The New iPhone Is Here!…

Share

My new iPhone 3G S has arrived…

blog-iphone3gs-2

I’m excited to dig in to it in depth, and once I do, I’ll post in detail on my experience with it. Before that, I want to share some photos of my unboxing of it:

blog-iphone3gs-1

blog-iphone3gs-3

blog-iphone3gs-6

blog-iphone3gs-5

I’m already impressed by the 3.0 software update which I’ve had for a couple of days now, and I’m really looking forward to the speed increase that comes with the new hardware.

For those also getting your new iPhones today – enjoy!

Just Released: Kindle For iPhone…

Share

This may be the tipping point for ebooks…

iphone-kindle-icon

Why?

Because with the release of Kindle Reader for iPhone, Amazon has just added 10 Million potential new ebook readers to their ecosystem. The reader is free, so there is no commercial reason why everyone couldn’t download it. I would also propose that there is a high correlation between people with iPhones and people that already have accounts on Amazon. That is a powerful combination, and one that will hopefully convince more authors and publishers to jump into the digital arena and make their books available on the Kindle.

Setting it up is a snap. I downloaded the application and entered my Amazon account ID and Password. That was all I needed to do. It came back with a list of Kindle compatible books I had already purchased and let me load them. Kindle for iPhone is more than just a stand alone reader – it also works well as a companion device to the Kindle 2 reader. When I opened a book on my iPhone it let me sync to the most recent page I was on on my Kindle 2.

iphone-kindle-screen

The reader itself is simple to use. It opens to the current book you are reading at the page you left off. You can also touch the HOME button and pick another book if you want to read something else. The display is well laid out and easy to read. You can turn pages just by flicking your finger on the screen in either direction. You can also add bookmarks or change the font size to something readable for you.

It’s simple and easy – exactly what Amazon should be doing here.

This could be the game changer I’ve been waiting for.

Hands On: The Amazon Kindle 2…

Share

I’ve had the chance to spend a little time with Amazon’s Kindle 2, and I want to share my initial thoughts. I have also included a photo gallery at the end of this post to give you some close up views of a few of the things I talk about here.

blog-kindleimage

The Packaging:
The first thing I noticed was the attention to detail that went into the packaging – it was almost Apple-like in its design. The outside of the box looks like a standard Amazon cardboard shipping package. On the “Tear Here” tag on the side of the box, the words “Once upon a time…” are printed – a nice, subtle touch. Opening the box, there is a covered tray holding the Kindle itself, the charging cable, and a thin, fan-fold “getting started” brochure. When you remove the cover from tray, the Kindle 2 is sitting on top, and has some basic instructions on it’s screen for charging it up and turning it on.

All in all, the new Kindle makes a great first impression.

The Device:
Unlike the slightly awkward feel of the previous generation Kindle, the new Kindle 2 feels refined and balanced. It has traded in the angular look for a smooth, rounded, very modern appearance. The ergonomics are really good. It’s easy to hold and use the device with either hand, and it is far more difficult to accidentally press any buttons. The new 16-grayscale display is great upgrade, especially when it comes to e-content that contains images – newspapers, periodicals and web content (more on this later). Even for books, the new display felt easier on my eyes than the monochrome screens of both my Sony reader and the Kindle 1.

Navigation:
Navigation on the Kindle is handled via a small five way joystick, Next and Previous Page buttons, and Home and Back buttons. Collectively, you can use them to navigate any menu or page. For the most part navigating books is dead simple, but moving through non-book content isn’t always that intuitive. That said, once you figure it out it isn’t difficult to do.

Buying Content:
Purchasing content is simple. One option is to shop online at Amazon.com and purchase books, newspapers, magazines, etc from the Kindle store. These purchases can be sync to your Kindle over Whispernet without needing to attach the reader directly to your computer. The other option is to buy content right from the device itself. Though lacking the refined shopping experience of the web, it is straight forward to find books you are interested in and to then purchase them with a single click. They are downloaded immediately. You can also download the first chapter of any book for free, letting you browse the catalog until you find something you’d may be interested in buying.

You can also purchase subscriptions to publications that will be delivered automatically to your Kindle. You could have the NY Times and The Wall Street Journal download daily to read on your daily commute or even when you’re traveling. While incredibly convenient, some of these subscriptions are quite expensive when compared to the cost of their online or physical counterparts. They also don’t have advertising (which I don’t understand) and lack some of the content found in the other formats as well. They come with a 14 day free trial, and I would recommend trying it out before you buy it to see if it works for you.

Adding Your Own Content:
Beyond purchasing, you can also put free content or content you already own on the Kindle. Every Kindle is assigned an email address in the form of name_of_your_choice@kindle.com. You can attach PDF’s or office documents to an email message you send to this address and they will be delivered to your device. As a part of the emailing process, Amazon will convert these attachments to a Kindle friendly format on the fly. There is a $0.10 charge for emailing documents to your Kindle, but that is probably about the same amount you would pay in consumable costs to print out a normal sized document on paper. I haven’t tested the limits of compatibility here, but it does seem to work well. You can connect the Kindle to your computer and move files to it directly, but Amazon hasn’t make a conversion application available yet that will let you convert files on your own. I would love to see them make something like this available, but I’m not sure if it is in their plan.

Though I haven’t done it yet, you can also add your own MP3 files as well as your own picture files to the Kindle 2 for playback on the device. It’s an interesting addition, but will probably be redundant for most folks, and a poor substitute for an iPod.

Accessing The Web:
Kindle also delivers the web to you – sort of. Every Kindle comes with Whispernet, a digital cellular connection (an EVDO Sprint connection here in the United States) that is used for delivering content to the device. Amazon does provide a very crude browser that lets you use it to connect to the web to do basic surfing. It works fine for simple sites like Wikipedia or Google, and does a serviceable job on news sites like CNN. Unfortunately, any site more complex than than probably wont work. I did a quick test of GMail, but that didn’t seem to work. Navigation runs from poor to painful to unusable based on the site, making this suited for light browsing at best. I’ll need to spend more time with this to map out what can reasonable be done – especially testing sites that are designed for more limited mobile devices.

An interesting, and controversial, new feature of the Kindle 2 is the inclusion of text-to-speech capabilities. This allows the Kindle 2 to read a book to you, albeit in a somewhat stilted, mechanical voice. The quality of the computer generated voice is actually quite good by technical standards, but it offers no where near the engaging experience a well read audio book can deliver. Unfortunately, this feature has also stirred up folks in the Authors Guild, who claim that text-to-speech conversions create a derivative work that Amazon has no rights to and thus see it as a violation of their copyright. I’ll post on this one separately, but Amazon has agreed to give authors control over enabling this feature for any books they publish.

The Reading Experience:
At the end of the day, the Kindle 2 is a device designed for reading, and at that it excels. The keyboard at the bottom, which I though would be a distraction, becomes more like the palm rest on a laptop and essentially disappears once you start to read. The screen is extremely readable – even under less than ideal conditions – and the font size adjustments easily let me compensate for the shortcomings of my aging eyes.

Conclusions:
While the Kindle 2 is pricey at $350 (US), you do get a lot for your money. The ebooks available for it are relatively inexpensive and you have a reasonably sized (and growing) catalog of digitized titles to choose from. There are also basic web capabilities built in to the Kindle, and the convenience of ‘on demand’ access to books, newspapers and magazines will guarantee you’re never in want of something to read. The Kindle 2 is far from perfect. Navigation can sometime be confusing, web browsing is really primitive, limiting what you can actually do online, and it offers no easy way to convert your own content for display short of the email option. There are no showstoppers in this list, and it goes a long way to making a ebooks a mainstream delivery model.

That said, ebooks aren’t for everyone. Some people I know seem to have an almost emotional attachment to the physical manifestation of the printed word. On the other hand, I much prefer the more streamlined experience of reading on these types of ‘virtual paper’ devices, and have been an ebook advocate for a long time.

If you feel like I do, Amazon’s Kindle 2 is definitely worth a look.

[nggallery id=4]

Blogging With iBlogger..

Share

I’ve just started looking into a new iPhone blogging application called iBlogger. Developed by a company called IllumineX, iBlogger offers a polished, streamlined platform for mobile blogging.
iblogger-web-page1
It has a pared down, uncluttered interface that is a pleasure to use, and is really optimized for blogging on the go.

iBlogger makes it extremely easy to snap a photo and do a quick post. Its usefulness sits somewhere between the quick posts I would do via Twitter and the long form ones I would typically do from a full sized computer. That said, I’ll freely admit that is a rather small space in my blogging world right now.

It works with a range of blogging services, as well as most popular self-hosted blogging platforms. Getting it to work with my WordPress setup was a snap. I just needed to give it my blog URL, User ID, and Password, and I was up and running.

Buttons along the bottom if the interface make it easy to add images, select categories and tags, and even to geotag your posts. There aren’t any fancy extras here. iBlogger sticks to the basics functions you need for mobile blogging, and it seems to do them all well.

I’m going to spend more time with iBlogger. I’m impressed by it’s simplicity and ease of use, and would like to see if it has a place in my workflow not handled by Twitter.

iBlogger is only $.99 at the iTunes store.

If you’re looking for a mobile blogging tool, it should definitely be on your short list…


Mobile Blogging from here.

The Palm prē Looks Interesting…

Share

Palm is definitely trying for a comeback…

I was over on the blog mobiledivide, and came across this short video interview with Palm’s Stephanie Richardson (part of their marketing team). It’s the first really close up look I’ve had of the prē, and a great introduction into the thinking that went behind the device’s touch interface design:

From watching this video, I’ll think you’ll see why there’s so much buzz about this device. Palm shows an understanding of interface design that seems to have escaped all of the other recent touch-based phone offerings. My favorite feature of the prē is its “Synergy” feature that pulls contextually related content together into a single display view regardless of what more traditional ‘silo’ application it may live in. Very semantic web like. Intellectual property issues aside, this is clearly the most interesting development in the mobile space since the iPhone itself.

It will be exciting to see this actually launch…

Thanks to mobiledivide for this interview. It’s an excellent site and worth both a visit and an add to your favorite feed reader…

Microsoft Paid $300M For This?…

Share

I can’t figure this one out at all…

Microsoft has launched a $300 Million fall advertising campaign in an attempt to come up with some kind of counter punch to Apple’s popular “I’m a MAC” ad’s. The campaign features a series of spots pairing up comedian Jerry Seinfeld with Microsoft chairman Bill Gates – an odd couple to say the least.

The first one aired last night during the opening game of the NFL season:

Is this really Microsoft’s big response?…

It felt like one of those campy “Saturday Night Live” commercials – a put on. I have no clue how they think this will connect with the market or enhance their brand – never mind help them sell something.

The best advice I can give Microsoft is actually a line by the character “Neal Page” from the Steve Martin/John Candy movie “Planes, Trains, and Automobiles”:

…And by the way, you know, when you’re telling these little stories? Here’s a good idea – have a POINT. It makes it SO much more interesting for the listener!


Jerry Seinfeld’s long running eponymous comedy series was affectionately known as “The Show About Nothing”, and this could easily be called “The Commercial About Nothing”. If Microsoft is hoping that this new campaign will jump start sales of Vista, they will need to do a LOT better than this.

We’ll see soon enough where this campaign is heading…

The iPhone 3G: Think Different…

Share

The new iPhone 3G has receive many rave reviews since its launch…

And rightly so.

It continues the elegant design cues of it’s predecessor, doubles the media memory to 16GB, adds higher speed network connectivity with 3G support, and packs in a GPS chip to location-enable all kinds of new applications.

But the hardware isn’t what makes the new iPhone 3G so special…

Bringing “touch computing” to the phone handset market was the revolutionary aspect of the original iPhone. To do that, Apple needed to invent an entirely new hardware platform. But with that core innovation now in place, the real heart of the iPhone family has become the software. The same way it is with the Mac.

And the new 2.0 software is clearly the heart of the iPhone 3G.

For this release, the new hardware just comes along for the ride…

Apple chose not to make the 2.0 software a “3G Exclusive” – it is available for the original iPhone as well. Not only that, but its available for free! And that is the beauty of committing to the iPhone. It isn’t static like most phones. It evolves and improves. Everyone that invested in the original iPhone over a year ago received a new phone last Friday.

They downloaded it off of iTunes…

With the 2.0 software architecture built from the ground up for professional applications, the new iPhone platform fulfills the promise of a true mobile computing platform (something never accomplished with Microsoft’s UltraMobile PC initiative). The integrated application store is a touch of genius, making the process of buying, installing, and updating software on the device as easy as buying a song on iTunes. And that simplicity – a hallmark of Apple products – will make the iPhone THE mobile computing device to develop for.

And as the Windows franchise has proven, applications are everything…

The iPhone is off to a strong start in this regard. There were over 500 applications available at the launch, and many of them are quite impressive. Given that the development SDK has only been available for a few months, I expect to see a lot more arrive between now and the end of the year.

I believe there is an interesting parallel between current iPhone application development and game development on a new console. While there are a few creative early releases, the initial crop of titles tend to be basic ports of existing programs, and they aren’t particularly optimized or efficient. But as developers gain experience, they are able to do more with less, and push the platforms to do some extraordinary things no one would have expected. This has lets consoles like the Sony PS/2 remain viable platforms even after the release of the newer PS/3. And I expect to see the same trend happen with the development of iPhone Apps.

So what has my experience with the new iPhone 3G been like?…

It has been largely positive, but with some frustrations. There are few external differences between the new and old handsets, and everything that I loved about the original iPhone is still true. The two major internal differences, GPS and 3G, are both great additions but at a noticeable cost in battery life. I find myself turning the 3G off on the phone to conserve the battery, switching it on only when I need it. I would love an option added to have it automatically switch on/off when going in and out of Safari.

While the 2.0 update has many usability enhancements, I have found it to be a bit unresponsive at times – something that never happened with the original software. I can touch icons or swipe across the screen and have a pause before seeing a response. On a device without physical keys, when the only response you get is visual, feedback needs to be immediate. I am putting this down to the first cut of a major software release – I’m confident that this will be fixed in the next software refresh.

I love the integration with Exchange – getting dynamic updates to my calendar are a major boost to my productivity. Unfortunately, this release of the software doesn’t provide a way for me to schedule an event on the iPhone and invite other people to it. If I am traveling and want to meet with my design team the next day to discuss a client suggestion, there is no way to schedule it via the calendar – I still need to send emails to everyone. There is also no way I have found to create email groups (eg – “Design Team”), forcing me to add people individually.

Having applications on the iPhone is fantastic. I use “ToDo” as a quick task list, news applications like “Mobile News” and “NY Times”, “ShoZu” and “Twittelator” for postings, “Facebook” for networking, “AIM” for IM’ing, and “Bloomberg” for tracking the markets.

And, of course, “iPint” for showing off the power of motion sensing interfaces…


http://www.carling.com/ipint_details.html

I don’t want anyone reading this review to think that I am down on the new iPhone 3G – far from it. As a hardware platform, it’s a measured evolution from the original iPhone, but as a software platform, it is a true revolution. I am confident that every issue I discussed in this review – even battery life – will be improved in future releases of the software. And I also expect some incredible new functionality to appear along the way as well.

That’s the beauty of Apple’s software based approach.

In many ways, the original iPhone was a proof of concept, showing that a touch based interface could go mainstream and redefine expectations for a product category like mobile phones. The 2.0 software extends this original vision to mobile computing, and represents the first true release of the iPhone as a platform. If you think about it, the iPhone is no more “just a phone” than iTunes is “just music” – they are both much more than their names imply.

I continue to be a big fan of the iPhone. The 3G release is no exception. Every aspect of it reflects a thoughtful design approach not found in many consumer products today. It is simple, elegant and powerful – far and away the best smart phone on the market.

And “smart phone” is just a small part of everything that it does.

iPhone 3G represents a totally different way of thinking about the mobile world…

Walt Mossberg's iPhone 3G Review…

Share

It’s no secret I’m a big fan of the current iPhone…

I made the switch to iPhone a year ago after being a longterm Blackberry user, and haven’t looked back at all. Well it’s almost time for the next iteration of the iPhone – the iPhone 3G – will go on sale this Friday at 8am.

If you’re a current iPhone owner, the big question is:

Do I need the new hardware, or is the free 2.0 software upgrade enough?…

Gadget geek that I am, I plan on upgrading my iPhone Friday morning when it comes out, and I’ll let you know what I think after I try it out.

Until then, take a look at what Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal has to say:

This should be interesting…