Archive for January, 2010
Apple removes fake Flash ads from the iPad promotional video
Jan 31st
Remember the speculative post we wrote about the fact that the iPad is showing Flash content in Apple’s promotional video? Well, it’s been replaced with a non-Flash version that shows the infamous blue lego. It appears as though we’re never going to see Flash on the iPad, iPhone or iPod touch… especially with Steve’s comments from the Apple town hall meeting.
We’re not terribly disappointed with Apple’s decision to avoid Flash… we’re more disappointed with the fact that most sites are using it to display their content. Flash is notoriously buggy and a resource hog. Why watch low-quality hosted content instead of high-quality local content? The mere fact that we have instant access to thousands of TV episodes and movies will create a demand for hosted content: no one has a collection as large as the internet. We really hope to see services like Hulu, the TV networks, and even YouTube move away from Flash sooner rather than later. From a technical standpoint, Apple is completely correct: Flash sucks. But they also shouldn’t ignore the fact that it’s the current standard… they should be aggressively moving a different direction, working with companies to support different media playback: we all know they have the money to do it.
Before and after shots of the iPad promotional video:
The future of Apple according to Steve Jobs
Jan 31st
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Mac Rumors has a great post outlining some things that Steve said to the Infinite Loop Apple employees this past week. Two independent sources have confirmed that the following bullets are topics that were discussed in the town hall meeting:
- Steve was very candid about their relationship with Google. He explained that Apple didn’t get into the search business, Google came into the phone business. He’s obviously not very happy about the situation and as a result… we’re going to get better software and hardware for the iPhone. Supposedly, we’re going to see updates so aggressive that Google and its phone OS, Android, won’t be able to keep up with the pace.
- Steve specifically called Adobe lazy, and that’s the main reason they’re not supporting Flash on the iPhone OS. The Mac Flash client has been notorious for being… well, garbage. We’re sure that Apple is afraid that the iPhone client would be even worse. According to Steve, the majority of reported desktop/laptop crashes are caused by Adobe’s Flash. He also went on to boast about the advent of HTML5, saying that no one will be using Flash in the near future… the world is moving to HTML5. CTA actually hopes that’s true, but we know what it takes to change a standard: 5-10 years.
- Jobs was as heavily involved with the iPad as we had suspected. It has been his primary focus since he returned to Apple at the end of June.
- Apple expects to integrate Lala into the iTunes team, which means it hasn’t happened yet. We’re still expecting the North Carolina server farm to host a large amount of North American iTunes content. We may even see it expand to support the streamed music and TV subscriptions we’ve heard so many rumors about.
- Supposedly, the next iPhone we see will be an “A+” update. That’s not very in-depth, but we can assume better hardware… and please let there be more customizable software!
- The Macs coming out in 2010 will set Apple apart from the rest of the industry… interesting, because we expected hardware revisions on the 27th, but didn’t see any. Will we have to wait until June? Either way, Steve said they’re not pursuing Blu-ray adoption until they see a solid increase in BR sales. Makes sense: I’ve never bought a BR disc because of the price tag. I have player in my media center, just haven’t used it for anything except rentals.
It’s nice to hear some of this stuff. If you’ve ever spoken to Steve in person, you’d know that he can get pretty passionate about many things… especially things that frustrate him (like Google and Flash). But, I’m probably one of the few in the room that can realistically say that. 
It pays to have been a Mac Genius.
iPad Analysis Part Two: The Hardware
Jan 31st
Welcome to the second part of our iPad analysis trilogy. Please make sure you have read the first post about the iPad’s software. We’ll be following this article up with our conclusion, which will combine everything we’ve learned about the software, hardware and hopefully formulate a verdict. Here’s everything that we know and you want to know about the hardware: things may change as we find out more about the iPad, but for now, what you see is what you get… and don’t forget to click the iPad to the right for an “exclusive story.” Warning: some parts have extreme technical content that we tried to break down into readable information.
Dimensions
The device itself is only 0.5 inches thick in the center and tapers off to the edges just like every other Apple mobile device currently on the market. It’s 9.56 inches tall and 7.47 inches wide… it weighs 1.5 pounds without the 3G assembly and 1.6 pounds with it (roughly five times the weight of an iPhone).
These dimensions are the root cause of all of our complaints with the hardware in this device. If Apple made it just a little bit thicker, they could have actually included useful connectors like a couple USB ports, a Mini DisplayPort or even a MagSafe connector for easier charging. We honestly love the fact that this device is so small, but we wouldn’t typically give up the expandability of a product in order to achieve something so thin.
iPad Analysis Part One: The Software
Jan 30th
Let us first preface this post with the statement that we’ll probably still buy an iPad because we do find it revolutionary… in software, not hardware. Part One of this editorial will focus on the amazing software that Apple included in the iPad. The mainstream media has put too much focus on the hardware and not enough on the magical software that they have developed. We’ll tackle the hardware in Part Two because we think it’s important to address. Think of it this way, Apple’s new iPad is a batter at the bottom of the 9th, 2 outs and a full count — he has to score in order to win the game. We don’t know what will happen yet because the last pitch (iPad product launch) hasn’t been thrown. So, we’ll leave the world of hardware for a moment and talk about the software that will make this device amazing.
Steve Jobs said in the keynote that, if a tablet is to succeed, it has to be better than its two closest competitors — the smartphone and laptops.
“Those devices are going to have to be far better at doing some key tasks… better than a laptop, better than a smartphone.”
What’s in a name? iPad edition.
Jan 30th
The snooze in the news lately has been the discussion about the name of Apple’s new tablet device: the iPad. I find this particular information very dull and will spend very little time focusing on it… But many people are questioning Apple’s choice of “iPad.”
To simplify, some people are trying to compare it to sanitary napkins. I didn’t make the connection when I first saw that “iTampon” was a trending topic on Twitter. I had to read another site’s article before I figured out what was going on.
Dear Internet, please grow up.
I’m sure there are many reasons why Apple chose iPad over other device names: they weren’t exactly the first company to tackle tablet computing… In fact, they weren’t in the first 20. My dream name of “Apple Slate” was ruined when I found out that HP already has a Slate tablet PC. Does that mean that iPad was the only option? No, but let us remind you that the name showed up in iPhone OS 3.0 early last year, so it has been on the table for a while. Do we think it’s the best name ever? No, but the iPod sounded just as weird when it was first introduced.
What’s in a name? Nothing as long as you can prove it’s awesome.
Cocoa Touch devices wallpaper
Jan 29th
Cocoa Touch Apps designed a new wallpaper or desktop background to commemorate the iPad announcement. We used Apple’s high resolution PR pictures (we had to photoshop them a bit) to make this background. The max resolution is 3000px by 1668px, resize it as necessary — hopefully that will work for most of you. We started with the iPad and then resized the iPhone and the iPod touch to scale. We’ve been dreaming of a Cocoa Touch tablet for over 1.5 years and Apple finally brought that dream to life with the iPad. Just right click it and save it to the destination of your choice. Please enjoy our wallpaper!
Note: Internet Explorer has trouble loading the file because it’s so large. Here’s a hint, don’t use Internet Explorer. Try Safari or Firefox instead. The full resolution wallpaper is after the jump… this one is 1024 by 576 to help reduce load times.
Walt Mossberg asks Steve Jobs the hard questions… sort of
Jan 29th
The video below shows Walt Mossberg talking to Steve Jobs right after the event on Wednesday. Mossberg asked Steve some interesting questions that hinted to the belief that 10 hours isn’t enough battery life for an eReader… we’d disagree. I’m not going to read for 10 hours at a time and that’s exactly what Steve gives as a response. He also addresses the pricing of eBooks on the iPad… Steve says that “the prices will be the same.” It also becomes apparent that the iPad will have 140 hours of music playback. Wow. Steve also confirmed that we have iWork to Office format conversions directly on the device. We’ll be able to create, save and email our documents to anyone directly from the device.
The questions start near the 1:50 mark. Enjoy!
iPad may have Flash after all… Updated: nope.
Jan 29th
That or Apple is doctoring their device videos. During the keynote presentation on Wednesday, the iPad ran into several infamous blue legos of death. That means the device they were using for the presentation was not running Flash… this is not debatable. However, several sites have come to report that the promotional video of the iPad shows Flash content.
The picture to the right is from the iPad video on Apple’s website. In it, the iPad is browsing a website that displays a food ad on the left. That ad is actually Flash and could not play on a iPhone or an iPod touch.
- What does this mean? There are many different possibilities, so let’s break them down bullet style:
- The iPad in the presentation could be an older prototype than that used in the iPad promotional video.
- Apple may have decided that the device should not run Flash in earlier testing due to instability.
- Apple is doctoring the iPad promotional video to make it a little less obvious that it doesn’t run Flash.
- Apple shot the promotional video with a 4.0 alpha release that includes Flash.
The last bullet is our favorite because we all expected iPhone OS 4.0 to be released along with the announcement of the iPad on Wednesday. We expect the iPad software in the presentation was left at 3.2 and we may see Flash when it’s upgraded to 4.0 sometime in the near future. We may not see iPhone OS 4.0 until the WWDC event in June, but we don’t expect that Apple’s announcement really covers everything that this device can do. We’re also still unsure about the power of the processor: it’s 1GHz according to Apple but that doesn’t mean much. The iBook G4 had a 1GHz processor in an early revision. Could it play flash? Sort of. But one thing we can say is that the graphics power appeared to be very good and responsive during the keynote. That makes us think this device is perfectly capable of running Flash, but we won’t know until someone from the press gets to play with one and run some benchmarks.
Update:
Mac Rumors is now reporting that the New York Times actually doctored the website for Apple’s promotional video. This information comes from and undisclosed source. Take it as you will, but we tend to believe it.
Apple and AT&T remove VoIP 3G restrictions… Updated
Jan 28th
After developers have had some (very little) time to dig through the new 3.2 SDK, iCall announced that it already has a 3G-capable Voice over Internet Protocol update in the store today. They also announced that Apple has removed the 3G VoIP restrictions in iPhone OS 3.2. We’re not quite sure how they managed to get their app out so quickly, but mad props to them for being the first — soon to be followed by, well, everyone.
We haven’t heard of iCall specifically, but we’ve known about Fring since it debuted in the App Store so long ago… we’ve never covered it here, but it’s been on our iPhones for a while now. It looks like Fring, Skype, Google Voice and the many other VoIP apps will finally be able to do what they needed from the beginning: make a call anywhere. Apple initially limited this ability due to what we all assume was a request from AT&T. There’s been a lot of speculation about the true reason behind it, but we’re just happy to see the restriction removed.
What does this mean for the iPad? Probably exactly what you think. The iPad will most likely be able to make VoIP calls if you so choose. With the $30 a month 3G data plan that AT&T is offering to Apple iPad users, VoIP suddenly became more appealing.
Add phone calls to the list of features. Go ahead, do it.
Update:
As we had expected, Fring now supports VoIP calls with its Skype integrated calling. There was no actual update necessary; the restrictions were on Apple’s end. So, that’s how iCall was able to announce it so quickly… they didn’t do anything.
Apple posts the Keynote on their website
Jan 27th
We’ve been waiting all evening, and it’s finally here… the actual video from the keynote presentation is available on Apple’s website right now. Just click the image and it’ll take you straight to the page. Happy watching!
