Steve Jobs: 1955 to 2011

Steve Jobs passed away earlier today, succumbing to that bitch: Cancer. Twitter has been going off tap, exploding in reportedly the heaviest load since it launched, causing the site to experience outages. News and tributes are flowing in from around the world. This is a quick snapshot of the sites I visit regularly and how they are handled this sad event in the first 2 hours after the news broke.

Apples influence on my life?

• Apple IIE at Primary School in Grade 4
• Apple Mac at High School in Year 7
• Apple Macbook – my future wife's, 2004
• Apple iMac, 2006 – my fiance's end of work present, before our first child
• Apple iPhone 3 – my wife's toy (I use a Blackberry, but played with her phone – alot) 2007
• Apple iPhone3GS – replacement for hers that was stolen – 2009
• Apple iPad – launch day, we were out shopping and chanced upon one: May 2010
• Apple Macbook Air 11" – launch day, my new work laptop, October 2010

Ashton Kutcher summed it up most aptly for the masses:

Apple's own Home Page, www.apple.com

With the click through going to a simple tribute:

On Facebook: Mark Zuckerberg's Status:

On Twitter: Bill Gates, Founder of Microsoft & Philanthropist

On Twitter: Lance Armstrong, 7 Times Tour de France winner and full time cancer fighter.

Boing Boing, changed its entire site to reflect Apple's Macintosh's original interface:

Googles Home Page, had a subtle, tribute, linking straight to Apple.com, their arch rival.

Wired's Home Page, is probably the most dramatic change, devoting its entire homepage, in place of its diverse blogs and news feeds:

The Cult of Mac, has an extensive collection of posts, historical archives and tributes:

Tablet Comparison: Which one?

We’ve been running with an Apple iPad 1 since the day it launched in Australia about 12 months ago and on the whole, it’s great. However, I’ve been thinking if (when) I get a second tablet, I want an Android Honeycomb one, because I need Flash for websites and I like the integration with all things Google. Plus, I can write it off via work because we need an Android platform to test our mobile apps & website dev in.

Considering I have a Blackberry Bold 9700, it would be silly for me not to have a test run of the impending Playbook. I’m not really interested in games  (Angry Birds can keep its 200 million user minutes per day statistic without me contributing) just web browsing, and getting news Apps from BBC, CNN, NPR & being able to watch HD Movies/TV Series.

I’m also intrigued and going to have a close look at the HP TouchTab when it launches, because before I had a Blackberry, I had a multiplicity of Palm Pilots, Handsprings and Palm Tungstens and I was gutted that the the Palm Pre, which I wrote about 2 years ago in May 2009 never made it here to OZ.

The march against Apple’s dominance started earlier this week, with the release of the Motorola Xoom with Telstra and the Asus Eee PC Transformer locally.

Notes: May 26th 2011

• Motorola Xoom is currently only available via Telstra. JB HiFi tell me they are getting Xoom’s instore shortly.
• Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1V is only available via Vodafone. No updates on whether this will be distributed more widely.
• Samsung has announced it is releasing updated Honeycomb 3.0 tablets in Q3 2011 -maybe wait?
  http://www.cnet.com.au/samsung-galaxy-tab-101v-339309234.htm
• Acer’s Iconia A500 at 10.1″ will soon be accompanied by the Iconia A100, which is a 7″ Android Honeycomb 3.0 device. Worth a look.
• Toshiba has indefinitely delayed release of its own Tablet (no reasons cited) – more testing no doubt
  http://www.smarthouse.com.au/Home_Office/Notebooks_And_Tablets/D4V7X5R7
• HP with its recent acquisition of Palm, is releasing its own HP TouchPad Tablet with WebOS in the next few months. The Dark Horse?
  Register your interest here: http://www.palm.com/us/products/pads/touchpad/index.html
• Research In Motion (RIM), the makers of Blackberry is entering the market with its Playbook concept, targeted at corporate users and heavily reliant on extended functionality from Blackberry phone owners. http://us.blackberry.com/playbook-tablet/
• Dell’s Streak, a 7″ tablet which is running Android Froyo 2.2 and been abysmal in sales has no updates on when it will get the Honeycomb 3.0 update.
• Asus eeePC Transformer is definitely worth a look, as it also comes with snap in keyboard, which going by Asus’ previous products will surely be of very high quality and capability.

My Space vs Facebook

Michael Arrington of Tech Crunch fame noted on his blog a couple of days ago the fact that My Space’s growth is stagnating compared to its arch rival Facebook .

Getting too it – why is My Space in decline?

Simply put – Usability. It sucks. I never got onto My Space because almost every time I visited it, I encountered the following problems

• Navigation moved around. One My Space site is different to the next, and the lack of consistent representation of the User Interface made it a nightmare to move through the site. I’m time poor as it is – I don’t want to spend it wading through and wrestling with navigation.
• Readability: Fonts and the use of crazy colours like white font on a yellow background (or vice versa) made it tough to read. Add to this the personalised backgrounds which varied from grim dense photos across to riotous  patterns made it nigh on impossible to read.
• Rubbish: Many My Space pages I came across were rubbish. I mean not even interesting rubbish. Just rubbish.
• Profile Picture Inconsistency – Portrait, Landscape, Big, Small – your friends lists looked like a mish mash of images stacked on each other. Amateurish.

I’ve always been of the opinion that My Space’s popularity stemmed from 2 key areas – Celebrity and Personalisation. The Celebrity aspect is that Hollywood A-List types, Rock Bands, Rap Singers, Soccer, Aussie Rules all got onboard, as the benefits from a distribution point of view and the relative low cost for the publicity and doing the “in thing” were all tangible and measurable in their benefits. Everyone flocked online, as the iconisation and ability to “friend” aspect were easy, accessible and straight forward. The Personalisation side is the ability to build your own page “just so”. That’s where the “Usability that sucks” enter.

Facebook on the other hand is positively anodyne in its austere interface. I’ve been on it for about 2.5 years now and watched it go through 3 changes. The current interface leaves alot to be desired, so much so, that I barely login anymore unless I’m wanting to see what is going on with friends who are travelling overseas. On the upside, the community is cohesive and a proper closed garden if you set your privacy settings correctly. The other strengths, or they were in the past, was that the interface was relatively persistent and most importantly, it was readable, putting the content as the focus. Usability and the subsequent User Experience went up, because, well it was easy to use.

And then when Facebook released the developer API in early May 2007, all hell broke loose, as Facebook’s own way of personalisation had entered the market, driven by the hot trends of the day – beyond the walls of the Facebook employee group, who whilst smart, could never hope to compete with the groundswell of applications from the global developer community racing to commercialise the next hot idea. Smart move Team Facebook.

And look who else has done good by releasing the API – Apple. iPhone. App Store. Is Good. RIM (Blackberry), Nokia & Sony Ericsson are playing catch up.

My Space has a MASSIVE user base. Right now. They need to start utilising it to maximise revenue by creating a community within its boundaries, one that embraces the individuality. They just need to fix up the Usability for it to work.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/05/18/myspace-is-in-real-trouble-if-these-page-view-declines-dont-reverse

Palm Pre

I will freely admit that I have had a huge number of mobile phones and Personal Digital Assistants (PDA’s) in the past 15 years. Before smart phones existed, combining PDA’s and Mobiles into the one unit just wasn’t a possibility and working around computers, lots of data and lots of people made for hundreds of contacts, necessitating some serious organisational capacity requirements. By contacts, at its peak I had over 3,000 individuals and with SIM cards at the time not being able to hold more than 99 entries, was far in excess then what the venerable paper address book could cope with.

Enter the PDA.

As a consequence, through various roles and personal circumstance, I’ve been fortunate to have run through my possession an original Palm Pilot 3,  Palm IIIx, Handspring Visor (remember them!?), Palm Zire 71 and the pinnacle being a Palm Tungstan T3. The T3 served duty for some 4 years and I only sold it last year on eBay to make way for my first smart phone. It was an awesomely well sorted piece of kit with a rock solid operating system and fantastic functionality, battery life and ergonomics. Hand in hand with this, my mobiles of choice since 1995 have ranged from  what would surely rate as an antique analogue Nokia 100, Ericsson GH337, Ericsson T10, across to what I thought at the time was a very cool Ericsson T39, Nokia 5110, Nokia 6230, Sony Ericsson T610, Motorola V620 (AWFUL Ergonomics) and a Sony Ericsson K610i. The key thing with all of these devices was that they had good battery life, were stable, secure and kept me productive whilst on the road and doing my job, staying in touch with friends and family.

I made my first foray into smart phones in 2007 with a O2 Atom Exec, which was a nice device, aside from running Window’s Mobile, which frankly, was appalling next to the smoothness, stability and functionality of the Palm OS. To say that I had grown spoilt by Palm’s excellent operating system is a gross understatement of the highest order. The unfortunate situation with Palm going across to Windows Mobile for their Treo range of Smart phones only jaded my faith with Palm and what had been a memorable relationship. The honeymoon was over.  Since that time, I’ve graduated to my current device, a Blackberry Curve 8330. A significantly different beast from my previous phones, I became a Crackberry addict from day one, as it has the same level of stability, battery life, functionality and robustness I had come to enjoy with the 2 device lifestyle I lived for so many years.

Then along came Apple’s iPhone.

I’ll paint a picture. I work in a Digital Services agency and suddenly 7 of them appear within a matter of days, 3 of them within 2 meters of me with the MD, GM & Dir. of Ops. cajoling, daring and taunting me to “upgrade”, because of the App Store, because of the usability, because of the gyrometer thingy, blah… blah… blah…. They said it was inevitable. In fact, the MD said too me at one time “Come on Col, just give in. You know you want too”. You’d think I’d been teleported and had landed in Apple’s Cupertino HQ and these guys had shares in Apple the way they were selling me the benefits. You can guess who was left defending RIM’s finest against the arm bending/dipping maniacal actions of my App Store talking, pick one: Urban Spoon, Weather, Word Scramble, Flight Control,  smug colleagues.

Then my wife get’s an iPhone and I have a really, really good opportunity at trying this “Smart” phone out. 1st thing. I get 80+ emails a day. Big attachments, often long, lengthy audit trails of response. There goes my data plan. Big time. 2nd thing – battery life or lack there of. It’s downright awful. 1 day??? I thought I was downgrading from 10 days standby/5 hours talk time with my T3 & K610i to the Blackberry’s Herculean 5 days/5 hours next to the Apple’s paltry offering. And what’s with the aversion to “Cut & Paste”? And not being able to send multiple SMS at once nor receive MMS are also big downsides in my book.

The upsides? That App Store – it IS fantastic. Web Browsing on 3G/Wireless. The fact it HAS wireless – what drugs were the Blackberry guys on when they neglected to include Wi-Fi with a Generation 4 phone? The web browsing experience is superb, font and image rendering, page caching in slide screens, zoom view, the whole lot. Contact’s integration with both Outlook & Mail is great. Contacts handling on Mac’s (we have one at home) is something Apple have had down pat for years – change the contact in any location – Address Book, Mail, iCal, it syncs and just works.

I had resigned myself to the fact that I was going to join the Apple masses and ditch my email connectivity, in favour of all those pesky games.

But then I saw the new Palm Pre tonight.

http://www.palm.com/us/products/phones/pre

Check out the Video’s in the “Meet the Pre”. THAT’s usability. Merged Contact & Diary’s between Google Gmail, Outlook and Facebook all at once? That’s contact management.

If the User Experience is 50% of what is shown on this site, I cannot wait to get my hands on one of these units.

Welcome back Palm.