in ther hands and put in a display. I do think however that most of the mainstream sales of media will become digital. Steam, the games distribution channel of Valve is an excellent example of how this could and should work. In it you only need to enter your bought product key and it will register the game to you. You then can download the game and play. When you login on another computer the game is still registered to you and you can download and install it again. Downloading is a bit slow though, maybe they should have used some bittorrent solution. That would have made the system a lot cheaper for them too.

But on the trading of second-hand games, movies and music, I think there are two sides to it. On one hand you should be able to sell your old games and stuff. That currently is one of the best ways to get cool games for a low price and have been for a long time. You also want to swap with your friends. On the other hand this seems a little bit silly with a digital product. Why would it disappear from you computer only because it has now also gone to your friends computer. And maybe the most important point. To create and maintain such a system there needs to be some sort of digital rights system in place which we have some pretty bad experiences with.

I have embedded the question on Friendfeed below. What do you think, should there be a way to swap and sell your digital media or not?

Somewhere, Somehow, This Is Art

2010-02-02T12:22:10Z

Sometimes you run into something that you don’t really appreciate at first, but have to get accustomed to. There is this trend of so-called image macros, which basically are images with some text on them. Now when the same image keeps being used, with differing text, a new internet fad or meme is born. Advice Dog is such a meme.

It’s the image of a dog on a colorful background giving you (often bad) advice. It’s only when you start to realize how these images and the whole meme was created you might view it as art. But more like the kind of art that won’t be recognized for it until 500 years from now someone digs up a computer server from the nuclear wastelands and thinks this is the way we express ourselves in the beginning of the third millennium.

Just have a look and try to see what I mean. These came in existence in the same way the marble season started on your school in the past. There is never any coordination or manual but it appears anyway. I have to give a small warning though, many of these are rude, insulting or otherwise politically incorrect. Make your own with the meme generator!

Advice Dog has many spin-offs: Courage Wolf, Foul Bachelor Frog, Socially Awkward Penguin, Technologically Impaired Duck and my favorite, Philosoraptor.

If you still don’t believe it’s art then look at the following video. It’s of an unrelated meme, but shows very nice how that originated, from a computer glitch to many people creating their own version and hundreds of thousands of people watching the creations.

My New Visual Tumblr Blog

2010-02-02T12:22:10Z

I have tried to keep track of the websites where I have an account and share stuff on my Web Wide page. Now I have an addition. I made a Tumblr blog. Tumblr blogs are usually used for images or videos. You can also write blogposts with Tumblr, but thanks to the beautiful ready made themes and easy bookmarklet they’re very suited to share visual stuff. That’s why I named my Tumblr blog “Speaksforitself“, for anything that more or less speak for itself. I don’t intend to write much with the posts and just let you enjoy the images. I also post my Youtube favorites on there.
You can follow the blog when you have a Tumblr account yourself or in your favorite RSS-reader. I’m still looking for a cool way to display all of my shared bookmarks, diggs, youtube favorites and stuff on one page, but I guess that’s maybe/someday.

Do you have a cool Tumblr blog or do you have any favorite ones you follow? Or do you know any other ways to share images? (I have also tried vi.sualize.us which is more like visual bookmarking and also pretty cool)

MakeUseOf: 9 Steps To A Great Start In Friendfeed

2010-02-02T12:22:10Z

I’ve recently been hired by howto and tech blog MakeUseOf.com. I’m very excited about it and have already published a couple of posts, but am still in my probation period. The first one is 9 Steps To A Great Start In Friendfeed. I’ve written it as a small starters guide. Especially for people who are already using twitter or other social networks. To start with friendfeed you don’t need to use any other social networks though. You can use it as a stand-alone website or as a hub for all of your networks. It’s been in quite a stir the last couple of days because they announced this week that they are bought by Facebook. It are very interesting times for Friendfeed. It can only mean good to Facebook when they receive the resources, infrastructure, but especially the team behind Friendfeed, but it’s not clear what will happen to Friendfeed.com and it’s community.

As for writing for MakeUseOf, this is my personal blog and I will of course keep writing pieces for it. I think I will be writing a bit more personal, opinion pieces for it, because MakeUseOf is more for useful howto and explanatory posts. I can’t crossposts my posts, but will update this blog when I have written a piece for MakeUseOf. You can find my pieces here.

Image Credit : adKinn

Dial gdgt for gadgets

2010-02-02T12:22:10Z

Who doesn’t call him or herself a gadgetlover? Everybody likes to look at and touch shiny new phones, laptop or gaming devices, right? We all like to open a package and smelling the plasticky Taiwanese smell before it dissolves (alright this is getting weird). Anyway, there is a new gadget site where you can go for all your gadget news and discussion. It’s not a new Gizmodo or Engadget, although their founder Peter Rojas is co-creator of gdgt, together with former editor-in-chief of Engadget Ryan Block.

The idea is not just a gadget blog where authors tell you what to think of something, but a more social experience. You can sign up for an account and add gadgets to your profile that you want or have. After this you can review them and of course read other reviews and discuss all the new shinies. I haven’t spent a lot of time there yet and as it has just launched the community has to grow. You can connect with my at my profile. But it is that community that has the potential to make this big. It looks like a great way to stay on top of the latest things and show off your new gadgets. If only they found a way to add that new plastic Taiwan smell.

Please Say Something, a short film

2010-02-02T12:22:10Z

If you’ve got 10 minutes to spare please have a look at this award winning short film. Put on your headphones or loud speakers! Or even better, watch it in HD at vimeo.

Please Say Something – Full Length from David OReilly on Vimeo.

A troubled relationship between a Cat and Mouse set in the distant Future. Winner of the Golden Bear for best short film at the 2009 Berlinale.

Written, Directed & Produced by David OReilly, Sound design & Voice synthesis by David Kamp, Sound design & Music by Bram Meindersma. Distributed by Future Shorts.