Apple co-founder Steve Jobs was a special person. He was able to combine some of the finer elements of the industry into products that made users worldwide drool. And along the way, he established himself as one of the most important figures in the technology industry. To say his contributions to the industry were significant would perhaps be too simple a summation of such an important figure.
In a world where the cost of some technology is hotly debated and is completely dismissed for others, it only makes sense that Apple would release the iPad mini for free. I wrote a column back before the iPhone 4S was release called Why the iPhone 4S will be free – turned out it wasn’t the iPhone 4S that ended up being free, but the iPhone 3GS – and that was indeed the first time any iPhone was offered up for free in a sales structure that remains today (with the iPhone 4 in that position at the moment). Apple will bring this structure to the iPad universe too – but it wont wait for its oldest models to fall into the $0 position to make it happen.
Though Apple hasn’t confirmed (nor denied) the existence of the iPad mini, the flurry of excitement surrounding the release of such a device quite recently makes this a perfect time to discuss what features a small iPad could fix. It’s not as if the iPad (the 3rd generation, that is) has a whole lot wrong with it at the moment – it’s far and away the best selling tablet-form device on the market, not to mention the best-selling iPad in the history of the iPad line. But what we’ve got here is the idea of the iPad made more accessible by the masses – the public that, believe it or not, can’t quite figure out why they’d pay $500 USD for a device that they might accidentally drop when they’re getting up from the couch.
Information is pointless if you can’t find it when you need it. That’s the ethos that has driven search engines like Google just as it has “digital notebook” services like Evernote, and it’s also the reason why Google+ could eat Evernote’s lunch if it put its mind to it. With the news of Facebook’s one billion active users, questions as to how Google+ will compete with Zuckerberg’s empire have inevitably surfaced; of course, the best way to stay relevant is to offer something completely different altogether.
I often look at Apple and what it has been able to accomplish over the last decade with amazement. Who would have thought that a technology company – especially one that was extremely close to failure – could become the world’s most valuable firm? But Apple has. And with over $100 billion in cash on hand, the chances of it going back to the old days of failure and despair seem unlikely.
In the announcement for the PlayStation Mobile store and environment released this week by Sony is a clause that’s rather tiny and is disguised as a perk: three devices allowed for each game. In the past, back before the smartphone, this sort of note would have been amazing – you mean I can play this game on my PlayStation at home as well as at my cousin Joe’s house? Amazing! Now here in the present, three devices is a limit that Sony shouldn’t be working with.
After its annus horribilis of 2011, HTC‘s year is looking considerably better. A solid reception to the One series and a potentially key deal to be the face of Windows Phone 8 – seized right under Nokia’s nose, no less – is the dressing around hardware that is finally compelling: attractive, competitively priced, not embarrassed in specifications. Now, with the HTC One X+, there are signs that HTC is addressing its last big blot on the score-sheet: cloud services.
Back in January of 2012 a message was released by HTC’s UK chief Phil Robertson that made it clear how the manufacturer would be limiting the amount of devices they’d release in 2012 – what happened to that promise? The words relayed back then made it seem as though HTC would be going Apple’s way with a strategy that focused on a single phone – or perhaps a small collection of phones – that would be supported in ways that simply are not allowed by a strategy that includes phone after phone released in tight succession. This was an amazing opportunity for HTC – what happened?
I’m an Android user. I love my Samsung Galaxy S III. So why am I punching my details into the iPhone 5 reservation site every day? For the past week or so I’ve been using a borrowed iPhone 5, tracking how it holds up – and where it falls short – to the Android experience I’ve grown accustomed to. During that time I’ve been frustrated by Maps, impressed by the camera, and generally had my expectations of iOS shaken up some. It’s always good to mix up the status-quo every so often, too, and along the way remember that there’s more than one way to skin a metaphorical cellular cat.
Nintendo’s Wii U will be launching with an ample number of video games to whet your appetite.
According to the venerable game company, a whopping 23 games will be available for the Wii U when it launches on November 18. New Super Mario Bros. U will of course be the leading title, but several third-party developers have also chipped in with games of their own.
Apple had a bad situation on their hands when it became apparent over the past week that their new non-Google “Maps” app appeared to fall short of expectations, but Tim Cook took this situation today and flipped it on its head entirely. It’s not that Cook apologized for the situation – the situation being that Apple Maps (without Google) isn’t as perfect as they wanted it to be – it’s that inside this apology, he encouraged users to use other products while they remain patient for Apple Maps to improve. Tim Cook took a situation where Apple could easily have said “just chill out” to the public and said instead, in so many words, “we’re confident enough in our own product that we’ll literally tell you to use other solutions while we prove to you that you’ll want to return to us when the time is right” – this is rare in the tech industry.
The tablet market is heating up, and for once it’s not Apple, or Google, or Samsung doing the shaking, but booksellers Barnes & Noble. The new NOOK HD and NOOK HD+ may carry the same name as B&N tablets of before, but they’re worlds apart in hardware and clarity of software ecosystem. Not content to chase Amazon and Apple on price alone, there’s an apparently legitimate attempt on B&N’s part to tune each model to the audience most likely to be interested in it, rather than chasing some imaginatively aspirational but likely non-existent “perfect” consumer.
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