Entradista

I'm Ian, and I do content.

With all of the discussion of the benefits and drawbacks of applying the iPhone OS to more general-purpose computing tasks, this is one aspect that’s easy to overlook at the beginning: software competition evaporates for anything already done by an Apple app. It’s an acceptable trade-off for a smartphone, but is it healthy for anyone if all possibilities vanish for alternative native web browsers, email clients, media players, media storefronts, calendars, and contact managers? And Apple’s apps span a wider range than just the iPhone’s “big four” bottom-row apps that have been forbidden to duplicate so far. How far will Apple’s “duplicates existing functionality” policy go as their App-Store-locked platforms are used for more general computing tasks?

Some people are complaining because it doesn’t have a camera in it. Spoiled techno-babies, all of them. Just because something is technically possible, it doesn’t mean it has to be done. It’s technically possible to build an egg whisk that makes phonecalls, an MP3 player that dispenses capers or a car with a bread windscreen. Humankind will continue to prosper in their absence. Not everything needs a 15-megapixel lens stuck on the back, like a little glass anus. Give these ingrates a camera and they’d whine that it didn’t have a second camera built into it. What are you taking photographs of anyway? Your camera collection?

We want you to know that ultimately, however, we will have to capitulate and accept Macmillan’s terms because Macmillan has a monopoly over their own titles, and we will want to offer them to you even at prices we believe are needlessly high for e-books.

—Amazon admits defeat over Macmillan E-books. Someone should tell them that companies that have a monopoly over their own ebook-reading hardware and uses DRM to tie books to that platform really doesn’t have a lot of a ground to be pouting over “monopolies”.

We can no longer afford to be [a] one-screen business. Social networks are finally the interactive dimension of storytelling. We now need to evolve with our audience. To resist this would be like resisting Technicolor.

—

Elisabeth Murdoch: ‘Borderline Piracy May Be Our Best Outlet’

By the way, Apple recently introduced the perfect second-screen machine…

The iPad and me

There’s a million posts around about the iPad today, and there will be a  million more tomorrow. My reaction is simply that I’ll be buying one, because I’m a geek, and that’s what I do.

As for whether it’s good or bad, game-breaking or Apple-breaker, that I’ve yet to learn.

I learned with the iPhone never to judge Apple products until I’d  had them in my sweaty paws. As a dyed-in-the-wool BlackBerry user, there was not way I was going to get an iPhone. Not a chance.

However, as a general nerd, I felt duty-bound to experience the interface - so I bought an iPod touch. Within two weeks, I’d bought an iPhone. Having used the interface  on the touch, there was simply no way that I was going to not have that lovely interface on my phone. It made my perfectly-good BlackBerry feel like something from the 19th Century.

So, till I actually have one in my hands, I’ll refrain from too much comment. People who judge Apple products by looking at the spec sheets simply don’t get it.

(Image by MarketingFacts)

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