Now that the iOS 5.1.1 jailbreak is available for the iPhone 4S, new iPad, and older devices, the subject of jailbreak in general is getting a lot of attention again, and with it, the dark side of jailbreaking. It seems whenever someone wants to attack the very concept of jailbreak, one of the first salvos unleashed is app piracy. The sad, ugly truth is that those attacks are made possible because some people who jailbreak do so mainly or entirely to get "free" apps. And the sadder, uglier truth is that there's no such thing as "free". Everything has a cost. Even and especially theft.

We're going to use the words "theft" and "steal" here instead of piracy because that's what we're talking about. Steve Jobs once raised a pirate flag at Apple as a symbol of their counterculture and ideals, and the jailbreak community has embraced that spirit.

By no means has the jailbreak community embraced theft.

Both iMore and Mobile Nations have a zero-tolerance policy when it comes to even the discussion of piracy. We place an incredibly high value on developers and the apps they make, and don't want to play any part, directly or indirectly, in disseminating information that hurts developers, the iOS platform, and the legitimate jailbreak community.

Likewise, prominent jailbreak developers have gone out of their way, numerous times, to distance themselves from app theft and ask those using their software not to steal apps.

There's a reason for that. App theft is not a victimless crime. It hurts the iOS platform, it hurts iOS developers, and because of that, it ultimately hurts iOS users.

Stealing apps isn't free. It comes with a very real cost.

Getting the excuses out of the way

For years people have been copying CDs, DVDs, Blu-Ray movies, games, and anything else they could get their hands on. Ever since media became copyable, people have been copying it. Some have applied philosophical wrappers around it -- that all bits should be free. Others think that since the original version remains, copies don't equate to theft -- you're not taking it away from anyone else. Others justify their actions based on the hostility often displayed towards users by traditional media companies.

The law does allow for copying in some situations, in some jurisdictions. It sometimes allows for copying to make a backup or change format, for example ripping a CD to iTunes or copying iTunes music to a disk. But none of them make allowances for theft.

Another common excuse is availability and price -- if content could only be bought immediately, and at a fair cost, there'd be no content theft. Game of Thrones is the most common current example. HBO won't release it for sale for months, so users go elsewhere to get it. If HBO would only put it on iTunes, Amazon, etc. in a timely manner, the argument goes, no one would be going elsewhere.

Well guess what -- in almost all cases, the App Store and apps do just that.

And not only that, apps are incredibly inexpensive by any reasonable standard. Paid apps are often $0.99 and most iPhone apps top out at $4.99 with very few exceptions. In most cases they're not only less than a cup of coffee or a movie, but substantially less.

Also, Apple allows users to re-download purchased apps. If you deleted an app by accident, it stopped working right, or you got a new iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch you have the ability to re-download your content without having to re-purchase anything. Your purchases are tied to your iTunes ID, not a specific device. Apple even allows you to authorize content on up to 5 computers and, when it comes to apps, practically as many iOS devices as you'd like.

Easily available, cheaply and fairly priced, and automatically backed up. That removes many of the rationalizations and justifications.

Note: There are some regions that don't support the App Store, or specific parts of the App Store, due to local policies on rating requirements or other licensing issues. In those particular cases, in those particular places, stealing apps may seem like the only way for these users to obtain App Store apps or games. This problem typically arises in countries that don't carry the iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch, in areas where iTunes payments are difficult or challenging, or where Apple is simply not allowed to provide a legitimate service. Still there are legitimate workarounds, like using a U.S. App Store account and loading it with gift cards. If you want to support developers, you'll find a way.

The cost to app developers

When you jailbreak to steal apps you're essentially taking money out of someone's hand, whether it's an independent developer or a development company. App development takes a lot of time and a lot of money.

Apps can and do cost tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars to develop. That means every sale is important and can make all the difference to a developer -- the difference between continuing an app or canceling it, making payroll or not making it, feeding their family or not feeding them.

If recent statistics are accurate, almost 60% of developers don't break even on costs when developing and executing an app. These costs typically involve marketing, development, graphic design fees, software licensing, and anything else that goes into submitting a fully polished app to the App Store.

These costs don't stop once the app is submitted to the App Store. If the app uses push notifications or has a web server back end, that costs money. Sometimes a lot of money. If a developer wants to provide technical support to their users, a service we've all come to expect, that's also a lot of money. There are considerable recurring costs for any development team that plans on supporting their app and updating it regularly.

Making, maintaining, supporting, and updating an app is incredibly expensive. And there's no promise every developer will ever get all that money back.

That's the cost to developers, and to users who may get less apps developed or updated because of it.

The cost to Apple

Apple owns the iOS platform. Anything that hurts developers hurts Apple. To that end, Apple has tried to implement services such as in-app purchases and iAds so developers can keep prices down and still earn a living. Yet there's more Apple can and should do.

There have been several developers who have reported seeing more players active on Game Center than have actually purchased their game via the App Store. Sometimes by a factor of 10 or more. There needs to be a way to shut stolen apps out of Game Center so there's less incentive to use the stolen versions of games. iTunes knows which apps we've bought. If a game isn't on our purchased list, it shouldn't work in Game Center. That removes the ego gratification of leader boards and the fun of multiplayer unless and until a legitimate copy of an app is purchased.

The same could be done with iCloud for non-game apps. If an app isn't on our purchased list, it doesn't sync, it doesn't back up.

I'm not pretending to know how complicated such a system would be to deploy, or how much it would disincentivize app theft, but it doesn't seem beyond the realm of possibility.

The more popular an app or game is, the higher the likelihood it will be stolen, and the less money a developer will make from it. If developers find they can't make enough money, they'll stop developing those popular apps. That not only hurts users who want great software, but it hurts the platform.

That's the cost to Apple.

The cost to jailbreak's reputation

I've been jailbreaking since iOS 1.x and I've never once stolen an app. For myself and many others out there, jailbreak is a tool to add functionality to our iPhones, iPads, Apple TVs, and iPods -- functionality that Apple won't or hasn't give us stock. I actually think I've spent almost as much money on jailbreak apps as I have stock apps. Yet even though many jailbreakers don't steal apps, the conception that jailbreak is a gateway to app theft is impossible to escape.

I've had people come to me for help with their iPhone, people that don't even know how to use iCloud, but who know all the ins and outs of app theft. They can't be bothered to back up their own data but they'll spend hours and hours figuring out how to screw a developer out of $0.99 or $4.99.

And they cost jailbreak its reputation. They enable jailbreak to be called a tool for app theft instead of a breeding ground for innovation. They enable those who would like to see jailbreak made illegal to couch their self-interest in the flag of criminal justice.

That's the cost paid by the jailbreak community, and by those who jailbreak for legitimate reasons.

The cost to users

I'm not here to give anyone a lecture on morals or ethics. If you're stealing apps, one article probably won't change your mind. Maybe you already know that you're costing developers money, that you're tarnishing the reputation of the jailbreak community, and maybe even that you're hurting the iOS platform. Perhaps you've justified it to yourself by saying developers are rich and you're copying not stealing, or you don't care about the jailbreak community, or that Apple has so much money nothing could ever hurt iOS.

But what about us?

We're all connected.

If you're stealing apps it's because you want apps. Keep stealing them, and the quality and quantity of apps will eventually diminish. If you're jailbreaking, you need the jailbreak community to keep releasing tools for jailbreak. Keep using jailbreak to steal apps and either laws using you as an excuse, or jailbreak developers fed up with how you're misusing their tools will stop providing them. And all of this is dependent on Apple not figuring out a way to shut it all down or make it so time consuming that it might as well be shut down.

I'd like to envision a strong future for jailbreak and for stock iOS. Stealing apps is simply the right way to get all the wrong attention, and to hurt everything you enjoy.

On the other hand, buying the apps you like rewards developers for their hard work and helps ensure they can continue to update those apps, and make more of them, now and into the future. It shows the world that jailbreak is about adding functionality and not stealing money. And it shows Apple that their time and attention is better spent being inspired by jailbreak rather than shutting it down.

Losing apps, losing jailbreak tools, and ultimately losing jailbreak is the cost to users.

Conclusion

For years we've been clamoring for great content, readily available and priced fairly. With the App Store, we have it. The best defense against accusations that jailbreak is all about app theft is simply not to steal apps. The best way to get more great apps is simply to buy the great apps we have today.

There's no such thing as free. Even theft has its price. And we can all choose not to pay it.

A few days ago rumors began to focus on the idea that Apple was moving to a 4-inch screen on the iPhone 5 (or whatever Apple ends up calling iPhone 5,1). I went through the mental exercise of mocking up, and breaking down, the various 4-inch iPhone options to try and figure out how Apple would get there.

Now, however, the rumors are coalesced around one specific option -- one I initially thought had fewer advantages, and was hence less likely -- a 16:9 aspect ratio, 1136 x 640 display.

So what would could Apple, a company that prides itself in saying "no" even more than saying "yes", consider switching their best selling product, the iPhone, to a 16:9 screen?

The road to widescreen

Last iMore heard Apple hadn't settled on a new iPhone screen size. One of the versions they were testing had the same 3.5-inch screen, but they were considering going as large as 4 inches. There seems to be one or more prototypes with that screen size, including a 16:9 aspect ratio version. Since we also heard the next iPhone isn't shipping until October, there's still lots of time for them to decide. (Apple is the company that changed from plastic to glass screen in just a few weeks before the original iPhone launch, after all.)

Both The Wall Street Journal and Reuters have now reported a 4-inch iPhone. Previously a The Verge reader, who caught John Gruber of Daring Fireball attention, and later, iLounge heard something around 16:9 was a target aspect ratio. Yesterday Seth Weintraub of 9to5Mac ran the math and, with some other information behind him, and posted the screen resolution on at least one of the 4-inch iPhone prototypes as 1136 x 640. John Gruber once again paid attention to that ratio. Matthew Panzarino of The Next Web took the idea out for a spin, and asked the impertinent question I find myself asking all the time as well -- How would a 16:9 display help Apple sell more iPhones? [Update: John Gruber has weighed in on this as well now.)

The three laws of Apple products

There are three laws by which Apple iOS products seem to be governed.

1. Apple will only do things that grow profits now, or better position them to grow profits in the future.
2. Apple will delight users with magical experiences, except where doing so would conflict with the first law.
3. Apple will empower developers to make insanely great apps, as long as doing so doesn't conflict with the first and second laws.

Hobbies aside, Apple sells iOS devices by the tens or hundreds of millions. So far every iPhone has sold more than every iPhone before it, and that's a pattern Apple is going to want to continue. So far, the App Store has grown faster and larger than any software market before it, and that's also a pattern Apple is going to want to continue.

But there's a second factor to consider.

Design matters

Apple's Senior Vice President of Industrial Design, Jony Ive, has espoused a very specific philosophy when it comes to product development. Back in March, Ive told The Evening Standard:

Most of our competitors are interested in doing something different, or want to appear new — I think those are completely the wrong goals. A product has to be genuinely better. This requires real discipline, and that’s what drives us — a sincere, genuine appetite to do something that is better.

Under that mandate, Apple wouldn't switch from the current iPhone's 3:2 aspect ratio to a 16:9 aspect ratio just to have a different iPhone. They wouldn't change for change's sake, or for fashion's. They would only change to a 16:9 ratio if made for a better iPhone.

Ive also, just today, told The Telegraph:

We try to develop products that seem somehow inevitable. That leave you with the sense that that’s the only possible solution that makes sense. Our products are tools and we don’t want design to get in the way. We’re trying to bring simplicity and clarity, we’re trying to order the products.

So the change from 3:2 to 16:9 should be a natural progression of the iPhone itself. Likewise, it shouldn't make anything more complex, cluttered, or confusing.

It should make it even clearer.

Adding a dedicated OS space

With all that in mind, the least likely option -- though the easiest for developers -- is for Apple to keep the app space the same on a 16:9 iPhone as it is on the current iPhone, and use the extra pixels exclusively for new and updated iOS features.

In other words, the main iPhone user space could still be 960 x 640, and an extra 176 pixels would be put on top of it, on the bottom, or split between top and bottom.

There are several things such a system space could be used for.

Static dock/fast app switcher

Right now the dock disappears when you go into apps, and the fast app switcher only comes up when you double-click the Home button. An even faster app switcher would always be there, recent apps only a tap away, controls and older apps only a swipe or two more.

A static dock would make switching apps quick and easy, both intentionally and otherwise.

Of course, it risks accidental, app-switching hits, and it's utility in landscape mode is questionable.

It's harder to accept the premise of a static dock when we consider landscape orientation.

Static widget space

Right now, widgets are hidden away in the fast app switcher, Notification Center, and Siri. While many people have expressed a desire for widgets on the Home screen, there's also an argument to be made that making app data available in other apps is even more valuable. (The current version of iOS is an app launcher, not a Home screen hangout for a reason.)

Widgets that are currently hidden away in Notification Center and Siri could be always available.

Again, however, landscape orientation wouldn't be as natural a fit, and would either require new UI, or the awkward sideways treatment fast app switching currently enjoys.

Landscape UI would require all new widget UI, something Apple hasn't done for the fast app switcher.

Static notification space

Right now, Notification Center banners fold down over and obstruct controls like back buttons, and provide no in-app functionality. With a dedicated notification space, not only could notifications keep clear of back buttons, they could have enough room for in-app actions like iMessage quick replies.

The temporarily nature of notifications make them less suitable for a static implementation, however. If there are no notifications, it's wasted space.

Extra space to prevent notifications from obstructing buttons, and provide space for actions like quick reply, but would often also be wasted space.

And I'm not even going to bother mocking up how awkward that would look in landscape. (But see above.)

Static gesture control space

Right now, system-wide gestures are completely absent from the iPhone, even though webOS has had them for years, the iPad has them, and BlackBerry 10 is intent on using them as a major differentiator for pro users.

A larger capacitive area may mean there's room enough to explore more complex, if less discoverable gestures. That said, it's almost impossible to imagine Apple keeping a permanent dead pixel area around just for swipes up and down, backward and forward, etc.

On screen gestures and gesture areas have both been proven effective enough there's no reason to waste perfectly good pixels on them.

Static iAd space

Right now a new iPhone costs $199 to $399 even on contract, and companies like Amazon have already experimented with ad-subsidized price reductions on devices like the Kindle.

Tweetbot developer and all around instigator, Paul Haddad jokingly tweeted this idea, and I'm including it here just to make him regret it slightly.

Apple made fun of ads in Gmail, no way they violate iOS with an ad space, no matter what any patents might suggest.

Ad sponsored devices are already a reality thanks to Amazon, but they seem far, far, far less likely from Apple.

Static system space that can switch between some or all of the above

A combination of the above, but where widgets and notifications and gestures and all the rest co-exist in perfect harmony, in one Apple-only screen section.

And none of that is likely

Static system space on a small, mobile screen flies in the face of Apple's design philosophy. It would clutter the iPhone screen and ensure, likely much to Jony Ive's consternation, that no user could ever lose themselves in the content. The interface would always be there, staring at them, even when they didn't need it.

While more flexible than the hardware keyboards Steve Jobs mocked during the original iPhone launch, there are times when it won't be useful, and Apple is all about eliminating absolutely everything that's not essential all of time.

That brings us to...

Creating a bigger screen

If we apply Occam's Razor, the simplest and most obvious way Apple could implement a 16:9 aspect ratio on close to a 4-inch display, is simply add the extra pixels, optimize the system software, and let developers have at it.

In my previous post, I saw some problems with this approach:

Since pixel size remains the same, text size would remain the same, control/button size would remain the same, and touch target size would remain the same. Apps that use the built-in interface elements would simply add an extra row of information -- an extra row of icons, an extra row to the table or item to the list. The display would be vertically larger, and more information could be displayed on it. But what about apps that don't use built-in UI elements?

Safari would show more of a page's length, Mail would show an extra message, but games and anything with a highly customized, non-table based interface would have to be pillar-boxed. If developers made new versions that fill the extra space, those versions would be cut off on older iPhones. And if developers made 2 versions of the apps, it would mean more work for them and "fatter" binaries for users to download. (A universal app would go from having iPhone and iPad interface elements, to having old iPhone and new iPhone and iPad interfaces.)

While many things are possible, this doesn't seem like a very Apple-esque solution. It would fragment the iPhone platform for developers in a way Apple has resisted so far, and offer incomplete user benefits (increasing pixel count in only one direction).

More importantly, it would mean either significantly redesigning (or eliminating) the Home button, or lengthening the iPhone casing, or a bit of both. iMore has heard the Home button isn't going anywhere, and parts leaks have suggested it looks pretty much the same, so that leaves a longer iPhone and that... would be awkward. (Even if you remove part of the bezel to make room for it.)

Let's re-examine some of that.

Default apps

Apps that use Apple's built-in interface elements, especially table views, should enjoy some level of automagic compatibility on a longer screen. iOS simply shows more information -- another row, or partial row. These have been mocked up to death already, notably on The Verge and Overdrive. Here's an example of my own, if only to set context.

In a vertical table view, the additional screen real estate can simply show additional information.

So far so good, right? Even if text and touch targets aren't bigger, more information is more. It's no accident, however, that most of the mockups have been in portrait orientation. Depending on text flow, landscape doesn't enjoy the same benefit, at least as iOS currently implements it.

Due to the nature of text wraps, landscape won't often get the same benefit.

In general, anything in iOS that already wastes space in landscape orientation would only waste more space at 16:9

The keyboard

The keyboard could be identical in portrait orientation due to the identical screen width, or Apple could take some of the extra vertical pixels and add another row of keys, either numbers on the default keyboard, or special purpose keys on custom keyboards (the way internet apps add @ or .com, for example).

The portrait keyboard could either look the same or take advantage of the extra height by adding another row of keys.

It would be more of a challenge in landscape orientation, however. Would Apple pillar box the Keyboard? Scale it to fit? Stretch it to fit? Split it, iPad-like, to fit?

A wide screen landscape keyboard is harder to predict, and doesn't seem to enjoy as big an advantage from the extra pixels.

Custom interface apps

Apps that don't use the built-in interface elements would be letter-boxed or pillar-boxed in the short term (or if abandoned, for as long as they remain in the App Store), and updated to fit the new screen ratio as soon as developers get around to it.

Custom interfaces, like games, would simply be letter-boxed or pillar-boxed until they're updated.

Web and web apps

The web and HTML5 web apps are largely seen as size and aspect ratio resilient. They'll flow content into and around the space they have, and simply show more or less of it, depending on the height or width of the display. In mobile, they'll typically size or re-size to fit as well. Some websites and web apps will need very little or no changes to fit the new ratio perfectly. Others, especially more static sites that made fixed-asset assumptions, may need more work.

In portrait orientation, this means we'll typically see the same size content but more of it. That's because the width hasn't changed but the height has increased, and the content will fill the extra space.

In landscape, on fixed-width sites, we'll see slightly larger content but less of it. That's because the width has increased but the height hasn't changed, and the content will scale up to fit the new width. Fluid-width sites will likely simply fill the new space, keeping the content the same but showing more of it. (Though the nature of line breaks mean less additional text content would fit in than it would in portrait mode.)

Because of the extra width, web content will typically scale to fit it. That means bigger content, but less of it.

Videos and movies

The current iPhone screen is 3:2. Most web video (i.e. YouTube) and most modern TV shows are 16:9. That means, where the current iPhone has to letterbox these types of videos, a 16:9 iPhone could show them full screen with no distracting black bars.

Movies are typically shot at close to 16:9 or wider. 16:9 is 1.77:1. Most modern movies are between 1.85:1 and 2.40:1. The Avengers is 1.85:1. Star Wars is 2.20:1. Wider movies would still require letterboxing, albeit with thinner lines.

That means most videos will be bigger, and look better, on a 16:9 iPhone.

A 16:9 iPhone would require no letterboxing for typical web video or TV shows, and thinner black lines for typical movies.

Backwards compatibility

Supporting both legacy 3:2 iPhone screens -- everything from the original iPhone to the iPhone 4S -- and the new 16:9 ratio would be trickier. It seems unlikely that anyone would be happy with new, widescreen apps getting chopped off at the sides or top and bottom on old, standard screen devices.

Due to the way the App Store works, separate apps for old and new iPhones isn't a great solution either. Developers wouldn't be able to give new versions away for free to existing owners, and existing owners wouldn't want to pay full price again for what's essentially the same app at a different ratio.

That leaves the ugly but not unworkable option of multiple binaries or at least multiple assets to support older devices and the the new iPhone all at the same time. Depending on the app, there could be some efficiency achieved by sliding elements around to fill or conserve space, but worst case it's another big bump in file size. More apps hit the 50MB cellular download limit, and the lower-end iPhones can hold fewer apps.

And if an app is universal and already has an iPad interface, that would make for three versions (or at least two with more complexity) in one binary.

So why would Apple go to 16:9?

Given the need to sell more iPhones and make a better product, and given all the challenges listed above, why would Apple go ahead with 16:9? Why would they say "yes" to this screen ratio and not proudly "no"?

Content really is king

iOS devices have always been a screen surrounded by the least amount of other stuff necessary to make it work. The screen, more specifically the content it displays, is everything to Apple. There needs to be a bezel, there needs to be mics and speakers and the barest possible amount of buttons and ports. There needs to be a battery and electronics. But as much as that can be minimized, as much as the screen and the content it's showing can be thrust forward, the better.

Design is constant compromise

If Apple doesn't want to make the actual physical phone much bigger, if they can't make the side bezel any thinner, and if they want to make the screen bigger and the content it displays even more immersive, there's only one direction left for the display to grow.

Both the iPhone 4 and the iPad 2 designs took away visual cruft from the sides. Rounded bands were flattened, think frames were removed and buttons and ports hidden behind.

Now, maybe, Apple is ready to chip away at the front.

It's not an edge-to-edge screen, it's not a transparent display, but given the limits of current technology and the premise that Apple wants a bigger screen without having to make a bigger phone, it's the best compromise they can make.

And with less faceplate and more screen, it could be a more immersive, and a better product.

Predation over competition

There's a school of thought that, since Apple's iPhone outsells all larger screened Android phones combined on major U.S. carrier networks, Apple doesn't "need" to go to a larger screen for competitive reasons. However, that doesn't mean they won't go there for predatory reasons.

Just because people are buying more 3.5 inch iPhones than larger Android phones doesn't mean people prefer 3.5 inch screens. It means, as a total package, they prefer the iPhone. Some users no doubt compromise on a larger screen size just to get an iPhone. Others no doubt compromise on getting an iPhone because they really want or need a bigger screen.

Apple may just have run some numbers and determined that a 4-inch iPhone could outsell large screen Android devices by even more. With a similar casing size, no current users are likely to jump ship. With a larger screen, however, some who chose size over iOS might just make a different choice. Introducing a bigger screen could increase the iPhone's addressable market, and sell more phones.

Conclusion

While rumors continue to grow about the 4 inch, 16:9 iPhone, October is a long way off and Apple may yet decide a more conservative, less ambitious iPhone screen is the way to go.

If Apple does go with a 4 inch, 16:9 iPhone, they already know how they're going to do it and how they're going to handle any problems, pain, and other turbulence during the transition. Apple has rarely shown an aversion to those things. They'll relentlessly pursue the future and expect users, developers, and even their own team to keep up.

And it'll be for two reasons and two reasons alone.

To make a better product and sell more iPhones.

Additional resources

• The 4 inch iPhone
• How Apple could provide direct document access in iOS 6
• iOS 6 and the opposite of widgets
• Is it time for Apple to revamp the Home screen?
• The challenge of bringing Siri to the iPad
• iOS 6 and privacy: How Apple should draw inspiration from Android for better app

The Photos app has provided a centralized iOS image repository for years. A Files app would bring the same functionality to iOS documents.

For a couple of years now, before every major release of iOS, I've begged and pleaded for a native iOS documents repository. Not a file system like OS X, but something that would do for documents what Photos.app and the photo picker do for images.

Right now, even absent a file system and hierarchy, it's still too complex, confusing, and unwieldy for users to remember, find, and attach documents in iOS. iOS 6 is a chance for Apple to change that, and a Files app and documents picker are simple, consistent, convenient ways to do it.

The problem. Times iCloud.

If I have a text document in iOS, I have no way to directly access that text document. I have to go to an app and hope that I can access the document from that app. If I created a text document in Simple Note, I have to remember I created it in Simple Note because chances are I can't easily open it in Drafts, much less in Apple's Notes app. If I have a Document in the Cloud, it's the same problem only worse. I can't just see Documents in the Cloud. I have to keep a mental list of what I've created over time and their associations, which is a lot of overhead for something that's supposed to be simple.

Conversely, if I have a text document in Dropbox, I can open the Dropbox app, see a list, pick the document I want, and send it to any iOS app capable of handling it. It's not elegant, but it works, and it fills a void left by Apple.

Frankly, I'd rather Apple fill it. They already do it with Photos. They already do it with Music. They already do it with videos. Files deserve equal status under the OS. Since Apple has has already done a lot of interface work for Documents in the Cloud, the material is all their. They just have to give it a face.

Right now iOS forces me to remember and hunt down the right app to find my file, and cloud stores present old fashioned file systems as a work around. Neither "just works right".

Mapping Photos to Files

As I've argued before, the template for a useful Files.app and documents picker is already present in iOS with Photos.app and the image picker. On the iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad, you can launch the Photos app and see a list of Albums, one of which is your local album, Camera Roll, another of which is your iCloud album, Photo Stream, and the rest of which are any albums you've manually created and moved images into.

Tap an album and you see a scrollable grid of the photos contained inside it. Tap a photo, you see the photo. With the Action, Edit, and Trash buttons, you can perform various image management, modification, and sharing tasks.

Now imagine you could launch the Files app a see a list of Folders, one of which is your local folder, Documents, another of which is your iCloud folder, Documents in the Cloud, and the rest of which are any folders you've manually created and moved documents into.

Tap a folder and you see a scrollable grid of the documents contained inside it. Tap a document, you open it in QuickView. With the Action, Edit, and Trash buttons, you can perform various file management, modification, and sharing tasks.

In a Files.app, document folders could be presented the same way Photos.app presents image albums.

Just like tapping into an Album shows you the photos in it, tapping into a Folder would show you the files.

And just like tapping a photo shows it to you, along with options, tapping a document would QuickView it, along with options.

Mapping image picker to document picker

Photos.app isn't the only way to access your pictures in iOS. There's also the image picture. It's an iOS controller that allows other apps, built-in and App Store apps, to access your photos. You can use it to both open images in apps, and save images from apps. It functions as a central image repository for iOS.

Launch Messages, tap the camera button, and the image picker lets you attach pictures to an iMessage or MMS. Launch Instagram, tap the pictures button, and the image picker lets you choose a photo to apply filters to and share. Launch AutoStitch, build a panorama, tap the Action button, tap Save to Camera Roll, and your composite becomes available in the image picker for any other app.

(Vexingly, while Mail.app can save images from an email, there's still no Messages-style camera button so you can add images to an email on-the-fly.)

Now imagine there was a documents picker controller that allowed other apps, built in and App Store, to access your documents. You could use it to both open documents in apps, and save documents from apps. It would function as a central document repository for iOS.

Launch Mail, tap the Files button, and the documents picker would let you attach a document to an email. (I can dream, can't I?) Launch Elements, tap the Files button, and the documents picker would let you open and edit any plaintext file on your device or in Documents in the Cloud. Launch Notes, create a document, tap Save to Files, and your document becomes available in the documents picker for any other app.

iOS already knows which files can be opened in which apps -- it shows you a list of compatible apps in the "Open In" Action (see the Dropbox cloud store example at the top). To keep things simple for users, it could only show compatible documents when the documents picker is called.

Also, it wouldn't replace the auto-save feature of apps like Notes. Those could still be saved within the and even synced the way they are now, utterly transparently. Document picker would just add the option to move a document to the central repository, the way photo editing apps can move a local image to the Camera Roll for universal access.

With the image picker, you're able to open or save a picture in an app. With the documents picker, you would be able to open or save a document in an app.

Both image and documents pickers would be especially useful if Apple applied them more consistently in built-in apps, like Mail.

Mapping Photo Stream to Documents in the Cloud

With Photo Stream, if you've chosen to enable it, any photo you take or image you save to Camera Roll gets automatically copied to the Photo Stream album, stored up on iCloud, and pushed to every other iOS device on your Apple ID (for one month or until 1000 other photos have pushed it off, whichever comes first), as well as iPhoto and/or Aperture (until and unless you deleted) on OS X, and the iCloud directory on Windows.

That's incredible from a backup and accessibility standpoint.

Take a photo of your child playing soccer at the game, your family can see it near instantly at home on the Apple TV. Take a screenshot on your iPhone and almost immediately drag it from iPhoto to Photoshop on your Mac.

Documents in the Cloud already ties into iCloud, but it lacks a user accessible interface on iOS like Photo Stream has with Photos.app.

It lacks Files.app.

Conclusion

iOS has become a mature operating system with text editing, multitasking, better notifications, and more. When it comes to file access, however, it's still in its infancy. Basic, needful things like attachments are still inconsistent between built-in apps like Message and Mail. Worse, Apple desire to abstract file systems to make things simpler for users has resulted in different, rather than less, mental overhead.

A unified document repository, modeled after the existing unified image repository, rounded out with more consistent attachment options, could be the best of all worlds. Users wouldn't have to remember which folder a document was in, nor which app. They wouldn't have to jump around to edit or share. Users could simply open any app capable of editing or sharing a certain type of app and go to work.

Having everything handled by a central Files repository and document picker would also keep Apple's sandboxed security model intact, at least as intact as letting email attachments or cloud store files open in compatible apps, or having a Photos app and image picker. It isn't as open or as useful, but is more secure, that full inter-app communication. It's not even Windows Phone contracts. But is far more useful than the model we have today.

I've wanted a Files app for two years running. Hopefully third time will be the charm.

Additional resources

• The 4 inch iPhone
• iOS 6 wants: The opposite of widgets
• iOS 6: Is it time for Apple to revamp the Home screen?
• The challenge of bringing Siri to the iPad
• iOS 6 and privacy: How Apple should draw inspiration from Android for better app

The release date for when the iPhone 5 comes out is the most frequent question we're being asked these days. That makes sense -- some people might need a new phone and don't want to get the current iPhone 4S if the next generation iPhone 5 (or whatever Apple decides to call it) is right around the corner. Others see competing phones like the Nokia Lumia 900, HTC One X, and Samsung Galaxy S III and want to see Apple's answer sooner rather than later. Still others always want the new stuff now, now, now. The day after Apple releases the iPhone 5, they'll want the iPhone 5S. That's just how it goes.

Past behavior

Apple, of course, hasn't even announced a next generation iPhone yet, much less the release date. If we use past behavior as the best indicator of future behavior, than for the first four years of the iPhone's existence, Apple announced the release dates at their annual World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) and shipped shortly thereafter. The original iPhone shipped on June 29, 2007. The iPhone 3G on July 11, 2008. The iPhone 3GS shipped on June 8, 2009. The iPhone 4 shipped on June 24, 2010.

And then everything changed.

Pattern breaks

First, the Verizon iPhone was launched on February 10, 2011. Then WWDC 2011 came and went without a new iPhone announcement. Last year's iPhone 4S wasn't announced until October, and didn't launch until October 14, 2011.

Many of the readers, listeners, and viewers asking us when the iPhone 5 is coming out are hoping 2011 was an anomaly or outlier, that the Verizon launch somehow causes a momentary blip in time and space, and that this year everything will return to "normal" and we'll somehow get a WWDC 2012 iPhone 5 announcement and June release date again.

The new normal

While it's impossible to rule anything out 100%, a June 2012 iPhone 5 release doesn't seem likely. First, it would be quite early in the product cycle to replace the iPhone 4S. While it took 16 months to go from iPhone 4 to iPhone 4S, reverting to a June release for the iPhone 5 means the iPhone 4S would only enjoy 9 months in the top spot.

Also, all those previous summer iPhone launches were preceded by spring iOS developer events where new versions of iOS were shown off. Last year's fall iPhone release didn't have a special spring developer release. iOS 5 was announced at WWDC 2011.

Likewise, Apple didn't have an iOS 6 developer event last spring either. Unless Apple doesn't plan on releasing a new version of iOS 6 this year, which seems unlikely, that leaves WWDC 2012 as the next venue where it could be introduced. If Apple is only going to show off the iOS 6 beta in June, that leaves little hope that the final version running on the iPhone 5 will be released any time before the fall.

Last year, the iPhone took the place of the iPod as Apple's big holiday release. Apple didn't even announce next generation iPods during their traditional fall event, just paint jobs. It was all iPhone. And given how important the holiday quarter is to Apple, that doesn't seem likely to change.

So when is the iPhone 5 coming out already?

iMore has heard that no new iOS devices will be announced at WWDC and that Apple is currently planning to once again release the next generation iPhone in the fall.

Based on everything we've heard, and everything we've seen so far, October 2012 is when iPhone 5 is coming out.

More information

• iPhone 5 page: Where we collect the latest information
• iPhone 5 Forum: Who cares what we think, tell us what you think!
• The 4 inch iPhone: A look at how Apple could implement a larger screen
• iPhone 5 to be another Google killer -- but with a twist: Why we're liking getting an updated Maps app, among other things.
• iPad mini: The other big rumor for the fall

It's a holiday weekend here in Canada. Victoria day if you must know. Except in Quebec where it's Patriot's day. Yeah, I don't care beyond the "holiday" part either. Actually, I don't care about the "holiday" part either -- I've heard of such things but rarely if ever experienced one myself. Still, I have family and friends congregating, and they're pressuring me to "get off that damn machine", so I'll keep this brief. Ish.

Grappling with Google+

I'm trying to use Google+ again. It's not easy but I'm trying. I go to Twitter and the last post is seconds or minutes old. I go to Google+ and the last post is hours if not almost a day old. I go to Twitter and I can interact with most of the people I know online. I go to Google+ and mostly I only see my friends from Android Central. And Scoble.

Maybe iOS and Google+ don't mix the way iOS and Twitter do, but Google put some effort into the new iPhone app. And Phil Nickinson swears it's a great platform for discussion.

So if you're there too, give me a shout and let me know what you love about it. Or hit me up on Twitter and tell me what you don't.

You can find me at +Rene Ritchie (or @reneritchie) -- and you we have a fantastic forum thread going where you can swap user names with other iMore members.

Do I believe

A 720p, 16:9 display at 4-inches would both shrink existing app UI elements and touch targets, and require an even larger letter and pillar box.

One of the most frequent questions I get asked online is "do you believe Apple will do XYZ." Right now it's "do you believe Apple will do a 4-inch iPhone."

Here's the thing -- my personal belief doesn't matter, and often doesn't exist. I'm not all Mulder or Scully about this stuff.

If Apple announces something, I'll report it. If we get a story from a solid source, or we can corroborate a story with a solid source, I'll report it in that context.

If you think I have secret information I'm not sharing, then either I don't or I can't. Either way, it won't inform any answer I give before it does a story I'll write.

So if you ask that question, the answer I'll give you is "I don't know".

Now if you ask me what I'd like or what I'd want...

Meet Gary, he's here to help

One of the biggest challenges we face at iMore is the incredible range of our audience -- from hard core geeks who want nothing more than the latest tweaks, to the soccer parents who just want to know how to iMessage a photo. It's an incredible challenge to balance our content and coverage to serve both extremes, and the many, many people somewhere in the middle.

Our current strategy is to do lots of really good stuff for both, and hope readers will congregate around what interests them, and either pass over, or pass along what doesn't.

And helping us do that is Gary Mazo, Mobile Nations' newest Senior Editor and all around how-to guru. Some of you might be familiar with Gary from the Made Simple Learning series that covered everything from BlackBerry to iPhones and iPads and back again.

Gary's done a few reviews and ninja-level how-tos for us so far, but this month he's going to be kicking it up another several notches.

If you want to know everything you can possibly know about iOS, or want handy links to pass on to friends and family so they can learn to do without you, he'll have you covered.

And he's starting a new series tomorrow.

3D movies are terrible

I've had 4 family birthdays in the last couple of weeks and all of them wanted to go see the Avengers. Yes, my family has good taste in movies. The first 3 times I saw it in blessed 2D. The last time I saw it in 3D. The 3D was, as expected, horrible.

Human eyes didn't evolve to focus and converge on different planes. That's why 3D makes overly sensitive people nauseous. The technology also isn't there yet. It's dark, and in the case of post-produced 3D, it looks more like layered paper bring dragged across the screen than actual depth.

It makes fight scenes look jumbled, special effects look cheap, and interferes with the narrative far more than it accentuates any experience.

The industry likes to tell us it's the next evolution and as natural a progression as silent to sound, black and white to color. It's not. It's a gimmick. And that they use it as a way to hike up ticket prices is a joke.

Hopefully Apple never announces anything 3D. Not a 3D display, not 3D content in iTunes. Not anything unless and until a technology comes along that works.

Like a holodeck.

Picks of the week, now more picky

One of the editorial goals of iMore is to more carefully curate what we present to our readers. We want everything we post to be deserving of your attention. With that in mind we're changing the way we do picks of the week.

Instead of editors and moderators choosing apps that interest them, we're reducing the quantity and upping the exclusivity considerably. Georgia, Leanna, Simon, and yours truly, with input from everyone, will make the calls.

Starting this week, we're picking one app, one game, and one accessory each week. And that's it. It might be brand new, or it might be a classic. It might be über popular or it might be a hidden gem. But it will absolutely be the best thing we could find.

Check it out, and let me know what you think. (We might even do them as three separate posts next week, if that works better?)

Features

Once again, an embarrassment of riches.

• The 4 inch iPhone by yours truly. If Apple does make the iPhone screen bigger, how could they do it, what would the benefits be, and what problems would it cause?
• Best free iPad games by Simon Sage. The definitive list of the best fun to be had on your iPad.
• Instacast vs. Downcast vs. Pocket Casts: iPhone podcast app shootout! by Ally Kazmuch. Which podcast app for iPhone reigns supreme?
• What Samsung's rise and Nokia's fall means for Apple and the iPhone by Chris Umiastowski. The smartphone market has almost literally turned upside down. Can the iPhone keep on capitalizing on the disruption?
• Facebook Pages Manager for iPhone review by Leanna Lofte. She had to review the Canadian App Store version, because Facebook hasn't seen fit to release it in the U.S. yet. Seriously.
• How to integrate all your social networks into your iPhone and iPad Contacts by Gary Mazo. He misses web OS and Windows Phone style social network integration. A lot.
• How to stop Twitter from tracking you across the Web by yours truly. Because knowing is half the battle.
• Pogo Sketch Pro vs. Kuel H12 vs. Jot Pro vs. Bamboo: iPad stylus shootout by Georgia. The results of our week long look at pro-level stylus pens. Which one is best, and which one is best for you?

Reading List

• Multiple Nexus devices could be a game-changer for Google and Android by Alex Dobie. If Google does press ahead with several hero devices from several manufacturers, what if anything does it mean?
• Four years of App Store by Federico Viticci. MacStories interviews developers about the state of Apple's mobile marketplace, and how it's changed -- and hasn't changed -- since 2008.
• Are apps bought or rented? by Ricard Gaywood. TUAW's resident number cruncher takes a look at the push-back on Instacast's new paid + in-app-upgrade pricing model.
• iCloud is the Difference Between Great and Excellent by Benjamin Brooks. iCloud is Apple's next generation digital hub. Competitors should be very afraid. (But probably aren't.)
• Web design manifesto by Jeffrey Zeldman. Finally, someone who proudly types even larger than Kevin Michaluk.
• Creating the Windows 8 user experience by Jensen Harris. An interesting look at the design decisions behind Microsoft's "no compromises" desktop to tablet to phone interface.
• How Yahoo! killed Flickr and lost the Internet by Mat Honan. A no-holds barred takedown of one of the worst corporate mismanagements in recent history. Something HP likely followed to the letter when running Palm.
• Hey did I miss anything? by Dan Harmon. Sony pictures drops the creator and show runner of the up-until-now-fabulous TV show Community, and apparently all the writers along with it, yet someone expects us to think the show will still be returning next season.

And now...

I'm getting off this damn computer.

Industry research firm Gartner just released its latest data on mobile phone sales for the first quarter of 2012. There are some interesting points to be pulled out of this report that I wanted to address.

Samsung dominates Android. Gartner’s data says that Korea-based Samsung shipped over 40% of all Android handsets last quarter. So that still leaves 60% of the market to other vendors, right? Yes, but according to Gartner none of these other vendors make up more than 10% of Android volume. None.

In terms of handset brands, Samsung is also now the #1 phone maker in the world, ahead of Nokia.

Nokia may have the #2 position in the market, but we need to remember that most of Nokia’s volume is based on the dying Symbian OS. Very little is based on its Windows-powered future at this point. So, considering that we’re looking at the death of the dumphone over the next few years, let’s look at smartphone vendors and volumes.

Samsung is the #1 player, having shipped 38 million smartphones. Most of these are Android powered, with a smaller number of Bada OS phones.

Here’s how smartphone market share looks, by vendor, based on the Gartner data:

1. Samsung with 26% market share
2. Apple with 23%
3. RIM with 7%

These are essentially the top 3 smartphone players right now. I realize that ZTE, LG and Huawei have a larger portion of the mobile market than RIM, but RIM is a pure play on smartphones whereas these three are not. Remember that other Android vendors have less than one quarter of Samsung’s volume.

What does this data mean to Apple?

Android is clearly taking a huge chunk of the market here, and that’s fine. The movement from the PC market to the mobile computing market has been a beautiful thing for Apple. They’ve gone from being a 6% market share player to something very significantly higher, depending on how you measure it. They don’t need to completely dominate the mobile phone market. Android will succeed, and so will Apple.

First and foremost, Apple just needs to keep delivering a beautiful user experience that makes people love their products. At the high end, it’s Samsung and Apple fighting it out, with Nokia and RIM trying to re-enter the race.

I’m more interested in what happens towards the middle and low end of the markets, in the fullness of time. This is not necessarily a 2012 or even 2013 strategy, but I’d like to see how Apple can profit from the continuing demise of Nokia.

Nokia still has almost 20% share of the mobile market. Granted, a LOT of that is at the uber-low end, and Apple isn’t going there anytime soon. But Nokia still has a very meaningful chunk of the mid and high end feature phone market. This is a dying market, and Symbian is a dying OS. Apple should be able to swoop in here and soak up a lot of the customers who move away form Nokia. After all, a Nokia customer may love the Nokia brand (maybe) but doesn’t necessarily feel the same way about Microsoft and Windows Phone.

With respect to pricing, if Apple can do something closer to what it did in the iPod space versus what it’s done in the Mac space, it can own a larger chunk of the lower end market. But I expect this to take a while. Tim Cook has made it abundantly clear that he won’t go to a lower price point if the product stinks as a result.

Either way, I love Apple’s positioning. They own a real platfrom, they’re already the #3 manufacturer of mobile phones in the world, and the #2 player is bleeding out.

Source: Gartner

If Apple changes to a 4-inch screen in the next iPhone (iPhone 5,1), how could they do it while minimizing impact on users and developers? Assuming everyone wants a bigger screen, how does Apple implement it without breaking existing applications, causing backwards compatibility problems, and otherwise fragmenting the platform and frustrating stakeholders? Let's try to figure that out.

For a while now we've been hearing that Apple hadn't yet decided on the next iPhone design, and that while they were then working off the same 3.5-inch size are previous generations, they were still considering increasing the screen size up to 4-inches (but no more than that).

Earlier today both The Wall Street Journal and Reuters published stories saying Apple was going ahead with a 4-inch iPhone screen, but didn't provide any details as to how a 4 inch screen would be implemented. And those details are arguably even more important than the screen size itself.

That's because change has ramifications. Every choice has a cost. When you're dealing with millimeters and milliamps and megabits-per-second, everything is a compromise.

If Apple has indeed chosen to go with a 4 inch screen, there are only so many choices they can make, compromises they can reach, and ramifications that can be handled, developers, and Apple itself.

Scaling the current iPhone screen up to 4-inches

Apple can simply take the current 960x640, 326ppi, 2:3, 3.5-inch display and physically scale it up to 4 inches. The pixel density would drop to 288ppi, which would be substantially less, but would still be more than the new iPad's 264ppi display. (And would still be higher than the new iPad display -- so hold that as close as you hold your iPhone and see how it holds up.)

The result of this type of screen would be bigger text, bigger controls and buttons, bigger touch targets -- in other words, bigger apps. There would be no extra pixels gained, so the amount of information that could be displayed wouldn't change, but the same amount of information would be displayed at a larger, presumably easier to consumer, easier to interact with size. Only at a lower density.

If the iPhone screen is simply stretched to 4-inches but the resolution stays the same, the physical size of icons, text, and everything else just gets bigger.

Does that matter?

Apple has invested heavily in the "Retina display" marketing concept. Retina, however, is a function of density over distance -- the further away you hold the screen, the lower the density needed for pixels to effectively disappear. Apple could, even tenuously, argue a bigger screen would be held slightly further away, resulting in little net loss of "Retina-ness". (They did that at the new iPad event, after all).

Put it all together and users get the advantages of a bigger screen, developers get the advantage of keeping a consistent screen resolution target, and Apple gets the advantage of not substantially disturbing or disrupting either of those groups. For these reasons, if Apple does go with the a 4-inch screen, this seems to me to be the most likely path they'll take to get there.

Scaling the current iPhone screen to 4-inches, pixel doubling it (again)

Apple could take the current 960x640, 326ppi, 2:3, 3.5-inch display and scale it up to 4 inches, and once again double the pixel count to 1920x1280. That pixel density would explode to 579ppi, which... is frankly insane.

Never mind how expensive that kind of panel would be, or how hard it would be to achieve usable yield rates, it's overkill. It would enjoy the same benefits as a physically larger display, but maintain Retina display -- even for a falcon.

But as Georgia pointed out on the podcast earlier, that panel would also cost battery power to light it up and graphics power to push that many pixels around.

Unless Apple wants to increase screen size substantially beyond 4-inches, and screen, battery, and mobile GPU technology advances while prices fall and yield rates shoot through the roof, this seems extremely unlikely.

Scaling the current iPhone screen to 4-inches, changing the aspect ratio

Apple could take the current 960x640, 326ppi, 2:3, 3.5-inch display but change the aspect ratio to something closer to 9:5 and increase the height to 4 inches by adding pixels. The resolution would increase to 1152x640, and the pixel density would remain the same. (It's just adding extra pixels to the top and bottom.)

Timothy Collins brought this up on The Verge and John Gruber of Daring Fireball pointed a giant spotlight on it. iLounge later added to this particular rumor pile.

Since pixel size remains the same, text size would remain the same, control/button size would remain the same, and touch target size would remain the same. Apps that use the built-in interface elements would simply add an extra row of information -- an extra row of icons, an extra row to the table or item to the list. The display would be vertically larger, and more information could be displayed on it. But what about apps that don't use built-in UI elements?

Safari would show more of a page's length, Mail would show an extra message, but games and anything with a highly customized, non-table based interface would have to be pillar-boxed. If developers made new versions that fill the extra space, those versions would be cut off on older iPhones. And if developers made 2 versions of the apps, it would mean more work for them and "fatter" binaries for users to download. (A universal app would go from having iPhone and iPad interface elements, to having old iPhone and new iPhone and iPad interfaces.)

While many things are possible, this doesn't seem like a very Apple-esque solution. It would fragment the iPhone platform for developers in a way Apple has resisted so far, and offer incomplete user benefits (increasing pixel count in only one direction).

More importantly, it would mean either significantly redesigning (or eliminating) the Home button, or lengthening the iPhone casing, or a bit of both. iMore has heard the Home button isn't going anywhere, and parts leaks have suggested it looks pretty much the same, so that leaves a longer iPhone and that... would be awkward. (Even if you remove part of the bezel to make room for it.)

Scaling the current iPhone to 4-inches, increasing the number of pixels

Apple could take the current 960x640, 326ppi, 2:3, 3.5-inch display and increase both the width and height to 4 inches by adding pixels. The resolution would increase to 1092x728 (or thereabouts), and the pixel density would remain the same. (It's just adding extra pixels all sides.)

As above, text, control/button, and touch target size would all remain the same, because the pixel density would remain the same. Apps that use the built-in interfaces could also add an extra vertical row of icons or list or row information, and could add extra "white" space in many cases, or vertical columns in some cases, to fill in those extra pixels.

While the user gets more information, unlike the vertical-only extension, splitting the extra pixels both ways means neither have enough room for an extra row or column of icons at the same pixel size. Safari would show a more of a page in both length and width, but Mail might not squeeze in an entire extra message, or that much more message contents. And now games and anything with a highly customized, non-table based interface would have to be completely boxed, the way iPhone apps are on the higher pixel count iPad display, or stretched to fit, which would look horrible.

If the screen gets more pixels, older apps would have to be boxed on the new iPhone the same way iPhone apps are boxed on the iPad. (Letter and pillar.)

If developers make new versions that fill the extra space, those versions would be cut off on older iPhones, or scaled down to fit that would likewise look horrible. (As I've discussed previously.)

So even more work for developers, maybe an @1.14x physical size, and still "fatter" binaries for users to download.

Automagic scaling, like some platforms promise with sliding components, is as mythical in design as "write-once-deploy-everywhere" is in programming. Lazy developers or incredibly programmatic app implementations might default to it, but pixel perfect designers are going to want pixel level control over every screen size and density.

That makes this solution just as unlikely as the last. Even if Apple takes the (now) unusual step of canceling previous generation iPhones when the new one launches, and abandoning their current lower price point strategy, there would still be hundreds of millions of 480x320/960x640 iPhones and iPod touches on the market, and developers would want their apps to run on that massive install base.

increase both the width and height to 4 inches by adding pixels. The resolution would increase to 1092x728 (or thereabouts), and the pixel density would remain the same. (It's just adding extra pixels all sides.)

Switching to 720p resolution

Apple could take the current 960x640, 326ppi, 2:3, 3.5-inch display and simply swap it out for a standard resolution screen like 1280x720, at 16:9.

There are Android Devices that use this screen, but so far they can't be made any smaller/denser than 4.3 inches (see the HTC Rezound). Does Apple might have the tech muscle to drive that resolution down to 4 inches any time soon?

The pixel count would be able to show more information horizontally and vertically, and it would be a Retina display and then some at 367 ppi. If icons and text stay the same pixel count, then the presentation would be smaller. If the physical size stays the same, pixel count has to increase.

That's what happens when you changing so many parameters at once -- physical size, pixel count, aspect ratio -- it has both the benefits and the problems of everything else already listed above.

A 720p, 16:9 display at 4-inches would both shrink existing app UI elements and touch targets, and require an even larger letter and pillar box.

Apple would need a third new interface size, existing apps would be boxed, and new apps would need to be cropped or scaled on older devices, resulting in a horrible experience and appearance. That makes this option seem the least likely of the bunch.

Switching to original iPad screen

Apple could take the current 960x640, 326ppi, 2:3, 3.5-inch display and simply swap it out for a much smaller version of the 1024x768, 4:3 iPad display. This would peg the density at 320 ppi.

Other than it being the same resolution as the original iPad and iPad 2, there's not much different about this option than the 2:3 1092x728 or the 16:9 1280x720. It has the same benefits and drawbacks as both the previous options.

The argument that it would let iPad apps run on the iPhone is problematic, however, as iPad apps have controls/buttons and touch targets designed for a much larger physical size and if you think shaving fingers down for a 7-inch version of the iPad is a challenge, reducing them to the needlepoints necessary for what would essentially be a 4-inch version of the iPad is even more so.

Under the "let iPhones be iPhones" motto, this doesn't seem likely either.

Something else

Apple could have some other way to handle a 4-inch screen, or combination of ways. Point of fact, Apple already knows what they're planning to do (if they're planning to do it), or at least which methods they're testing. That doesn't diminish the mental exercise of trying to divine it before Apple announces it, but it does put it in context.

If Apple goes with a 4-inch screen -- and until Tim Cook or Phil Schiller holds it up on stage, or it somehow leaks conclusively, a 4-inch screen remains an if -- these are just some possibilities.

And all of them have ramifications, opportunity costs, and compromises. Some simply more than others.

Additional resources

• iOS 6 wants: Files app and documents picker with iCloud
• iOS 6 wants: The opposite of widgets
• iOS 6: Is it time for Apple to revamp the Home screen?
• The challenge of bringing Siri to the iPad
• iOS 6 and privacy: How Apple should draw inspiration from Android for better app

With both Mothers Day and a birthday in the family this weekend, I didn't have time to compile my usual weekly column. But there are a few things I'd like to comment on and draw your attention to. So let's dive right in.

Podcasts

We've changed up the format of iPhone & iPad Live so that we're talking about less, but talking about it more in-depth. We'd gotten a bunch of feedback about this over the last few months, with many viewers and listeners saying there was just too much news and not enough analysis, too many app mentions and not enough opinion or discussion about how we use them, too many accessories and not enough comparisons. Well, we listened. Now we have one, more in-depth spotlight topic each week and a couple of discussion points. We're still tweaking things, so please keep the feedback coming. (Due to popular demand, we're going to start featuring your feedback on the show as well -- so if you haven't left a comment on last week's episode yet, get to it!)

Speaking of podcasts, the feedback on ZEN and TECH lately has been off the charts (special thanks to the blogging community who've told us how much they like it). The world we live in is more stressful than ever, and Georgia is by far the best in the business at helping people center their inner geek and deal with their connected lives. If you haven't watched or listened lately, do yourself a favor and watch or listen now. It can literally change your life for the better.

Last but certainly not least, we had Loren Brichter on Iterate this week. He created Tweetie which became the original Twitter for iPhone, and is still Twitter for iPad and Twitter for Mac. He also invented pull-to-refresh. Yeah. Genius. Give him a listen.

Rumors

iMore is really careful about rumors because we really value your attention. We're not a rumor site -- we're an enthusiast site. 9 out of 10 times we'll just link to rumors posted on rumor sites. A few times a year, however, we're fortunate to get some really good information about upcoming Apple products, and we're able to check into it and determine it's really good information. Like the iPhone 4S and the new iPad. It's never all the details, so sometimes we misunderstand pieces (i.e. we heard quad-core for the new iPad, and it turned out to be specifically quad-core graphics, not CPU), but overall the info we've gotten has been rock solid. Here's hoping last week was no different.

• 7-inch iPad on track for October 2012 release, $200 to $250 price: Apple doesn't want to leave any room for Amazon in the lower-end tablet space.
• iPhone 5 to be another Google killer -- but with a twist: A new Apple-powered Maps app in iOS 6 might just be the tip of the iceberg.
• iPhone 5 design still not finalized, still no big screen, still no metal back, still on track for October release: Despite some recent rumors to the contrary, we've heard Apple hasn't settled on a widescreen display or metal back yet.

Features

Some great stuff this week:

• Jailbreak concepts Apple should implement in iOS 6 by Ally Kazmucha. Last year Apple took Notification Center, Wi-Fi sync, and more from jailbreak. What should they take this year?
• Is there a future for jailbreak? by Ally Kazmucha. On the flip side, if Apple keeps Sherlocking jailbreak, is there a future left for it?
• Weekly Photo Contest: Black and White! by Leanna Lofte. She's been showing you how to build your iPhone photography skills, and here's your chance to wins some prizes.
• iOS 6: The opposite of widgets by yours truly. Rather than having widgets that take information from apps and splay it on the Home screen, we want that info inside other apps.
• SkyDrive vs. Dropbox vs. Google Drive: best cloud storage option for iPhone and iPad users by Ally Kazmucha. Whether you're new to cloud storage or simply want to check out other options, here's your breakdown.

And the stylus showdown begins:

• SGP Kuel H12 stylus for iPad review by Georgia. Your best bet for long-form note-taking.
• Adonit Jot Pro stylus for iPad review by Georgia. What you want if you're a technical artist.
• Wacom Bamboo Stylus review by Georgia. An okay stylus but not as good or as cheap as the pro-level competition.

Keep an eye out for a pro-stylus battle royal on iMore TV this week!

We're just under a month away from Apple's WWDC 2012 and with it, an expected preview of iOS 6. Last year, we had a list of features available through jailbreak that we wanted Apple to make mainstream in iOS 5. Apple listened, and we got everything from Notification Center to Wi-Fi sync. This year is no different -- once again we have wants. Here are my top jailbreak concepts Apple should implement in iOS 6.

Widgets API

Developers don't currently have the ability to develop widgets for Notification Center. If Apple would open up API for widget access and allow developers to integrate them with current app offerings, it could open up a whole new world of possibilities. This ability is already available on Android and other mobile platforms.

Jailbreak apps have been taking advantage of widgets since iOS 5 was released. There are several widgets that allow access to contacts, system toggles, music, battery info, quick Google searches, and more. Having access to all kinds of settings and apps right from Notification Center is much more convenient than digging for an app or system setting.

Notification Center enhancements and quick replies

While iOS 5 was a huge improvement over the way notifications were handled under previous versions of iOS, there is still room for improvement. Jailbreak apps like IntelliscreenX and LockInfo offer much more control over notifications than stock iOS does. You can fine tune notifications down to the tiniest detail. Do all users need this ability? Absolutely not. But a compromise would be nice.

First, find a way to make the Lock screen more intuitive. Right now all Lock screen notifications are dismissed the moment you swipe to unlock. By all means, clear the screen, but why not keep the notifications available in the window shade until they've actually been viewed, like they are in Notification Center proper.

Second, add the ability to clear app badges the same way Notification Center can be cleared. One little X gets rid of an entire list in Notification Center, but there's no way to get rid of badges in an app without hunting down and viewing every alert individually -- if you can find them.

Thirdly, make in-app banner notifications actionable. Right now if you tap them you're ripped out of the current app and sent into the source app. Having to exit one app to respond to something as simple as an SMS or iMessage, or tweet, is irritating. BiteSMS and Messages+ for jailbreak have offered this functionality for a long time. Enhancements of this nature would make the entire experience of using the iPhone or iPad much faster and much better.

Siri API

While Siri is great at dictating notes, punching out emails, scheduling Reminders, and sending messages, it can't do anything beyond that. Yet. And even if Apple expands it to support other integrated services, like Twitter, it still wouldn't enough.

Having options like sending out a tweet via Tweetbot, or adding a task to Clear, or otherwise letting App Store apps integrate with Siri directly would be a welcome addition. Jailbreak apps such as AssistantExtensions add tons of functionality to Siri. It'd be nice to see that become official in iOS 6.

Better multitasking gestures and shortcuts

Right now the iPad has limited multitasking gesture shortcuts but the iPhone and iPod touch have none at all. Jailbreak apps like Zephyr have brought gesture shortcuts to iPhone and iPod touch, but this is really something Apple needs to slap a coat of paint on and release as stock in iOS 6.

Tabbing through apps should be easier. Sure there's the iOS 4 fast app switcher, but swiping is faster. Custom gestures for favorite app access would be great as well.

Mail enhancements

Mail has previously been given a unified inbox, threaded messages, and flags. Otherwise it's not much different from the days of iOS 1. Mail Enhancer allow jailbreakers to better handle and sort mail on their iPhone or iPad. You can color code different mail accounts so you know what account a message is from when in the unified inbox.

And for the love of all things that are good in the world, can we please have multiple signatures for mail accounts? For users with separate accounts that they use for different purposes, editing signatures can be a huge pain. I may not want a client having my home phone number but I want my friends and family seeing that in my signature. Allowing multiple signatures is the only feasible solution and hopefully it's on the slate for iOS 6.

In addition to per-account signatures, per-account mail tones would be a nice bonus. Sometimes work mail needs to stay on when personal mail does not (or vice versa).

Better Folder functionality

iOS 4 brought the addition of Folders but their functionality remains limited.. The iPhone only allows you to place 12 apps within a folder while the iPad allows 20. Sure, the iPad screen can show more apps at one time, but the difference harms users who want a consistent Home screen setup between devices. For example, if I have 15 productivity apps and keep them on both my iPhone and iPad, on my iPhone I have to have 2 folders while I only have one on my iPad.

Jailbreak apps such as Infinifolders and Folder Enhancer have been around before iOS supported folders. They've also been more functional. Both allow you to stick as many apps as you want in a folder and either page through them like you would Home screen apps or scroll vertically, whichever you choose.

Nested folders is also something jailbreak apps allow for. I frequently use this feature for game folders. I have my strategy, puzzle, adventure, action, and other types of games inside of one main games folders. Unfortunately, it's probably far too hierarchical and "file system-like" for Apple to ever consider.

Themes or Home screen refresh

It's about time for Apple to re-design the Home screen or give us a way to customize it if we want to. iOS 4 introduced the ability to set a picture as your Home screen background but besides that, the Home screen we all know hasn't changed much since the inception of iOS. There's always an argument for familiarity and experience which Apple prides themselves on but it's beginning to look a bit dated.

Jailbreakers have been theming their iPhones for years. While I don't necessarily want my iPhone looking like an Android phone, apps like Shrink allow me to change icon size while apps like Winterboard give me the ablity to change up fonts and status bar icons.

It's highly unlikely that Apple will ever integrate even an Apple exclusive Theme Store into iTunes, but at the very least it would be nice to see iOS 6 bring with it a newly designed Home screen or a few options for customization.

Your iOS 6 want list

What jailbreak apps can you not live without that you'd really like Apple to add stock? Are there any quirks or oddities in iOS that you really can't stand and use jailbreak as a solution?

Hit the link below to let us know in our forums!

Additional Resources:

• What jailbreak features do you want most in iOS 6?
• Best jailbreak apps for new iPhone users
• Jailbreak and unlock discussion forums

A couple of years ago Steve Jobs called a Town Hall meeting at Apple and rallied the troops by saying the next iPhone, which was to be the iPhone 4, would be an A+ update and take it to the turncoat Google and their Android operating system. According to our sources, a similar sentiment is being expressed by Apple in Cupertino again this year, but with a decidedly different twist. Instead of just hitting Google and Android in the market place with better hardware and software, and in the courts with patent litigation, they're going to hit them where it really hurts.

While the exact numbers are hotly debated, it's long been said Google makes more money off iOS than they do off their own Android operating system. The reason for this is simple -- mainstream iOS users tend to use the web and apps more than mainstream Android users, and iOS is filled with Google services. The built-in Maps app is powered by Google and provides sponsored search results. The built-in Safari web browser defaults to Google Search and serves Google Search ads. When iOS users use those services, Google makes money. Regardless of whether or not iOS or Android is winning in the market place, Google is winning in the wallet.

And Apple wants to end that.

Removing Google from Maps is an easy step in that direction. As reported by 9to5Mac earlier today, and as we've confirmed from our own sources as well, iOS 6 will come with an updated Maps app that removes the Google backend and replaces it with an Apple backend.

This isn't without precedent. Both Apple and Google used to use Skyhook for Wi-Fi router location mapping, and both have now switched to in-house databases. Google used to license map tiles and has since re-drawn them themselves. Apple has bought 3 mapping data related companies, and could have either re-licensed or redrawn tiles by now as well.

For the end-user, the interface is the app, and switching out backend pipes is far more transparent than altering front ends. Mail is Mail regardless if it's being fed by iCloud or Gmail. The same holds true, in large part, for Maps.

So in this case, the goal is more interesting than the process -- to remove Google as much as possible from iOS.

Realistically, Google Search will be tougher to replace since Google enjoys an almost monopoly sized share of the search space. But it may not be impossible to displace. Apple is already intermediating Google Search with Siri and that will likely continue.

Google isn't in the search business, it's in the data collection/advertising business. It doesn't make money when you search its index, it makes money recording your information, aggregating it, and brokering deals for it. Search isn't the product it sells. We are. If Apple steps in and makes the queries on our behalf, and returns them on Google's behalf, Google is cut out of the important parts -- the money.

All of this is in stark contrast to January 2007, when then Google CEO Eric Schmidt took the Macworld stage with then Apple CEO Steve Jobs to celebrate the Apple/Google iPhone partnership. That was before Google pulled a 180 and turned Android from a low-end Windows Mobile and BlackBerry competitor to an iPhone competitor. That was before Apple started suing Android manufacturers and Steve Jobs threatened to go "thermonuclear".

And that's before Apple decided to stop helping Google's revenue stream, data stream, and perhaps bolstering their stock profile, by giving them built-in access to iOS users, and Apple branded data deals.

Now, Apple isn't just fighting back by making the best iOS software and iPhone hardware they can, and by trying to legally force Android manufacturers to stop copying Apple. With iOS 6 on the upcoming iPhone 5 and rumored 7-inch iPad, they're fighting back by removing as much of Google as they can as well. By denying Google access to iOS eyeballs and data.

If history is any indicator, both new devices will sell incredibly well, and tens of thousands of new customers, and hundreds of thousands of newly updated customers, will be funding and feeding Google less than ever before.

This time Apple's fighting back by hitting Google where it really hurts -- in the wallet.

Last week I ruminated out loud about whether or not Apple needs to redesign the iOS Home screen. We've continued to discuss it on the podcast and in the forums and I realized something: as much as it'd be nice to information from apps and make it glanceable on the Home Screen, it'd be even better to take functionality of apps and make it accessibly from within other apps.

Sure, it's nice to be able to see today's date on the Calendar icon, and it would be nice to see today's weather on the Weather icon and so forth, and information density could absolutely stand to be improved on the Home screen. And yes, there's an argument to be made that familiarity is a feature and Apple won't mess with the app launcher, the familiar mechanic by which hundreds of millions of users feel comfortable using iOS. But either way, that's a fleeting concern -- I don't spend much time hanging out on the Home screen.

Apple has said all along that the goal of the iPhone and iPad was to get out of the way. They're essentially giant screens so that, when you launch an app, the device becomes the app. When you're in Calendar, it becomes a calendar. When you're in Phone, it becomes a phone. When you're in a game, it becomes that game. Arguably, the Home screen is just a simple app launcher because all Apple wants you to do is unlock your iPhone or iPad and launch apps as quickly as possible. They want you in apps. And that's exactly where I am. I'm in Twitter. I'm in Campfire. I'm in Safari.

The problem is, when I'm in an app, if anything else happens, I'm forced out of that app and into another app. If a notification pops up alerting me to an iMessage or an email, and I want to either read all of it or respond, I have to stop what I'm doing, leave the app I'm in, go to the source app, and then respond.

Notifications are actionable but not immediately functional. I can't "quick view" a Tweet or a Facebook message, I have to go to the Twitter or Facebook app. I can't "quick reply" to them in-app, I have to go back to the associated apps to respond. That either causes me to ignore messages I may not really wish to ignore, or to wrench myself out of what I'm doing to go handle them immediately.

There's more to this equation as well -- Windows Phone-style contracts so apps can better communicate with each other, and an iCloud aware Files.app so documents can be picked in-app as easily as photos and videos.

We may no longer have model alerts in iOS that you can only ignore or act on immediately, but in some ways, notifications today remain as binary as they ever were.

By contrast, jailbreak apps like BiteSMS let you quickly respond to a text no matter which app you're in. Your app (or game) pauses, a text entry box is overlayed, you enter your message, you hit send, and you're current app resumes. With apps like LockInfo, you see an email notification, and you can tap a button, and read it without even unlocking your device.

Those may seem like subtle differences -- a pause of state rather than change of state and back -- but in practice it's far more efficient. It reduces a lot of friction, and makes the experience far, far better.

It could be implemented as a popup or added to an existing layer like Notification Center (tapping the icon goes to the app, tapping the snippet flips Notification Center around and shows a preview/reply bow, for example). Apple has all the tools to make it happen.

So rather than widgets, which take app data and put it on the Home screen, I'd far prefer functional notifications that take app interactions and put them wherever I happen to be.

And I'd like it in iOS 6.

Additional resources

• iOS 6 wants: Files app and documents picker with iCloud
• The 4 inch iPhone
• iOS 6: Is it time for Apple to revamp the Home screen?
• The challenge of bringing Siri to the iPad
• iOS 6 and privacy: How Apple should draw inspiration from Android for better app

There was a time when power users simply had to jailbreak their iPhone as a matter of necessity. If you wanted to get any serious work done with iOS, you had to jailbreak. If you wanted apps, if you wanted copy and paste, if you wanted multitasking, if you wanted proper notifications and Lock screen info, if you wanted Wi-Fi sync, if you wanted any number of features users of other platforms took for granted, you had to jailbreak.

But iOS has evolved. Year after year, Apple has added features, sometimes copied them directly from jailbreak. And each time, the functionality gap closes, the reasons to jailbreak become fewer, and the number of users who jailbreak become fewer along with it.

iOS 5 was the turning point for many. Could iOS 6 be the final straw? Could we be approaching a future where Jailbreak has little or no legitimate place in most iPhone and iPad users lives?

The good of the many vs the good of the few -- or the you

Almost all the big ticket innovations that Apple has brought to iOS, jailbreak brought first. Prior to iOS 5, to pick but one recent example, if you wanted real, unobtrusive, notifications, you had to jailbreak and install apps like IntelliscreenX and LockInfo. MobileNotifier had a strong influence on the way that Notification Center handles notifications today.

With iOS 5 Apple introduced Notification Center. And they did them in a way that catered to the mainstream. There are no difficult settings to weed through or overwhelming menus and options like you find in LockInfo or IntelliscreenX. Is Notification Center perfect? Certainly not. But it's easy. And that's what matters to the majority of consumers.

IntelliscreenX and LockInfo do far more, far better than Notification Center, but to many former jailbreakers, Notification Center does enough, good enough, that they'll stop jailbreaking and just make do.

Not everyone, but a significant number of people.

Innovation at the speed of freedom

Apple only releases one new version of iOS a year (or 16 months last year). While they have interim updates in between, those are adding increasingly fewer new features, and never add major, system-level changes. Jailbreak, by contrast, never stops. New tweaks and new utilities are always being developed and released.

That means jailbreak is typically faster at discovering and delivering new features. While the masses may not know they need a feature or function until Apple gives it to them, power users typically want it before Apple can or is willing to give it to them. To keep to the same example, jailbreak users had LockInfo and IntelliscreenX and Mobile Notifier long before Notification Center shipped.

Whether this year will bring with it a newly designed Home screen or other major new feature, odds are it really won't be that ground breaking to jailbreak users.

In this aspect, jailbreak will continue to be a breeding ground for many developers that want to push the limits of what the iPhone and iPad are capable of. They'll bring the future to us today.

But again, the amount of users who need a cutting edge level of functionality is less now than it used to be. Apple has taken care of the low hanging fruit and for the most part, only niche-needs remain to be filled. That means less people will go through the trouble to jailbreak because it's increasingly not worth it for them. Good enough is good enough and perfect isn't worth the trouble it takes to get it.

The rejection objection

Many developers that find themselves rejected by Apple for one reason or another have used Cydia, the jailbreak app store, as a way to distribute their apps. Whether Apple rejected an app because they manipulated the iOS file system, or because it duplicated -- and sometimes improved! -- the functionality of a built in app, or because it hooked into and changed a part of the system Apple simply doesn't want changed, Cydia (or another jailbreak app store) remains the only way to get certain apps.

However, while there are apps that Apple will never let onto the App Store under current policies, Apple is rejecting less apps than they used to. Often there will be some neutered version of an app that does something similar, and unless a user really needs a specific prohibited feature, they'll increasingly suck it up and make do with the App Store. Again, good enough.

Themes and toggles and tweaks, oh my

Even though Apple adds more and more native functionality with each major revision of iOS, there will always be a niche group of advanced users that want to customize and fine tune their experience beyond what Apple allows. This holds true for rooting and homebrew communities on other, more "open" platforms as well. For some of us, there's just never enough. We'll customize and flash down to the ROM level if we can.

For the iPhone and iPad, whether it's a new look for the Home screen and icons, fast access to Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, or other Settings, or system extensions for Notification Center, folders, Siri, or more, there's almost no chance Apple can will meet these needs, especially not any time soon.

These jailbreakers are still jailbreaking, and likely will for a longtime to come.

Illegitimate interests

While we have a zero tolerance policy when it comes to app theft here on iMore, we simply can't talk jailbreak without facing the reality that some segment of the user base jailbreaks simply to steal apps. Those are the users that will probably continue to jailbreak regardless of how much functionality Apple adds. They could care less. It doesn't matter how nice Starbucks is inside if all someone wants to do is steal coffee.

It's a sad reality but one that exists on almost every platforms, mobile or otherwise.

Those who jailbreak to steal aren't the ones that keep Cydia going. If they're stealing App Store apps, they're most likely not paying for jailbreak apps. The users who support jailbreak open their wallets to support the jailbreak community -- they like paying for apps and themes and tweaks because they know that's how they'll get more of them. Same for app store apps (and coffee!)

Some users will continue to jailbreak to steal apps, but if that's ever the only reason left to jailbreak, the community would likely stop looking for exploits, creating tools, and making great jailbreak software. It's a dead end.

(Considering Cydia is still chugging along, arguably better than ever, it's a good sign that there are still many users out there who jailbreak for legitimate reasons.)

A tale of two systems

As iOS becomes more refined and functional, certain users who used to jailbreak find it no longer worth their effort, and they either settle into, or settle for, stock. However, Apple will never be able to please everyone. In fact, pleasing everyone is the opposite of Apple's philosophy. Apple will continue to make the iPhone that Tim Cook and Jony Ive and Phil Schiller and Scott Forstall want to own and use. That will suit the mainstream just fine, but it will continue to leave many other users wanting more or different.

There may be less casual jailbreakers now than there were before, and there may be less reason for average users to jailbreak now than before. Good enough may be good enough for many.

But not for everyone, and not for those for whom better or perfect is a very personal, sometimes changing target.

iOS may make more and more users happy, but jailbreak will remain, giving advanced levels of control and customization, and allowing users to "beta test" the future. The users that will be interested in doing that are the tinkerers, hackers, and mobile enthusiasts. These are the users that see a new piece of tech and have to have it or want to find a way to get their current device to duplicate another platform's functionality before Apple decides they can have it. While this will always be the case for some, it isn't the case for many.

You can never predict the future. Apple or the carriers could crack down on something that drives more users to jailbreak again. A breakthrough new feature could appear on a competing platform and jailbreak could once again offer it well in advance of Apple. But it will never be the same as the heady days when you had to jailbreak just to run apps, or just to use an iPhone outside the U.S.

Jailbreak under iOS 5 is not what it was under iOS 4 and the same will most likely hold true with every iteration of iOS to come. As more features are added and the needs of many would-be jailbreakers are met, the numbers will continue to dwindle and users that once swore by jailbreak will find themselves weighing out whether or not jailbreak holds value for them anymore. At some point, iOS will cross the threshold of being good enough for some jailbreakers to being good enough for many.

And that's okay. Because the jailbreakers who are left will be just as passionate and just as needy as always. There may be less as a percentage of the total user base, but those who remain, who still want jailbreak, will really want it. They'll need it.

And that -- sense of shared purpose more than any number of people -- is what makes a community.

Instacast 2.0 is a significant update to one of the most popular iPhone podcast clients. It changes the user interface and user experience while lowering the entry price and adding an in-app purchase for additional functionality. Both of those things have caused some controversy. Our own Seth Clifford, co-host of iPhone & iPad Live and Iterate is clearly on the "ticked off" side of this particular equation. And he's clearly got his Hulk pants on for this one.

Instacast released its 2.0 update yesterday to some Twitter fanfare. As a regular user of the app, I updated immediately. Now, to be clear, I don't love Instacast. In fact, I have lots of personal issues with it. But as a regular listener of podcasts, it sucked the least of all the apps I've tried, and I've tried many. I wish so much that Apple would add even the most basic subscription support for podcasts to iOS within the native music app, but they haven't, and it doesn't look like they will any time soon.

What I found after updating was an interface that remained just as abstruse as the initial one, with the "added value" of reduced functionality. Most notably, the default behavior for podcasts downloaded within the app was altered. The original behavior of the app was that when podcasts were downloaded, they would stack up in a list, from oldest at the top to newest at the bottom. Now that order is reversed, to list the newest at the top. Which fundamentally changes the only way I listen to shows.

Read the rest of it via the link below. To be fair, there are some people who seem to really like the Instacast update. I haven't spent any real time with it yet, but plan to. The previous version, as Seth states in his article, had significant usability problems (as do all the iOS podcast clients I've tried).

Source: Seth Clifford

And there came a day, a day unlike any other, when Earth's mightiest mobile sites found themselves united against a common threat. On that day, the Mobile Nations was born -- to provide the coverage no generic tech blog could provide! Through the years, their roster has prospered, changing several times, but their glory has never been denied! Heed the call, then—for now, the Mobile Nations ASSEMBLE!

BlackBerry World 2012

Our sibling site, Crackberry.com did a fantastic job covering BlackBerry World 2012. Head on over there to read all about it, or check out reading list below for Kevin Michaluk's round up. tl;dr version: They loved it. I watched the Keynote stream and... it was more of a mixed bag for me. When RIM should have rushed to adapt to a post-iPhone world, they took so much time they nearly destroyed their brand. When they should have taken their time to release a proper tablet, they rushed and let the PlayBook drop like stone. Now, when they're bleeding market share and user base each and every day, they're taking their time to get BlackBerry 10 as perfect as possibl. It's absolutely the right thing to do, but they simply may no longer have the time or technology left to do it.

They weren't expected to show anything at the keynote but they ended up showing just a little bit. It was interesting -- very much the PlayBook made phone. It's heavily gesture-based, which means discoverability will be a problem and it'll skew towards a more savvy, less mainstream audience. But that's exactly who RIM is targeting.

The new CEO, Thorsten Heins, apparently came off far, far better than his predecessors during the event. During the keynote, however, he tragically maintained the Regis Philben schtick of Mike Lazaridis -- constantly staying on stage and consistently interrupting during tech demos. Hopefully when RIM watches the replay, they'll stop that from happening again. They also have to stop RIM Australia from doing dumb, distracting stunts just says before their big events.

RIM has a lot of challenges ahead -- they're incredibly late to market, their developer platform is still remarkably unfocused, and what they showed on stage did not appear to be as far along as what Steve Jobs showed off in January 2007, some six months before the original iPhone launch. Steve Jobs, however, didn't send developers at Macworld home with prototype hardware. He also didn't pledge $10k paydays for certified apps. Hopefully both those things will help make up the difference for RIM.

Bottom line, though, the only thing that really matters now is shipping. They have to nail the BlackBerry 10 landing. And they have to nail it hard.

Samsung Unpacked

Android Central likewise killed it at Samsung Unpacked. Unfortunately, Samsung did everything they could to kill the event first. Sure, I'm used to the polish and precision of an Apple event, but there's just no excuse for a lot of what happened at Unpacked. It was as if no one bothered to rehearse the presentation before hand.

Samsung announced the hugely anticipated Galaxy S III to thunderous applause and the director immediately cut to the crowd -- where no one was clapping. Samsung announced their new, rain drop inspired audio tone, it sounded like someone peeing, and the Samsung rep herself looked aghast -- and called it "bizarre". On mic. Not only did they invoke Palm's river stone design philosophy, claim technically if not morally correct invention of Palm-like wireless charging, they managed to match the creepy lady motif of Palm's early, ill-fated advertising with truly strange videos all their own.

They also announced Samsung versions of Siri and iTunes Match, after earlier announcing a Samsung version of iCloud.

Given the build-up -- a build-up Samsung orchestrated -- it's understandable that there were a lot of heads shaking after the event. Last year Samsung blew HTC out of the water with the best Android phones on the market. This year, when compared to HTC's new One kit, they came up decidedly short.

Rumor repeats

Hey, did you hear? The iPhone 5,1 might have a newly redesigned micro dock connector and a widescreen display. It's been "confirmed".

And it sure sounds familiar. It's almost as if it had been reported months and weeks ago.

If you hear a rumor, and it's been reported before, telling your readers that lets them better assess the likelihood of the rumor. That's the job of a writer -- to serve the reader.

Features

Now for some original content.

• Best free iPad apps: Leanna leads team iMore in the presentation of 50+ awesomely free apps for Apple's tablet.
• Post iPhone ergo propter iPhone: Yours truly begins to explore the strategy Apple has used to try and continuously off-balance their competition and force them into a constant cycle of reaction.
• Pandora vs. Slacker vs. Spotify: iPhone music streaming app shootout!: Ally takes a look at the three most popular U.S. streaming music solutions, and helps you pick the very best one for you.
• iOS 6: Is it time for Apple to revamp the Home screen?: Yours truly again, this time taking a look at the iOS Home screen, how it compares in terms of usability and information density to competing platforms, and whether Apple needs to address any discrepancies.
• Siri six months later: Community report card: the iMore nation tells us they're just not using Siri and we try to figure out why.
• Apple’s next big thing: You know who, looking at Apple's accelerating device profits, and what product could possibly keep them up.
• How to use iCloud like a Dropbox or Google Drive-style cloud store: Gary goes all ninja on iCloud to try to make it work in as close to a Dropbox style manner as possible.

Reading list

• Five Important Observations From BlackBerry World 2012 by Kevin Michaluk. A list of what RIM got right at BlackBerry World.
• Why You Can't Trust Tech Press to Teach you About the Tech Industry by Anil Dash. A case study in how it can be frustrating when someone else misses something you wouldn't (though you'll likely sometimes miss something someone else wouldn't either).
• Apple Is Doomed: The Phony Sony Parallel by Jean-Louis Gassée. Why Apple wasn't like Sony before, so can't be modeled on Sony now. By one of the guys at Apple between Steve Jobs' two acts.
• What retail is hired to do: Apple vs. IKEA by Horace Dediu. An interesting look at why IKEA, like Apple, isn't getting their retail implementation copied.
• I'm leaving the internet for a year by Paul Miller. As stunts go, there doesn't seem to be a clear win here. In some ways, the longer it lasts the less interesting it becomes. Like groups who live without electricity, the line drawn always comes off as arbitrary -- i.e. why are you allowed fire but not lightning?! (I do know I wouldn't last a day. Maybe a week if I was locked in a harem. But that's it.)

The Avengers

Joss Whedon's Avengers was fantastic. Pretty much the super-hero epic I've dreamed about since I was a child. We're talking about it, with lots of spoilers, and the type of nit-picks only those deeply in love with a film can pick. Jump on over to our Movie & TV Forum to get in on the action.

If you haven't seen it yet, go now.

"Post hoc ergo propter hoc" is Latin for "after it, therefore because of it". That it comes from Latin should indicate how far back that particular fallacy can be traced. Yet ever since Apple launched the original iPhone in 2007, it has been the point of comparison for every flagship phone, from every manufacturer, on every carrier. Just like "post hoc ergo propter hoc" isn't always -- or even often -- true, "post iPhone ergo propter iPhone" isn't always true. Yet time after time, phone after phone, everything from hardware design to software features are taken as derived from, or as being a response to, the iPhone.

There's a theory in combat that dates back to Sun Tsu, if not earlier, called "strike first to gain the initiative". If, in a fight, all you do is defend, you'll eventually make a mistake and get tagged. Even if you're a natural counter-puncher, if you don't take an opportunity when it opens up, at best you'll stall your way to stalemate (and get booed for your efforts), and at worst you'll mess up at some point and get clobbered. That's why a good fighter knows everything is an attack. Everything is an attempt to turn an opponent's mind away from acting and towards reacting.

It can be obvious -- a strike or shoot or something else an opponent has to deal with. Or it can be subtle -- a change of angle or distance that rocks them back on their heels or shoulders and messes with their balance and timing.

Those same essential strategic truths apply to the ancient battlefield, the modern Octagon, and business -- including the smartphone business.

In 2007 Apple didn't introduce a better Treo or BlackBerry, they introduced a better device. They didn't take a tiny little step that entrenched competitors could quickly match. They took a diagonal leap that entrenched competitors either couldn't quickly match, or didn't even understand. They changed the rules of the game. They attacked.

It didn't matter that the 2007 iPhone lacked apps or copy/paste or unobtrusive notifications or MMS or any of a dozen features existing smartphone has on their neat little checklists. It mattered only that multitouch, and the way the iPhone interface leveraged it to make a new experience, was so compelling no one cared what it was missing.

That was an attack.

The shift was so radical that for years after, every other flagship, or would be flagship phone was pitched by desperate competitors and attention-seeking media alike as an "iPhone killer". (Early among them, the Samsung Instinct -- a coincidence, I'm certain.) That the iPhone made every headline, that every device was cast not as something unique unto itself but as something wholly dependent on the gravity well of the iPhone, was the punchline. (No true iPhone killer would ever be called that -- everyone would be too busy talking about it to bother mentioning the iPhone.)

And since then, no one else has done much attacking. Hell, most of Apple's competitors ignored or derided the iPhone at launch. Smartly, Google didn't. They spun on a dime and turned their new Android acquisition from a BlackBerry or Windows Phone Standard (or Nokia Communicator, if you lived in Europe) competitor to an iPhone competitor almost over night.

Yet Apple didn't react. They didn't rush to match any Android features that the iPhone was missing or toss in a hardware keyboard to win over legacy smartphone users. They changed the rules again. They acted again. They attacked again. They announced the App Store.

Palm got back into the game sooner than the other traditional smartphone vendors. But when they made the leap from Palm OS to webOS it was far more audacious than Android. (That tiny, cash-starved Palm literally coded circles around mighty Google, and made a more Google-esque product than Google itself, should be scrawled in permanent marker atop the dessert-laden garden in Mountain View so as to never be forgotten.) While elements of the Palm Pre were inarguably iPhone inspired -- having the former head of Apple hardware, Jon Rubenstein, as their CEO and a lot of Apple engineers on their team will do that -- they played a smart strategy. Rather than matching iPhone features, they tried to hit Apple where Apple was weak -- multitasking, notifications, unified messaging. And unlike the early days of Android, they did it in an elegant, tasteful way.

RIM floundered with the Storm. And the Storm 2. And the Torch. Microsoft stumbled with Windows Mobile 6. And Windows Mobile 6.5. Still, other platforms started adding their own centralized software stores. Android Market (now Google Play), Nokia Ovi Store (no, really), webOS App Catalog BlackBerry App World. By and large, like Palm with the Pre, they tried to differentiate themselves by going where they thought Apple was weak -- openness. It turned out, however, that openness didn't translate into a better user experience. Having great apps and being able to take credit cards in large amount of global markets were far more important. (The "iTunes advantage" was the platform equivalent of having seized the high ground before the battle ever begun.)

Sadly, Palm never made webOS work well enough, fast enough, to catch on before they were brutally bought and betrayed by HP corporate intrigue and ineptitude. Android, however, got some body shots in. The Nexus One was smartly timed to the hit the market right in the middle of Apple's typical year-long product cycle. With great hardware, an improved OS, and features like voice control, it caught influencers at the perfect moment and got a lot of attention. The Droid, meanwhile, seized on the huge, Verizon-sized hole Apple left in its flank by being locked to AT&T in the U.S. for 4 long years. (The Evo did similar on Sprint, and I'm sure something did on T-Mobile as well...)

Apple's limited carrier footprint couldn't stop Android from gaining incredible non-AT&T marketshare, but the iPhone remained a strong enough device that it not only held its own ground with but one flagship a year, on one carrier in the U.S., but kept on growing it.

And then Apple changed the rules again. They acted again. They attacked again. They released the iPad.

It was a tablet launched in 2010 that didn't (and still doesn't) have a desktop or windowing system, that didn't (but now does) have multitasking for 3rd party apps. Like the iPhone in 2007, it didn't matter that the iPad didn't have nearly as much as the decade of Tablet PCs before it. It utterly obliterated and obsoleted its predecessors before it even shipped.

Again, Google reacted. They spun on a dime and rushed out (a still closed-source version of Android), Honeycomb, to compete in the tablet space. Absent the carrier opening it had with the iPhone, however, and left to their own devices, Android tablets haven't caught on. Nor did the incredibly iPad-like Palm TouchPad hardware, even with it's arguably still more elegant multitasking, notification, and messaging software. Nor did the BlackBerry PlayBook, similarly rushed to market without even a chance to put its email on.

Microsoft, meanwhile, finally got Windows Phone off the ground. Unlike Palm, however, they didn't target the iPhone where it was weak. They copied the weaknesses the iPhone had at launch. Weaknesses Apple, for the most part, had long since addressed -- no multitasking, no copy and paste, and an app store that needed to be filled from scratch. The design was new, much to Microsoft's credit. It wasn't the same old app launcher and swapping panels. That part Microsoft absolutely nailed. But taken as a whole, great new design with fundamental flaws in functionality (not to mention branding), it wasn't enough to slow the iPhone's momentum. The same interface gambit that gave Apple its smartphone mindshare in 2007 just wasn't repeatable in 2011. At least not by Windows Phone. (Maybe one of those transparent aluminum jobbies from Avatar or Iron Man, branded as XPhone, could have made that shot...)

BlackBerry is now trying to get back into the game, some 5 years later, with BlackBerry 10. Based on QNX it will offer realtime capabilities and the most promiscuous development story in the smartphone space. The PlayBook, like Honeycomb, shipped before it was fully baked. RIM seems prepared to take their time with BlackBerry 10. We'll have to wait see how that works out for them.

Until then, one essential truth remains indisputable -- Apple, who wasn't even in the smartphone or tablet business before 2006 -- has controlled the pacing of both industries since the moment ever since. While they've given up a step or two, while they've been cut and bloodied a little at times, for the most part they've stood at the center of the ring, cut off the angles, and forced everyone else to circle and fight Apple's fight going on 5 rounds now.

And if the Galaxy S III event is any indication, where Samsung introduced a bigger black slab with music matching and interactive voice control, no one is even challenging them for control of round 6.

Whether you like Apple and their products or would love nothing more than to kill them just to watch them die, everything that matters that's happened in mobile since 2007 is because of Apple and iPhone, or has been in response to Apple and the iPhone.

Post iPhone ergo propter iPhone.

And as someone who loves technology even more than I love the iPhone, I'm well past tired of it.

Siri, the iPhone 4S' flagship feature has been on the market now for 6 months. On one hand, Siri is absolutely amazing -- the first real virtual personal assistant with a personality right out of Pixar. On the other hand, Siri is obviously still in beta and often fails or works just enough to frustrate more than any outright failure. That makes it an odd choice for a flagship feature, but given the lack of a physical redesign and the obvious potential for awesome demos, rightly or wrongly, Siri was what Apple had to work with.

But does it work for us?

Survey says: Siri usage is low

iMore is an iPhone enthusiast site, so our community is predisposed to adopt new features quickly and use them extensively. Yet Siri usage among the iMore nation remains curiously low. As of today, with over 4000 votes cast, nearly 50% of our readers seldom, if ever, use Siri.

That's... astonishing. Here's the full break down:

• Almost 5% use Siri often, many times a day.
• Over 15% use Siri frequently, on a daily basis.
• Roughly 23% use Siri infrequently, at least several times a week
• Nearly 50% almost never use Siri, monthly or less.
• Just over 7% might use Siri, but it's not yet available in their native language.

Taken together, only 20% of our iPhone 4S users are using Siri on anything approaching a regular basis. That leaves 80% using it irregularly at best, and 50% barely using it at all.

This in spite of Apple showcasing Siri during the iPhone 4S introduction, putting it front and center on Apple.com, and making Siri the focus of most of the iPhone 4S advertising. They gave it the iPhone event keynote. They gave it Santa. They gave it Samuel L. Jackson.

And still few of our readers are using it.

That's not unprecedented, of course. The 2010 iPhone 4 launch saw a lot of attention placed on Apple's video calling service, FaceTime. But it's still interesting.

Siri community commentary: six months later

So why are -- or mostly aren't -- you using Siri six months after it was introduced? Here's what you've told us:

I prefer dictation to Siri most of the time. Use Siri not quite everyday, but I think several times a week is still pretty often. Now my 5 year old thinks Siri is great, talks to her several times a minute when i let her.

• Cody Hahn

Some of you in the US who think its bad should try Siri in the UK. It’s virtually useless. I’d love to ask Siri to locate the nearest pub or something, but we can’t even do that. Yes I know it’s in BETA, but I really had hopes they’d be releasing updates more frequently when I purchased my 4S to be perfectly honest.

• Chris Flowers

It’s always down, or something else is wrong. Or it just hangs when I tell her to call someone. Kind of giving up on it. Needs a few more years of seasoning.

• Dave D

I’ve stopped differentiating between Siri and voice dictation, as I believe it is largely the same animal. Siri interaction is a bit more problematic, so I often leave Siri alone and then dictate directly within a given app. For appointments and reminders, I ONLY want to use Siri. I almost won’t set the calendar/reminder item until Siri is no longer “sorry.” So, I use it a good once a day, at least, if you consider the above under the same umbrella.

• West

I use Siri daily.. with 90% success rate. I use it for meetings, reminders, appointments, looking stuff up, texting and calling. So easy to say call Wife at work and it is done.

• Craig

Siri NEVER works for me. I'm always in full signal 3G or Wifi at work and home and it takes her at least 30 - 60 seconds and I get to frustrated and turn it off. I am not a fan.

• Tytanious

I use Siri all the time. Reading, writing texts. Setting up reminders, making and editing notes, getting directions (navacon), toggling Bluetooth, wifi, flashlight etc... I'd be lost if I couldn't talk to my phone.

• Sherlock

I use Siri for reminders. The few times I've tried using it to send a text while driving I've gotten so frustrated I could have just as easily been texting. The whole idea is to to not take your mind off the road.

• Alli

I still use Siri and it is very helpful. As I stated in another thread, I use if primarily to text & respond to text messages while driving, set reminders, look up information and to dial contacts for me. I have never asked it frivolous questions and it did not factor in to my reason for buying my iPhone 4S. Could it be better? Heck yeah. Do I depend on it? Absolutely not. I've had a smartphone or a PDA phone for so long and I'm so used to doing things manually that I forget about Siri sometimes.

• JustMe'd

I use Siri everyday and every time Siri comes up I can't help thinking 3 things: 1. Why didn't we have this 10 years ago? 2. Why isn't this better? (Can't launch apps or modify settings) 3. How do people still "type" messages, it feels so archaic to type in 2012. It's great for reminders and meetings. Sending texts, timers for cooking or whatever it is you are doing. Why type???? I just don't get it besides being in an environment where you it wouldn't be appropriate to speak.

• jb 1007

Deciphering the disuse and discontent

For a few readers Siri has become important or even quasi indispensable. (Some of our editors have even joked Siri has made them so lazy that, if it's unavailable, they'll wait rather than actually type out a text message...) However, for many more readers, Siri simply wasn't part of their iPhone usage pattern. Based on the feedback we've gotten, it seems the disuse or discontent with Siri can be broken down into a few categories.

1. Some people just forget Siri is there. Siri is something new and new things don't always enter into, or find a place in, established workflows.
2. Siri not working -- either because it doesn't understand certain accents, because the required network connection fails, or because it simply takes too long to respond -- causes enough frustration that some users simply abandon it and don't go back. How many people would use Google if searches routinely took 30 seconds or more to return?
3. The inconsistent implementation -- ability to read texts but not emails, ability to launch some apps for specific functions but not simply launch an app, etc. -- creates an unpredictable or incomplete enough usability model that many simply exclude it entirely.
4. The lack of timely and consistent updates from Apple -- only one new language in 6 months and no new features or integration -- creates a wait and see attitude that, so far, is still waiting but not seeing.
5. The amount and type of Siri advertising creates expectations that the actual service (point #2) and support to date (point #4) don't live up to, leading to dissatisfaction.

There's also another alternative -- Siri is a new kind of interface meant for a new kind of user. iPhone sales numbers indicate it's the first smartphone to capture a predominantly mainstream audience. That audience isn't familiar with how smartphones historically worked, and something like Siri might ultimately prove more accessibly and less intimidating than a traditional app-launcher style interface. All of the factors listed above absolutely hurt Siri's chances of achieving that right now, but Siri could still achieve that in a future where it's both more reliable and more functional.

If that's the case, our iPhone enthusiast audience may never be the target for Siri, but the mainstream audience that is its target isn't using it, or isn't enjoying the use of Siri just yet.

Siri next steps

So six months later and Siri usage among iMore readers is low. What can be done to change that? The opposite of what we conjecture is causing it.

1. There's not much more Apple can do to boost Siri awareness, given that it's already the centerpiece of their iPhone 4S advertising, and making Siri popup like Microsoft Assistant would cause most of us to throw our phones at a wall. They can't just make people more aware of Siri, they have to make Siri more usable.
2. Improve Siri's ability to understand accents in the U.K. Since Siri claims to support U.K. English, supporting U.K. English is something important to do. No doubt the beta period, where Siri is fed more and more voice data, will help with that. Network connection issues are tougher. There's absolutely no excuse for Siri's servers on Apple's data centers to go down or even be slow to respond. Apple is rich enough to support the best technology and ensure among the best up times and availability in the business. Carrier connection problems. especially notorious in the U.S., are beyond Apple's ability to address unless/until they can put some base level of Siri functionality locally, on-device, as a fallback.
3. Adding more well-rounded features may be non-trivial but is necessary to create consistency in the Siri experience. If text entry or basic navigation was different, or non-existent, from app to app, it would make the iPhone unusable (see early versions of Android). Siri working differently, or not working at all, with some core apps makes it likewise difficult to count on. Adding the basics like Settings toggles, app launching, email reading, etc. would increase consistency and also solve general iOS pain points. ("Siri, turn Bluetooth off!" alone would likely bolster usage considerably.)
4. Roll out incremental updates. The power of online services is that they can be updated on the server-side, which means they're less disruptive and can be more frequent than larger software patches. Updates create confidence. Japanese was a great addition in iOS 5.1, but it was the only addition in 6 months and that's a long time.
5. Obviously Apple isn't going to stop advertising Siri unless and until they have something just as compelling to replace it with, and they're not going to make it tell Zooey Deschenel it can't connect to the network when she wants to get her dance on. That's the cost of marketing based on a beta feature that sets expectations the product can't meet. Apple doesn't often do it, but they've done it in this case and they're stuck with it now.

Conclusion

Six months later and a lot of you simply aren't using Siri. If you're one of them, let us know what Apple could do to get you on board. If you are using Siri, why do you think so many others aren't? The first developer betas for iOS 6 may be just around the corner, and the next generation iPhone 5,1 may just be on track for a fall release. What does Apple have to do to turn the corner on Siri and make it as mainstream and popular a feature as the iPhone itself?

Georgia contributed portions of this article

Image credit: iDoodle by Jason Harrison

At Macworld 2007 Steve Jobs pulled the original iPhone from his pocket, held it up high above the stage, and showed off the app launcher-based Home screen... that's pretty much remained the same ever since.

That's not entirely true, of course. Apple quickly added the ability to create WebClip icons for websites, and to re-arrange and delete them. With iOS 2 (iPhone OS 2) they added native apps to that mix. They increased the number of Home pages. They added Spotlight. They added wallpaper. With iOS 4 they layered in the multitasking fast app switcher. They layered in folders. The iPad, and the iPad alone, got landscape Home screen support. With iOS 5 they layered in Notification Center and Siri.

Is it time for something more?

Familiarity is a feature

To a casual user -- someone who only makes calls, plays music, takes photographs, and runs the occasional app -- the iPhone today works almost exactly as it did back in 2007. Just like a casual Mac OS X user can ignore the Terminal, iOS users can happily ignore Spotlight, the fast app switcher, folders, Notification Center, and Siri, and still fully use and enjoy their iPhone. They can wait years between hardware upgrades (and sometimes, because of that, software upgrades) and still pick up the latest iPhone and use it exactly as they used the first iPhone.

That may not matter to gadget geeks who change their platform as often as they change their jackets, but to mainstream users, to those for whom technology has traditionally been intimidating and inaccessible, that familiarity is a huge feature.

It's why Apple made the iPad work almost identically to the iPhone and said as much -- hundreds of millions of people already know how to use it.

It's why Home screen interface and experience isn't fashion. If you're bored by the iOS UI or UX, consider how little computer UI and UX has changed much over the last few decades. For all its other advances, for all it's design tweaks, OS X still has icons and folders on a desktop, the same as the classic Mac OS had generations ago. For all of Windows 8's Metro skins and finger-friendliness, it will still ship on beige boxes with full mouse and pointer support at its core.

That being said, mobile is moving at a blisteringly fast pace. While the iPhone and iOS were the startling new in 2007, they're now one of the oldest mobile experiences in the space. Interface and experience aren't fashion, but users are fashion conscious, and phones are subject to fashion trends.

Android has a huge marketshare. Windows Phone is getting a lot of attention, not just from AT&T but from designers. BlackBerry 10 may bring a new level of gesture-based interface to the table (if they can solve the discoverability issues).

These Home screen experiences not only look different to iOS and the traditional app launcher, but they function differently as well.

App launchers and information density

iPhone wasn't the first app launcher style Home screen. Not by a long shot. Long before smartphones, Palm Pilots were based entirely on the icon grid. When smartphones came along, the Treo retained the app launcher. Windows Mobile adopted it as well. Even today, you can find app launcher Home screens on webOS, BlackBerry OS, and Android. Some of them also add other layers, like Cards or widgets, but for the most part app launchers are never far away.

That's because they're familiar, as mentioned above. You see an iconic representation of something you want to do, you tap it, and it opens up. Because they're iconic (or supposed to be), and because human brains are great at pattern recognition, they scale well and can (usually) be picked out even among a large quantities of other icons.

What they lack is information density.

With very few exceptions, all an icon on an app launcher tells you is which app will launch when and if you tap it. They're static images and there's typically no information about the current state of the app, or any relevant data beyond the static image.

In the case of Apple's iOS, Calendar will show you the current date on its icon, and Apple created a badging system to overlay the number of outstanding alerts an app has pending. But that's it. With Notification Center, with a little extra effort, you can pull down snippets of those alerts, and see widgets for Weather and Stocks. However, the level of immediately available, glanceable data remains low.

Even if we consider the status bar, which shows carrier and Wi-Fi, time and battery, location and Bluetooth, none of it is actionable. It can't provide additional information or take you to it. (Although it has added persistent color bands for tethering, voice recording, VoIP or telephone calls, etc. and tapping those will take you to the associated app or Setting.)

Widgets and cards and tiles, oh my

There's no consistent Android interface, but stock Google, Sense, TouchWiz, "Blur", and other manufacturer implementations typically offer some variety of widgeting system. With them, you can have social statues, search boxes, clocks, news feeds, and a huge amount of glanceable data available right on the Home screen. They typically take up more space, however, might use slightly more battery and bandwidth as they keep up-to-date, and add an element of chaos to the layout. However, the amount of time they can save makes for an excellent tradeoff. (If that type of data is important to you -- some users simply don't find a use for widgets on computers or smartphones.)

webOS takes a different approach, shrinking entire apps down into "Cards" that stay live-ish on the Home screen, and thanks to more recent updates, can be stacked together. Flipping through Cards doesn't give you an iconic view or a widget-ized extract, but a look at the entire app, in its current state, with its current data. BlackBerry's Tablet OS essentially aped this approach as well. The only drawback is that sometimes some apps aren't as identifiable by their actual screen as they are by their icon (long white list views just look like long white list views). So, it might take a moment to find the exact Card you want, but probably not longer than finding and launching an app.

Both Android and webOS have easily accessible app launchers as well. Both also typically provide more information in the status bar, including the ability to tap into icons to activate drop down menus or initiate other functions.

Windows Phone 7 took an even more radical approach. They threw away the Windows Mobile app launcher and replaced it with a tile-based Home screen. Squares or rectangles represent categories of functionality, and can show a small amount of live content -- a picture, an avatar, a number, an icon, etc. It's not always great, however, since at times they take up the space of a widget while not showing much more data than an icon. (They're not as informationally dense as they could be, at least not yet.) And because they update, they're not as visually persistent, which means they lose the advantage of pattern recognition.

BlackBerry 10, which will only be released later this year, seems to be taking a hybrid approach. In the little they've demonstrated so far, they've shown something akin to a set of four cards, one per corner. Sliding panels also allow access to notifications, messages, and more. (Somewhat like Twitter for iPad. There's likely a lot more to it as well, and we'll hopefully see it as time goes on.

Siri

Siri is and isn't a Home screen. It isn't the traditional implementation of a Home screen -- something you can sit in and navigate around. It demands immediate interaction. But Siri can be used to access data and apps without having to move through the traditional Home screen. Rather than unlock, look for an icon, and launch, with Siri hold down a Home button, wait for a double tone, and speak.

Siri can by no means replace the traditional iOS Home Screen, but it can and does sit in parallel to the traditional iOS Home screen, and can replace its use in a few very specific ways. Yet it's clear Apple put significant work into Siri, not just into the server-side voice and context parsing engine, but the interface as well. Siri got a lot of the widgets that the traditional iOS Home screen hasn't. Depending on what you ask, all manner of clock and alarm and to-do and information snippets pop up. All incredibly well thought out and incredibly well rendered.

Getting a Reminder into iOS using the traditional Home screen, icons, buttons, and gestures is a chore. Getting a Reminder into iOS with Siri is remarkably fast. (Granted, when Siri works.)

Siri is still in beta, it's still not fully baked, Apple hasn't implemented it on the iPod touch or iPad. So, while Siri is no doubt part of the future, how much of the future is still to be determined.

iOS 6 and the Home screen

There's not a lot of low-hanging fruit left in iOS. Over the years, Apple has slowly but steadily added in most of the features that most of the people thought were missing in the original iOS (iPhone OS) -- apps, copy and paste, multitasking, notifications. There's a lot of ways to improve the existing functionality, but not a lot of functionality that's still missing. So on what tent poles will Apple hang its iOS 6 keynote this year?

Sure, Apple's bought 3 map visualization companies (but no map tiles), so a new Maps App could be one. I'd still sincerely love a Files.app repository, now iCloud enabled. Georgia still wants her Theme Store, where users can choose between a small amount of Apple designed iOS skins. But over the years, as iOS has matured, the amount of features truly "missing" has reduced considerably.

That leaves improving existing functionality. And that brings us neatly back to the question asked in this article's title.

Is it time for Apple to revamp the iOS Home screen?

Do you want them too? Do you need them too? If so, how so? Is it as simple as adding a widget layer to the existing multitasking and notification layers? Is it increasing Siri to the point where the app launcher becomes secondary? Or does it require something completely new, something that makes Windows Phone Metro and webOS and the upcoming BlackBerry 10 look old and outdated?

If Apple does make a substantive change to the Home screen, what does that mean for the hundreds of millions of mainstream users who are used to, perhaps dependent upon, the way things work now?

Apple has always been fearless when it comes to driving the future. They obsolete hardware and software often faster than the market itself. Is it time for Apple to apply that fearlessness to the iOS Home screen?

Additional resources

• iOS 6 wants: Files app and documents picker with iCloud
• The 4 inch iPhone
• iOS 6 wants: The opposite of widgets
• The challenge of bringing Siri to the iPad
• iOS 6 and privacy: How Apple should draw inspiration from Android for better app

From Apple II to Mac to iPad to... what exactly?

Last week, during their Q2 2012 financial results conference call, Apple CEO Tim Cook said that, in terms of sales, the iPad achieved in just 2 years what took the iPhone 3 years, the iPod 5 years, and the Mac 20+ years.

I'll let that the idea of that jump-to-warp-speed acceleration curve sink in for a moment while I digress into nostalgia.

Apple made mainstream the personal computer with the Apple II, the graphical interface with the Mac, and the multitouch interface with the iPhone and iPad. Decade after decade they made computing ever more personal, from clunky command line to intermediated mouse, to intimate touch. That is the single, relentless theme of Apple's existence.

They wove branches around the trunk of that theme as well, of course. Cameras and printers that didn't set the world on fire. Set top boxes that faded away or remain just a hobby. Social networks that have been anything but. Yet a few of those branches have been every bit as compelling as the main theme. The iPod popularized digital audio players and iTunes, digital audio. Apple Stores redefined the retail experience and the brick-and-mortar consumer electronic profit potential. The App Store revolutionized software delivery and the idea of mobile devices as platform ecosystems.

By any measure, Apple has had an unprecedented string of successes that not only dented the gadget universe, but knocked it sharply on its ass.

Now back to that acceleration curve. As mind-boggling as Apple's past successes have been, they also sharply bring this question into focus -- what's next?

Steve Jobs' biography raised television, textbooks, and photography as areas of interest. Apple has already dabbled in television with their aforementioned hobby, the Apple TV. They've stuck their toe into the textbook space with their recent Education Event and iBooks Author initiative. And, hey... they make iPhoto and Aperture.

There have been persistent rumors of an Apple television set proper, something that Steve Jobs may have said he'd cracked the interface for, and something Apple might have already prototyped to some degree in their labs. It remains to be seen if Apple will ever decide to release their own television set, however. And if Apple does release it, it's doubtful it could match or exceed the sales of the iPad, that it could it do in one year what the iPad did in 2. It could absolutely change the rules, the way the Apple II did, the Mac did, and the iPhone/iPad did, and disrupt the current television industry to the degree that it soon begins to redefine it, but it wouldn't redefine computing itself again.

An Apple television wouldn't be part of Apple's relentless theme to further democratize and popularize computing. It could further socialize it, since television is more familial than personal, but it would simply be another branch, perhaps lucrative as the iPod, or perhaps just a hobby like the Apple TV. It wouldn't be a leap beyond the iPhone or iPad.

Same with photography. Apple has already played the iPhone card, and that's a great play in the point-and-shoot, mobile photography space. High end (DSLR) isn't mainstream and supporting services is another sub-plot, not a theme.

Same with textbooks. Again, Apple has played that card with the iPad and everything else will just enhance that existing disruption.

So what does that leave? iCars, iWatches, iRobots? Unlike many of their competitors, Apple doesn't just drop nukes on the future and hope to hit something, some day. They fire cruise missiles and carefully adjust the course until they hit just exactly what they want to hit, just exactly when they want to hit it. That's why, despite their tendency towards patterns and cycles, they remain hard to predict.

The Apple II was released in 1977. The Mac some 7 years later in 1984. The iPhone and iPad some 20+ years later in 2007 and 2010. As much as the sales curve is accelerating, the big leaps in product category for the devices that serve Apple's main theme have slowed considerably.

That's why the branches are so important, and that's why there will continue to be iPods and iTunes, Apple Retail and Apple TVs. There will be products besides a personal computer and a mobile device, that mainstream consumers will still buy by the hundreds of millions, and are ripe for an Apple style revolution.

Apple will still pursue their main theme, and will follow the iPhone and iPad the same way they followed the Mac, but there will be a lot more iPods and iTunes along the way.

Perhaps Apple will get into mobile payments and further expand the reach of the iTunes checkout system (sure, Apple could buy Square and Foursquare -- and why not Squarespace -- while they're at it?). They could finally overcome the cataclysmic myopia of Hollywood by either funding creators directly and serving up more Dr. Horrible style made-for-digital content, or simply buy a studio like Sony did and force Hollywood, kicking and screaming, into the future (is Pixar for re-sale?). There are many, many opportunities ancillary to Apple's existing businesses over-ripe-to-the-point-of-rotting for innovation.

So, while every pundit and their analyst seems eager to rumor up Apple's next big thing while simultaneously dismissing all current things as "iterative", I'm eager to see all of it. From Mountain Lion and iOS 6 at WWDC 2012 to the 2012 iPhone this fall and the next new iPad beyond it.

Nothing Apple does exists in a vacuum. Sure, at some point in the future, when technology makes it possible, Apple might just re-revolutize personal computing again. Maybe they'll make it wearable or implantable. Maybe they'll make it more human, with a natural language and thought interface disruption that does to multitouch what multitouch did to mouse and mouse did to command line and command line did to punchcard.

Or maybe, just like the computer became the network, the device may become the ecosystem, and each element from hardware to software to service will drag each other inexorably forward. Maybe Siri and iCloud are the first indicators of that.

What better way to serve Apple's theme but for the next big thing to be a relentless stream of small things?

Image credit: iDoodle by Jason Harrison

June 11. That's the date we've long suspected but just this week had confirmed. Apple's 2012 World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) is now official hurtling towards us (or us towards it). But it's not the only things going on this week, so let's get to it.

WWDC 2012 and iOS 6

Apple announced WWDC 2012 at 5:30am Cupertino, California (PDT) time, less than 50 days before the June 11 start date, with a $1600 ticket price, and it still sold out in 2 hours. Many developers and interested parties had created scripts that would look for any change in Apple's WWDC website and alert them immediately. Others signed up for text message notification services. Still others networked with friends, family, peers, and others to keep constant vigil and light the web on fire the moment tickets went live.

Some got them, some didn't. No one seemed thrilled with the process. Probably not even at Apple. The list of problems are easy to identify -- too much demand, not enough availability, and a high stress, no-notice acquisition process. Solutions are harder to come by.

For gadget enthusiasts, however, the only real problem is anticipation. With WWDC comes Apple's annual keynote. In years past it's introduced the iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS, and iPhone 4. Last year it introduced iOS 5 and iCloud, but no new hardware.

And this year?

iMore has heard that, once again, there won't be any new iOS devices this summer, but like last year there's a lot of software for Apple to spotlight. No doubt we'll see OS X Mountain Lion get it's first public demonstration. We should also see iOS 6, or whatever Apple calls the next version of its mobile operating system. There was no iOS SDK event like there was in 2008, 2009, and 2010, so just like 2011 we're expecting WWDC to see the launch of the first iOS 6 beta.

And that should be interesting to say the least.

I'll be there all week, along with our apps editor, Leanna Lofte, and my co-host on the iPhone Live and Iterate podcasts, Seth Clifford.

Google Drive

Google Drive is finally here. Unlike Nokia Drive, which is a turn-by-turn navigation service, Google Drive is a cloud storage service. (English is funny, but not as funny as branding in English.) Based on how it's currently set up, it could also be called Google Docs+, but at this point I'm just happy it's not Google Play Drive.

And it's not bad. Prices are more than competitive and if there's anything Google knows, it's how to store data at scale. Some might have philosophical problems with the way Google monetizes all that stored data, but nothing's really free. If you don't want to pay with money, you're going to pay with access to your demographic and other data. Everyone has to decide from themselves what's a fair price and how they're willing to pay it.

Personally, I'm not switching away from Dropbox any time soon. While Google Drive is cheaper, Dropbox has momentum. All my stuff is already in there, most of the apps I use are already integrated with it, and Google Drive isn't better enough to make switching everything over anywhere near worth it.

I will add it to the mix, however, much as I did iCloud. Right now I'll use it as a big online scratch disk and see if anything further evolves from there.

A lot of that will depend on how long it takes the iPhone and iPad apps to ship, and how good they are. Sadly, I've come not to expect much...

Why can't great companies make great mobile apps?

Let's be perfectly blunt -- most of Google's iOS apps have been terrible at launch and haven't improved much since. About the nicest thing you could say about them is they make sure Facebook isn't alone in buggy apps from major corporations that should know better and be better. And I don't get it. These are two of the biggest, smartest, most talented, and certainly wealthiest technology companies in the world and they can't make a killer iOS app between them?

Indie developers, unimaginably more limited in resources, literally code circles around Facebook and Google when it comes to mobile. Look at Tweetbot. Look at Twitterrific. Look at Tweetie (before Twitter bought it). Look at webOS, which cash-strapped Palm put together on a shoe-string and a dream. Facebook for iPhone was mortally wounded when the original developer, Joe Hewitt, left the project and while it's improved slowly over time, it's not where it needs to be or should be. Not by a long shot.

Google has bought iOS apps (and canned them), Facebook bought Instagram, but neither has shown they have what it takes to transition from web companies to mobile companies. They're mobile immigrants, not mobile natives, and they're not enculturating well.

But mobile isn't just their future, it's the future. They need to do whatever it takes to nail mobile apps, and now.

Google has a chance with Google Drive for iOS to show us they're more than a wafer thin UIWebView wrapper and a terrible web-based authentication system. I sincerely hope they do.

Features

Lots of great stuff to shine the spotlight on this week.

• Siri co-founder talks to iMore about the future of technology, mobile interfaces, and implementing Siri: Ally got a chance to hear Dag Kittlaus speak and ask him some questions. If you haven't read it already, read it now!
• Best free iPhone games: Simon entered the wilds of the iPhone App Store, and hunted down and captured the very best free games available.
• Stellar Q2 2012 highlights why Apple is a must-own tech stock: Chris U. goes over Apple's killer second quarter to help us make better sense of the crazy high numbers.
• Ultimate guide to iCloud: If you've got questions about iCloud, the whole iMore team came together to bring you answers.

Ultimate guide to iCloud

Speaking of the Ultimate Guide to iCloud -- we got a lot of feedback on it. It was one of the longest articles we've ever posted and for a lot of you it was simply too long to be manageable. So we listened and we made some changes. Instead of stuffing everything into one post, we've now broken it up into several parts. The main article is now an index and each section has its own dedicated article (many of which we'll be expanding on in the near future). Check them out:

• How to set up, back up, restore, and update using iCloud
• How to set up and use iCloud mail, contacts, and calendars
• How to set up and use iTunes in the Cloud
• How to set up and use iTunes Match
• How to set up and use Photo Stream
• How to set up and use Documents in the Cloud
• How to set up and use Find my iPhone
• How to set up and use Find my Friends
• iCloud help and discussion forum

Reading list

• Unravelling Samsung's Galaxy S3 riddle: Alex Dobie of Android Central spends his time waiting for the Samsung event -- and Phil Nickinson's arrival in the Old World -- by going over what we can expect from the next great iPhone rival.
• Former RIM employee takes to reddit for some no holds barred Q&A: For those with morbid curiosity, CrackBerry reformatted a gobsmacking Reddit Q&A into much more legible form. (Or you can read the original on Reddit to get all the responses in a threaded view).
• My Dropbox Writing Workflow: Federico Viticci lays his text editing strategy bare. It's real, and it's spectacular.
• CinemaCon 2012: THE HOBBIT Underwhelms At 48 Frames Per Second and the rebuttal, Peter Jackson responds to complaints about 'The Hobbit' footage: I dislike 3D -- the human eye does not handle converging and focusing well on a fake, flat 3D plane, but I'm undecided on 48 fps. I'd like to try it out, I'm just not sure I'd like to risk trying it out on the Hobbit.

They've cut the hardline

Long week and they won't be getting shorter any time soon. Time to find another exit.

Carriers have a love/hate relationship with the iPhone. They hate Apple's control (because they want that control for themselves) but love the money and customer-retention having the iPhone on their network brings them. Sprint's willingness to pay damn near all the money in their pockets, and delve into whatever passes for a corporate second mortgage, proves that that point.

AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint sell Android because they want to. They sell iPhone because they have to.

Apple isn't exactly easy to deal with. Android gives carriers far more control, generally requires far less up front investment (in terms of subsidies), and promises a thus far inexhaustible cornucopia of new devices to thrust at consumers on a seemingly weekly basis. It just doesn't generate the revenue or reduce customer churn the way the iPhone does.

They tried. They really did. Verizon pushed the Droid and Sprint pushed the Palm Pre and the EVO. They had successes to be sure, especially in sheer volume of units sold. But they never came anywhere near iPhone levels of profit or customer loyalty. And at the end of the day, even for carriers, that's what matters.

Not that you'd know it by looking at their websites. Go to Verizon.com or AT&T.com or Sprint.com and iPhones have little to no home page presence and remarkably little wireless site presence.

Verizon's home page features the eye of Sauron the Droid. Their wireless page does have the iPhone in the first of three small blocks at the bottom, but the massive feature boxes are filled almost entirely by Android. There's even a token BlackBerry thrown into the mix. But no iPhone.

This despite Verizon selling 3.2 million iPhones last quarter, accounting for more than half the smartphones they sold (i.e. the iPhone outsold all Android and other smartphones combined.)

AT&T's home page is all about Windows Phone and Android, with Nokia grabbing one of the hero slides and HTC and Samsung getting the other two. On their wireless page Nokia repeats in the spotlight, with Android and cheapy phones playing backup. There's no iPhone in sight.

Yet AT&T sold 4.3 million iPhones last quarter, which was 75% of all the smartphones they sold, and 60% of all the on-contract phones AT&T sold period (including feature phones).

Sprint's home page has the iPhone in the third of four feature spots, and the fourth of four bottom blocks. They don't have a separate wireless page, so their home page does double duty.

Still, Sprint managed to sell 1.5 million iPhones last quarter. They don't break out how many smartphones in general they sold, however, so there's no way to calculate the iPhone's percentage of total sales.

And that's just in the U.S. Internationally, Apple sold over 20 million iPhones. Rogers in Canada reported 35% more iPhone activations, year-over-year, compared to just 20% more smartphone activations overall. (And their home page features Android and Windows Phone, and iPad, and their wireless page shows an iPhone only in a block advertising their Find my iPhone-like Phone Finder service.)

So with little attention, ad spend, and product placement, Apple's iPhone still accounts for most of the carriers smartphone -- if not all phone -- sales, and reduces their customer churn. And that probably drives them up-the-wall crazy.

Apple, who doesn't let them festoon the iPhone with their revolting logos, clog it up with their dodgy crapware, allow them to delay or refuse software updates, or arbitrarily alter casing designs, and charges them among the highest up-front prices of any manufacturer in the industry, is increasingly responsible for their financial and customer success.

And it doesn't even have LTE (yet) or a ginormous screen (likely ever).

If carriers had their druthers, manufacturers -- including Apple -- would be little more than dumb assemblers (much as, if customers had their druthers, carriers would be little more than dumb pipes). Yet as much as Verizon, AT&T, and Sprint would far, far prefer to sell the always amenable Android, customers, increasingly, want iPhone. So carriers increasingly have to deal with Apple. Even if they continue to try to find viable alternatives.

That's why carriers will never go all-in on iPhone promotion. They don't want to become entirely dependent on Apple (or any one platform). It's in their best interest to have several, highly competitive platforms on the market that they can hedge with, and against.

Still, it's interesting to imagine a market where carrier manipulation didn't influences the market. Free to compete strictly on customers and merits, would smartphones be more like tablets, and would the iPhone have the same relative positions as iPad does to Android tablets, BlackBerry PlayBook, and the like? The same position the iPod had in the carrier-free MP3 space?

Apple'S Q2 2012 results weren't quite as strong as last quarter’s (the holiday period), but year-over-year it was another set of records for Apple.

Apple Q2 2012 Highlights

• Revenue was $39.2 billion, profit was $11.6 billion and EPS was $12.30. Wall Street analysts had been expecting EPS of $10.06, so this is a substantial beat.
• Apple shipped 35.1 million iPhones, only slightly below the 37 million shipped last quarter (the holiday quarter). Impressive! This represents 88% year over year growth in unit shipments. However, over 2 million of the phones shipped were to help build up channel inventory.
• iPad shipments were 11.8 million units. This is down from 15.4 million last quarter, but is still 151% unit growth compared to last year’s March quarter.
• Mac sales grew 7% year over year, while industry analyst data shows that the entire PC market only grew 2%. So while Apple’s Mac business isn’t the sexy growth engine of the company, this product division is still kicking some Redmond butt.
• As expected, the iPod business is shrinking. Apple sold 7.7 million units compared to 9 million last year. They still control over 70% of the US MP3 player market, but obviously the strength of the iPhone is displacing the need for stand alone MP3 players.

Overall, these strong numbers have set the stock back up to $600, after cratering to about $560 over the last 11 trading days. Is it enough to help the company reach a new high? Perhaps not this week. But I think Apple will get there.

Wall Street’s only criticism is Q3 financial guidance. But that’s typical with Apple. The company notoriously plays down its earnings potential for the next quarter. Then, almost like clockwork, they beat their own forecast.

Apple currently says it will earn only about $8.68 in EPS next quarter. Wall Street had been modeling $9.93. It’s likely that analysts will pull in forecasts for Q3, but I don’t see this as a cause for alarm. Apple is in fine shape. It’s just that they had huge demand for the iPhone 4S last quarter and channel inventory (carrier shelves) were bare. Apple needed to stock them up. So they did. They shipped about 2.6 million extra iPhones to accommodate this inventory build.

Gross margin was also incredibly strong for Apple this quarter. In fact, they reported margin of 47.4%, a whopping 540 basis points above expectations. They say half of this strength was due to commodity pricing. When you’re as big as Apple I guess you’re bound to get better pricing on components. The rest of the margin beat comes down to unexplained one time items, and revenue mix. I find it amazing that Apple’s revenue mix helped margins considering that the more expensive “new iPad” is now selling. It has a more expensive screen, batter, radio, processor and a bunch of other upgrades so it surely has a higher BOM (bill of materials) cost. And they STILL delivered such stellar margins? Wow.

Tim Cook recently unveiled Apple’s big dividend plan. Will this put much of a dent in cash? It sure doesn’t look that way. Apple’s cash balance is now over $110 billion, up from $97.6 billion last quarter. They’ve certainly left themselves room to raise the $2.65 quarterly dividend.

During the Q&A session, Cook took a question on the highly visible topic of iPhone subsidies. He answered by saying that the subsidy is low in proportion to the net revenues carriers generate over the 24 month contract period. But he also said something else that I found surprising. Cook said,

“Our engineering teams work extremely hard to be efficient with data and differently than some others. And we believe as a result of this iPhone has far better date efficiently compared to other smartphone that are using sort of an app rich ecosystem. Finally, and this is most important, iPhone is the best smartphone on the planet to entice a customer who is currently using a traditional mobile phone to upgrade to a smartphone. This is by far the largest opportunity for Apple, for our carrier partners and its a great fantastic experience for customers. So its a win win win there”

So, Cook is saying that the iPhone is far more data efficient versus Android (not BlackBerry, notice the careful wording). But more important, customers who upgrade to their first smartphone still want the best phone ... hence Cook’s huge confidence in Apple’s upside.

On China: “There’s a lot of headroom here in our view”

In response to a question asking for more details on China, Cook said revenue was over $7.9 billion in the quarter. That’s up more than 3x over last year. If China was only 10% of Apple’s business, this wouldn’t be so darn impressive. But $7.9 billion is one fifth (20%) of total revenue. That fifth is up over 3x? Holy cow. Cook described the results as “mind boggling”. Pent up demand for iPhone 4S was a big part of the growth. But iPad 2 growth is strong and the new iPad isn’t even shipping in mainland China yet. Mac sales in China were also up 60% versus 6% for the overall market. So the halo effect is alive and well in China.

iPad Growth Opportunity Still Huge

Apple emphasized a few times that the supply of new iPads is constrained right now. They are selling them as fast as they can make them. They haven’t launched it in mainland China yet. The opportunity for iPad growth still seems insanely huge. The education (K-12) market is buying 2 times as many iPads as Macs. The lower pricing on iPad 2 has created a spur of demand in several countries. Cook points out that many industry analyts are forecasting the tablet market to be as big as the PC market by 2015.

Conclusion: The stock is a keeper

I’m hanging on for the ride on this one. I’ve been a very happy shareholder ever since the first iPhone came out. I like how Apple sticks to its view of the world and just executes with precision. There are a lot of mobile phone users who don’t have smartphones. Apple will capture its fair share of them. There are a lot of laptop / desktop users who don’t own tablets yet. Apple will capture a good chunk of those. And there are still tons of people who aren’t using Macs. Apple continues to gain traction there.

The stock may be trading at $600 again, but they have over $116 per share in cash. They’re piling on cash at an incredible rate. I don’t feel like we need to rehash the price to earnings multiple here, but it isn’t high. Given Apple’s growth, it seems to me this is a must own tech stock. But that’s just my opinion.

A little over a year ago I wrote a rather controversial editorial stating that iOS users don't ever need to kill all the apps in their multitasking dock (fast app switcher). A couple of months ago the subject was brought back to the spotlight, with other developers and bloggers reaching pretty much the same conclusion.

It remains true. There's no need to regularly "clear out" all the apps in your multitasking dock. We've said it, other developers and bloggers have said it, even Apple has said it.

But here's the thing -- sometimes Apple Geniuses will tell users to do just that. Which is what makes it controversial. Here's why:

Trouble-shooting is sometimes a slow, complicated process.

If a customer comes to the Genius Bar with one poorly coded app or rogue process that's continuously slowing down their iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad, or causing massive battery drain, figuring out which app it is, and fixing it, can take a lot of time and effort. It can involve buying system monitoring apps, rebooting a lot, launching apps, testing, checking system status, killing apps, rebooting, deleting apps, reinstalling apps, etc. etc. It can involve a lot of things that some Apple Geniuses believe mainstream, non-technical users will have trouble understanding and doing.

It flies against Apple's recommendation, it flies in the face of best trouble-shooting practices, and it makes advanced users cringe, but...

Killing everything, in that specific case, for mainstream users, is the fastest, easiest path to problem resolution.

So if a Genius tells your non-techie mom or friend to kill all her apps every day or week, that's why.

It's wrong. It's unnecessary, and you can certainly take the time to properly troubleshoot an issue for them. But that's why it's happening.

If a carrier, like AT&T, wants to improve profitability on iPhone sales, it has to do so by reducing the subsidy. The only way to reduce the subsidy is to get Apple to drop its pricing, or to sell at a higher contract price

Yesterday, on Wall Street, we saw something rare. An Apple analyst downgraded the stock from a “buy” to “neutral” rating. Most analysts who cover Apple are incredibly bullish. So it’s interesting to think about why this analyst, Walter Piecyk from BTIG Research, disagrees.

I haven’t seen his research report with my own eyes, so I’m relying on the good reporting done by AllThingsD here. The crux of the downgrade reasoning seems to come down to subsidies.

Apple sells its latest iPhones for over $600. This is well known by most industry pundits. This is how Apple can make such healthy margins compared to most other players in the market. Analyst speak for this price is ASP, or “average selling price”.

Carriers then subsidize the phone. In the US, typically the sticker price to a consumer is $199 on a two year contract. So the carrier is forking over more than $400 just to bring the customer onto their network.

This wouldn’t be a problem if the $400+ subsidy was a one time thing. But it isn’t. Every two years, customers are eligible to resign a new contract, and grab another subsidized phone. Many carriers, like AT&T, also allow you to upgrade early (before contract expiry), at a higher price. But that higher price still bakes in a huge subsidy on the phone.

Piecyk says, “We expect post-paid wireless operators to remain firm in their plan to stunt the pace of phone upgrades in 2012 and we expect to see some initial evidence of their success in the current quarter.”

He estimates that AT&T will implement stricter upgrade policies, and other carriers may follow suit. This could lead to fiscal Q3 iPhone sales of only $27.5 billion, or about $1 billion less than the average estimates (the Street calls this “consensus”). Remember Q3 is Apple’s June quarter since its fiscal year ends in September.

I don’t think it makes sense for carriers to spend tons of cash to let customers upgrade such an expensive phone one year into a contract. And beyond this, I think the average consumer doesn’t want to upgrade that early. While Piecyk may have a valid argument for a short term weakness in Apple stock, I want to think about this longer term.

I think the real risk to Apple could come from ASP pressure, not a small change in upgrade pricing. The carriers don’t like paying $600+ for iPhones. Most competing high-end smartphones cost less.

If a carrier, like AT&T, wants to improve profitability on iPhone sales, it has to do so by reducing the subsidy. The only way to reduce the subsidy is to get Apple to drop its pricing, or to sell at a higher contract price (say $299 instead of $199).

Both of these will be incredibly hard to execute. Unless there is collusion between carriers, it is hard to imagine that one of them would be willing to raise the iPhone contract price on its own. It would be a sure way to drive all customers to the other carriers. Apple may well have a contract with carriers that defines contract pricing, too.

Apple is also unlikely to respond to requests for better pricing from carriers. Apple sees itself in the position of power, which also happens to be an accurate view. They sell a premium product at a premium price. End of story.

I’m still bullish on Apple. I realize pricing will probably drop over time, but I expect this to occur alongside an expansion into many more markets around the world where customers can’t afford $600 for a phone. The iPod used to be a highly priced product too. As Apple perfected ways of introducing cheaper versions, it did so. The real risk to Apple comes if the company needs to lower prices in response to competition rather than as a way to expand global addressable market.

Another longer term risk is HTML5. I still think it will be a couple of years before iOS developers see a good reason to shift to HTML5. But when it happens, Apple could lose some of its control over customers, and the range (and quality) of apps on the App Store versus competing stores could narrow. As the user experience moves to the web instead of the OS, Apple products could be less “sticky” with those of us who don’t consider ourselves exclusive to the Apple ecosystem.

Obviously Apple stock has risks. Piecyk points out a short term risk. I’ve highlighted a couple of potential longer term risks. There are always risks. But from where I sit, I still think Apple has a lot of growth left.

With Facebook buying Instagram, the world's largest social network site scooped up one of the fastest accelerating social network apps. The cost for the acquisition was $1 billion in stock and cash. That's roughly twice what many thought Instagram was worth, which raises the question -- why?

It wasn't for the technology behind the social platform or the raw numeric user base. Facebook is the social network already, with a footprint larger than many terrestrial landmasses. It wasn't for the photos or fancy filters. Facebook is already the largest online photo repository on earth, and larger by such a degree that very little else can be seen outside their shadow. And a company one one-millionth the size of Facebook could come up with their own filter pack, or just clone Instagram's, faster than even the Google Play Store would approve the app. It wasn't for that app either. As buggy and beleaguered as Facebook for iPhone is, Instagram isn't exactly a user interface or user experience triumph. Viewed simply as a camera replacement, it's serviceable but not inspired, usable but not delightful.

Taken piece by piece, it's hard to see anything particularly attractive about Instagram that warrants a $1 billion pay day. But taken together? Taken as the sum of its parts? More than serviceable, more than inspired, and absolutely delightful.

Facebook just bought an incredibly fast growing social network with a passionate, engaged user base -- that's entirely mobile.

In a way, it's like IBM buying Microsoft just as DOS was about to get going. Or Yahoo! buying Google just before AdSense became a cash cow. Or Google buying Facebook back when a billion dollars would still have been cool.

Instagram was by no means poised to replace Facebook in any way resembling any of those previous generational shifts, but it was specifically poised to cause Facebook a huge amount of pain in areas where Facebook is extremely tender.

By easily letting users share photos in a way much funner, cooler, and mobile-centric than Facebook, like IBM with Microsoft, Yahoo! with Google, or Google with Facebook, Instagram left Facebook ill positioned to respond.

While it's almost terrifying to think of Facebook as the old guard or the establishment, the acceleration of mobile has made Facebook exactly that. Where IBM was a mainframe company at the dawn of PCs, Yahoo! a directory company at the dawn of ad-auctioned search, and Google a search company at the dawn of social, Facebook is a web company in a world increasingly dominated by mobile apps.

Other than as a way to enable cross-platform sharing and account management, and to serve as a billboard encouraging app downloads, Instagram barely even has a website in the traditional sense.

The more users go mobile, the more photos are shared on Instagram, the more friends tharey made and comments are exchanged there, the less time users have to spend on Facebook. As much as Facebook intercepted and walled off traffic that might have gone to Google (through an "open" web filled with Google served ads), Instagram was beginning to intercept and wall off social photography traffic that might have gone to Facebook.

No one ever sees their own disruption coming, but smart companies can act the moment it first shows up on their radar. Instagram was certainly showing up on Facebook's radar, and what better way to beat them than to buy them?

Facebook gets an injection of young, hip blood. Instagram gets deep pockets to either continue whatever strategic vision they had pre-acquisition (if they had one other than acquisition, that it), or to bring them into the greater Facebook experience. Right now Facebook claims they're going to keep Instagram "as is", but it's best never to trust giant corporations still in the heat of new purchase. For every YouTube there's a Flickr, for every Siri there's a Jaiku.

Either way, it's almost certainly business as usual for Apple. With iOS, Apple is already incredibly well positioned in mobile and while Photo Stream isn't a great mobile photo solution, Apple has the capability to improve it on their own. The increased quality of the cameras on both the iPhone 4S and iPad 3 show photography is a priority for them, as did the comments from Steve Jobs on photography still being in need of innovation.

While the idea of an alternate universe "What if Apple had bought Instagram instead of Facebook?" story isn't without it's theoretical appeal, it's also without any apparent upside. Sure, Instagram built into iOS would have given the iPhone filters like many Android interfaces have, and a social network on the opposite end of the hip spectrum from Ping. However, it wouldn't have helped Apple do the only thing Apple exists to do -- make more money for Apple.

A Facebook owned Instagram, as long as the app stays available for iOS, is pretty much the same as an independently owned Instagram. If Apple had, or ever would plan to integrate Instagram into iOS the way they did Twitter, previous differences with Facebook could now make that less likely, but certainly not impossible. And if Facebook ever scraps the iOS version, say to make it exclusively for, and central to, an Android-forked Facebook phone, it wouldn't be too hard for Apple to roll their own filters and turn on some form of commenting system. (Make all the Ping jokes you want, but hundreds of millions of users with sudden access to a Twitter-integrated social network for photons would fill an immediate gap, if nothing else.)

For iPhone users, the situation is pretty much status quo as well. You can export your Instagrams and kill your account if even the whiff of Facebook is too much for you. But day to day, photo to photo, it's going to be business as usual for everyone involved, and it'll likely remain that way for the foreseeable future.

Facebook bought Instagram precisely because they weren't Facebook, but could become something... next. While Instagram may or may not be worth $1 billion, being ahead of the disruption curve certainly is. And the best way to ensure that continues is to keep Instagram as not Facebook.

Running something like iMore is a little like the first regular season episode of Battle Star Galactica (2004). You jump, and then spend the next 33 minutes scrambling to do everything you have to do before the Cylons find you 33 minutes later and you have to jump again. It. Just. Never. Stops. When you're not catching news and writing it up, you're working on features or editing or planning future content and features. It's a machine with a lot of moving parts, which means there's a lot to keep track of and a lot to get done. Most of that ends up on the website in one way or another. But once in a while we get to branch out and give you something special...

The iMore app

We shipped it. After several months of hard work and a lot of finger-crossing come review time, the iMore for iPhone app hit the App Store last week. And wow but guys gave it a great reception! From the sheer number of downloads to the incredible feedback we've gotten, you've absolutely knocked our collective socks off. Everyone from iMore, Nickelfish, and Mobile Nations worked really hard on it, so we're thrilled that so many of you like it so much.

We're already hard are work planning out the next version, including iPad support and much, much more. So make sure you get your feature requests in now!

(And if you haven't downloaded it already, it's completely FREE, it's in the App Store, so grab it NOW!)

iPad mini redux

Week before last I wrote a story about the iPad mini, the still-mythical 7.85-inch smaller sized tablet that Apple has in the labs but may or may not choose to release (tl;dr: Apple's a go-to-market company and they won't release an iPad mini -- or any new product -- until there's a compelling and profitable reason to do so). Last Wednesday John Gruber of Daring Fireball, who has excellent Apple sources, said on his podcast that he'd heard pretty much the same and went over his own list of why and why not we may see an iPad mini (or iPad Jr.) soon. Fredrico Viticci of MacStories and Matthew Panzarino of The Next Web weighed in as smartly as well.

The iPad mini, like the iPhone nano, remains something Apple won't do because they can, but will do when they feel they should. When could that be?

Gruber speculated that an iPad mini could be a WWDC 2012, though we're still hearing that, once again, there won't be any new iOS hardware this summer.

Obviously

Speaking of John Gruber, he had an interesting back and forth with Sebastiaan de With of DoubleTwist over the tension between simplicity and obviousness.

These challenges aren't anything new of course, even in mobile. Going back to the Newton, Palm Pilot and Handspring/Palm Treo, Windows Pocket PC and Windows Mobile, there have been app launcher Home screens and simple, zen-like user interfaces. (Palm was famous for "counting clicks" to minimize how long it took to do something with Palm OS.) You want interfaces to be simple and obvious for users, but the focus isn't the simplicity or obviousness, but the users. You match the tool to the job, not the other way around.

When that doesn't happen, user interface, not matter how audacious, how brilliant, gets in the way. When it does happen, when it relentlessly serves the needs of the user, it disappears. There is no tension. There's almost no interface. (Not in terms of chrome or elements, but in terms of friction and cognitive load.)

When Apple (or any designer) succeeds, whether it's with something as utilitarian as Mail for iOS, it's because the UI is so consistent and clear you barely notice it. It's when my 2 year old godson can unlock an iPhone or iPad, navigate to his favorite game or app, launch it, and use it. Well. It's when my mom can discover, download and install, use and recommend apps in a way that encourages and delights her rather than frustrates and shames her.

It's not about chrome or no chrome, buttons or no buttons, gestures or no gestures, simplicity or complexity, it's about balance. It's about usability. It's about accessibility.

Apple is smart about this. iOS has the basic Home screen and that's all you ever really need to use. If you want more, you have the gestures, the fast app switcher, Notification Center, etc. Likewise on the Mac, a Unix geek can live in Terminal, a regular user in Aqua, and a new-to-the-Mac iOS user can easily relate to Launchpad.

When the right elements are in the right place, that's when everything from an OS to an app feels simple and obvious.

Sourcing

Since it's baseball season, let's go inside baseball for a moment. Every once and a while bloggers get stressed over how stories are sourced. We all work really hard on original content and exclusive reporting, and when we do a good job it's rewarding to get recognized by our peers with links back to that work.

iMore clearly and consistently places source links at the bottom of every article, so that readers can quickly and easily find where each and every story comes from (if they come from somewhere else). We also take pains to drive traffic back to the originating source, so they're encouraged to make more great content, and we have more great content to link to in the future.

Some sites and editors don't like that and think source links should be in the body of a post. Since the body of a post can contain 2-20 other -- mostly internal -- links depending on a story, in-body source links can also easily get lost. Often that's not the intention, but just as often it's the result. (It's especially evident to us when sites that repeat our stories get incorrectly attributed as the originator of those stories.)

If the author deserves to be highlighted outside the body, if the date, if the tag, if any number of other meta attributes deserve to be singled out and made noticeable, certainly the source link does as well.

Obviously there are limits and exceptions -- articles with multiple sources, like this one, can't clearly attribute each one in a source field so I'm linking in the body -- but that's where flexibility and editorial judgement are important. It's really the intent that matters. Good sites with good editors will get it right. They'll find the correct source and attribute it correctly -- and every reader will know where every story comes from, be it the site itself or some place else.

Features

Going from inside baseball out, once again we had some great features on iMore this week.

• Best iPhone and iPad apps for Major League Baseball fans: Gary handed us all a hotdog and tasty beverage, and showed us how to get the most out of opening day.
• Weekly Photo Contest: Flowers!: Leanna kicked off our new series of iPhoneography contests, just in time for spring, and entries so far are outstanding. Make sure you get yours in asap!
• How to fix a cracked or broken screen on the Verizon or Sprint iPhone 4: Ally's taking her DIY iPhone repair series to a whole new level. If you're using an older device, she'll absolutely help you keep it going as long as possible.
• Making the right choices: How we designed and developed the iMore for iPhone app: Seth opens his kimono (figuratively speaking!) and explains the thought process behind the new iMore app.
• How to use your iPad in direct sunlight: Georgia and Steph show how polarized sunglasses can be used to more easily see your iPad display in direct sunlight. They also point out it's not the orientation, but how different sunglasses require different orientations to work properly.
• I for one welcome our new Android Instagrammers: There was a lot of angst and acrimony surrounding the arrival of Instagram on the Android platform: It was silly, so iMore brought out the welcome mat and invited them on a photo walk.
• Great Artists Steal: Yours truly weighs in on the difference between being inspired by what came before and using it as a springboard to create something new, and simply copying someone else's implementation as closely as possible.

Recommended reading

If that's not enough to tide you over, here are some great articles from around the web that I enjoyed this week.

• Anil Dash Calls Foul by Benjamin Brooks is the latest in Brooks' excellent series of articles on Readability's business model and the concerns it raises for some publishers.
• Searching for a rational reason to hate a manufacturer's UI by Phil Nickinson tackles the interesting issue of the love/hate relationship some Android users have with manufacturer specific interfaces from the likes of HTC.
• Welcome to iTextEditors by Brett Terpstra breaks down dozens of iOS text editors by dozens of feature sets in an effort to help compare and contrast them.
• How to check for—and get rid of—a Mac Flashback infection by Jacqui Cheng breaks down the first massive Mac malware attack (that we know of), tells you what it is, how to see if your Mac is infected, and what to do about it if it is.
• From the Editor's Desk: Last blog standing by Derek Kessler takes the look at the state of webOS blogs, then straps on his Roosevelt pants and vows webOS Nation has only just begun to fight.
• Four and a Half Years On by Stephen Fry takes a look at everything that's happened in mobile since the introduction of the original iPhone, as only Stephen Fry could look at it.
• Care-taking and The ultimate bucket list are the latest two episodes of ZEN and TECH, which is the most important show Mobile Nations does. There's a lot we can do to help you improve your smartphone or tablet. This show will help improve your life. I can't recommend i enough.

Spinning up the FTLs

And... jump.

The late Steve Jobs referenced the quote "good artists borrow; great artists steal" and since then it's been weaponized and used to both condemn Apple for a perceived lack of creativity, or to excuse or justify competitors feeding off Apple's creativity, or both.

There was Xerox PARC before the Mac, critics say. There were Palm Treos or LG Pradas before the iPhone. There were Tablet PCs before the iPad. Nobody copied Apple and if they did, Apple copied other people first! Great artists steal!

Except that's not what the quote means, and it's not at all what Apple does.

Great artists steal inspiration not implementation.

Therein lies a monumental, industry defining difference. Apple, namely Steve Jobs, saw a mouse and graphical UI, but he didn't make a copy of Xerox's STAR, he made the Mac. He didn't look at it and see what it was and then copy it -- he looked at it and saw what it could become and then created that.

The Mac was inspired by the same fundamental user interface concepts as the STAR but it implemented those concepts in a far more consumer-friendly way.

Same goes for the iPhone, which was certainly inspired by the ideas of the Palm Treo -- a connected, multifunctional device with a touch screen -- but once again implemented those ideas in a way far more accessible for far more people.

I wrote about this yesterday in the comments to the post about Larry Page dismissing Steve Jobs' anger towards Google and Android as "a show".

Apple’s singular talent is taking existing technologies, putting them together in ways that are elegant and sensible, well packaged and integrated, and making them mainstream.

Henry Ford didn’t invent the car, he invented a way to make the car for everyone. Apple didn’t invent the elements that went into the iPhone, but they absolutely invented it. They invented how it looked and felt, how it was manufactured and how it worked in relation to the carriers. As the sum total of its bits and atoms, they invented the iPhone.

And not just the iPhone.

Again, it's why Apple made the Apple II and not IBM, why Apple made the Mac and not Xerox, why Apple made the iPod and not Sony, why Apple made the iPhone and not Palm, why Apple made the MacBook Air and not HP, why Apple made the iPad and not Microsoft.

Any one of those would have been an achievement. All of those together, from one company, over the span of one lifetime, is something much more.

It's great art.

Instagram for Android finally hit the Market Play Store yesterday -- check out our Instagram on Android vs. Instagram on iPhone shootout -- and the reaction by some in the iOS community was... decidedly negative. It was almost like a TV sitcom when the pristine private pool is suddenly, forcibly opened to a flood of marauding masses. You know, like when AOL users finally got unrestricted internet access. (No doubt Android users would have felt them same way when Google+ opened up, had there been a similar flood...)

Some of it was obviously in jest, but a lot of it wasn't, and not just from the general population -- but from the higher profile technorati as well. And that's too bad. See, I love my iPhone, but I don't hate other phones, and I certainly don't hate the people who use other phones. Just like I don't hate the people who drive different types of cars, drink different brands of beer or soda, drive-through different franchises of fast food restaurants, or read comic books printed by different companies. I'm as tribal as the next person, but my tribe really doesn't give a crap if your tribe is into something else.

A while back, when Instagram for Android was first introduced, I wrote a guest editorial for Android Central trying the explain why Android users might enjoy Instagram. Let's face it, most modern smartphones can easily share photos right out of the box (tap Action button, tap Tweet, get on about your day). Some Android phones and user interfaces even have filters built right into the camera apps. But Instagram brings focus. It's just photos. If that's what you want to look at and enjoy, they're right there ready and waiting for you, without having to wade through tons of text tweets or likes to get to them.

Until yesterday, those photos were exclusively from iPhones and iPhoneographers. Today we have a much richer diversity in lenses and eyes. I can see photos from people I've known and admired for years, like Phil Nickinson, Jerry Hildenbrand, and Alex Dobie. I can also see photos from some great mobile cameras like the Galaxy S II and some of the HTC kit. (I can also take some iPod touch photos and upload those so the Galaxy Nexus owners won't feel so bad by comparison...)

Sure, there's some gentle ribbing to be given over things like the latest, greatest HTC One X not being supported, but that'll get fixed and then we'll see some great shots from that pretty damn good camera too. And frankly, I've got a right to see what ALL my friends can do when they take state-of-the-mobile-art images and reduce them to 1960s Polaroids, not just my iPhone friends.

So instead of hating on Instagram for allowing them in, or Android users for crashing our here-to-for exclusive iPhone party, I'm offering them a lounge chair and giving them a place to put down whatever beverages and snacks they brought to the party.

It's natural to fear change and a massive addition of divergent userbase to any social platform is about as big a change as online networks can have. But once everyone settles down and gets acquainted, it can be pretty great as well.

Goodness knows, something needs to disrupt the monotony of iPhone chick pics, bobble heads, pet shots, food pr0n, and landscapes. May as well be Android chick pics, bobble heads, pet shots, food pr0n, and landscapes...

(And if that's terribly disappointing to you and you would have preferred some fervent denouncement of all things Instagram and Android, topped with a hearty rah-rah for iPhone-über-alles, then my apologies. Feel free to read this piece backwards.)

Or, why building a solid iOS app ain't like dusting crops, boy!

Han Solo's right. People release thousands of apps a week into the App Store, with varying levels of commitment and forethought to the final products. At Nickelfish, we pride ourselves on not being those kinds of people. Which is why when Rene and the Mobile Nations guys came to us and asked us to build them a great iMore app, we said yes. Obviously, as a podcast host and occasional contributor to iMore, on a personal level I'm deeply invested in making iMore and Mobile Nations look as good as possible, so there was a definite component to this project that made the stakes a little higher. It also made making choices that much more difficult. That's what it's all about though -- making the right choices at the right time, and releasing a product of which you can be proud.

We knew collectively that in order to release a great 1.0, among the most critical choices would be what we needed to leave out. It's the basic tenet of Apple's iOS philosophy at its core: to do a few things really well, and add others later when the time is right, and the appropriate level of planning and work has been applied to them. We knew the app would be "missing" features. We knew that people would talk about what's not there (yet). This was a conscious choice we had to make as a team. We believe strongly that in most cases, it's far better to develop a strong first entrant into the market and iterate quickly and effectively to continue strengthening the product. It's the path we took with iMore, and it's a path we've walked before with great confidence.

Since there isn't a whole lot of clarity for the end user in many of these cases, I also wanted to write something about it after the launch in an effort to not only share how this process works with the iMore community, but also as my own little way of creating the right expectations going forward -- for this app and for other apps people may download in the future. We often forget that real human beings are pouring hours -- and their hearts and minds -- into their work. The App Store makes it easy to overlook the complexity of how this all comes together (and it should -- that's what makes it an effective sales and distribution platform). So here's a tiny bit of background on the thinking that went into the app's development.

Taking a lightsaber to it

One of the first wireframes of the iMore app, breaking down basic layout and behavior

Rene and I, as well as his Mobile Nations team and our NF team all talked about what the big picture for the app looked like. The whole thing. Let's put everything on the table and add every possible feature we would want in this most killer of killer apps. A large feature list is compiled. We all read it and continue adding things to it.

Then we take a lightsaber and slice that thing open. We take out what we don't need (tauntaun guts) and make sure the things that are most important for right now (Luke) go in.

Now we ask the tough questions. What do we need for a 1.0? What is the core idea behind the app? Who is the target audience for the app? These seem like easy answers, especially if you're already an iMore fan. However, you need to consider the much wider audience of the App Store now. What do those people want in an app, and how do we deliver it without executing a "lowest common denominator" approach (so as not to alienate or take away from a hardcore fan's experience)? Do we need forums? Yes, we need forums. Well, it turns out, after days of research, phone calls halfway around the world on weekends (yes, to do things right, you have to sometimes work on weekends) and a lot of heavy discussion, we realize we can't do the forums the way we want to. Visually, functionally, and in any number of other ways, we aren't happy with the results. Do we want to drop them completely? No, of course not. Will it bother people that they can't access the forums from the app? Almost certainly. But it's a choice -- do we appease everyone at the cost of seamless functionality and aesthetics? Or do we draw a line in the sand and say "now that's a v2 feature"? Or it's an app unto itself, as Rene has already mentioned.

It's a trap

Early color mockup of the iMore app's built-in podcatcher

Everyone will look at this app and say "it's really great, but it'll be even better when it has (blank)". We know. We know because we had that same thought when we first discussed the app, again when we first designed it and again and again when we tested the early alpha and beta releases. We had the same thoughts we knew everyone else would have when they held it in their hands and saw it on their iPhones. And we had a long talk about it, and we had to make a choice. No one liked it, but it had to be done. Because if we hadn't, you'd say "it's cool that (blank) is here, but it kinda sucks the way it works". And that's a trap. It's pure poison. Your impression is already tainted, and the delight we could have provided is diminished by our inability to properly choose what is most important at this time and place.

We see it every day, in software, in devices, in almost every facet of consumer electronics. The more you try to do, the less you'll be able to do really, really well. It's a simple equation. The other part of that equation is much more quantifiable: budget and time. Things cost money, and making things takes time. If we waited to do all the features that should be in the app, you wouldn't be enjoying it right now. It would still be 6-12 months away from launch. And if we thought of more features, or if new devices hit, or new versions of iOS, it could be even longer. It could be Duke Nukem longer. The more you try to do before you launch, the more you will watch the market, people's expectations, and even your own feelings about the project change -- all of which are out of your control.

Here's where the fun begins

In case I haven't already beaten this point to death, it bears repeating just once more. Being great isn't about hitting all the targets all at once in any way you can. It's about systematically taking each one down with precision. Each step you take with a project should be meaningful. And you'll never please everyone, so don't even bother -- make something great, something that makes you proud. Which is what we tried to do.

And we can't wait to show you what's coming next.

Free - Download iMore for iPhone now

Two years ago today Apple released the original, first-generation iPad Wi-Fi. Decried by critics as a "big iPhone" it turned out that was just exactly what the mainstream market wanted, and the iPad has gone on to pretty much create it's own product category. Rather than a complicated, desktop-style experience, Apple produced something remarkably focused.

No one really knew what to make of it back then, not even everyone at Apple. Their late co-founder, Steve Jobs, however, believed it was the next step towards the future -- post-PC before the coin was termed, a computing appliance when many felt the idea itself arrogant and oppressive. Something to once again democratize technology and make it even more accessible to the masses. (Something the iPad 2 would later run away with.

The line ups on launch day were geeky, filled more with people who already used Apple and iOS products and less with the mainstream crowds that would come just a year later. (Steve Jobs went to the one at Palo Alto) Apple managed to sell 300,000 original iPads that weekend, a tenth of the 3 million they sold on iPad 3 launch day this year, but an incredible amount by the standards of the day. (And unbelievable compared to the previous ten years of Tablet PC sales...)

There were a surprising amount of good, tablet-optimized apps available on launch day (I bought about $120 worth of them that morning!), and they just kept getting better and more numerous as developers figured out the strengths of the newer, bigger platform.

Now we have Retina display, LTE networking, everything iOS 5 has to offer, and the wonder of what iOS 6 might bring. But then we had the fresh and fervent memory of Steve Jobs putting sneaker to stage to introduce his last next big thing, something we'd seen for month but suddenly became real to us that morning when we finally got our hands on it and that big screen lit up bright.

The future.

So here's a slice of birthday cake and two candles burning just as bright. Happy birthday, original iPad, and here's to many more to come!

Here's my recollection of getting the original iPad, make sure you share yours!

I've mentioned this several times already on the iPhone & iPad Live podcast, in the new iPad round-table, and on Twitter, but I wanted to get something up here as well. The Retina display is great, but I'm not a designer or a photographer and I still read more on a computer and on paper than I do on my iPad. I have a Wi-Fi iPad so LTE isn't a consideration for me. Dictation is great and will make a huge difference to people who prefer to, or need to, talk rather than type. But for me, none of that is truly compelling. For me, instead of supporting a double density display or a faster network, I would have loved the extra power of that Apple A5X chipset and that extra RAM to do one thing and one thing only -- make my iPad faster.

I hate waiting. I watch lower resolution videos because I hate waiting for streaming to start or buffering to finish. My iPad turns on instantly and I love that. But then when I launch a website, I'm still waiting for pages to render and when I launch a game, I'm still waiting for it to load. Because things like turning on are so fast, when you do have to wait for something it feels so much more apparent.

The iPad 2 was such a speed increase from the original iPad that it I noticed it immediately. Even the iPhone 4S is fast enough compared to the iPhone 4 that I noticed it immediately. The new iPad... is about the same as the iPad 2. That it's the same given a Retina display is awesome, but I can't help wishing it would have stuck with a regular display and been twice as fast again.

Top to bottom: new iPad, iPad 2, iPad

The resolution of text or images never bothered me; the speed of getting them to show up on screen did. Maybe that wouldn't have been as sexy and upgrade, or maybe "thinner, lighter, faster" wouldn't have been a strong enough selling point two years in a row, but I'm willing to bet it would have been welcome by many.

Also, let's not forget battery life. It's remarkable that the new iPad gets a Retina display and keeps the same 10 hour battery life as an iPad 2. Imagine how much battery life it would get without it? Probably 17 hours.

Retina display and LTE now done, next year's iPad will probably lose the extra bulk and speed up again, maybe even get longer battery life as well. That's the upgrade I'll be waiting for.

In the meantime I'll be waiting for my web pages to load and games to start...

Steve Jobs sometimes liked to quote Henry Ford -- "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses". Instead he gave them something they had no idea they wanted until he gave it to them -- a car. With the new iPad, however, I suddenly find myself on the opposite side of that equation. All I would have wanted was a faster iPad.

Would Apple release a 7.85-inch iPad and what it would mean for iOS and the tablet market?

While Apple has been busy launching the new iPad -- their third generation 9.7-inch iPad now with eyeball popping Retina display -- the rumor mills have kept on churning away about the iPad mini. A still-mythical 7- to 8-inch iPad, it would compete with the still-not-competitive (marketshare wise) BlackBerry PlayBooks and Amazon Kindle Fires of the budget tablet world, while also not being as portable as a 3.5-inch, $199 iPod touch.

The iPad customer

Apple no doubt has an iPad mini in the labs, just like they have an iPhone nano in the labs. Whether they ever bring it to market, however, is the question. So far they haven't pulled the trigger on the iPhone nano, or on the also-surely-in-the-labs Apple iTV television that's busily competing for rumor attention. Before anything else, before technology, before experience even, Apple is a go-to-market company.

The reason the current iPad is 9.7-inches is that, in all likelihood, it was designed with one specific customer in mind. The ultimate customer. Steve Jobs. Before his untimely passing, Apple's co-founder was the absolute best product guy in the business, and hit more Babe Ruth-style home runs out of more technology parks than anyone.

Apple tested numerous screen sizes and ultimate they, and Jobs, felt the 4:3 aspect ratio, 9.7-inch diagonal display size was the perfect confluence of portability, flexibility, and functionality. It was the best size and shape for browsing, email, music, video, games, and reading. It could, in Jobs' words, run a new class of software that wasn't just scaled-up smartphone apps or awkwardly transplanted PC mouse-and-pointer apps. It could be a transformative device.

The market has proven him right. While competitors continue to misstep thinking they can get an advantage through higher specs, more desktop-like interfaces, more complex gestural controls, or cheaper, content-subsidized models, they've gained almost no traction in the global market because customers haven't shown any real interest in any of those things.

There's no tablet market because the iPad isn't a tablet in the traditional sense. It's a computing appliance that's far more accessible to a far wider customer base than ever before. It's Steve Jobs' relentless mainstreaming and democratization of technology taken to its highest level so far.

My 2 year old godson could use it. My mom can use it. I can use it. That's how you go to market with a goal of selling hundreds of millions of devices, not hundreds of dozens.

The challenges of the 7-inch tablet

Steve Jobs was also directly dismissive of smaller tablet formats, saying they weren't just smaller, but were significantly smaller (half the size). He did not believe great tablet apps could run on smaller 7-inch diagonal screens. He said that Apple had done extensive testing and really understood the usability implications -- that there were limits as to how close you could pack interface elements. He called 7-inch tablets DOA.

Granted, he was addressing 7-inch tablets that weren't running Apple software. Jobs has also said Apple wouldn't make a phone and that no one wanted to watch video on an iPod, so what he tells the public at one point in time clearly doesn't always reflect what Apple may or may not release in the future. Especially in a future that no longer includes him at the helm.

The 7.85-inch sweet spot

A.T. Faust from App Advice has a tremendous article up crunching the numbers on a 7-inch iPad.

Apple will release a 7.85-inch tablet later this year. And yes, it’s going to be called the iPad mini. It may or may not have the “skinny” bezel everyone’s been talking about, but two things are crystal clear: It’ll sport a 163 PPI 1024 x 768 display, and lots of folks are going to buy it.

He makes a great case for why, including manufacturing efficiencies and app compatibility. Indeed, if Apple does release an iPad mini, for the reasons Faust states, it could very well be that size, at that pixel density.

But back to the challenges

Even granting everything above, that a 7.85-inch iPad mini makes the most sense, there are still a few questions left to ponder.

What about the exiting iPad mini, the iPod touch?

Apple hasn't updated the iPod touch since fall of 2010. It's the only iOS device that hasn't received an update in the last 12 months. It's also already priced at $199 for the baseline model. Right now, it seems to exist as an inexpensive point-of-entry to iTunes and the App Store, and way to get non-iPhone and non-iPad users into the iOS ecosystem.

Does that hint that Apple's interest in budget mobiles, like budget Macs, is limited? If it is, is there room for an iPad mini?

Where does the iPad mini fit between the iPad and iPod touch?

If the iPod touch line continues, and doesn't get replaced by something bigger, where would a baseline iPad mini fit between the $199 iPod touch and $399 iPad 2?

$299 is the obvious answer. But is that cheap enough to compete against $199 BlackBerry PlayBooks and Kindle Fires? Against budget Android tablets?

If it goes to $199 (or even if it only goes to $299), would that cannibalize iPod touch or iPad sales? Apple usually doesn't care about cannibalizing their own products to prevent competitors from doing it, but there has to be a compelling marketing reason to do it. Apple would have to feel they could sell enough iPad minis to overcome any loss of iPad sales, the same way they're selling so many iPads it easily eclipses any loss of Mac sales. (And, according to Apple, hurts Windows PC sales more than Apple Mac sales -- a bonus.)

Apple never made a cheaper MacBook to combat low end Windows netbooks. They made the MacBook Air and iPad instead. If the Kindle Fire or other budget tablets ever become a legitimate threat to Apple's profits, they may not respond with a cheaper iPad either. Winning the top end and eschewing the low end in Macs has kept them so far ahead of the industry in terms of profits that they could well choose the same strategy for tablets.

What compelling market demand would Apple satisfy with a 7.85-inch iPad that isn't already satisfied by the existing 9.7-inch iPad or 3.5-inch iPod touch (or iPhone)? If they determine there is one, then like the iPod market, it would make sense to start filling out the line with cheaper alternatives. If they determine there isn't one, then the answer is even simpler.

How would an iPad mini fit in Apple's release schedule?

Apple apparently isn't going to release any more iOS devices this summer, just like they didn't release any last summer, and they're going to be releasing a new iPhone this fall, like they did last fall. Where would an iPad mini fit into that release schedule?

Would Apple piggy back it onto the new iPhone cycle? Would Apple do an additional iPod event this fall and attach it that? Would Apple wait until 2013 for the next iPad event?

Launches are part of going to market, and something Apple takes seriously. What's the window for an iPad mini?

Counter-Resolutionary

iOS devices all currently sport HiDPI Retina displays (even the 2010 iPod touch). If Apple goes with 163 ppi for the iPad mini, would that be a step backwards? Apple typically doesn't go into reverse when it comes to technology.

If Apple is locked on Retina as the future of all iOS products, would they pixel double an iPad mini display and make it to 326 ppi to pass the Retina threshold? If they did, is there any way they could still hit the $299 price point. Could they hit $199?

User experience

Would a reduction from 9.7-inches to 7.85-inches harm the usability of existing iPad apps by scaling down their interface elements too severely? There's an argument to be made that it would.

Yes, original iPhone apps were 3.5-inches at 168 dpi, but they were also 480x320 and optimized for smartphones, not the tablet-class apps the iPad enjoys and Steve Jobs specifically pointed out. iPhone apps did, and still do, present a different user interface than iPad apps, with a single visible column view rather than multiple column views.

Reducing iPad apps to iPhone-like user element sizes might not be the best of both worlds. It might be the worst. It would result in the kinds of compromises -- developers and designers having to make single touch targets to suit both physical sizes -- that the original iPad and it's UI scale was created specifically to avoid.

Creating a 3rd UI size isn't a great alternative either. Having regular and HD versions of apps, or universal apps with both 3.5-inch and 9.7 inch interfaces in them, creates a better user experience but requires more heavy lifting from developers (fine) and more management from users (acceptable). Having regular, mid-sized, and HD versions, or universal apps with 3 interfaces baked in would mean even heavier lifting and more complex management, and larger app sizes for universal binaries. Again, the rewards would have to eclipse the costs.

The mini mindset

Apple expanded the iPod line with the iPod mini, then replaced that with the iPod nano and added the iPod shuffle. They blanketed the price points and feature levels, and left no space for competitors to get a foothold.

Apple has thus far not expanded the iPhone line, not introduced the iPhone nano, and removed space by keeping previous generation iPhones around at $100 discount levels.

Apple has thus far not expanded the iPad line either, not introduced the iPad mini, and removed some space by keeping the previous generation iPad around at a $100 discount.

The iPad could very well become like the iPod with several models to address several different market segments, but it hadn't yet. Steve Jobs seemed genuinely against it, given the market and technology of the time. Tim Cook's Apple might not be as religious about it, and market and technology conditions will continue to change.

However, just like the iPad had to be fundamentally better at certain things than the smartphone or laptop for Apple to release it, an iPad mini would have to be fundamentally better for a certain type of user than an iPod touch or iPad for Apple to take it to market.

They won't ever do it just because they can. They'll only do it when, and if, they feel they should.

iMore iPad mini concept by John Anastasiadis

Back in the 1990s when I was writing for martial arts magazines, one of my editors told me that any time they could put Bruce Lee on the cover, their sales would go up exponentially. So, no matter what, there was a huge incentive for them to run as many Bruce Lee covers as they could a year. Mercifully, magazines only came out once a month, and they couldn't do it every month, but it was still done just as often as the market could bear.

That's exactly what's happening with Apple in the personal technology space right now. Put Apple in a headline and you'll get more clicks. Truth, logic, intelligence, relevance -- none of that matters compared to getting Apple in the headline, baiting the links, and garnering the click-throughs.

And that's all of our fault.

Twenty years ago customers voted with their wallets and bought exponentially as many magazines when Bruce Lee was on the cover. Now readers vote with their clicks/taps and visit exponentially more tech stories if Apple is in the title.

A publication's job is to serve the reader, stories about Apple are what the readers want, so that's what publications are going to serve. If it's something like a keynote where a new product is launched, it benefits Apple tremendously in terms of immediate and extended coverage and enormous amounts of free publicity. If it post product-launch. when outlets are trying to look for anyway to keep the stories going, it can harm Apple tremendously as also sorts of problems, real or imagined, get their turn in the spotlight. And since sensational stories get the most attention, most of the stories will get sensationalized to get that attention.

Since the web means no longer having to contend with monthly magazine publications, or even daily newspaper printing, we just get it from everywhere, all the time. It's even bleeding out of the technology section and onto front pages.

It's a vicious cycle.

Even smart readers and savvy journalists end up visiting -- and sharing! -- even the most absurd, objectionable, and outlandish dumb Apple stories. They do it in droves.

That feeds them, encourages them, and condemns us all to more of the same. Again and again and again.

So the next time any of us roll our eyes, grit out teeth, clench our fists, share our disbelief, post our retorts, or simply shake our heads at a stupid Apple story we're reading and wonder why it got written -- that's the reason. Because of us. Because we not only give them attention, but we give them most of our attention.

Apple's being put on as many covers, in as many ways as possible, and we're racing to buy up every copy.

(For my part, I'm not linking to any of it here on iMore any more, and I'm not Tweeting it, sharing it, or doing anything to help spread it. If we have to disprove out-an-out BS, we'll do it in a stand-alone way, or we'll link to someone who's written something smart, inspiring, or admirable instead. And if there was a rel="unlink" attribute that would actually reduce the spread of the dumb, we'd use it.)

Following the launch of the new iPad there's been a lot of discussion about how, and where or even whether, websites should update to support the needs of HiDPI screens like Apple's Retina display. If users are going to be looking at websites on a Retina display iPad, and one day Retina display Macs, HiDPI Android and Windows displays, and other high density screens, having them look as good as possible is a definite concern.

Bjango's Marc Edwards previously wrote about why it might take a while for developers to upgrade their apps for Retina display graphics, and has written several posts and how to include Retina graphics in design workflows.

The web, unfortunately, is nowhere near as controlled environment as the App Store.

Apple, of course, updated their iPad page for Retina display right away. According to Jason Grigsby of Cloud Four Blog, they're doing it with image_replacer.js.

What they’ve chose to do is load the regular images for the site and then if the device requesting the page is a new iPad with the retina display, they use javascript to replace the image with a high-res version of it.

The downside of this approach is that it's expensive, especially if you're serving all images this way, and the images are big. Bandwidth costs money and making every image 4 times larger (or more) means paying higher server bills. Serving a regular image and then switching to Retina is even more expensive, because you're serving both images to Retina devices. (Granted there aren't many yet, but their share will only grow.)

Phil Webb of Mobify.com offers several good pieces of advice, including prioritizing which images really need to be Retina (like product heroes), that text should be served as text and not images (we're in the age of TypeKit, after all!), creating double-sized images that are constrained by CSS width and height attributes, and the use of mobify.js.

Mobify can detect extra-high resolution displays, like the iPad 3 Retina and iPhone 4 and iPhone 4s with Retina, and serve them higher quality images.

And unlike many other techniques, like the approach Apple has taken to delivering Retina-quality images by just double-serving images, it lets you just serve the right image to the right device. So page performance is always as fast and snappy as possible.

On Quora, Read it Later developer Steve Streza promotes the use of CSS background images, the background-size attribute, sprite sheets, and media queries.

The big advantage here is that you can target specific screen scale factors with CSS, using a trick known as CSS media queries. This lets you specify entire CSS files, or parts of CSS files, to load for devices at 1x scale, at 2x scale, and other scales (as well as ranges of scales). This means that 1x scale devices are only loading 1x assets, and 2x scale devices are only loading 2x scale assets.

When it comes to photography on the web, Duncan Davidson, working with Streza, figured out that WebKit (the rendering engine behind Apple's Safari, Google's Chrome, webOS, BlackBerry's Torch, and other browsers) put limitations on image sizes that could conflict with serving Retina-calibur graphics. The workaround is to use progressive JPGs. But currently comes at a price.

Now, before you go reprocessing all your photos—and keep in mind that you can’t export progressive JPEG out of Lightroom or Aperture, so this isn’t an easy undertaking—please understand that this is just sorting out how to push a high DPI image to an iPad Retina display. Doing this well for more than a one-off example is going to take a lot more work, not the least of which is sorting out how to decide when to push a progressive JPEG at what size for the right client and bandwidth combinations.

So while it's early days and there are no clear standards for implementing cross-platform, cross-browser HiDPI graphics, there's a lot of experimentation being done. We consciously made the choice to use as much CSS as possible with our last iMore redesign, and I think that paid off. We've also replaced our previous, PNG background logo image with a 2x icon graphic and TypeKit text. We need to tweak it some more, but it already looks better on the new iPad. Likewise, we've used higher density Team iMore pictures in the sidebar for a while now, and are going to be rolling out more of them into the rest of the fairly static page elements.

If you're working on adding Retina/HiDPI support to your website, jump into our Iterate mobile design forum and let us know how you're doing it and how it's working.

Despite the latest rounds of super-gigantic iPhone screen size rumors, iMore is hearing that, as of last month, plans for the new iPhone (iPhone 5,1) called for the same 3.5-inch screen as previous generations. While we're told that isn't set in stone, and it's possible Apple could go slightly bigger, there's doesn't seem to be any chance for anything even approaching the size of a Galaxy Nexus.

Not only does that come from a good source, but it stands to reason. First, Apple has put a tremendous amount of time, energy, and marketing into the concept of a Retina display. With a Retina display, density can get lower as distance increases -- that's why the new iPad's 2048x1536 Retina display at 264 ppi doesn't need to be as dense as the iPhone 4S' 960x640 Retina display at 326 ppi. -- but Apple probably wouldn't push a 960x480 display to 4.65-inches and settle for 248.12 ppi.

They probably wouldn't bump up the resolution either, because it would break compatibility with existing software. That's something they deliberately avoided in the past by exactly pixel doubling the older screen resolutions to get to the Retina display, rather than going with an arbitrary size or standard resolution like 720p.

Apple has also paid attention to one-handed ease of use, keeping every inch of the iPhone screen easily accessible -- if held in one hand, most people's thumb can still reach the opposite corner without much difficulty.

Surveys have suggested users would appreciate a larger screen on the iPhone, and perhaps Apple would consider something up to 4-inches. At 960x640, a 4-inch screen would be 288 ppi. A 3.75-inch screen would be 307 ppi. Both are lower than the iPhone 4S but still higher than the new iPad, but they'd let Apple maintain the current resolution and much of the one-handed ease of use.

Nothing bigger than that seems likely, however. Apple also has a way of disregarding market research. The late Steve Jobs liked to quote Henry Ford: "If I had asked my customers what they wanted they would have said a faster horse."

The new iPad and the iPad 2 are very simliar in form factor. They're actually almost impossible to tell apart from a the outside with the exception of a slight difference in thickness. That's disappointing, because I was really hoping Apple would change the way the new iPad was constructed and make it more user-serviceable.

While the new iPad and iPad 2 are beautiful devices to look at and hold in your hand, the overall design is terrible from a service perspective. iFixIt recently tore the new iPad down and went on to share a lot of the same sentiments I do about the overall design.

As our video guide guru MJ points out in her video below, not only can we hold Apple to a higher standard than other manufacturers, we must. If Apple ships one million iPads today, at 1.44 pounds each, that means 650 metric tons of unrepairable toxic iPad going out just today. And Apple’s the most valuable company in the world. Their stock hit $600/share yesterday. They’re recognized as leaders in the design and business worlds.

If Apple is going to be at the head of the pack, we must ask them to lead responsibly. And in electronics, leading responsibly means that your devices must be sustainably made and designed to last. Designed for use. Designed for repair. Designed for a more sustainable future.

When it was suspected that the new iPad would be a bit thicker than its predecessor, I was secretly hoping that Apple would be going back to using clips to hold in the screen like the original iPad instead of adhesive. Alas, that was not the case and Apple decided to stick with the same horrid adhesive they used on the iPad 2.

Now this would be fine if there were a way to gain access to the device from the rear. But there isn't. The only way to access internals on an iPad 2 or new iPad is to physically melt the adhesive around the edges of the screen. Yes, I said melt. This makes it a nightmare for anyone who wants to DIY repair anything other than a broken screen. Actually, replacing a newer iPad screen is a terrible experience in itself and way beyond what most would be willing to take on.

I've gotten several emails from readers asking for directions on how to repair their iPads, the same way I've shown how to repair iPhones. I've been hesitant to even offer advice as the process is so tedious and way beyond what even a skilled user should attempt on their own. The screen is damn near impossible to get off without breaking it. This is why I dread the day when the iPad 2 starts coming out of warranty all at once and I start getting calls for battery replacements, bad home buttons, and anything other than a cracked screen.

For those of you wondering what goes into replacing an iPad 2 front assembly- here's a quick run down.

Repairing a new iPad or an iPad 2 can be messy and is something many wouldn't even attempt.

First you'll have to take a heat gun to the edges of the screen and get the adhesive running around the edges soft enough to be able to fit a putty knife underneath an edge. Next you slowly heat small section by small section sliding your putty knife around the edges to free the glass front from the adhesive.

The thick adhesive around the edges and the foam adhesive on the LCD makes it extremely hard to gain access to the inside of the new iPad and iPad 2.

Apple also decided to put a devilish type of foam adhesive on the frame of the LCD which you'll have to break too. You'll have to do this without inserting your putty knife too far as you can easily scratch or ruin the LCD completely if your putty knife comes in contact with it.

While working your way around the edges you'll need to be careful not to damage the Wi-Fi antenna which sits to the right side of the home button and can be ripped right out of its home easily if you pull up even the slightest bit too hard. This is because it will stick to the adhesive and come right out with the screen. This is why I stay away from using large suctions cups on iPads as there are just too many delicate internals that will get stuck to the adhesive.

The 3G and 4G antennas can easily be pulled from the inside casing if care isn't taken to separate them from the main digitizer before removing it.

Just like the wifi antenna, the 3G/4G antennas can easily stick to the screen adhesive as well in the top middle portion of the iPad. You have to take great caution to melt the adhesive completely so it doesn't come up with the digitizer.

Once you've finally gotten all the adhesive broken, you'll be able to remove the front assembly, hopefully still in once piece. And when putting on a new piece of glass you'll need to make sure every single shred of glass or old adhesive is completely picked out of the frame before placing in a new one. If you don't, it won't sit flush and you'll have terrible light leak. If the frame was bent, you'll either need to replace that too or dremel it down. Not. Fun.

Not only is repairing the new iPad and iPad 2 extremely difficult, tiny shards of glass can also make it dangerous.

The worst part of all this is the tiny shards of glass that you'll more than likely end up picking out of the frame. I've had more than one client attempt a screen replacement on their own. Only one has succeeded and more importantly, another actually hurt themselves pretty badly when a piece of glass broke off in his hand.

This is not taking into account the other small cables and odds and ends you can easily tear or rip if you move too quickly. I've been guilty of sticking a putty knife just a bit too far under too quickly and cutting a cable. Then you've got that to replace as well.

I understand Apple wants to keep these as sealed appliances, as magical boxes that, if they break, you simply bring them back to Apple and either swap them for, or pay for, a replacement.

But what happens to your old device?

It gets ripped apart and a many of the internals may never be used again. A few components may get re-used but for the most part, it's garbage. The same thing goes for iPhones and iPods which are actually fairly easy to repair. I can probably swap four to five iPhone 4 or 4S screens in the time it takes me to fix one iPad 2.

The sad part is most of the phones that go into Apple and get swapped for new ones probably could have been fixed and given back to the customer in less than 30 minutes time. To my knowledge the only thing Apple employees are even trained to replace is the back cover, rear-facing camera, and vibrator assembly on the GSM iPhone 4 and the front assembly of an iPhone 3GS. Anything else just gets swapped and that's a shame. It's prioritizing packaging over everything else. It's too much.

Users have been fixing their own gadgets for years -- whether it's a phone, tablet, or a computer. Apple's recent design practices are making it economically unrealistic for businesses like myself to even bother with devices such as the iPad 2 or new iPad. The process is time consuming and has a very high margin for error. The front assembly isn't a cheap part and it's extremely difficult to remove it without breaking it or scratching the paint around the edges.

iFixIt is dead on in asserting that Apple should be responsible for making sure their devices are not only sustainable but repairable.

I fear what the next iteration of iPhone is going to bring with it and surely hope that Apple seriously evaluates their current design process and changes some things.

Not only because it would hurt me but because it hurts my clients. Some of them just don't have the money to walk into an Apple store and drop another $200 or more on a brand new replacement device. But they can afford to buy a part and swap it themselves or pay me a more reasonable amount to fix a shattered screen, broken home button, or replace a battery. They walk out happy and the odds of them purchasing another Apple device is more likely. They have the security that if an accident does happen, they have a safety net -- either their own repair skills or businesses like my own.

Apple offers certified repair for computers, why not mobile and tablet devices? Isn't that a better option than tossing devices that are perfectly salvageable? Apple retains a happy customer and it's better for the environment.

iFixit gave the new iPad a 2 out of 10 on their repairability scale. One of their lowest scores ever. They also lowered the iPad 2 repairability score down from a 4 to a 2 as well. I stand behind their scores completely. These devices are extremely hard to repair. I'm convinced that Apple can find a different practice of securing the screen without sacrificing size or thickness and would allow easier access to the internal components.

Sure consumers can buy services like AppleCare+ to avoid unfortunate accidents and save themselves some money but that only lasts for 2 years and after that customers are left with no options but to buy new devices, which they can't always afford.

Apple, please consider how these practices impact your consumers, other businesses, and the environment. You're selling millions and millions of iPads yet you continue to make them almost unserviceable even by your own stores. Creating a product made mainly of glass that's next to unrepairable is not responsible, it's form over function. You now set the standard in mobile. It's time for you to re-evaluate those standards and prioritize not only beautiful looking, excellent working devices, but easy to repair and maintainable ones as well.

Response to: iFixit

(Note: This is part of an ongoing point/counterpoint series at iMore, where different writers with different opinions make their arguments. We'll post and link to an alternate point of view in the near future.)

Following its introduction last week, the idea that the new iPad was "unbeatable" began to get a lot of attention, primarily due to an article in Slate with that very title. Indeed, when seeing a product like the new iPad, it's easy to get swept away -- there's just so much technology wrapped in so beautiful a package for such an unbelievable price that it's almost impossible not to. I get that. But it's not true.

Nothing and no one is unbeatable. Not the iPad. Not Apple.

In an industry of titans, no one has ever seen the next big transition coming. IBM didn't. Microsoft didn't. Sony didn't. HP didn't. Yahoo didn't. Google won't. Facebook won't. And neither will Apple.

The only advantage Apple has is that they've been there before, prior to the second coming of Steve Jobs, when Michael Dell was suggesting they turn off the lights and return the money to the shareholders.

The Mac was beaten. Apple was beaten.

Because of that, I don't think Apple considers themselves or any of their products unbeatable. I think they actively fear the complacency that comes with that kind of thinking.

It's dangerous.

Apple literally wants to stay hungry and stay foolish in so far as they never settle for what they're doing now and relentlessly explore what they could be doing better in the future. The near future.

Apple is like Balboa after Clubber Lang clobbered him early on in the third Rocky movie. Microsoft took the PC championship from them. They'll never forget that beating and they're working their collective asses off to make sure the same doesn't happen in the rematch.

Like Steve Jobs said in his famous Stanford address, once you know you're going to die, you achieve an amazing clarity. Once you know you can be beaten, you likewise develop an amazing freedom.

They're naked. Not trapped into defending the revenue streams of the past at the expense of future success. Rather they're relentless, almost to a reckless degree, about embracing it.

They ditched the floppy drive in favor of USB and the internet. They obsoleted the iPod with the iPhone. They cut into Mac sales with the iPad.

They've done everything every one of their competitors is terrified to do. And they've done it because they not only know they're beatable, but because they're intent on proving it again and again, year in and year out -- by beating themselves.

Tim Cook said as much during the new iPad keynote, and Steve Jobs has said it before.

That's what makes Apple dangerous.

The knowledge that they're beatable.

In response to: Slate

The new column. It comes after last week's column 2. If that confuses you, just call it the column (3rd edition). Yeah, I went there. It's been a heckuva week so cut me some slack. We've all been running on equal parts adrenalin and recklessly strong coffee and might soon be going into a collective apoplexy not dissimilar to what I'm sure faced the CEOs of rival tablet manufacturers sometime Wednesday afternoon. Yeah, I went there too. Here's why...

The unbeatable new iPad

I've already written about the new iPad event and what it means for the new Apple, so go read that first. Done? Good. Here's a little more.

The new iPad event was the first event following the passing of Apple co-founder, Steve Jobs. So, it's being afforded way more attention than it otherwise might (and as we all know, stare at anything long enough and you'll be seeing shapes and patterns that aren't really there).

Along with the need for more better helmets, that probably explains a lot of link-bait that's been going around since the event. It's dumb Apple stuff and I'm not going anywhere near it, nor the noble but unfortunately perpetuating link-back refutations that still leave me dumber for having scanned them. Instead I'm going with the opposite -- the chest beating. The stuff that's even more dangerous. The stuff that's saying that Apple is unbeatable.

Nothing and no one is unbeatable. Not even Apple. And no one ever sees the next big transition coming. IBM didn't. Microsoft didn't. Sony didn't. Google won't. And neither will Apple.

Apple's advantage is, right now, they don't consider themselves unbeatable. They're scared and they're hungry. They're Rocky III after Clubber Lang clobbered him midway through the film, and they're working their collective asses off to make sure they don't lose the much bigger rematch. They know they're beatable because they've been beaten in the past, and they're lucky enough to have gotten a second chance. They're smart enough to keep proving they're beatable, each and every year, by beating themselves.

That's what makes Apple dangerous.

[Update: I thought more about this and spun it off into a separate editorial called Beatable]

The new Apple TV

Now it comes in 1080p.

The Privacy car

Android Central had a great editorial about mobile privacy this week. It's the kind of smart, non-sensationalist, non-reactionary writing we need more of. But that's not going to stop me from disagreeing with it in a fairly fundamental way.

Yes, the concerns raised by headline-seeking senators in regards to mobile privacy are neither new nor unique to mobile. Potential bad guy developers can access your photos on your phone, just like they could access those photos on your Mac or Windows PC too. Heck, we can't go a week without yet another celebrity's nudie pics getting hacked and splayed across the internet. We get it.

But smartphones and tablets aren't PCs. To quote Steve Jobs, mobile is the car to the PC truck. And mobile users aren't the same types of drivers as traditional PC users. They're often people for whom traditional PCs were intimidating and inaccessible, and for whom the idea of a file system and permissions were confusing and off putting. They got smartphones and tablets, in part, because they wanted something easier.

Time was if you owned a motor vehicle you needed some measure of mechanical knowledge to operate it and keep it operational. Even years later common prejudice held that you shouldn't drive something you didn't know how to fix. But times changed and cars became more user friendly. Now most people get in, turn a key, shift an automatic transmission, and go. If they break down, they call someone. Mainstream drivers often have no idea how modern cars function and wouldn't have the first clue how to fix them if they ever broke down. Same goes for PCs.

That's the price we pay for democratizing technology.

And that's why it's not reasonable to expect mainstream users to even begin to understand the subtleties and specifics of online, mobile privacy permissions.

I'm a huge believer in personal responsibility. Don't put something online that you couldn't survive going public. But the concept of computers and filesystems and permissions is antiquated and outdated in our brave, new mobile world of always accessible networks and instant uploading apps.

We need something simpler, more sensible, and easier for mainstream users to understand and employ. We've made PCs into computing appliances, into cars, far more elegant and accessible than ever before. It's time to make the privacy and security settings match.

I repeat, I'm a huge believer in personal responsibility. I'm also a huge believer in platform responsibility. This is something Apple and Google (among others) need to address and now.

Podcasting

I did a double-header on the iPhone & iPad Live podcast this week -- a live show during the new iPad event with Seth Clifford (calling in from Aruba no less!), and Simon Sage, and a post-event analysis show with Georgia and David Barnard of App Cubby (which is currently sitting at #8 in the iTunes gadget podcast listings, thanks to all of you). We're doing fewer podcasts these days but our goal is to do each show better. I've already switched from iMovie to Final Cut Pro X for the editing and while it's taken me a couple weeks to even begin to feel comfortable, the time saved in rendering (almost 2x) has already made it more than worth it.

We're thinking of doing a few specials soon, both for Iterate and iMore, and for Mobile Nations, and the new schedule it what's going to make that possible. Stay tuned.

Features

Apple turned our schedule upside down this week. Usually there's a few days if not a week between an Apple event and the release of a new iOS update (for developers to test the Gold Master (GM) build against their apps), and between device announcement and pre-orders (for Apple to get everything in place). This year Apple pushed iOS 5.1 out and opened pre-orders right on event day. And we all scrambled. We'd already planned and written a lot of content, but we needed to wait for the announcement to finalize it (so we'd know the actual details of what they announced). We believe iMore exists only and always to serve our readers, and a big part of that is helping our readers figure out new software features and decide which version of new hardware to buy. Let's just say some of us didn't get much sleep for the last few days. But we managed to get a lot of stuff done. Much of it is rounded and summed up in these two, conveniently bookmarkable places.

• iOS 5 walkthrough: A complete look at Apple's latest mobile software for iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad.
• 2012 iPad buyers guide: Everything you need to know before buying the new iPad, including how to pick your model, storage capacity, color, and 3G or 4G LTE carrier.

We also had a huge internal debate about the name "the new iPad"... or the new "iPad" depending on which side of the debate you fall on.

• Why the new “iPad” has the perfect name: Leanna fights back with great points about how Apple has always handled new products and their existing product lines.
• Why “the new iPad” is a terrible name

Me, I fight for the user. My mom bought an iPad 2, went and searched for "iPad 2 cases", and found one she liked for exactly the model she had. As an experiment, I searched for "new iPad cases" and "iPad cases" (fair is fair) and got results that were far too broad to be useful. Accessory makers and stores alike will need to do some heavy lifting on their ends to help customers navigate that. I'm guess app devs who target only the latest hardware will have to do likewise. So in theory, while "iPad" is shorter, "iPad (3rd generation)" is both more realistic and less penetrable for my mom.

In lieu of her usual photography column this week, Leanna took a look at Apple's new photo editor for iOS. (Spoiler: It's powerful but not perfect, but a damn sight better than Photoshop Touch -and shows it's time for Adobe to ditch AIR and get in the native game.)

• iPhoto for iPhone and iPad review

Ally also tackled the questions that were rapidly filling our email boxes.

• Can you jailbreak the new iPad, AppleTV, and iOS 5.1?

Meanwhile, Georgia did the best she could to make sure some cool iPhone kit still hit the site.

• SGP Linear Blitz Case for iPhone 4S and iPhone 4 review

Some readers expressed concern that case might be too slippery or might interfere with reception. I've used it and found it had a great grip and didn't notice any signal lock. I'm guessing the ones the iMore Store sells are simply badass.

If you're not read-out yet

This went rather long, so I'll keep the recommended reading brief.

• From the Editor's Desk: Privacy, Google Play, Nexus tablets and more: Phil Nickinson started this very format on Mobile Nations and does it better than anyone.
• MacStories Reading List: New iPad Special Edition: Federico Viticci inspired me to share links to smart stuff I liked.

This Friday

I'll be lining up to get my new iPad in Montreal on Friday. Black. 64GB. LTE. (Go big or go Kindle.) If you're around, come say hi and get a free special edition iMore t-shirt.

I'm your huckleberry.

Following the new iPad event, the internet erupted not with praise for the new iPad's Retina display, or it's A5X quad-core graphics chipset, or the availability of 4G LTE models. No, it erupted with controversy surrounding Apple eschewing the name "iPad 3" and going with simply the new "iPad."

Note, that's not "the new iPad", it's the new "iPad". Apple is just referring to it as "the new iPad" because it's the iPad that is new. Heck, even with the iPhone, that currently does have a numbering system of sorts, is referred to as "new" by most people. Many people don't know what model number the newest iPhone is at, or think they do and get it wrong. On multiple occasions, I've had people say something like "yeah, well my brother has the iPhone 4G!" when telling them I had an iPhone 4. It's a well known point of confusion (and one that likely just got worse, thanks to AT&T and Apple).

Yesterday, Simon Sage, expressed his dislike for the new name and argued that even though the rest of Apple's product line -- iMac, Macbook Pro, Macbook Air, iPad -- aren't numbered, Apple still doesn't run around calling them "the new [insert product name here]".

Actually. They do. Here's "The new iMac".

And "The new MacBook Air".

And "The new Mac Pro".

They may not have done it as repeatedly or in as many places as they've done "the new iPad", but they have done it. And for a reason. MacBooks and iPods haven't had numbers before, so the new MacBook or the new iPod is an easy transition. The last iPad was the "iPad 2" so Apple needs to stress that while the latest model isn't being called the "iPad 3", it's still the latest model. It's still new. The word is simply a descriptive term to go along with it and emphasize the transition.

I guarantee your new iPad will not arrive in a box labeled "The new iPad".

As to the argument that there's be no way to distinguish between iPad models, that's something we've already learned to deal with. Just like we have "iPod touch (3rd generation)" and "iMac (early 2011)", we'll have "iPad (3rd generation)" or "iPad (early 2012)". Now, I do agree that with the iPad, it is a little different because Apple will be selling two models at the same time, but really, it doesn't change anything. The current iPad will get the spotlight, and somewhere in the corner will be the previous year's model with the appropriate label.

I also agree that for this year, and this year only, this rebranding might confuse customers. The fact that the iPad 2 is older than the iPad is bewildering, so, absolutely this will be confusing to consumers -- but that's precisely why Apple is being so adamant about referring to the latest iPad as "the new iPad".

Apple has always been relentless about embracing change and it's served them pretty well. "iPad" is simpler, stronger, and more Apple-like. It's better. People have a tendency to resist change, so it's certainly understandable that many reacted strongly, even negatively to Apple calling the new iPad simply the new iPad.

Arguably, Apple's mistake was not with axing the numbering scheme now, but with starting it in the first place. The repercussion of that mistake is to have one confusing year. In a couple years from now, this will be a non-issue. And in reality, how much will this confusion actually hurt them? A customer is going to walk in and ask for an iPad, an employee will show them both models, and they'll make a decision. It will have zero effect on Apple's bottom line.

Back in October, I predicted that Apple was going to make this naming move with the next-generation iPhone. Looks like I nailed it, I just underestimated how quickly they'd move.

At the new iPad event, one of the most remarkable announcements came when Apple claimed the new iPad will maintain the same battery life as the iPad 2, despite having 4G LTE and a Retina display suckling away the power. While batteries aren't exactly the flashiest of features, the fact that Apple has managed to offer so much more and only make the new iPad under a millimeter thicker and a scant 50 grams heavier is a huge achievement.

So, just how big is the battery?  The new iPad clocks in at 42.5 watt-hours, which works out to 11,666 mAh. That is a solid 70% boost to capacity over the iPad 2's 25 watt-hour,  6,944 mAh battery.  The new iPad maintains the established 10-hour lifespan standard, and even if you're active over LTE rather than Wi-Fi, you're still getting a very respectable 9 hours of life. 

To put that in context, an iPad 2 with with this new battery, if such a device existed, would probably last close to 17 hours on Wi-Fi.

How does this shape up versus other LTE tablets? Well, Samsung claims the LTE-enabled Galaxy Tab 10.1 has 12 hours of continuous usage with a 7000 mAh battery, while AT&T claims just as much with HTC Jetstream and its 7,300 mAh battery. Of course, these are dealing 1280 x 800 screens, which are bound to be way less taxing on lifetime, but it's still a considerable difference.

Of course, we aren't going to know for sure if the new iPad lives up to those figures until we get our mitts on one next week, but this isn't an area where Apple tends to disappoint. I'm curious to see the teardown of the new iPad so we can see how much the battery has physically grown, how the weight is distributed throughout the devices, and most importantly, what if any new innovations Apple may have come up with.

Until then, we'll have to cross our fingers and hope that even with the mind-blowing Retina display, the new iPad manages to live up to battery life expectations.

During Apple's new iPad event yesterday, I (among others) were waiting for the other shoe to drop: what are they going to name the new iPad? From the get-go, it was only being referred to as "the new iPad". It was easy to sit through the various demos hanging my hat on the idea that Apple was being coy and would close things off with some flashy video with a big reveal punctuated by a snappy one-liner. "iPad 3 - we just revolutionized magic. Again." "iPad HD - your TV won't know what hit it." But one by one, we watched the new iPad apps come and go, until the event wrapped up with a colourful remix of Apple's classic logo and no further mention of the name was made.

Huh. I guess they're just calling it "the new iPad."

Scouring through the updated content posted on Apple's site, we have at best a mention to the "3rd.-generation iPad," but nothing so official as to imagine another name on the box. Once the reality started setting in, the scenarios for confusion rushed in a flood: would we still be calling it "the new iPad" in eight months? Would we have to qualify the name on our own terms, outside the blessing of Apple's marketing department, and if so, how consistent could that naming be? Will Apple drop "the new" from the website branding soon and leave us with just "iPad"? There are too many questions that are being raised just by a name; Apple has a reputation for being simple, but going this far is just obtuse.

I'm still having trouble understanding why Apple would even bother going this route. Sure, it streamlines things so consumers aren't overloaded with options. In theory, a mainstream shopper could walk into an Apple store, hold out their hand, and say "I want an iPad" and there wouldn't need to be any additional discussion because for all intents and purposes, there's only one iPad. Unfortunately, it won't work out that way because Apple will be selling the last generation for at least awhile. And the old generation is called "iPad 2".

The one with the number 2 on it is older, cheaper, and not as good as the one without the number 2 on it. That's more confusing than a Star Wars prequel.

After the iPad 2 is phased out, "the new iPad" will have a successor. If "the new iPad" is also kept around at a lower price, how then will Apple differentiate? How will customers tell them apart on the shelves? Unless Apple brings down the hammer and wipes out all of the old stock and replaces it with the newest models, nameless iPads are bound to cause a lot of confusion.

Sure, Apple has done this for years with Macs. The latest MacBook Air isn't MacBook Air 4, it's just MacBook Air. And Apple didn't keep the backlight-free MacBook Air 3, or the old design MacBook Air 2 on the shelves at a reduced price along with it.

Apple hasn't numbered iPods historically either. Then again, when Steve Jobs introduced the new iPod touch back in September 2010, he called it "the new iPod touch" but it wasn't branded that way on the keynote slides behind him like "the new iPad" was for Tim Cook.

Beyond sheer logistics, there's a nice continuity and narrative that sequential naming provides. The iPhone lineup has struck a nice rhythm with S-level iterative updates interspersing the big launches. You can put each and every iPhone on a timeline, and it makes sense. The iPad is now only three generations in and the ongoing story is getting muddled. In two years, having "the new iPad" in the middle of the timeline is going to look weird, especially if the next one returns to naming convention, even one as simple as "iPad 4". Even OS X has had solid delineation between between updates, even though it stopped numerical changes in branding years ago.

Phil Schiller, Apple's Senior Vice President of Worldwide Product Marketing was quoted yesterday as saying Apple chose to go with "the new iPad" so as to not be predictable. That's not a typical Apple answer, so it's possible Schiller was being coy. Their marketing is usually as incredibly focused and on point as their products. "Not being something" is different and less powerful than "being something".

Luckily, this naming mess is the only sour point in Apple's new product; the new iPad has LTE, a quad-core graphics processor, and a Retina display, which is all anyone really wanted. Yeah, NFC might have been nice, but it's far from a dealbreaker, and most of the other rumoured features, like electro-static feedback, were pretty far-fetched anyway. And who knows? Maybe Apple's marketing department couldn't settle on a name for the event, and are postponing the official branding for the launch next week. Then again, that's probably just wishful thinking on my part.

[Leanna disagrees with Simon completely and will be presenting a counter-editorial shortly - Ed.]

Gaming played a huge role in the new iPad announcement. For one, Apple's upcoming tablet will be hosting a dedicated quad-core graphics chip, and while every app that runs on the new iPad will see some improved quality as a result, only rich 3D games will be taking full advantage of what's available. On top of sheer processing power, the iPad's 9.7-inch display has been upgraded to Retina-quality. At 2048 x 1536, the resolution makes it sharper than anything you could see on most high-def TVs - or at least that was Apple's angle. To demonstrate the new hardware, Namco and Epic Games both had some slick-looking demoes for titles coming exclusively to the new iPad. One of those developers even hoisted the new iPad above the Xbox when it comes to performance.

Let's face it - the iPhone has pretty much single-handedly dislodged the portable gaming industry. Like a sulking child, Nintendo has sworn off doing any work with smartphones, while others, like Sony, are adapting by making game-savvy Android smartphones and adding 3G connectivity to their PlayStation Portable line. To think that the iPad will follow up by eating the Xbox's lunch may be  a little bold, but not entirely unfounded. The horsepower and the display are certainly raising the bar. Game publishers are already plenty comfortable with the iOS ecosystem, and smart ones like EA are heavily tying their mobile products to their Xbox and PS3 counterparts, as with the recently-launched Mass Effect: Infiltrator. Is there any reason consumers wouldn't be interested in something that's just as fast, sharp, connected and stocked with games as a console, but is infinitely more portable?

Well, there are a few roadblocks. For one, there's price. The new iPad starts at $499, while the Xbox 360 (which still supports excellent titles despite its age) is going for $199. (That doesn't include the price of the TV, of course, but almost anyone who buys an Xbox will have a TV already.) Given, you'll be using your iPad for a lot more than gaming, but these days, you'll be using your Xbox for plenty of home media stuff too. Secondly, there's the controls. Even when optimized for a gesture-based interface, iPad and tablet games necessarily block parts of your view throughout gameplay, while a traditional console affords a full viewing area thanks to dedicated hardware controls. Whatever advantage the new iPad has gained in displays is cut proportionally to the size of your thumbs. Thirdly, the top-tier titles will never make the leap from console to iPad with the current pricing standards. Right now, game developers regularly charge $50 for console titles; if you even tried to charge the console bargain bin price of $20 in the App Store, you'd be laughed out of business. That said, the games that have the most work put into them will always go to consoles and PC first.

With stuff like wireless device mirroring to the TV through AirPlay, I can definitely see how the new iPad might start horning in on the territory of established gaming, but I think at most it will offer a taste of high-quality fun to those that normally wouldn't shell out the cash for a dedicated gaming console. I know I've certainly been surprised by how often I've been lured away from proper gaming rigs with stupid little casual iPhone games, but I don't know if I would eschew having an Xbox, PS3 or gaming PC altogether. What about you guys? Could the new iPad get you to spend less time and money on traditional gaming? Is the new iPad a legitimate threat to the console gaming industry?

I've watched the new iPad event twice now. They hit most of the notes most of us expected -- including the Retina display, LTE 4G networking, and iPhoto for iOS. The way in which they hit those notes, however, and some of the notes they didn't hit, were just as interesting and revealed as much about the new iPad as they did the new Apple.

This is a subset of a much longer, more involved, more interesting discussion I had with Georgia and AppCubby's David Barnard earlier tonight on iPhone & iPad Live. We'll post that show tomorrow, but here's the gist:

Tim Cook remains solid as an event anchor. He's measured, methodical, and supremely knowledgeable about Apple and their products. That sounds obvious, but many CEOs don't come off that way. He's an operations guy, not a product guy, but he's better than 99% of the keynote speakers out there, and if anyone knocks him it's only be he's taken over from the best keynote speaker in the history of the industry, the late Steve Jobs. That stage was owned by Jobs. He was infectiously engaging yet, at the same time, looked as though, at any moment, he could spin around and end you with a glare. That's an impossible act to follow. That Cook turned in a solid performance, that Phil Schiller remained affable and informative, that Eddy Cue brought a little bass, was not only commendable, but given the circumstances, phenomenal.

That Scott Forstall wasn't on stage was as notable as iOS not really being on stage. After the longest beta cycle that I can remember, iOS 5.1 was announced by Tim Cook as being available immediately. There was no GM (Gold Master) build for developers to test out, and apparently none needed since there were very few new, customer facing features. The original iPad release in 2010 had Forstall on stage showing off iOS 3.2 and the new iPad interface itself -- how the built in apps had been re-built to take advantage of a 1024x768 9.7-inch display. With the iPad 2 in 2011 Forstall showed how iOS 4.2 unified the platform and brought everything from multitasking to folders to the iPad. With the new iPad this year, nothing. iOS was less keynote and more footnote. (No doubt iOS 6 will be the star of Apple's WWDC this summer.)

Same with the new Apple TV. It did get a new interface (which I'm not wild about -- more on that in the review), and a new model that is software-identical in every way with the exception of 1080p video support. However, the new Apple TV wasn't even announced as peripheral to the iPad, but as peripheral to the 1080p video. The original Apple TV got the full Steve Jobs treatment during the original iPhone keynote no less. The 2nd generation Apple TV got similar treatment during the 2010 iTunes and iPod event. This one got an "if you also want." That's going from "hobby" to "aside". Whether that's a sign the living room is still in a holding pattern for Apple, or it's the calm before an Apple television storm is hard to say.

Either way, it's more than the iPod touch got. The iPod touch now the only iOS device that hasn't received an update to the latest generation hardware specs, and the iOS device that's gone the longest ever without receiving an update -- since fall of 2010. Once positioned as a gaming platform, it briefly enjoyed a processor that out-clocked even the iPhone. Now two generations behind when it comes to internal architecture, stuck on the A4 to the iPhone 4S' A5 and the new iPad's A5X, it's hard to see where it fits in Apple's plans beyond "cheapest gateway to the App Store". Starting at $199, it's competitive with budget tablets, even if half the size, so maybe that's enough for now.

And yeah, Apple went with the A5X system-on-a-chip, which we heard would be quad-core but turned out to be dual core for the CPU and quad-core for the GPU. Apple stressed the quad-core and the GPU, and touted the graphics performance far more than the raw processing power, but the proc itself is dual. (At least that may explain the divergent rumors.)

Maintaining 10 hours of battery life with the denser, Retina display screen is impressive. Maintaining 9 hours of battery life with a 4G LTE radio is flabbergasting. Speaking of which, one 4G LTE model to support AT&T, Rogers, Bell, and Telus, and another to support Verizon, and no word on Asian, Australian, or European 4G LTE is likely to frustrate people outside North America. It's a hell of a radio, though, with HSPA+ 42mbps support as well, and the most bands ever according to Apple. That will no doubt make it tough for some to decide which network to go with.

Tethering is a huge plus as well.

Keeping the price point identical the iPad 2, given the sheer amount of new technology in the new iPad was most impressive. Those panels and those radios can't have lowered the bill of goods. Keeping the iPad 2 around at a $100 discount was just as impressive. It lowers the price differential between the cheapest iPad and the $299 budget tablets, and it makes the platform more accessible than ever to schools and Enterprise that don't need or don't want all the bells and whistles. For cash-strapped consumers, deciding between the $399 iPad 2 and $499 new iPad might be just as tough.

Glass shelves in iPhoto for iOS show skeumorphism is alive and well, perhaps more so than ever with all the faux brushes and other effects. It wasn't the more graceful Aperture-like experience I hoped for, and the user interface isn't as elegant as Apple achieved with GarageBand for iOS. It does complete the iLife package (iWeb and iDVD are dead, thank you very much), however, and pushes the iPad further into the content creation space.

It does Sherlock photo editing apps, but as Avid Studio showed against iMovie, there's still a lot of room for 3rd parties to show off. (Too bad Photoshop Touch didn't stick their landing.)

Siri didn't get any iPad user interface love at all. The idea of moving Siri over to the bigger iPad screen was a challenge to begin with. As Alex Heath postulated, they went with a subset -- voice dictation rather than something more ambitious or nothing at all. That eases one of my text entry pain point, but it means Reminders will remain an app I populate solely via Siri on the iPhone 4S.

While Apple has previously referred to "the new iPods", they didn't brand them as such, in giant Myriad letters.

Now the name. "The new iPad". The logic is sound -- it's not MacBook Air 3, after all, it's just MacBook Air. In theory it's cleaner and stronger branding. At least it would be if "The new" didn't squeak every time it turned around too fast. It's also a little awkward if a first time customer walks into a store and sees an "iPad 2" on the shelf next to an "iPad" and the "iPad 2" is the older, less-good-but-cheaper option. In a couple of generations, when the iPad 2 is a memory and it's been just "iPad" for years, it won't matter. But it does feel out of place right now. (And yes, Leanna predicted the next iPhone would be simply the "iPhone" so kudos to her for the concept, even if Apple beat her to the timeline.)

(Technically, like iPods and Macs, Apple refers to "the new iPad" as iPad (3rd generation) on product order and support pages, and it has an internal model number of iPad 3,x, so you can still be precise if you ever need to be.)

Phil Schiller was quoted rather broadly as saying the new name was a sign Apple didn't want to be predictable. That sounds like when the brilliant head chef has left the restaurant and the apprentices finally have direct access to the spice rack. It's no longer all saffron all the time, exactly the way they're told. There's more variety, more individuality, more nuance. Sometimes refreshingly so, sometimes head-scratchingly so. It may not always be as perfect, but it's even more exciting.

That rather neatly sums up both "the new iPad" and the new Apple.

Apple hasn't forgotten their roots -- they still bleed in six colors, they're just more willing to mix it up now.

Phew! That March 7, 2012 announcement date rumor turned out to be accurate. Apple will indeed be unveiling their next generation iPad in San Francisco this coming Wednesday, and it will not doubt dominate the news, and our attention, for weeks to come. As we wait for that giant wave to hit us, however, there's a lot of other interesting stuff happening...

iPad 3 event

Now that invitations have gone out and the iPad 3 event is official, we went through all the hardware and software rumors we've been tracking and put together a monster iPad 3 event preview. Georgia also put together a couple of polls asking for your iPad 3 expectations. Make sure you get your votes in.

While a ton of material has allegedly been leaked already, including what could be a fairly complete outer casing there's still a lot we don't know. Especially about the software.

What apps will Apple show off on stage? They've done GarageBand and iMovie in the past? What's left? What will be the big hero features that highlight iPad 3 commercials for the next year? And will it get Siri? Many of us would love to see Siri on the iPad 3, but there are a lot of challenges Apple will have to overcome to make it a great experience.

All we can do now though is sell off our old iPads, watch for last minute rumors, and wait for Wednesday.

Speaking of rumors...

iMore is fairly cautious about posting rumors when we get them. Several times we've gotten good stories, sat on them to check and check again, only to see a mainstream publication run the story first. That's okay. Sometimes it's better to sure than first. When we do run something it's because we've got a good reason to, so it's nice when something like the March 7 iPad event date pans out. (Sometimes it's even hilarious.) Now we'll just have to see what happens with the quad-core processor we, and several others, heard was on board, the March 30, 2012 released date we heard about last week, and that big micro-dock story for the iPhone 5.

We link to a lot of other sites' rumors though, and there has been a ton of iPad 3 stuff lately. Some of you seem to love it -- you get angry if we take too long to get them linked up. Others of you don't seem to care for them very much at all. The good thing about the timeline nature of web sites is that you can always skip something that doesn't interest you and go on to something that does. But for interest's sake, here's how we're handling it.

Our current strategy is to post anything that gets a lot of attention and try to provide some analysis and some context. If it sounds possible, we'll say so, and if it doesn't make sense, we'll tell you that too. If it's just utterly ridiculous, we'll err on the side of not posting.

Our job is always and only to serve our readers, viewers, and listeners. If that means helping sort through the deluge of rumors that come up before a major Apple launch, that's what we'll do.

Which brings me to what we won't do.

Linking to Linkbait

Definitions for linkbait vary. Here's mine -- when someone smart posts something incendiary, outlandish, or otherwise asinine in a faux attempt to be controversial and attract negative attention. When it comes to iMore, that means dumb Apple stuff. A lot of big sites and big personalities have been posting dumb Apple stuff lately and it's really tempting to take the bait and respond. We've done that in the past. But it never ends. In fact, it just shows them their strategy works and encourages them to do it again. And again.

I love snarky rebuttals, but I can't read the pull quotes that are being snarkily rebutted anymore. Claim chowder takedowns are worth a chuckle but all they ultimately beget are more chowder claims to take down. Whether it's on websites or Twitter, links to dumb Apple stories only proves their formula and all we end up getting are more dumb Apple stories. There's so much intelligent, insightful, inspiring commentary being written in the Apple space it's really disheartening that the dumb stuff seems to be getting so many links. What we really need is an un-link protocol. Absent that, there's still something we can do.

We're going to make up for the linkbait we don't post with high quality, carefully curated links to really good content from really smart people. Like Richard Gaywood's recent article on TUAW about Retina display Macs, iPads, and HiDPI: Doing the Math that we linked to earlier in the week.

Here are some more:

• OS X @2X by App Cubby's David Barnard, which continues the exploration of Retina display Macs.
• iPad 3′s Retina display means trouble for many apps due to Apple’s 20MB 3G download limit by The Next Web's Matthew Panzarino, who rightly asks what inflating app sizes will do for impulse app sales.
• Retina & Universal by MacStories' Frederico Viticci offers some potential solutions to the problem.
• Frequent, Intense Mature and Suggestive Themes by Marco Arment looks at Apple's ongoing, inconsistent, flabbergasting practice of labeling any app with a built in web browser (UIWebView) as 17+ and scaring potential customers with warnings of "Frequent/Intense" content.
• The Readability Fallacy by Ben Brooks about the confusion Readability's business model causes for content creators and users of the service alike.

I don't agree with all of their opinions either, but when I read thought-provoking ideas, it causes me to question my own preconceptions. Sometimes I change my mind, sometimes I don't. But either way I've gone through a process, sharpened my thoughts, and come to have better opinions.

When I read the dumb stuff, even when I read smart people explaining why it's dumb, ultimately I still feel dumber. I'd rather focus on the smart stuff.

Speaking of the smart stuff

Those new columns I mentioned last week just keep getting better.

• How I use my iPhone for police work is from CrackBerry.com's David Boyd and delves into how law enforcement officers can benefit from Apple's mobile tech.
• In defense of Cydia, the jailbreak app store is Ally's counter-argument to Georgia's Agony and ecstasy of Cydia piece from a couple weeks back.
• How to make your iPhone photographs more powerful with negative space is the latest entry in Leanna's outstanding iPhoneography series.
• How my iPad helped me learn to play guitar is a wonderful piece by Gary that makes me think even I have a chance at figuring out how to jam...
• Nexia Home Security Bundle review: The future of iPhone home automation is now has Georgia taking a look at home automation, iPhone style

Look for more to come, even if we take a pause this week to cover iPad 3.

Adobe Photoshop Touch

One of the things that didn't get written last week was my Adobe Photoshop Touch review. I've been using it all week and I'm still deeply conflicted by it. On one hand, it's a fantastic app, with excellent tutorials for beginners, and that brings a lot of great features and functionality to the iPad, and shows just how incredible big screen, multitouch devices can be for content creation. On the other, it's a terribly frustrating experience that stymies my attempts to really use it at every turn.

I'm not sure if it's because Photoshop Touch is an AIR cross-compile and not a native iPad app, and that reduces its intuitiveness and raises the cognitive overhead for almost every activity. It could also be some of the UI decisions, for example having an & button is an odd, utterly opaque choice. I'm assuming the iPad also imposes limitations, for example the maximum canvas size is fine for blog images but way too constrained for professional work. (Could an iPad 3 with more processing power and RAM overcome this?) The masking is also far too imprecise for my tastes.

The bottom line for me is this -- I've worked as a designer for over a decade and lived in Photoshop for years, and I while I can have a lot of fun with Photoshop Touch, I can't even begin to do real work with it.

It doesn't even natively support PSD files for crying out loud.

There's a real opportunity here for a Pixelmator or Accorn or even an Apple-made iPhoto/Aperture to redefine the king of the imaging hill for the next generation of computing appliances.

Adobe should be scared out of their socks about that. They should forget all this AIR/Flash nonsense, forget protecting the platform lock-in, roll up their sleeves and focus 100% on making a fantastic content creation app again.

Join us on March 7

We'll be on Ustream Wednesday at 1pm ET/10am PT/6pm GMT during the iPad 3 event with a special edition iPhone Live podcast, and we'll follow up with a post-game show during our usual 9pm ET/6pm PT/2am GMT. Whether it's an iPad 3 or it gets another name, whether we see a 1080p Apple TV or a new iPod touch, whether new Time Capsules are in the wings or something completely new, we'll give it all the commentary, color, and analysis, it can handle. And we'd love for you to join us.

Actual out.

Georgia recently wrote an editorial about the frustration she's experienced using Cydia, the jailbreak app store. I'm a long time advocate of jailbreak and the benefits it brings with it. While Cydia may not be perfect, and it definitely isn't the same experience as using Apple's App Store, there are reasons for why it works the way it does, and some huge advantages that come along with it.

When you use an iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad, you expect your experience to be seamless and intuitive. Apple has long been known for creating devices that are extremely accessible to just about anyone, and work incredibly well with other Apple devices. It's like training wheels or rails. As long as you stay on the track, everything goes exactly as it's supposed to. When you decide to jailbreak, however, you're deciding to go off that Apple approved track, and you have to realize your experience is going to change.

You're not sacrificing much. Your iPhone will still make calls, your iPad will still be able to visit websites, and you can still buy anything you want from the official iTunes App Store, the same as always.

But you're gaining a lot. You can tweak your device so it behaves the way you want it to, including providing quick access to settings and in-app SMS replies, and you can theme it so it looks the way you like, including icons and user interface elements.

A stock iPhone or iPad user is typically after the convenience and ease of use Apple provides. A jailbroken iOS user is typically willing to part with some of that convenience and ease of use in exchange for the additional functionality and control.

Cydia is not the App Store

One of the biggest frustrations new jailbreakers have to overcome is Cydia, the jailbreak app store. If you've decide you want more control over your iPhone or iPad, and the ability to install applications and utilities that are not given the Apple stamp of approval, there's a price to be paid. You're classifying yourself as an expert and a power user, and you have to take on the responsibility that comes with it. You've entered a different level and you'll have to check some of your carefully curated expectations at the door.

While Cydia does play host to almost all available jailbreak apps, just as the App Store does for official applications, the similarities pretty much stop there.

The App Store is a simple "search, tap, enter password, and you're done" experience. Cydia is not.

Load some vs. load all

First, Cydia takes a lot longer to load and update. There's a reason for that. Cydia doesn't handle data in the same way the App Store does. The App Store, for example, has chosen to only present you with 25 applications at a time. That saves time up front but if you'd like to view more, you'll need to tell it by tapping to "View more" button and waiting again. And again, each time.

Cydia actually loads all packages at launch and you can page through every single one of them after the data is done loading.

The App Store also only loads data from one source -- iTunes. Cydia typically loads data from several different repositories. With the App Store, you're limited to that iTunes data source. With Cydia, you can add additional repositories if you wish.

Manually entering and managing repositories is a more complicated process than the App Store's iTunes-only approach, but it means you have access to a wider range of software, including betas. Downloading beta software isn't something the iTunes App Store supports at all.

It means you have access to cutting edge, even bleeding edge technology. If you're willing to do the work, you'll find ways to get iPad-like gestures (and more) on your iPhone, custom widgets and settings toggles in Notification Center, and other enhancements that may not come to Apple's official iOS for months, if ever. (Apple does seem to take inspiration from jailbreak now and then.)

Cydia has long been the breeding ground for amazing apps and utilities. If I have to wait a few more minutes for packages to load or deal with an occasional error or instability, that's a choice I've made and I'm okay with that trade-off.

Fragmentation vs. functionality

The iTunes App Store handles compatibility in a fairly straight forward manner. If your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch isn't able to run the version of iOS an app requires, you can't install that app. Developers list their requirements and if your device can't meet them, you can't have the app.

There's still a lot of crap in the App Store, some buggy apps slip through (including major apps from major developers like Google and Facebook!), and older devices can glitch or crash more on the most cutting edge, most demanding games, but for the most part you don't have to worry about whether or not an app will run on your device.

Cydia does things a bit differently. While some Cydia packages won't allow you to purchase them if they're not 100% compatible, others do not have this safeguard. There are many repositories you can add to Cydia that aren't curated for compatibility at all.

Generally, the ability to download what you want to download when you want to download it is considered a huge benefit of jailbreak. But with great power comes great responsibility, right? In other words, you have to do your homework. You have to check and make sure what you download is compatible with your device and your version of iOS.

(Incompatible or conflicting apps are often the reason for jailbreak headaches, especially for new users.)

Read release notes and app descriptions, and ask in our Jailbreak Apps Forum and your Cydia experience will be a much more enjoyable one.

Payments and process

Even before Apple introduced the App Store, iTunes was one of the biggest online payment systems in the world. Now they can handle credit cards and other forms of transactions in more parts of the world than just about anyone. Because they completely control iTunes and the App Store, they can also make using their payment system incredibly streamlined and simple. You tap a button, you type in a password, and you're done. One login to rule them all.

Cydia doesn't have that luxury. Cydia is dependent on third-party payment systems, namely Amazon and Paypal.

Apple also has a massive cloud infrastructure so your iTunes account can be tied to all the apps you've ever purchased and those apps can be easily restored to any device you own, new or old.

Again, Cydia doesn't have that type of account authentication system, so they've tied into Google and Facebook.

Apple's way is simple, but it's also without choice or option. You use iTunes or you use nothing. With Cydia you can choose to use Facebook or Google for account authentication, and you can choose to use Amazon or Paypal for payment.

Because the App Store is entirely controlled by Apple, they can store your credit card information and credentials and provide that really simple one tap, one password purchasing experience.

Because Cydia doesn't control Facebook, Google, Amazon, or Paypal, it can't store your credit card information and credentials, and so you do have to enter them more places, and more often, than you do with iTunes.

Again, it's the price of operating outside the Apple approved process, and again, the complexity has drawbacks but it also comes with some benefits.

Conclusion

No system is perfect. Not Apple's iTunes App Store and not Cydia, the jailbreak app store. I'm willing to overlook a lot of Cydia's flaws because I benefit from the apps and utilities it delivers. Without Cydia, many developers would have no way to distribute their apps, and to earn enough money to keep developing them.

While I think what Cydia brings to the table greatly outweighs its problem areas, I do think there's room for improvement. My biggest peeve is actually the organizational method Cydia uses. While discoverability on the App Store is a long standing problem, it's not always easy to find something on Cydia either unless you know what you're looking for or have a lot of time to browse through cluttered sections.

Making it easier to find really great apps and utilities is something that would make the initial Cydia experience better and a lot less overwhelming for new users.

If you're a Cydia user, new or long time, what are your thoughts on its usability? What would you most like to see changed or improved?

Additional resources:

• How to use Cydia, the jailbreak app store
• Jailbreak starters guide
• iMore jailbreak forums

Siri on the iPad would need to address connectivity, user interface scaling, and some long missing apps

I would love to have Siri, Apple's voice-controlled virtual assistant, on the iPad 3. I wrote in my iPad 3 event preview preview that I anticipate it, and not a day goes by that I don't instinctively reach for the Dictation button on the iPad 2 keyboard and then grumble when I realize for the umpteenth time that it's just not there.

But as much as I love the idea of Siri on the iPad, there are some challenges Apple would need to overcome.

Preface: Apple a) knows if they're bringing Siri to the iPad 3 or not, and b) if they are, will have no doubt worked all of this out already. So this is entirely a mental exercise on my part. If the iPad 3 is announced with Siri, however, these might be at least some of the reasons why.

Connectivity

iPhone 4S has a 3G data radio, so it remains online pretty much everywhere. iPads have Wi-Fi-only models, so they could be offline for extended periods. Is that an experience Apple would be happy with?

There was no iPod touch update in 2011, so Apple didn't have to deal with that use-case yet. However, there is considerable precedent for how Apple handles other internet-dependant applications when they're offline -- they pop up a network error. Siri already does this as well on an iPhone 4S in Airplane mode. "Siri not available. Connect to the internet."

Siri already tells you when it's not connected to the internet

They could throw in a few funny variations, make a HAL or Skynet joke or two, and almost any user would quickly be conditioned to connect first, ask Siri questions later.

Server load

Another connectivity issue exists on Apple's end. Siri on iPhone 4S, while much better now, had a lot of growing pains on the server side. Apple will want to make sure they have the capacity to handle tens of millions of additional Siri users, and all their queries, before they increase Siri's deployment.

For a while after the iPhone 4S launch, Siri had server load issues. Would adding iPad 3 queries further strain resources?

User interface scale

The full screen Siri interface currently used on the iPhone 4S wouldn't look good if scaled up to fit the bigger iPad screen. That's a problem Apple has faced and overcome several times before with the iPad UI. Mail's composition sheet, for example, doesn't fill the whole screen on the iPad the way it does on the iPhone. Likewise, while Notification Center is full screen on the iPhone and iPod touch, on the iPad it's decidedly not.

The same approach could theoretically work for Siri on the iPad, but not without some reconceptualization. Mechanically, Notification Center pulls down on both the iPhone and iPad. The iPad version just isn't as wide and doesn't pull down as far. Siri on the iPhone starts off more like the fast app switcher, revealed when screen pulls up. The fast app switcher works fine at full width on the iPad, and in full width regardless of whether the iPad is in portrait or landscape orientation.

That's something to consider as well -- Siri is portrait only on the iPhone, and that works fine because the iPhone's Home screen system is portrait only. The iPad's Home screen system is deliberately designed to work in both portrait and landscape modes. Siri's UI on the iPad would likewise have to work in both portrait and landscape mode.

Having the Siri microphone revealed at the bottom isn't an issue -- it would work and look fine. But having the whole screen pull up to display the results would look odd. It would look as odd as a full screen Notification Center. Which is why Apple didn't do Notification Center full screen on the iPad, it's why they didn't do Mail composition sheets full screen on the iPad, it's even -- according to legend -- why there aren't clock or weather or stocks apps on the iPad. It's something Apple seems incredible conscientious of, and not without good reason.

The Siri microphone might look okay as is on the iPad, but the widgets would look far too small, especially in landscape mode.

The Notification Center solution

Going back to Notification Center, which works fine in both portrait and landscape mode on the iPad, it might be worthwhile sacrificing the iPhone mechanic for the pull down's flexibility. Would Apple really be happy with something that works differently on the iPad than it does on the iPhone? Would users find it disconcerting?

The Siri user interface could be re-conceptualized to work on the iPad the same was Notification Center does -- as a drop down overlay.

It's workable, but not ideal.

The Mountain Lion solution

With OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, Apple is bringing Notification Center to the Mac. Mac's are landscape-only devices, but instead of a drop-down overlay, Apple placed it off to side and, like the iPhone, put it "under" the Home screen.

Apple could implement Siri like they implement Notification Center on Mountain Lion, but even if it's slimmed down it might not look great in portrait mode.

That could potentially work as a more consistent implementation on iPad for Notification Center and Siri both. While in landscape mode. But as discussed above, the iPad is Apple's only real orientation agnostic device. And in portrait mode, the Mountain Lion solution may not look as good.

And there's a bigger problem.

Clock, Weather, and Stocks

If we look closely at the Siri mockup above, there something missing. Or rather there's something there that's missing on the iPad: the Clock, Weather, and Stocks apps (along with Calculator and Voice Memo). As mentioned above, rumor has it that Apple and Steve Jobs didn't think they looked any good scaled up to 9.7-inches. Whatever the reason, the iPhone has them and the iPad does not.

Siri ties into the iPhone Clock, Weather, and Stocks apps. The iPad doesn't have these apps.

And the problem is, Siri uses them.

• "Set an alarm for 7:30"
• "Do I need a raincoat in Cupertino?"
• "What's Apple's stock price?"

Sure, the iPad doesn't need these apps for Apple to bake the functionality into Siri. Notification Center on the iPad does okay without these apps, but missing the weather and stocks widgets is still irksome. Siri would do okay with these apps as well, but it would likewise be irksome. On the iPhone I can go in an manually kill Alarms if and when I need to. I can change the local weather if and when I want to. Not necessary by any means, but nice.

Apple could add the Clock, Weather, and Stocks apps to the iPad. There are clock and weather and stocks for the iPad with well thought out user interfaces, so Apple could certainly figure it out, if it's something they decide to do.

Siri on iPad

I'd really like Siri on the iPad but there are some challenges Apple will need to overcome to make it a reality. Some of the best user experience designers on the planet work at Apple, though, and they've no doubt thought all of this through long ago. If they do decide to bring Siri to iPad, it'll be interesting to see how they figured it out.

Additional resources

• iOS 6 wants: Files app and documents picker with iCloud
• The 4 inch iPhone
• iOS 6 wants: The opposite of widgets
• iOS 6: Is it time for Apple to revamp the Home screen?

John Anastasiadis conceptualizes a Liquidmetal, carbon fiber, full screen iPad 3 that absolutely, positively will not stop until the iMore nation is awed.

We've already posted our iPad 3 event preview, rounding up all the rumors and outlining what we think Apple's likely to do with their next generation tablet. We've also asked you what you, our readers, expect from both the hardware and the software as well. Okay. Fine. Done. Good for us. Now it's time to have some fun. Now it's time to forget practical, forget realistic, and go full out, balls-to-wall, sky's-the-limit gadget porn.

Georgia and I, along with kickass product designer John Anastasiadis, brainstormed what we'd love to see in our dream iPad 3. We didn't go entirely Iron Man or Avatar transparent aluminum on it, but we didn't hold back much either. John then fired up his imagination and his rendering engines and brought it to vivid, virtual life.

• Smaller bezel: more room for that gorgeous 2048x1536 Retina display
• Capacitive home button and volume keys: Touch is the new click
• Quad core: Super fast, super fluid, with 1GB of RAM and 128GB of storage just because
• Single model: One device to rule them all: Wi-Fi 802.11ac, 3G, and international 4G LTE
• Liquidmetal frame/antenna array: future materials for future speeds
• Squared, angled edges: flat like the iPhone, still easy to get a finger under
• Carbon fiber back: Light enough for a Kindle bikini chick
• Super HD cameras: Crisp FaceTime in front, 1080p in the back
• Surround-sound speakers: Forward projecting, room filling
• Micro dock connector: Save room inside because more battery is more
• And Siri, of course

The driving principle was emersion. We wanted to get even more of the device out of your way and really let the content shine. A Retina display that big, that expectantly beautiful, deserves to be the absolute star of the show, bar nothing. (And definitely bar 3D. Yuck.)

The chipsets to make a single SKU don't exist yet but they're getting closer. Even though 4G LTE is a bag of frequency hurt, and Gigabit Wi-Fi is still a ways off, they're on the horizon. Likewise with 24nm 128GB NAND Flash storage at affordable prices. (Yes, even our dreams need to maintain the $499 entry point.)

Keeping the Home button was essential (our moms would find gestures utterly undiscoverable) but making them capacitive instead of physical seemed like a fair middle ground. Apple bought the rights to Liquidmetal, so why not put it use? It could maintains structural strength while still letting the frame flatten out and better match the current (and perhaps future) iPhone aesthetic.

Carbon Fiber was a tougher choice for the rear. John pointed out right away that it's not a radio-friendly material. This is fantasy though, and we wanted something that was really strikingly different. (So just imagine the antennas run through the Apple logo in the back -- which is why it's not yet glowing in this version! -- and around the Liquid Metal edges.)

Better cameras were a no-brainer, and Georgia insisted it was time Apple pay equal attention to better audio. Making the speakers surround sound and turning the to face front means they'd rock hard enough to make Dr. Dre run home and rethink his beats.

And yeah, the micro-dock, just because.

For more of John's work, check out his terrific BlackBerry 10 concept with a wrap-around screen and then head on over to the Anastasidias Portfolio for even more amazing design work (including a bonus render of our dream iPad 3).

Once you're done ogling, come back here and tell us what your dream iPad 3 would look like, or better yet -- jump into our Designers Forum and show us!

Complete rumor rundown of Apple's upcoming iPad 3 event, from release date to hardware hopes and software speculation

Apple's next generation iPad 3 will almost certainly be announced on Wednesday, March 7, 2012 at the Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco, California. Everything else about it, however, is still up in the air. That's nothing new. The road to every Apple product release is paved and pot-holed with rumors true and fake - and this one is no different.

Still, while Apple is secretive they do tend to follow patterns. What they've done in the past can indicate what they may do in the future. That's what we're going to look at here -- sift through all the recent rumors and try to figure out what makes sense.

Name

Product names are ultimately marketing decisions and regardless of specs, chronological or model generation, or any other factor, Apple can call any of their products anything they like, whenever they like. The 2010 iPad was simply "iPad" and the 2011 iPad was simply "iPad 2", so there's a good chance the next one will be simply "iPad 3".

The internal Apple model number seems to be iPad 3,1, but that doesn't always translate to marketing name. (iPhone 1,2 was released as iPhone 3G, and iPhone 2,1 was released as iPhone 3GS). Could Apple go with an iPad 2S name like iPhone 4S? Given the presumed Retina display (see below) and processor bump, it seems unlikely. So do things like iPad Pro or iPad HD. The former seems more fitting of the Mac line, the latter unlike anything Apple has used for a flagship products in the past.

So, for purposes of this article, we'll stick with iPad 3.

Release date

Apple will no doubt announce the release date for the iPad 3 during the March 7, 2012 event. We've heard a couple of dates, the most frequent of which is Friday, March 30, 2012.

That fits with previous releases, which were also on Fridays. It is a long time between announcement and release, however. If they go earlier, March 16 or March 23 are both good targets.

Until we hear otherwise, however, March 30 is likely.

Hardware features

Because Apple doesn't manufacture their own hardware, there are often leaks that come from the factories that do the assembly, or accessory makers who manage to sneak a peak at the assembly. However, Apple also tests and produces different prototypes, so leaks might not always be for the final production model.

When looking at rumors, one thing to consider is component availability and costs. Apple will need to keep component costs down to maintain price points and margins. They're in the hardware business and they don't price their products to be at or near the break-even price point.  The iPad 3 has to make money, and that helps reduce the likelihood of some of the more extravagant possibilities.

Processor

Rumors about the iPad 3 processor are split right down the middle. iMore heard Apple is going quad-core with the iPad 3. Others have heard they're sticking with dual-core, albeit supercharging it with much better graphics. 9to5Mac discovered references to both a quad-core and a dual-core chipset in the iOS software, so it's possible Apple is testing both and will decide based on factors like battery life. It's also possible dual-core and quad-core will each be deployed in different devices, an Apple A6 quad-core processor for the iPad 3 and an Apple A5X processor for something with lower requirements, like an Apple TV 3.

For the most part , it won't matter much. Since Apple controls the iPad 3 from atoms to bits, they can optimize dual-core to do specific tasks better and smoother than many non-integrated quad-core devices. And either way, it sounds like iPad 3 will be a monster gaming machine.

While there haven't been many specific RAM rumors about the iPad 3, BGR obtained an alleged iPad 3 iBoot log, and developer Will Strafach spotted a reference in it that suggests there will be 1GB will be on board.

Again, because Apple can optimize iOS for the exact hardware they're releasing, they can usually get by with less RAM than competitors. More pixels (in a presumed Retina display, see below), and more power might just demand more memory, however.

Storage rumors have been all but non-existant this time around. iPad 2 came in 16, 32, and 64GB models, as did the iPhone 4S. 24nm NAND Flash chips have been announced, making 128GB a technical possibility. Whether it's a cost-effective one remains the question.

If 1080p content becomes a reality (see below), the extra storage will certainly come in handy, but if iCloud really is Apple's future, they may consider streaming far more important than storage. Apple can buy in flabbergasting volumes, but even at iPad numbers, 128GB still seems like a very expensive option.

Quad-core Apple A6 with 1GB of RAM and 16, 32, and 64GB of storage sound most likely at this point.

Radios and 4G LTE

We heard that Apple was going 4G LTE this year, but weren't certain if it would start with the iPad 3. The WSJ claims it will. What we're still not certain about, however, is where LTE will be available.

LTE isn't a standard and different carriers around the world use a wide range of different bands to support it. There are so many variations, in fact, our friend and LTE expert, Mickey Papillon thinks Apple would need two different LTE models -- one to support North American, and another to support Europe, Australia, and Asia.

It's possible Apple restricts LTE to North America only, or to the U.S. only for AT&T and Verizon. Verizon needs it the most -- their current CDMA/EVDO Rev. A iPads are almost crippled at 2-3mbps.

There are also newer, faster and more flexible Wi-Fi technologies on the horizon, and Apple was an early adopter of 802.11n. Is it possible Apple will add 802.11ac Gigabit Wi-Fi, or Wi-Fi Direct to the iPad 3? 802.11ac may still be a ways off, and AirPlay and AirPrint are doing a lot of direct Wi-Fi transfers now, though not via Wi-Fi Direct. So neither seem imminent at this point.

Both the iPhone and Mac have gone Bluetooth 4.0 however, and it makes sense for the iPad to follow suit. That will allow for low-power accessories, and likely speed up the iPad (and other iOS devices) becoming interfaces for all sorts of accessories, from household appliances to cars to healthcare products and everything in between.

So LTE, but perhaps North America only, and Bluetooth 4.0 are good bets, but 802.11ac and Wi-Fi direct probably aren't.

Cameras

The iPad 2 cameras are... terrible. There are reports from NextMedia that we might see a better rear camera in the iPad 3, anywhere from 5 to 8 megapixels, the latter of which would match the excellent iPhone 4S camera. The size and quality of the lens, however, is limited by the depth of the device, so a better camera would either need a slightly thicker device or be positioned at a thicker point in the device. Both are possibilities, given other rumors.

Likewise, Apple has introduced "FaceTime HD" cameras in the Mac, but not in the iPhone 4S. With a Retina display rumored for iPad 3 (see below), the current, incredibly low resolution front facing camera in iOS devices would make my eyes bleed. It seems logical Apple would give it a bump, even if only into the very low megapixel range.

Frankly, any camera improvement would be welcome at this point, so anything 5mp or above on the rear, and FaceTime HD on the front would be huge wins.

Dock connector and speakers

While iMore did hear Apple was getting ready to ditch the traditional dock port for something smaller, it sounds like that's on more of an iPhone 5 timeline than the iPad 3 timeline.

As for speakers, Apple hasn't shown any interest to date in augmenting them for their iOS devices. They let the headphones handle the heavy listening. Even though competitors have implemented technology like Beats, there have been no rumors suggesting a speaker improvement is in the cards.

Screen size, aspect ratio, and Retina display

Apple has said they don't think smaller tablets are as usable or allow for the quality of apps they want on the iPad. However, Apple has famously derided products and features they later went on to release themselves. Even so, and even though rumors of iPads in sizes from 7- to 8-inches have floated around for a while, there's absolutely no reason to think the iPad 3 will change screen sizes any time soon. Especially not with so many apps in the App Store designed for the current screen size. (Shrinking apps, even if you keep the same resolution, makes touch targets small and hurts usability.)

Likewise, while 16:9 aspect ratio tablets are better for 16:9 video (which is mostly HDTV -- movies tend to vary more), they're terrible for portrait use. Apple needs a device that's okay for both landscape and portrait, and that means sticking with 4:3.

A 2048x1536 Retina display seems like the closest thing to a sure bet. Apple has reportedly been working on it since before the iPad 2 launch, and if parts leaks from MacRumors are to be believed, they can finally produce them cheaply enough, and in sufficient quantities to make them affordable and viable.

To put the display in context, 2048x1536 (and it really couldn't be anything else without trashing existing apps) is a higher resolution than many computer displays, and higher than a 1080p television (1920x1080) -- in a 9.7-inch screen.

The idea is that it makes pixels so small they disappear - all you notice is the content. Everything from ebooks to web pages to videos should look almost as good as they do on the iPhone 4S. The density isn't quite as high, but since the screen is bigger you'll probably hold it slightly further away, making the relative quality close to the same.

So yeah, 9.7-inch, 3:4 Retina display at 2048x1536.

Home button

Apple's iPad event invitation (see above) didn't show a Home button, leading to rampant speculation that Apple might be ditching the click and going exclusively to multitouch gestures, as introduced in iOS 5.

Gestures aren't as discoverable as buttons, however, and the iPad is a decidedly mainstream device. The introduction of the Fast App Switcher has put more strain on the Home button than ever before, but with the iPhone 4S Apple has begun making them stronger and longer lasting.

There have been rumors from Boy Genius Report about Apple dumping the Home button in the past. There have also been parts leaks showing an unchanged front-panel layout, including the Home button spot.

It could be something Apple's working on obsoleting, but not any time soon.

Miscellaneous

No glowing Apple logo. No additional hardware buttons. No AMOLED screen, super or otherwise.

Software features

Software is harder to predict than hardware. With the exception of the beta process for developers, and carrier testing for network compatibility, Apple gets to keep it completely in house. Leaks happen when people discover hidden strings and images, but Apple almost always keeps the most exciting, most demonstrable new features completely out of the software until event day. That makes new apps and many new functions much harder to guess before hand. Still, there are some things to consider.

iOS 5.1

New versions of iOS have traditionally come with new models of iPhone, and while the incremental x.1 version of iOS has traditionally come with new models of iPod touch, there wasn't one last year (not really) and so iOS 5.1 falls to the iPad 3.

iOS 3.2 was a major new version, bringing iOS to the big screen, tablet style user interface for the first time. iOS 4.2 was fairly big, re-unifying the platform and bringing all the iOS 4 features like multitasking and folders to the iPad for the first time.

The iPad got iOS 5 day and date with the iPhone back in October, however, so we're probably not looking at anything nearly as profound as the last two years.

iOS 5.1 has yet to go Gold Master (GM), but that will probably happen at the March 7 iPad event, with release to follow a couple of days before the iPad 3 hits stores.

In addition to some small changes already seen in the iOS 5.1 betas, like the ability to delete Photo Stream photos, faster fast camera access, and fixes to some privacy bugs, there are still a few cards left for Apple to play.

Siri

Apple's intelligent virtual assistant, Siri is the headline feature of the iPhone 4S and hasn't been made available to any previous iOS devices. Apple was also careful to point out that Siri is still in beta, with limited language support for now. The beta was, in part, to allow Siri access to far more voice data than it could ever get locked up inside Apple’s private test bubble.   Although Siri was plagued with server problems early on, it's largely more stable  (though certainly not perfect) now.

If Apple really wants to push Siri as part of their user interface going forward, they'll have to bring it to more devices... eventually. iPads aren't as mobile as iPhones, however. They aren't as ubiquitously connected to the internet either (there are Wi-Fi only models, after all). You likely won't need to dictate iMessage replies on your iPad while driving.

But even now, when I'm using my iPad 2, I keep trying to hit the Dictate button so I can use Siri.

It will likely require better mics, like the iPhone 4S has, but Siri seems like a good bet for iPad 3. If it's not there, the absence will be notable.

1080p

With a Retina display screen, the iPad 3 will have a higher pixel count than a 1080p television -- 2048x1536 vs. 1920x1080. With a faster processor, regardless of whether it's dual- or quad-core, it'll be able to handle video better than ever before. 1080p content just seems like a natural fit, and a great way for Apple to show off that new display and all that new power.

Whether iTunes begins to offer 1080p content, and how much they can offer, how soon, and in how many regions is another question. In some areas, ISP bandwidth caps may prove prohibitive even to an average amount of 1080p content. Likewise, even with 4G LTE, the ability to stream 1080p would likely be extremely limited if not blocked outright.

But having even simple support for local 1080p -- however you get it on the device -- sounds absolutely reasonable.

iMovie HD/Final Cut Pro X for iPad

Apple launched iMovie for iPad alongside the iPad 2, but it's since been overtaken by Avid Studio which offers better support and more features. Again, given the Retina display, it feels like Apple is going to want to show off a little and give iMovie an update.

Given the recent iMovie-style makeover of Final Cut Pro X, there's been some speculation Apple may start porting their pro apps to iPad, but that seems less likely. There are still limitations to mobile devices and multitouch that professional level software doesn't face on the desktop.

If Apple goes back to video for the iPad 3 launch, a version of iMovie that supports 1080p and overtakes Avid Studio in features seems more likely.

iPhoto/Aperture

iOS 5 added rudimentary retouching tools to the Photos app, but it's nowhere near the desktop iPhoto in feature set or functionality, never mind the professional power of Aperture. Again, a Retina display seems to demand great Apple software to go along with it, and iPhoto feels like it fits that bill.

Aperture, like FCPX, is a pro tool and probably wouldn't fit with demands of mobile and multitouch, but iPhoto would. Photography professionals are already drooling over the idea of a Retina iPad for carrying around their portfolios. Give them -- and us -- even good quality consumer tools for editing them, and it will be a huge win. (Especially if, given the native code and Apple UI acumen, it proves more useful than the often-frustrating Adobe Photoshop Touch.

FaceTime conference calls

If Apple goes with a FaceTime HD camera in front, an better chipset inside, and a Retina display on the panel,

one of the best demos they could do alongside it would be a  A FaceTime conference. Showing gandma the grandkids and talking to a colleague across country is one thing, connecting several members of a family or a team scattered across the globe is quite another.

It would make for a great commercial. Allowing it to work over 4G LTE, if available, would just be a bonus.

Miscellaneous

Given the recent developer preview of OS X Mountain Lion, it's obvious that there a lot of other interesting stuff Apple's working on. And as much as iPad interface an experience elements have been brought "Back to the Mac", it'd be great to see some of the Mountain Lion stuff brought Back to the iPad as well. But that's probably more likely in iOS 6 than it is for the iPad 3.

One more things...

In addition to the iPad 3, there are rumors suggesting other products might also make an appearance at the next Apple event on March 7. Some Apple events, like the fall music events, typically showed off numerous iTunes-related products. Apple's famous "One more thing..." has also been used to highlight additional products, including the original MacBook Air, during largely unrelated events.

Apple TV 3

There are rumors, many from 9to5Mac, that Apple's getting ready to announce an updated Apple TV 3 as well. Given the Apple TV wasn't updated last year, it makes sense they'd want to get it on the new hardware platform eventually.

Would they take attention off the iPad 3 launch with an Apple TV 3 introduction? Sure, they split the original iPhone launch with the original Apple TV launch back at Macworld 2007. If the Apple TV 3 is positioned as having cool new features that enhance what Apple shows off for the iPad 3 -- especially 1080p -- then it's easily something we could see.

New iPod touch

Like Apple TV and the rest of the iPod lineup, the iPod touch received no significant update last year, which makes it feel like it's due. However, the lack of any leaks surrounding a new iPod touch make it seem like it's not a priority right now and probably won't happen for a while still.

(Georgia thinks the "And touch." in the iPad event invitation might hint at it.)

Conclusion

It's been roughly a year since Steve Jobs took the stage to launch the iPad 2. This year, Tim Cook, Phil Schiller, Scott Forstall, Eddy Cue, Jony Ive, or some combination thereof will show us what Apple has in store for iOS for the first part of 2012.

Regardless of which rumors ultimately prove true, and what surprises may or may not be in store, one thing's for certain -- it'll be one hell of a show.

Join us next Wednesday, March 7, at 10am PT/1pm ET/6pm GMT for iMore's usual commentary, color, and analysis. And until then, give us your best predictions in the comments below!

Once upon a time pundits proclaimed that Apple simply had to make a netbook, or low cost, low margin laptops from competitors would destroy them in the PC marketplace. More recently, they said Apple just had to make a discounted iPad or cheap, content-subsidized (in theory) tablets from Amazon would quickly overtake them. Today, and not for the first time, the call is coming for Apple to make a cheap pay-as-you-go iPhone to compete with the bargain basement Android offerings taking financially savaged parts of Europe by storm.

But Apple doesn't do cheap.

Under Steve Jobs and now Tim Cook, they never have. They've thought differently, changed the game, and somehow they've managed to survive.

Most north Americans and some western Europeans are far more familiar with the idea of a post-paid phone, if not the term itself. Basically, it means you get the phone up front, heavily subsidized, and in exchange agree to a long term service contract (2 years in the U.S., sometimes less in Europe, 3 years in Canada). You save roughly $400 on your new iPhone, but you're paying roughly $1000 a year for service, so the carrier makes their money back and then some.

In pre-paid markets, you typically pay full price for your phone up front, then pay-as-you-go for service, without any contract or long term commitment. Because you have to pay full price for the phone, however, without any subsidies to defer the cost, cheap phones end up being attractive to far more users. And Apple doesn't have an answer to the ultra low end, uber cheap, bargain basement $100 Android phones that are increasingly dominant in pre-paid markets.

Now Apple doesn't like to leave money on the table, but they love to leave "no money" on the table. They value saying "no" far more dearly than saying "yes".

So far they've said a resounding "no" to high volume, low margin markets.

The Wall Street Journal posited today that Apple's reliance on carrier subsidies were "a crutch" and offered this statement from John Lagerling, Google's director of Android partnerships:

"Our competitors are much more dependent on such subsidies. From a sustainability standpoint, if you have very expensive devices as the only ones available to access your ecosystem, then that can come with a pretty severe hangover in the long run."

Returning again to the theory that past behavior is sometimes the best indicator of future behavior, however, we can look at the aforementioned netbook market for precedent.

Apple's first answer to the netbook wasn't a crappy, creaky, barely usable Mac with a tiny screen and cramped keyboard. It was the MacBook Air. It was a premium product that two generations later became 11- and 13-inch marvels that, while 5 times (or more) the cost of a netbook, to this day has competitors struggling to match its quality and value at the same price point.

Apple's second answer to the netbook was also the iPad. Still a premium product but one that started at half the price of the Air and, while not doing everything a traditional laptop did, was carefully and precisely aimed at doing several important, mainstream tasks better than most laptops could. Certainly better than netbooks could.

Turns out it was a killer strategy. They divided and conquered. The MacBook Air has become a trend-setting laptop, owning a key part of a lucrative product position. And the iPad has become virtually its own product category. Neither are typically subsidized.

Compare the success Apple has had with either of the those products to the results competitors have seen from devalued, depressed, and demoralized netbook offerings, and it's hard to imagine any of those pundits are still in a position to pund (punditize?) let alone keeping punding (punditizing?).

While it's dangerous to draw parallels between the very different PC and mobile spaces, Apple's ability to earn tremendous amounts of profit while owning only a tiny percentage of the market should show how their priorities are aligned. (And is something other companies, like RIM, need to think about carefully if they consider attempting to be successful with small amounts of market share.)

Even when it appears like Apple is selling the iPhone "cheaply", they're really not. They're selling it with massive carrier subsidies. An iPhone 3GS is "free" on AT&T because AT&T is paying Apple hundreds of dollars for it, making it up over the course of the 2-year service plans customers agree to when they get the subsidized phone. An iPhone 4S is only $299 - $499 on contract. It's $49 to $849 off contract.

That's not cheap.

If it means Apple doesn't do as well as $100 off contract Android phones in pre-paid markets, right now it looks like they're fine with that. As fine as they were in not doing well in the $300 PC netbook market.

Apple doesn't have to do well in every market, it only has to do supremely well in the most valuable markets. Sometimes the best way to win is not to play every game.

And if Apple one day decides they do need to present an answer to Greece and Portugal, to emerging markets, and to carriers who balk at subsidizing a flagship Apple device, it probably won't be with a cheap iPhone. It will be to the cheap phone market what the iPad was to the cheap netbook market.

Something thought differently. A game changer.

Source: The Wall Street Journal

Control, privacy, platform, and competition are just some of the reasons both iOS and OS X integrate Twitter but not Facebook.

With the upcoming release of OS X Mountain Lion, Apple will be fully integrating Twitter social sharing across all of their included apps, as well as extending a developer API for 3rd party apps available through the Mac App Store. This follows similar integration in iOS 5 last year and leaves one huge, lingering question: where's the Facebook integration?

Facebook has roughly 845 million users on their platform, and Facebook for iPhone has been one of the most popular apps on the App Store since launch. Both iOS and Facebook are massive platforms and the intersection of those to platforms is enormous.

That's not taking anything away from Twitter, which is also extremely popular and also shares a huge intersection between its user base and Apple's. They're just very different social networks, with different features, and iOS currently only has one and not the other.

So why would Apple choose to leave out Facebook and rely only on the less-enormous, less feature-filled Twitter for social integration in OS X 10.8 and iOS 5?

Control

The first reason that springs to mind is control. Apple likes to have as much control over their platform as they can in order to deliver the absolute best user-experience possible. Twitter doesn't take much issue with this, but Facebook is a different story.

Apple and Facebook once tried to work together on Apple's Ping social music service. According to the late Steve Jobs, Facebook wanted "onerous" terms in order to allow integration between Ping and Facebook's platform. Apple declined. Facebook pulled support. Finger pointing and harsh words followed.

(There are also some signs that Apple and Facebook flirted with integration in iOS 4 as well, but nothing became of it.)

Privacy

Apple has had some issues with privacy, including the collection of traffic data and recently apps that uploaded Contacts info without permission. However, they've also used privacy as a way to needles Google. Apple makes most of their money selling products, not selling advertising services, so they don't want to or need to collect a lot of user data. They've also been fairly unimpeachable when it's come to insisting other companies get users to opt-into sharing information up front, rather than force them to opt-out in some convoluted manner later. (Much to the consternation of advertisers and marketers, most recently in the magazine subscription area.)

Facebook on the other hand likes to collect huge amounts of data from its users, often with a collect first, apologize later mentality. Apple might take issue with Facebook wanting to harvest iOS user data, package it up, and market against it. Especially if all they, and users get in return is integration for status, photos, and location.

Platform

Facebook views their service as a platform. Just as OS X and iOS are unique and proprietary platforms meant to help Apple sell hardware, Facebook's platform is a proprietary service meant to help them collect data and sell ads. Apple wants to prioritize their iPhone and iPad devices, Facebook their social graph.

Those different and diverging priorities can easily be at odds and lead to conflict.

Competition

Lastly, Facebook has long been rumored to be working on their own smartphone. This could present the same problem for Apple that Google did when Android was released. In fact, it could be an even bigger problem if Facebook's integration is more broad than a maps or video app, or a mail account. Facebook integration isn't a bell that can be easily un-rung.

It would make sense for Facebook to make their own smartphone, however, the same way it made sense for Google.

Steve Jobs threatened to go Nuclear on Google when Android was released, to spend Apple's last dollar suing Google over their "stolen" technology. Would Apple set themselves up for that to happen again?

Twitter

Twitter doesn't seem to want as much control as Facebook. They're so far much more upfront about user privacy. While they're also a platform, it's one that seems -- at least for now -- more compatible with Apple's needs than is Facebook's. There's also no sign of a Twitter Phone on the horizon (or rather, almost every smartphone is already a Twitter Phone these days.)

Of course, it's always possible that Apple and Facebook may come to some sort of agreement down the road, ultimately paving the way for Facebook integration in iOS 6 and future versions of OS X. During Apple's recent shareholder meeting, CEO Tim Cook was asked about their relationship with Facebook and where exactly the popular social network would eventually come into the picture.

We do a lot with them, our users use Facebook an enormous amount. [...] I've always thought that the two companies could do more together.

Apple could stay away from Facebook just as they have always done, allowing Twitter to continue on its course of massive growth and user adoption. Or Apple and Facebook could patch up their differences, work out a deal, and give users more benefit with additional social sharing options..

Regardless, it would be nice to see the two work something out given how popular Facebook is and how often most of us use the social network on our iPhones, iPod touches, and iPads.

Why would Microsoft make Office for iPad, and why would Apple want it?

There's been a bit of a brouhaha this week over the possibility of Microsoft Office coming to the iPad. It's been teased, denied, rumored for a keynote spot at the anticipated iPad 3 event, summarily dismissed and otherwise masterfully debated everywhere from blogs to social streams and back.

But does it even matter? Is it merely the significance and symbolism of the idea itself -- having Office on iPad -- that's important, or is anyone actually expecting killer software when years of Office on Mac still haven't provided a truly excellent, fully compatible experience?

Why would Microsoft make Office for iPad?

Microsoft is getting ready to finally ship their iPad competitor -- Windows 8 on tablets

While education has always been a stronghold of Apple's, and according to their Q1 2012 conference call, almost the entire Fortune 500 is testing or deploying iPads, for everyone from students to enterprise, having a real, compatible Microsoft Office suite on Windows 8 Tablets could very well sway consumer dollars in Microsoft's direction.

Why then would Microsoft want to release Office for iPad -- Word, Excel, and PowerPoint -- when making Office an exclusive for their upcoming Windows 8 tablets would boost Microsoft's own platform and give it a fighting chance against the Apple incumbent?

Because Microsoft is a software licensing company. It's what they do. Sure, they talk a good platform game, and they've succeeded in building platforms, but at their core they're the guys who licensed DOS and BASIC to the world.

Take Exchange ActiveSync as precedent. Exchange was Microsoft's attempt to displace BlackBerry from the enterprise. It was the crown jewel of Windows Mobile, the predecessor of Windows Phone. And Microsoft gave it to Apple, Google, and others.

They hurt -- badly hurt -- Windows Mobile to help -- really help -- Exchange ActiveSync. They chose software licensing over platform success. They chose beating BlackBerry over helping Apple and Google.

There are hundreds of millions of iOS devices on the market. The revenue that could be realized by selling Microsoft Office licenses at $30 a pop (assuming a price similar to what Apple charges for the full iWork suite) to those hundreds of millions of iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad users is compelling. Even if Microsoft begins solely with an iPad version of Office -- as Apple did with iWork -- tens of millions of licenses is nothing to sneeze at, not even for Microsoft. It might even make up for a lot of ~$15 Windows 8 Tablet licenses Office on iPad costs them. Software licensing over platform success.

And hey, if Office on iPad helps Microsoft compete against Google Docs, all the better.

Office on iPad could also be similar to Office on Mac -- a second class experience that leads users, and enterprise, dependent on Microsoft's software to switch over to Microsoft platform to get done what they desperately need to get done.

Of course, Microsoft doesn't make Halo for the PlayStation 3, so it's possible Office for tablets will be considered in the same way, but if iPads are really the mainstream consumer computing appliance of the future, Microsoft will want their software, and revenue stream, to be on it.

Why would Apple want Office on iPad?

Apple already offers iWork for iPad -- Pages word processor, Numbers spreadsheets, and Keynote presentations

Microsoft owned, utterly and completely owned, the last wave of personal computing from the operating system that still runs 9 out of 10 PCs to the Office software the powers a massive percentage of work and home productivity alike. Having Office on iPad could pull people away from Apple's existing iWork software and take money from their pockets.

Why then would Apple want Office released on iPad when it would eclipse Apple's own iWork suite -- Pages, Keynote, and Numbers -- with a far more established, more functional competitor on Apple's own platform?

Because Apple is a hardware company. It's what they want. They make razors and rely on compelling but convenient and commoditize razorblades to increase the attractiveness of their products. They're the guys who give iOS away for free and run iTunes and the App Store at just above cost.

Take Office on Mac as a precedent. Office on Mac mattered so much that, upon his return to Apple, Steve Jobs let Bill Gates dwarf him on the keynote stage to announce the deal that would keep Office on the Mac for years to come. It didn't matter that then, like now, Office on Mac wasn't great software (consider iTunes on Windows revenge) it only mattered that it was Office and it was on the Mac. It was good enough for most of the people most of the time. It checked a box and removed a barrier to purchase.

The same holds true for Office on iPad. There is a segment of the market, consumer and enterprise, who simply won't buy or use something that doesn't run Office. Put Office on it and that box gets checked, that barrier to purchase gets busted down.

Does any of that matter?

The Daily claims Office for iPad is ready to go but Microsoft says it's not so

If Microsoft can work a Windows 7-class miracle and make a fantastic multitouch version of Office, then absolutely it matters. It'd be a fantastic win for everyone. Microsoft's reputation for tablet software would grow, which would encourage consumers to give Microsoft's other offerings, including their platform, a chance. Apple would get more killer software to help them sell more iPads. And customers would get a really great Office suite to work with.

If Office is as middling as it is on Mac, Microsoft's reputation for poor off-platform software will persist, but Apple will still get a massive name on the App Store, and customers will get an app that may frustrate them but will still be familiar and somewhat comforting.

That's assuming Microsoft is even making Office for iPad.

The symmetry of an Office for iPad announcement at the iPad 3 event makes for compelling conjecture.

The last time Microsoft appeared on an Apple stage it was to rescue Apple from near bankruptcy and pledge Office to Apple's user base to mitigate Microsoft's anti-trust concerns. If Microsoft appears again, it would be to acknowledge Apple's unprecedented success in consumer electronics and offer Office to Apple's massive user base.

If it doesn't happen during the iPad 3 event, it could still happen by way of press release and sudden appearance on the App Store. I don't have any specific information one way or another, my guess is it will happen.

Microsoft is a software licensing company. Apple is a hardware company. It's what they do. It's what they want.

Feels like it's just a matter of time.

Update: Guy English has a smart take, and killer closing, on this as well on Kicking Bear

Apple co-founder, guiding mind behind the iPhone, iPad, iTunes, Apple Retail, Pixar, and literally a lifetime of other culture- and industry-changing innovations, Steve Jobs was born 57 years ago today. He passed away last October right after the introduction of the iPhone 4S and Siri, leaving Apple under the guidance of Tim Cook.

Under Cook, the iPhone 4S and iCloud has shipped, OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion has been announced, and the iPad 3 launch is all but upon us.

But the man who shaped consumer electronics this generation, who relentlessly drove the mainstreaming and democratization of technology, who made form matter to function, and who smiled and wrung his hands on the keynote stage as he prepared to announce "one more thing..." is no longer here to enjoy it with us.

Apple enthusiasts wishing to remember and celebrate his life will be gathering at prominent Apple Stores and similar locations. He was just a man. But he dented a lot of universes.

Happy birthday, Steve. And thanks again.



• End of Act Two
• Steve Jobs: 1955 – 2011
• One more thing...
• iPad Live 77: Requiem
• Celebrating Steve Jobs event

For a few years every hot new hero phone that hit the market was dubbed "iPhone killer" and lavished with link-bait praise for a week or so, until users hit usability walls, and the link-baiters were on to the next, hot new "iPhone killer".

Nothing killed the iPhone, of course. It couldn't be killed. It wasn't only a smart phone, it was a great phone that was smartly conceived and executed.

Nothing makes that more clear that the fact that it's gone on to sell more in each incarnation than all incarnations before, and it's spread from a single U.S. carrier, AT&T, to become the best selling device on all 3 of the major U.S. carriers, including Verizon and Sprint. (And to be blamed for the misfortunes of the 4th largest, T-Mobile, the only major carrier without an iPhone in their lineup.)

Gimmicks like screens-as-buttons, sliding keyboards, Adobe Flash support, "openy" ecosystems, etc. didn't work. Not for the BlackBerry Storm or the Palm Pre or any individual Nexus or Droids. Competing based on feature lists and spec sheets, in any form, didn't work.

The Pepsi challenge

So now we're on to the "Pepsi challenge" phase of counter-programming. It's a classic bit, where you define the terms of the comparison to get the result you need. Pepsi is sweeter so in small amounts, like taste tests, more people will choose it. You put a sprinter in a marathon, or vice versa, and you pretty much know how it will net out.

Samsung is the obvious place to start. They're absolutely the smartest of Apple's competitors at the moment. They realized there would be a market for people who wanted an iPhone or iPad, but not from Apple, or not running iOS. So they made their products look as close to iPhones and iPads as possible, and made as many of them as possible to fit that segment. Too many, perhaps. (Motorola, who makes decidedly not-iPhones that are also not-iPhone looking, hasn't fared as well in the market.)

The latest Samsung commercial, for the Galaxy Note, puts it head-to-head in challenges against a hapless iPhone user who sadly, doesn't seem to have an app handy for any of that.

The Galaxy Note has a huge screen with a stylus, and comes packaged with software to support just the kind of map-annotating, head-cutting-off tasks requested by the host. (You can download apps and buy a stylus for the iPhone, but the average user probably won't have either immediately available.)

Microsoft's recent "Smoked by Windows Phone" series is similar.

Windows Phone has excellent Facebook integration (and damn fine camera software); iPhone has none. You can get a Facebook app but the iPhone's built-in social sharing options are limited to Twitter (and iMessage if you want to count that).

Both of these campaigns are designed to get potential Apple customers to at least consider getting something other than the iPhone. To try Pepsi instead of buying coke by default. They're not aimed at Apple Store shoppers -- you can't buy and Android or Windows Phone there -- but carrier store and big box store shoppers, who they're hoping will at least consider alternatives before walking out with an iPhone.

And that's an important battle for individual Android device makers, and Windows Phone in general to make. Especially as they increasingly battle each other for unit share.

While Android collectively is the market leader, there are so many Android devices on the market that it's hard for any individual one to stand out, or to stand out for more than a couple weeks. (The top 3 selling smartphones in the U.S. are iPhone 4S, iPhone 4, and iPhone 3GS -- the latter of which is only available on AT&T)

Also, the obsolescence curve for Android devices is brutal, and that's not good for the profitability of each individual phone and the manufacturer who makes it. (Making 10 million of the exact same phone is typically a lot cheaper, per unit, than 10 thousand.)

Samsung is far better when it comes to obsolescence than Motorola has been of late, but their totally undisciplined when it comes to dilution. Instead of releasing only one or two carefully planned, carefully marketed devices, intended to sell in those tens of millions, they're putting out up to a dozen devices, at quarter-inch screen intervals, some like the Note that may not sell more than the tens of thousands.

Who does number 3 work for?

Microsoft's problem is even worse.

Carriers have to carry the iPhone. Dealing with Apple, who won't give them any control, is a huge pain in the ass, but they simply have to do it if they want sales and profitability. Sprint mortgaged the company to get it, customers demand it, Apple still can't make it fast enough. It's a given.

Carriers want to sell Android. Google lets them do almost anything with it, including integrating all their value-added features and services, and while it doesn't make as much money for them as the iPhone, it's nowhere near as expensive either, and satisfies the not-iPhone market almost completely.

Where does Windows Phone fit in? The carriers don't need to sell it because there's nowhere near iPhone level customer demand. They don't want to carry it because Microsoft won't give them anywhere near Google levels of control. So Android remains their preference.

What's the market for the number three cola company?

There's probably a hope inside Microsoft that there will be a large enough segment of not-iPhone customers who either also don't want Android, or try Android, are dissatisfied, and want a not-iPhone not-Android phone. They might also hope carriers want to hedge against Google and, rather than simply fork Android the way Amazon has done -- Verizon vOS DROID KRAZR MAXX! -- they'll come to Windows Phone.

The chances of any of that happening are slim. The Galaxy Note is interesting but ultimately a niche product; like Schrodinger's device, neither tablet nor phone, with no clear market. Windows Phone, especially the Nokia Lumia 800 and 900, are absolutely gorgeous but are caught between the customer-favorite iPhone and carrier-favorite Android with not much space left on the shelf. (Especially given Microsoft's continued, flabbergasting desire to pin their mobile brand to Windows and not just release it as Xphone 720, Halo Edition.)

A piece of the iPhone

We'll probably see more of these commercials for a while, especially when the inevitable Galaxy S III comes to market and Microsoft revs up the Windows 8 machine later this year.

But here's the thing -- none of these marketing ploys, none of these devices will matter unless and until Samsung, Microsoft, and any other would be competitor does what Apple did:

Make a great phone that's smartly conceived and executed.

When we start seeing these commercials, and it's the Lumia 1000 that Samsung is gunning for, or the Nexus Megatron that Microsoft is playing catch-up to, that's when the market will have changed.

Until then, we'll just keep seeing everyone and their phablet desperately trying to get a piece of the iPhone.

Late last week, the feds showed up at the home of John Kinnucan and arrested him on charges related to insider trading.

John Kinnucan is an equity analyst who founded his own research firm, Broadband Research, LLC. Firms like this employ analysts to do research on stocks. They then “sell” that research to institutional investors. In case the term “institutional investor” is new to you, it just means hedge funds, mutual funds, pension funds, or any other “professional” money manager.

Since I worked as an equity analyst in the technology sector for over 10 years, I am always fascinated by stories like this because they point to the pressure that analysts are under to uncover differentiated information on stocks. If an analyst doesn’t have an “angle” on a stock, it’s very hard to build up a reputation and get paid.

I’m not condoning Kinnucan’s behavior nor am I stating an opinion on whether he did anything illegal or not. I don’t know him, nor do I know anyone at his firm or any of the people involved in the story. So let’s simply examine the allegations the Feds are making for the purposes of explaining what it all means. Ok? (We're not turning this into a discussion of guilt vs. innocence.)

Institutional investors pay for research by directing trading commissions to the research firms that provide good quality research. Analysts usually need to prove their worth by servicing clients first, and then asking to get paid. It’s a strange world because there is no set price for a particular research report. There is no subscription to an analyst’s research. Money managers just pay what they want to pay by directing commissions.

In many ways, it’s like running a tech blog. If you don’t have good stuff to publish, nobody cares. You won’t get traffic. You won’t generate any advertising revenue.

My point is that providing equity research is a highly competitive business. And if you’re a small guy running your own shop, like Kinnucan, you need to have some kind of edge over the larger research shops in order to get paid. Big money managers don’t just take pity on you because you’re small. They could care less. Help them make better investment decisions and they pay you. End of story.

Of course there are legal ways to gather and sell equity research, and then there are illegal ways to do it. Illegal methods have a much higher potential payoff (since clients who pay for this type of research can generate huge profits), but it can also land you in jail if you get caught. Dangerous game.

So what exactly constitutes illegal activity when it comes to equity research? Disclaimer: I’m not a securities lawyer. That said, you need to understand two things about so-called “information” on a company.

Public versus non-public

Information in the public domain can never get you in trouble. Something written in an annual report, in a press release, stated on a conference call, or otherwise available for the world to access, is safe territory. Investment decisions that you make based on public information are never illegal. Passing on public information is not illegal.

On the other hand, “non-public” information might be illegal to use, but not always. Non-public information is anything that the general public does not have access to.

Material versus non-material

All information is either relevant, or not relevant. Say you come across some “inside” (non-public) information. To know if it’s material you just need to ask yourself, “If the whole world knew this would the stock price react?”

Here are two totally fabricated examples:

• The front-end RF power amplifier supplier to Apple told me that they’re shipping 100 million chips to Flextronics for the iPad 3 in March.

• My friend who works for Apple told me that the bathrooms are being renovated to include bidets for better employee cleanliness.

Yeah, as you may have guessed, the second bit of “insider” information isn’t something Kinnucan (or any other analyst) would be calling his hedge fund clients about. But the first piece of info? It wouldn’t take a rocket scientist to realize the 1:1 relationship between that type of part and the number of iPads being built. It would certainly be meaningful to Apple stock since it would imply massive shipments above current Street estimates. If the world knew this information, Apple stock would be trading a lot higher.

So it’s the combination of non-public (i.e. insider) information that is “material” to a stock where people can get in trouble.

Oh, and you don’t actually need to make an investment using your material insider information to get in trouble. Telling someone else still puts you on the opposite end of the law. But as we’ll soon discuss, massively publicizing the information seems to keep you safe from prosecution.

Analysts and information

Usually analysts come across material insider information by forming trusted relationships with people in the know. A sales executive at an Apple supplier should have detailed knowledge of how many parts he’s forecast to sell. He’ll be one of the first to hear about a change in forecast. Changes in supply forecasts are highly sensitive and could certainly classify as material inside information.

If an analyst gains access to material insider information and tells a select group of clients, then he is breaking the law.

What makes equity research different than blogging?

You might wonder why an equity analyst can go to jail for leaking insider information to hedge fund clients, but bloggers never seem to get in trouble for publishing details of upcoming product launches that came from obviously-insider sources.

Like I said, I’m not a legal expert, but I see one HUGE difference. It’s about where the money comes from. The business models are totally different.

If a blogger gets insider information and publishes it on his website, he gets paid with a massive increase in traffic, incoming links (which translate to more traffic and website authority). For website owners, traffic equals money (assuming they know how to monetize the traffic).

The blogger is also leaking the information to the entire world in one fell swoop. The value of insider information to a website comes from being the exclusive source of the news. By contrast, the value of insider information to a hedge fund comes from being the exclusive holder of the news, such that profit can be made by trading on the information.

Trading on material insider information is illegal. But nobody seems to get prosecuted for taking insider information and turning it into public information because there is no stock-based profit being made.

Insider trading rules are in place to protect honest investors from getting screwed at the expense of dishonest ones. Bloggers who leak insider information are not helping dishonest investors. They’re just taking traffic away from competitors.

But, if a blogger decided to take his insider information and call up Mr. Hedge Fund and provide exclusive access to this information for a hefty fee before publishing it, you can bet he’d be thrown in jail along with the hedge fund client.

Somehow, I think the blogging community will steer clear from this type of trouble. It just doesn’t make financial sense for exclusive leaks to be sold to unscrupulous investors. It makes far more sense to capitalize on the traffic and authority that it builds.

Depending on how an app was designed and developed, updating for an iPad 3 Retina display could take days or weeks

Flash forward — After lining up for hours, or sitting at home all day waiting for a courier to arrive, you finally have your hands on an iPad 3 with its amazing Retina display. A display with over 3.1 million pixels. All of them difficult to distinguish, because they're so damn tiny. Text is crisp. Photos look are amazing. This thing is gorgeous.

You launch your favourite app and notice things aren't as amazing as they were a few seconds ago. The app in question doesn't contain Retina image assets -- the pictures that make up the user interface elements are at the iPad 2's screen resolution, so things look as blocky as they did on your previous iPad. What's going on?

Custom UI vs standard UI

A regular graphic (1x) will simply be rendered with four pixels per point on a Retina display, unless proper Retina (2x) resources are in place to take advantage of the higher density

When creating an iOS app, developers can choose to use Apple's supplied UI (user interface) elements, they can create their own, or they can use a mixture of the two.

If they choose to only use Apple's in-built elements, then the onus is on Apple to ensure everything is designed to take advantage of the iPhone 4, iPhone 4S and iPad 3's Retina displays. No additional work needs to be done by the developer. Apps like this will look great on the iPad 3 on day one.

For designs using entirely custom elements, every single part of the user interface needs two images created — one for the previous, non-Retina size, and another at the new, double resolution Retina size (these contain "@2x" at the end of the filename). A simple app may only contain tens of images, but most of the prettier iOS apps also contain a large amount of individual images to construct their overall design. Some of the apps I've worked on have well over 300 images, so by the time we've finished creating the Retina assets, that's doubled to over 600 images.

Depending on the designer and developer involved, each image may take up to a few minutes to create. Multiply that by the images required and it can often be a daunting, awkward, repetitive task. This also assumes the artwork was created using vector layers and layer styles in Photoshop (or a similar, freely scalable method). If it hasn't, there's a good chance everything will need to be rebuilt from scratch, using vector layers and layer styles, turning a few solid days' worth of work into something that might span weeks.

Thankfully, the transition from iPhone 3GS to iPhone 4 has taught a lot of iOS designers to work in ways that make creating two sets of images easier. If you're a designer looking to learn ways to improve your workflow when building non-Retina and Retina images, I've written articles on Designing for Retina and automated exporting.

Preparation is the key

Some developers have made the assumption that a Retina iPad was on the horizon, and have already included Retina images in their apps. However, I suspect the vast majority haven't, even if they have the images on hand — being double the width and height also means the images are bigger in file size, which may push the total app size over the 20MB 3G download limit (apps bigger than 20MB can't be downloaded over 3G networks).

Why doesn't iOS just use vectors for everything?

From the app Consume, an example of a vector interface element set up in Photoshop

If the issue is that pixel based images look blocky when they're scaled, why aren't vector based image formats, like SVG and PDF, used for iOS? Sometimes SVGs and PDFs are used in iOS development, but only rarely -- they're not the method Apple recommends. Vector formats tend to be far more resource hungry, especially for photorealistic icons, due to the amount of layers that have to be drawn independently to create the final visual. Mobile devices just don't have the grunt or memory to draw everything on the fly.

That's ok though -- think of the bitmap images used in iOS apps as pre-rendered vectors. The tools developers use to create the initial design should be easily scalable, but the final assets used in the app should be bitmaps, because they offer better performance (everyone loves silky smooth scrolling).

Patience

Good developers will know what's required of them, but may not want to start the arduous task ahead until the iPad 3 is announced (keep in mind that until Apple announces, we don't really know anything for sure). So please be a little patient if your favourite app doesn't take full advantage of the iPad 3's Retina display on launch day.

Marc Edwards is the founder Bjango and co-host of the mobile design podcast, Iterate.

Fraudulent apps are a complex, entangled, messy piece of business that harms Apple, developers, and consumers.

Recently there's been a dramatic rise in the number of fraudulent apps getting attention -- even top sales positions -- in the iPhone and iPad App Store. Some scam apps are copy-cats that duplicate as closely as possible the name and icon of popular games in order to confuse consumers and get them to buy a scam app instead of the real thing. This costs the consumer money for the scam app and developers money for the lost sale. Others scam apps appear to be byte-for-byte copies, stolen whole-cloth and offered for sale side-by-side with the original. This still costs the developer money for the lost sale, and while consumers get a functioning app, it's likely not one with any support going forward. Still other scam apps rip off the copyright of a popular brand (like Pokemon) for bogus apps that do nothing but cheat customers out of their money.

They all combine to damage confidence in the App Store, and harm the experience of the iOS platform.

For a developer, it's just one more risk they need to consider when developing for iOS -- even if they make a superbly crafted app, avoid dilution and downward price pressure from lower quality apps in the same space, and hit the jackpot by landing on a top seller list, their marketshare and customer base can be quickly assaulted by scammers.

For consumers, it's just one more hurdle to face when trying to find the good apps -- even if they hear about something fantastic from a trusted source, even if they manage to find the right app, they now have to worry if the one they find is the right, right app.

For Apple, it's just one more problem they have to figure out in order to maintain the appeal and value of their ecosystem -- even though they have a curated system that makes it easy to sell and easy to buy, they now have to deal with scammers damaging both the selling and buying trust of their store.

Can you spot the copy cat and rip-off apps in the top chart?

Right now, from the outside, Apple's approach seems to be that of YouTube -- approve any app that meets technical criteria and then respond to publicity or legal takedown demands from copyright holders when and if they come in. It's one of the smartest, safest approaches, legally, for Apple. They certainly don't want to take on the responsibility of pre-emptively moderating intellectual property, and then have their necks on the lawsuit line when something slips through and the rights holders sue both the offending party and Apple.

It's also open for abuse by large companies misusing infringement claims to remove competing apps by smaller companies who can't afford the litigation.

So it's a complex, entangled, messy piece of business that harms Apple, developers, and consumers. The fault lies entirely with the scammers making the fraudulent apps -- they're the ones to blame. But ultimately Apple will have to fix it, because it's Apple's store.

How to fix it is the question.

If the scammers can't make money, they'll be less inclined to spend time scamming.

It likely puts Apple in a more actionable position, will probably get them sued more often when a scam app slips through or when a non-scam app gets incorrectly targeted, but it just might be the cost of doing business to maintain a better, more valuable store for developers.

Flagging a scam with a simple click or tap would be great

Apple is clearly bringing the best parts of the iPad to the Mac, but how about bring iOS some of the best parts of OS X as well?

Yesterday Apple released the OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion developers preview, and like OS X 10.7 Lion before it, front and center was a drive to take what worked best in iOS in general, and the iPad in specific back to the Mac. To make an Apple experience that's more consistent across their two platforms.

But how about a little quid pro quo? There are several aspects of OS X, including some of what's being implemented in Mountain Lion, that I'd love to see in iOS 6.

Messages

While webOS-style Synergy should be the end game, one Messages app to manage them all would be a good start

Messages for OS X replaces the venerable iChat and brings iMessage to the Mac, including the ability to send text messages, as well as picture, video, and audio messages, and to share location and contact information. Just like in iOS, you get delivery and, if enabled, read receipts.

You can literally send an iMessage from your Mac at your desk, pick up your iPad and send a reply from the couch, then grab your iPhone and continue the conversation out the door. It does test the boundaries between connection and noise, staying in touch and being just to much, but it's there on the Mac if you want to use it.

And unlike the iPad, it also handles AIM, Jabber, Google Talk, and Yahoo! Messenger protocols. Can we have this for iOS?

The ideal would be a webOS-style Synergy, where Apple would collect all your IM accounts in silos and present them in a unified view, so it doesn't matter to the user what protocol anyone else is using, they just see it in iMessage. (Sort of like the unified inbox in Mail doesn't care which account anyone is sending from, or which account you're receiving from.)

One Messages app to rule them all, however, would be a good start. (Especially if they could figure out the iMessage overload issue.)

Notes

Adding photos to Notes would be nice. Adding typeface options would be nicer.

Notes has been around since iOS 1 (iPhone OS 1) and works in the best tradition of the venerable Palm OS memos, automatically saving anything entered into it. Aside from some typeface choices added to settings, however, and rich-text options made system-wide, it hasn't had much attention over the years.

The Mountain Lion version keeps the iPad aesthetic but adds some functionality, including rich text formatting options, the ability to add images, and to tear off pages to stick to the desktop. It's not TextEdit-type functionality, much less Pages, but it's... something.

It's going beyond simple notes but not entering the realm of true text editor. It's closer akin to the very basic image editing features added to Photos in iOS 5.

I don't know if we'll see anything so "widget"-like as page tearing in iOS any time soon, but the ability to do rich text, basic formatting, and paste images would be nice. What would be even nicer would be more typeface choices, like the Mac.

Marker Felt, Chalkboard, and Helvetica make for a rather anemic selection. iBooks offers more for reading than Notes does for writing. iOS in general, now that it has far more processing power and bigger storage options, could do with more typographic options to go with it.

Notification Center

Putting linen back in the background would please designers, stopping banners from covering buttons would please everyone

Both iOS 5 and OS X Lion make abundant use of the linen texture, but its inconsistency in iOS has caused some consternation in the design community. Given linen's use in the fast app switcher and folders, it seems to signify a layer beneath the Home screen -- something literally in the background. Yet Notification Center slides down on top of the Home screen.

Mac Notification Center uses linen, but is visibly beneath the scenes, just like folders and the iOS fast app switcher. It's more consistent, which is far from a mainstream problem to to be sure, but it's something Apple usually nails. So, yeah, want that.

The stacked banners shown off for Mountain Lion could work on iPad but not the limited screen real estate of the iPhone. Already on the iPhone the banners often obscure buttons at inopportune moments (until they automatically go away or you manually dismiss them.

Again, webOS does this better by making notifications much easier to dismiss with a quick swipe.

So take the background layering from the Mac, but take the functionality from webOS.

Gatekeeper

But would allowing the side-loading of non-App Store apps, signed by identified developers, really fix any iOS pain points?

This is the big one. The thing most power iPhone users have probably dreamed of since the original, no-third-party-apps iPhone launched in 2007 -- the thing that led to the jailbreak scene. The ability to run apps not approved by Apple. The ability to run app that come from outside the App Store.

The Mac has always been able to do that. (The Mac App Store is a very recent development). With Mountain Lion, however, Apple has given users the choice -- run only App Store apps, run App Store apps and non-App Store apps signed by identified developers, and run any app, no matter where it comes from.

The App Store provides a lot of security -- it minimizes the chance for malware or other malicious software. For all the hoops developers have to jump through to get their apps approved, it creates a trusted environment that makes users not only confident and willing to buy apps, but eager to.

Non-App Store apps signed by identified developers is a good middle-ground. They don't need Apple approval but if any of them are found to be malicious, their certificate can be revoked.

Unfortunately, I don't think this would mean much for iOS. It still wouldn't allow the tweaks that jailbreak users enjoy, the ones that hack into notification center or the dock or folders or the messages system, or otherwise modify the system itself. It could potentially allow porn, copy-cat or other intellectual-property violating apps, GPL-licensed apps, and the few remaining things Apple still blocks or removes from the store, but what else? Tethering apps? Apple may yank certificates for those anyway. And unlike the Mac, the potential market doesn't seem worth the effort on iOS.

A few more things

There's more from OS X and the Mac, past and present, that I'd like to see on the iPad and iOS. In no particular order:

• FaceTime conference calls. Like the iChat that Mountain Lion kills off, the big iPad screen -- especially a Retina display on a quad-core iPad 3! -- should allow for multi-person calling.
• iPhoto. The built-in photos app has basic editing now, but it doesn't have the range of tools iPhoto offers. Aperture could be an App Store app, but unifying Photos and iPhoto, like iChat and Messages, should be on the agenda.
• Print to PDF. A built-in PDF printer option, built into AirPrint, that goes right to Documents in the Cloud, would be great for everything from Mail to Safari.
• Per-account mail signatures. No reason the current signature setting can't be moved down a step in the Settings hierarchy. Work and play can't always have the same signature.
• Top Sites for Safari. I could do without the forced curve effect, but quickly getting my most common sites as thumbnails is very convenient.
• Launch center. Or Expose. Apple originally tested a more Expose-like fast app switching system before settling on the current, dock-behind-a-the-dock approach. Visually, it still seems like a better metaphor, especially for a larger display like the iPad. Apple used it in Safari (well before webOS cards), and they could still take it system-wide.

I'm sure others would add multi-use login, or even guest login, to the list, but it's fairly clear Apple means for iOS devices to be personal devices at this point.

iOS 6

While iOS is based on the same core as OS X, and they share many of the same concepts and ideas, if different implementations at times, there's a lot about the Mac that should now go back to the iPad. Hopefully Apple has that planned for iOS 6.

We've been covering the AT&T unlimited data plan throttling debacle from the beginning, including early reports, egregious 2G speed drops, and the recent 2GB "trigger" they seem to be using as the enforcement point. We've also been keeping closer track of things in our AT&T Forum. And after weeks and weeks of complaints, from loyal, longtime AT&T customers, we've yet to hear word one back from AT&T. There's no end in sight.

We've created a poll in the forums and asked you exactly how much data you've used in your previous billing cycle, regardless of your carrier of choice. The results to date are as follows.

• 36% used 1GB or less
• 25% used between 1GB-2GB
• 10% used 2GB-3GB
• 27% used 3GB plus

We're obviously an enthusiast community, and not the average user base, so the results aren't surprising. They do show what AT&T is dealing with, however, among a segment of their customers.

To address it, AT&T could try using a carrot as well as a stick. Offer grandfathered AT&T unlimited plan users some incentive to move to a new, tiered plan. Free tethering (within the data limit), or a small discount on the plan. Anything, as a sign they're willing to return the good faith of their customers.

Or they could just be honest and cancel the unlimited plans, and force everyone to move to a tiered plan, take the consequences and be done with it. They way it is now, since the first time that I was throttled at 2GB, I've felt like one of those settlers in the movies, with an evildoer cutting off food and water, and sending thugs to harass me, trying to slowly break my will and drive me out.

Great way to treat your customers, isn't it? Especially with Verizon offering better LTE deployment, which will be important come iPhone 5, and Sprint still offering unlimited data, which could be important to some customers now.

AT&T needs to get out in front of this. Hiding behind passive aggressive warnings and deliberately trying to ruin the experience of their customers is shameful. Let unlimited customers use the unlimited data they signed up for, offer us a fair incentive to move to a tiered plan, or just force the move already.

Right now, the situation is intolerable.

"I’m in the camp that believes Apple will become the world’s first trillion dollar company."

Yesterday we had the pleasure of listening to Tim Cook deliver a superb presentation to a group of institutional investors at the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet conference in San Francisco.

I guess when you’re Goldman and you host your conference an easy drive from Cupertino, there’s a pretty good chance you can snag an appearance from Apple’s CEO.

If you didn’t catch the whole presentation already, you can catch a replay at Apple’s website. The first several minutes are focused on the issue of underage labor at factories from Apple’s suppliers. Cook was convincing that Apple is on top of the situation, but it honestly doesn’t spark my interest too much as a tech geek and shareholder.

Before I dive into the bits I found most interesting, I need to say that Apple is obviously a well oiled machine when it comes to everything PR. And speaking to investors, while technically an IR (investor relations) role, is still just another form of PR. After all, these events are publicly broadcast due to regulation FD.

Tim Cook knew exactly what he wanted to say to the audience. I’m quite sure that the Goldman analyst’s questions were vetted by Apple ahead of time. It’s all about controlling the message. Apple did this with the precision of a trained sniper.

So let’s move onto the stuff that got me jazzed as a shareholder.

The Huge Opportunity Facing the iPhone

Yeah, Apple shipped 37 million iPhones last quarter. But Cook points out that this still only means Apple sold 1 out of 4 smartphones. And they sold only 1 out of 10 mobile phones.

Consider Cook’s comments that the smartphone market will expand to one billion units by 2015. That’s no so far away. If Apple hangs onto even 20% of this market, that’s 200 million units, or an average of 50 million per quarter. This is substantially more than the record 37 million unit quarter Apple just delivered.

Emerging markets are playing a huge roll. Cook talked about how China generated Apple only a few hundred millions of dollars in revenue a few years ago. But last year? 13 billion bucks! Kinda makes it all clear as to why Apple is so focused on China.

Cook also gave a great example of how Apple keeps operating along its “think different” mantra. The company believes that no matter where you are, people want the best products. So they convinced China Unicom to try a post-paid (contract) plan for the iPhone. The result? It worked in spades. Who knows if Apple can swing this with more carriers in more markets, but for all of us (me included) who thought the market was moving more towards pre-paid, maybe Apple is changing the game again?

Oh, and Cook believes that 25% of smartphone demand will come from China and Brazil by 2015. Apple has said before that it has started to focus more on the Brazilian market over the last year.

Will the Tablet Market Exceed the PC Market

One year ago, I wrote this blog post about how the tablet market would grow to be 400 million units, matching the then-size of the smartphone market.

Cook said that he thinks the tablet market will exceed the size of the PC market. His reasons for stating this line up really well with what I published last February. And just for comparison, by 2015 the PC market is expected to be somewhere north of 500 million units. His prediction exceeds mine. Nice.

Apple only holds a single digit percentage of the PC market. But with tablets? They invented the space. They dominate the industry. Even with the momentum of Android, I’m going to throw out a broad range and say that Apple could hang onto 30-60% of the overall tablet market. That’s 150 to 300 million units if the market demand reaches 500 million.

For comparison, last quarter Apple sold 15 million units. Run rate that number and you get 60 million (and remember last quarter was a peak holiday quarter, so run rating it isn’t exactly fair to do quite yet).

If you believe the tablet market is growing like crazy and that Apple can keep up a reasonable market share, revenue is bound to go up, up, up.

Even with reasonable ASP (average selling price) declines on the product line, the future is looking very bright for Apple. With that kind of growth opportunity, I’m more than happy to see the iPad cannibalize some Mac sales.

More Hints about the TV Market

Tim’s comments here were very interesting. He said Apple doesn’t do hobbies. So why is Apple still calling the Apple TV a hobby? Well, Tim doesn’t think that it has the same kind of potential as the other legs of Apple’s stool (Mac, iPod, iPhone, iPad).

But he did tell us that Apple believed something would come of this market if they kept “pulling the string” and “following our intuition”.

Then he left us hanging, and they shifted the conversation to Siri and iCloud. Kind of interesting when you realize that these are two features that would make an entirely-Apple TV set a killer product. And let’s not forget that in the Steve Jobs biography, he said he felt they finally cracked the problem.

The TV is becoming a smart, connected device. Why shouldn’t Apple extend its dominance to this market? It’s just another device to interact with and connect to the iCloud.

If I were running Samsung’s TV business, I’d be crapping my pants in fearful anticipation of what Apple’s got planned.

Returning Cash to Shareholders

Cook came right out and said that Apple has more cash than it needs to run its business. It’s an extremely obvious statement, but when a CEO publicly admits this it all but guarantees they’ll be doing something about it.

Wall Street is expecting a buyback or dividend this year. I think we’ll see it. I hope we’ll see it. I don’t think Apple is getting the credit for its cash hoard in its stock price. But we have to wait and see. Cook is asking for investors to be patient so they can “do this in a very deliberate way and make the best decision for shareholders”.

Heading to a Trillion Dollar Market Cap?

Overall, I thought Tim Cook did an amazing job at the Goldman Sachs conference. His message was clear, strong, and believable.

I’m in the camp that believes Apple will become the world’s first trillion dollar company (by market capitalization).

Who’s with me?

Cydia is the jailbreak app store -- the place to get all the great, useful, functional programs that for various reasons Apple doesn't allow in the official iTunes App Store, like in-app SMS, themes that change the look of your entire phone, quick toggles for Wi-Fi or Bluetooth settings, and much, much more. But whether you're new to the iPhone or to jailbreak, or have been hacking your gear since day one, you know Cydia can be as much pain as pleasure. You can find the most amazing utilities, themes, tweaks, and apps there - but buying them can sometimes cause way more frustration than fun.

Now, I fully realize that by jailbreaking my iPhone 4S I've classified myself as a power user who's chosen to jump through hoops go the extra mile to get some of my apps outside of Apple's official app store. But while waiting for the iPhone 4S jailbreak, and living with a stock iPhone for a week, I was reminded of the sheer difference in user experience between the App Store and Cydia. I went over this already on the first episode of our Apps & Accessories Live podcast, but here's the gist.

Buying an app on the App Store

Buying from the App Store is as simple as tapping the price, typing your password, and tapping OK.

1. See an app you want
2. Tap the price tag
3. Enter your iTunes password
4. Get the app

That's it. Sure, tapping the price tag isn't always intuitive for new users (a big BUY or DOWNLOAD button would be easier). Sure, you had to set up the iTunes account and decide to trust Apple with your credit card information. But once that's done, aside from having to verify you credit code if you use a new device, you're good to go. If you have multiple devices, like an iPad and iPod touch, or you upgrade to a new device, you just re-download the app. It couldn't be easier. It makes buying a snap, especially impulse buying.

Buying an app on Cydia

With Cydia you have to login to your account via Google or Facebok (even if you don't like either service)

And login separately to pay via Amazon or Paypal, which sometimes has errors and sends you back to the beginning

1. See an app you want
2. Tap to buy
3. Choose to login with a Google or Facebook account
4. Login with your email and password
5. Choose to pay with Amazon or Paypal
6. Login with your Amazon or Paypal account
7. Hope the app recognizes the payment, if not, try to restore the license
8. Sometimes re-spring the Springboard (iOS Home screen system)

On the surface it may seem only twice or three times as complex, but what the simple list could easily be expanded with:

1. Trying to figure out what to do if, like me, you've consciously decided not to have a Google or Facebook account due to privacy concerns. (I ultimately made a Google account just for Cydia and for Google's strong-arm Google+ authorship drive.)
2. Sometimes being thrown back to the very beginning of the buying process, over and over again, when something goes wrong with the payment process (why can't it just send me back to the payment screen?)
3. Sometimes having a huge struggle getting the app to realize you've paid for a license
4. The problems often associated with changing devices, like when you get a new iPhone, and trying to use a previous license.

Now you can choose to pre-authorize a certain amount via Amazon, if that's your preferred checkout option, but that really only delays the inevitable.

And still that doesn't cover the apps that choose not to be part of the Cydia system.

I recently tried to buy IntelliScreenX to check out it's iOS 5 integration. The process was so labored, so error-prone, I ultimately gave up and waited and calmed down for several days before going back to try again. (And sent Rene a string of incredibly angry text messages in between fully laying out my frustration at the process.)

Not only does it absolutely discourage me from impulse buys (good for me, bad for developers), it discourages me from any buys (bad for everyone).

Again, I understand that by jailbreaking and buying jailbreak apps, I'm stepping outside the Apple eco-system and the ease of use it provides. I also understand the Herculean task Saurik, the creator of Cydia, tackles every day in making and improving the Cydia app store.

Maintaining a user account system isn't easy. Having a checkout system isn't easy. Getting developers the money they deserve and protecting apps from unlicensed use isn't easy.

But the current process is still too hard and often too frustrating.

Time for Cydia to strike back

Figuring out a way to store the user-account on-device would be a good step. If Google or Facebook force a timeout, investigating a Cydia account system proper would be a great alternative. Storing the associated payment system username would further reduce the friction (not the password, of course). And if a problem occurs, returning the user to the previous screen, not the very beginning of the process, would be a huge improvement.

I love my jailbreak. I lasted 6 days with a stock iPhone 4S before I jailbroke. I love the ability to customize my phone -- to make my device work the way I want it to work. I love Cydia and all the great apps it gives jailbreak users access to.

I'm offering these criticisms and sharing these experiences because I love it so much, and really hope it gets even better. We've been hearing whispers about improvements coming to Cydia for a while now, so hopefully those will be released and address a lot of what's mentioned above.

iOS 5 stole a lot of ideas from jailbreak. It's jailbreak's turn to strike back!

With up to 38 different 4G LTE frequency combinations at play around the world, Apple would need to offer more than one iPad 3 model in order to support North America as well as Europe, Asia, and Australia

Following not only rumors by nearly every tech blog out there, but sources for both iMore and The Wall Street Journal are saying that the next version of the iPad will almost certainly come in an 4G LTE option. The Wall Street Journal says AT&T and Verizon are sure things, but what about everyone else? Not only is LTE up-and-comer Sprint not mentioned, but neither are carriers in Canada, the UK, or anywhere else in the world. Let's dig in a little to discuss if it would be worth Apple's while to make an iPad to work internationally.

LTE is a standard that is being used around the world, starting with TeliaSonera in Sweden and Norway back in 2009. In the US, you have AT&T, Verizon and even MetroPCS with various states of active LTE networks. In fact, there are over 30 countries that have commercial LTE service available, so pushing the standard into the iPad sounds like a no-brainer. That is, until you consider the frequencies used. Unlike GSM which used exclusively the 800, 900, 1800 and 1900 MHz bands around the world, LTE is being used in nearly every band available. In North America, the 700 and 1700 MHz bands are the main bands for LTE, but 800, 1900, 2500 and possibly even 1500 MHz are in play. Add in the rest of the world, with 900, 1800 and 2600 MHZ, and you have the potential for up to nine bands that the radio chipset would have to support. Complicating matters even more, even in similar frequencies, there are multiple chunks of spectrum that don't overlap. For example, Verizon uses 746-787 MHz, while AT&T uses 704-746 MHz. While close, these different blocks have different equipment needed due to radio propagation and interference issues. Extrapolate this across the world, and we're now encompassing 38 different frequency combinations around the globe.

Now, a multi-band phone can only do so much. Look at the devices we have now, which include the bands for GSM on 800/900/1800/1900 MHz, and usually only three similar bands for 3G. If Apple is to make the LTE enabled versions available all over the world, a nine band LTE radio is not possible. Keep in mind that Verizon has essentially said that single band LTE devices are all they're going to be rolling out in the near future.

So going back to the question, is it worth Apple's while to make an iPad to work around the world? No, because they can't do it with just one device. However, it is worth it to make multiple devices. One will support the 700 and 1700 MHz bands in North America, and one for the 800, 1800 and 2600 MHz bands for Europe, Asia and Australia. At this time, the 900, 1500, 1900 and 2500MHz bands are outliers, and though will some day be used, aren't necessary for a successful international launch. Remember T-Mobile here in the states? Apple seems to be doing just fine without supporting their 1700 AWS spectrum.

I think the initial iterations of an LTE iPad are going to be similar to the iPhone 4 strategy. Recall the Verizon version shipped months after the AT&T/GSM version and only worked on the 800 and 1900 MHz bands for CDMA here in the US. Meanwhile, an international version worked on GSM and HSPA networks around the rest of the world. I expect the initial version to be rolled out for North America, launching in the US and Canada right away. Then a version with support for the most widely used blocks and bands for other parts of the world in the coming months.

Mickey Papillon host The Cell Phone Junkie Podcast and is a frequent contributor to Mobile Nations. Follow him @TCPJ_Mickey.

Like with Notification Center, Apple should look to and improve on what Google's done with Android to better keep our Contacts safe.

Earlier this week the internet got itself into a kerfuffle over Path, a small-circle social networking app for the iPhone, which took Contact information without asking and openly transmitted it to Path's servers. It's an important issue to be sure, one worth getting into a kerfuffle over, and Path eventually apologized and vowed to make changes. But Path was only one of many, many apps to act this way.

A couple of years ago there was a similar kerfuffle over Dragon Dictation when Nuance was transmitting Contact information to their servers as well. Nuance did this, it turns out, so that its server-side voice recognition services could better understand the names of your friends and family.

Path, it turns out, did this so it could notify you if your friends and family were already using, or started using, their service and offer to connect you in the app as well. (Though the "open transmission" part was concerning -- hashing or otherwise encrypting the data between iPhone and server would have been a good idea.)

It could have been any of a number of other apps in Path's place, however, if they'd been discovered first. Many of them are now updating, adding security if they weren't already, and custom-making request popups for user permission before transmitting Contact information. And that's a good thing. But it exposes a problem with the way Apple currently handles user privacy on the iPhone.

If an app, any app, even a built-in Apple app, wants to know your location, it has to ask for permission. If it wants to send you Push Notifications, it has to ask for permission. If it wants to access Twitter integration, it has to ask for permission. If it wants access to any of your personal information, however, like Contacts, it doesn't have to ask at all.

Apple should change that, of course. They should require that apps ask permission to access Contacts -- and Calendars, and any other personal data -- and insist any information be transferred in a secure manner, and never be stored permanently on a developer's servers.

Just like with Push Notifications back before iOS 5, however, their popup requester system doesn't scale. Right now, if you launch a new Twitter app for the first time and you get popup after popup, asking you to tap to approve Twitter account access, location, and Push Notification. Imagine when Contact access, Calendar access, and conceivably other information is added to the list. As the number of popups grow, the likelihood that a user will read and consider each one falls precipitously. They'll just start tapping through to get to their app.

Current iOS permission requests come via popups, which limits their scalability.

There's a school of thought that says inattentive users deserve what they get -- if they don't read, they abdicate their right to complain later. Apple doesn't usually subscribe to that school of thought, however. That's probably why they've kept permission requesters to a minimum for now.

Just like with Push Notifications, however, a better solution exists outside popups, and Android could once again be drawn upon for inspiration.

Android requires an app to list all the services it wants access to when you buy it

When you browse an app on the Android Market, whether via the web or in the Market app proper, there's a clearly defined place see what permissions that app will require. Arguably, Android presents way too many permissions and users might not bother to read them any more than they would a popup, but having them there as a permanent reference is invaluable.

Even on the web, Android Market presents you a list of permissions requested by an app

for iOS 6, Apple could do what they did with Notification Center in iOS 5, remove the cumbersome nature of popups, simplify Android's implementation, and, when an app launches, present a simple sheet of toggles allowing a user to pick and choose which ones they're willing to grant access to.

Mockup: What an iOS 6 "Permissions" sheet could look like, providing persistent access to information and toggles

Things like storage access are more noise than information, but Contacts and other areas that touch on personal information should absolutely be there.

Likewise, the permissions sheet could be kept available in the settings for the app (or in the general Settings.app), so users could easily change them at any time. Under special circumstances, if a service is absolutely required for an app to work -- for example, location is required for a photo editing app to access potentially geo-tagged photos in the Camera Roll -- then a popup could be generated explaining the situation.

For special circumstances, when an app absolutely needs a specific permission to function, a popup could then be used to inform the user.

Adding a list of permissions each app requires to the App Store, on device, in iTunes, and on the web would be a nice-to-have as well.

Path deserved the push-back they got for doing what they did with Contacts, but Apple deserves push-back for letting them do it in the first place.

Apple has shown a relentless drive to tackle the rough edges of iOS in recent releases, and as iPhones and iPads become more powerful and apps more sophisticated, privacy becomes one of the rough edges they need to get a handle on quickly.

They've used Privacy as a differentiator from the competition in the past, and Notifications and Location Services in iOS 5 are a huge leap forward when it comes to granularity and usability. Hopefully Apple brings it all together, and gathers up the loose ends like Contacts, in iOS 6.

Rene recently wrote an editorial about the current controversy surrounding Apple and the working conditions in the Chinese factories where Apple -- and almost every other consumer electronics company -- has their products made. It was a nice editorial, but I disagree with it completely. Well, almost completely. I do agree that it's an important issue and that the discussion is good. He took a position and argued it well, that China was the story, and Apple merely link-bait. And it's that position I disagree with.

First of all, just because almost every other consumer electronics company uses the same factories in no way lets Apple off the hook. If anything, it just means those hooks are awfully crowded.

Each and every one of those companies, including Apple, are accountable for their own actions, or lack of action, concerning the working conditions in the factories where their products are made.

If Apple were to pull out of these factories, it's true that a lot of other companies would remain, but so what? Apple will have done something, and even more pressure could be exerted on the ones that remained, and they'd look even worse because they remained.

Change often comes from a single, courageous act that disrupts the status quo and sets into motion a new course of action that others simply must follow.

If staying engaged proves to be a better strategy, however, Apple could still be a greater agent for change. They could see to it workers were paid more, for example, or insist upon more reasonable working schedules.

Of course, Apple can't just give the factories more money. It would likely disappear long before it reached the workers, as money often seems to. But Apple could make worker wages a condition of their contracts. It would take time, and require enormous oversight to make sure the factories followed through, but it would be worth it.

Apple makes incredible profits. That's their job as a company. Using those profits to elevate the wages of Chinese workers isn't a net loss, however. It's an investment. Just like Henry Ford insisted on paying his workers enough so that, one day, they could become his customers, Apple would one day benefit from the more rapid establishment of greater customer base in China.

Yes, we in the Western world went through our own industrial revolution, and the working conditions were deplorable, but now we have labor laws and minimum wage, access to health insurance or health care. Unemployment and homelessness remain a huge problem, of course, and there's suffering and abuse of the system to be sure. But in general we as a society face a far, far higher standard of living than that facing Chinese factory workers.

And it's not okay to exploit that difference.

When the media reports on Apple's role in the Chinese factory system, when organizations plan protests, rather than say it's link-bait or opportunism, I see it as a call to action.

Apple is one of the wealthiest and most influential companies in the world. With that money and power comes responsibility. While having razor-thin profit margins certainly doesn't excuse the Dells or HPs, having hefty profit margins absolutely puts the burden on Apple to lead the way. They can afford to pay more. Customers like me might even be proud to know that Apple is paying more.

I buy fair trade coffee. I'd certainly buy an iPad proudly produced by fair labor.

Things won't change over night. They never do. The people who run the factories in China won't wake up tomorrow and suddenly start paying their workers better, or start making their working conditions more palatable.

But demanding change will make it come faster.

The more the media reports on working conditions in China, the more people are informed about it, the more the outcry that follows, the more companies like Apple fear the bad press and public perception, the more their brand or reputation suffers, the more they're motivated to take action, to speed up the change.

Apple gets the spotlight because of their size and their impact. They dent the universe. Instead of just denting it with better phones or newer tablets, why don't they really wind up and dent it by making lives better?

Tim Cook purportedly said, in response to these stories, that Apple "cares about about every worker in their worldwide supply chain."

Great. It's time for them to prove it.

"Boycotting Apple because of working conditions in China makes about as much sense as boycotting The New York Times because of journalism conditions in America."

There are several stories floating around the web this week concerning boycotts planned against Apple, the result of stories floating around the web last week concerning working conditions in China. While in some cases the sentiment is good and the intention noble, in many cases its based on lazy, exploitive journalism and shallow, opportunistic activism, fed by a soundbite- and sensation-seeking readership.

And while Apple and China is just the latest example, it's also one of the most tragic.

We've talked about it for the last couple of weeks during the iPhone & iPad Live podcast, but it's worth going over again here.

The problems with working conditions are real. Absolutely. Apple's role in the Chinese manufacturing system is real. Undeniably. But just as absolutely, just as undeniably, the real story here is about China and workers, not about Apple.

The pain isn't of a situation but of a transition -- the pain that come with the slow, steady growth through industrialization and the creation of a middle-class, manufacturing society.

Apple is only one of many, many, many companies that use factories in China to produce their goods. While some few, token others are sometimes briefly listed in one sentence, the title, lede, and every other sentence in a lot of the recent coverage throws the spotlight entirely on Apple.

That misses the industry-wide nature of the issue, and the global economic nature of the issue. While Apple is certainly the most wealthy, influential, and likely powerful company in the industry, and in the world, at the moment, they aren't the industry and are certainly not the global economy.

If Apple pulled out of China tomorrow, the entire rest of the industry would remain. The rest of the industry that hasn't posted supplier responsibility reports like Apple has done. HP, Dell, Nokia, Samsung, Lenovo, Motorola, LG, Sony, and everyone else in consumer electronics who aren't facing any media or pundit pressure to do so anyway.

All the other industries would remain as well, from jeans and shoes to toys and household goods and everything else. The factories would no doubt be hurt by the loss of revenue from Apple, however, as would the workers, who typically earn more from these types of factory jobs than they can otherwise earn in the region. The increase in unemployment following an Apple pullout would probably only make that situation worse. But it would go on.

Once upon a time in the Western world, though not too long ago, we had children working in factories and mines for fractions of pennies. We had had working conditions almost unimaginable even in in China or other, similar, out-sourced locations. We had them until, as a society, they became intolerable to us and we forced the cultural and legal changes necessary to stop them. To say they would no longer be tolerated. (Though sadly, they still persist in some of the darker cracks of our society.).

China will have to face this as well. With or without Apple. With or without the linkbait of major media outlets. With or without the protests of the guilty-of-concience, opportunistic of cause, or patronizing of agenda. With or without the attention of a readership that increasingly only mortgages their attention for linkbait and opportunism.

There's a real story here. A story about China's industrialization, of the political pressures within the government, the suicide rates in the country as a whole, the earning potential inside and outside the factory system, the ratio of worker pay verses management profit in the factories, the costs associated and benefits gained through in-sourcing vs. out-sourcing, and how the lives of Chinese workers would be affected now, and in the many potential futures with, without, and beyond the factory system.

But it's a story that won't be written, because it won't get anywhere near the amount of clicks, because absent Apple it won't get anywhere near the mainstream reaction. It's a vicious cycle of our own creation.

That's why boycotting Apple because of working conditions in China makes about as much sense as boycotting The New York Times" because of journalism conditions in America.

The quest to get thinner, stronger, faster, and healthier with iMore and Mobile Nations continues!

We've survived the first week. We've set our goals and whether we achieved them (yay!) or are still working on them (take that!), we're feeling better and doing better because of it. And we're getting tons of great feedback. This might just be the year where mobile and lifestyle fully come together, where eHealth and eFitness -- or iHealth and iFitness -- finally start making the impact we've all been waiting for. It's gone from being a token arm band case to being an entire ecosystem of highly specialized companion apps and accessories.

Jared took a look at what he considers the best calorie-counter app on iPhone (and iPad), MyFitnessPal, last week, and we'll be looking at a lot more cool stuff this week and next.

We recorded a special edition of ZEN and TECH with CrackBerry.com' Kevin Michaluk, where we answered a lot of questions, cleared up some big misconceptions, and went over a lot of dos and don'ts to get things going.

Also Kevin produced the single greatest (or most terrifying) fitness video in the history of YouTube. Watch his Sexy and you know it workout.

So let's keep it going! Once again, we're setting reasonable, attainable goals, and we're going to take advantage of our awesome community to make sure we attain them. We have a special edition of our Superfunctional podcast coming your way this weekend to help keep you motivated, and as always we're running everything through our Health and Fitness Forum to keep us focused, keep us accountable, and keep us keeping on!

Oh, and we're still giving away a lot of great prizes

• Weekly drawings for an iPod nano. We're giving away 4 total, one each week!
• Grand prize drawing for an iPad 3 IOU! (You'll get it when Apple launches it!)

Our ZEN and TECH podcast has also added to the pot with an Xbox 360 Kinect giveaway, so be sure to enter that as well!

So hurry up and jump into our new Health and Fitness Forum now and pick your goal for week 2.

Mobile Nations fitness month continues!

Do not -- repeat -- do NOT put WD-40 or any such substance in your iPhone or iPad -- it won't permenantly fix your Home button and may, in fact, damage it far worse. The idea that repeatedly squirting WD-40 into your iPhone or iPad Home button could fix responsiveness began floating around the internet last month and has gotten some attention -- that needs to be stopped immediately. Keep in mind we're huge fans of DIY repair here at iMore. We have a weekly column focused on DIY repair. But putting WD-40 on your iPhone is not DIY repair. It's dangerous, particularly for iPhones and iPads that are built with moving, plastic parts.

WD-40 may be non-conductive but the solvent in it will break down plastic. Your home button is plastic as well as some of the internal parts. Your speaker assembly is plastic and sits directly below your home button. Also, WD-40 is a liquid and you're spraying it dangerously close to where the wiring for the dock -- the place you charge your iPhone or iPad -- sits. The only substance that should ever be applied to an iPhone or iPad is high concentrated alcohol to remove corrosion from a logic board after it has been damaged by another liquid. None of the other components should ever come in contact with liquid. Including WD-40.

iPhone 4 home button and flex cable

To understand what causes a sticky home button you need to understand how the home button works. On an iPhone 4 there is a flex cable that connects to your dock and comes around the front. This piece has a contact on it that is connected to the home button with adhesive. When this button is depressed too many times, the contact starts to wear and get thin. Eventually this results in a "tacky" home button or clicks not registering as the contact is not thick enough to apply the correct amount of pressure to register to trigger a click. It was bad design on Apple's part, especially after introducing the double-click to launch the Fast App Switcher in iOS 4.

iPhone 4 home button next to an iPhone 4S home button secured with rubber gasket

The iPhone 4S Home button was re-designed to fix these problems. The button is actually stuck to the main assembly with a rubber gasket. Then a bracket is put into position behind that, similar to that of the iPad 2.

Your iPhone or iPad Home button isn't a squeaky old spring or noisy hinge that a couple of squirts of grease can easily fix. If the Home button flex cable wears down over time, nothing but replacing the Home button flex cable will solve the issue. Spraying a substance like WD-40 into your device will only make matters worse or damage other components inside your device. If you're under warranty Apple will swap out your iPhone 4 at no cost. If you're not, you should repair it the correct way or send it in to someone who can. Here are some good software fixes to try on your own first -

• How to troubleshoot a buggy home button
• Get around a broken home button with an Activator gesture (jailbreak)

So put the WD-40 can down and slowly back away, then tell everyone you know -- including the people who post these tips -- to do likewise.

Apple is increasingly playing defense against lawsuits from Samsung and Motorola that seek to take iPhones and iPads off the shelves and out of stores. Apple is trying to do the same to their competitors, of course, but there's a subtle difference -- Samsung and Motorola are suing Apple over FRAND (Fair, Reasonable, And Non-Discriminatory) patents and are apparently seeking licensing that's anything but fair and reasonable, and may in fact be discriminatory.

FRAND patents are typically typically pledged as part of a standard, which makes them essential to a technology, the organizations that govern those standards require them to be equitably licensed back to everyone. That's the whole point of having standards. If you want your invention to become a standard, you let it be used as a standard.

FRAND vs. non-FRAND

Apple doesn't play the FRAND game with the iPhone or iPad. They don't want their multitouch patents to be a standard. They don't want other companies using them. (Unlike Microsoft, they don't want to make their competitors' products more expensive, they want them to stop being Apple-like.)

Samsung and Motorola did play the FRAND game, however, and did want their wireless patents -- covering core 3G technologies, among other things -- to be standards. However, when Samsung and Motorola infringe on Apple's non-FRAND patents, they then demand outrageous terms from Apple to license their FRAND patents -- which Apple has to use for their products to work on existing networks -- hoping Apple will cave and cross-license their non-FRAND patents as part of the deal.

Put another way, it's like the owner of your local public pool refusing to let you swim there unless you let them swim in your private pool at home. Worse, it's like the manager of your local public pool demanding you pay him $1,000,000 dollars to swim in a pool you're supposed to have fair and equal access too, unless he gets to swim in your private pool at home. Worse still, it's like the manager of your local pool has made agreements that force anyone who wants to swim anywhere to get a license from his pool first, then demands you pay him a fortune for it, and give him access to your private, home pool. (In one case, in a swim-suit that looks surprisingly like yours. Only bigger.)

What can Apple do?

According to Florian Mueller over at FOSS Patents, this means Apple has to be careful, and iterative in their defense.

Apple won't get a deal that meets its needs unless Samsung and Motorola (or Google) are forced to recognize the fundamentally greater strategic and commercial value of Apple's non-standards-related patents, which are the fruit of independent innovation and independent commercialization as opposed to a company's ability to push its patented ideas into industry standards everyone is forced to implement after a collective of major industry players defines them.

Samsung and Motorola (or Google) would like all patents to be treated in more or less the same way. They give nothing more than lip service to their FRAND licensing obligations. They may hope that the law on this isn't sufficiently settled in major jurisdictions. They look for loopholes in the rules -- including certain opportunities in Germany, where the case law on this is more favorable to them than elsewhere. If they realize at some point that this strategy doesn't work out because of a combination of court rulings, regulatory intervention and Apple's determination to stand its ground, then -- and only then -- Apple will ultimately get the kind of deal it wants. Until then, Apple doesn't even have much to talk about with Samsung and Motorola (or Google).

Sure, you can say Apple is being selfish by not licensing multitouch to one and all, but they never agreed to in the first place. (Are you being a selfish by not letting everyone who wants to come swim in your private home pool?) Samsung and Motorola did agree to let everyone use their patents under FRAND terms so those patents would be become essential to the standard.

Enter the European Union

Now Samsung and Motorola are certainly free to do and to sue what and who they want... up to a point. The European Union has already announced they're investigating Samsung for FRAND abuse, and Motorola may not be far behind. With pressure from Apple on one side, and anti-trust action on the other, it puts them in a delicate position.

In the meantime, Apple can't give in to Samsung and Motorola's unfair, unreasonable, and discriminatory demands, and they can't risk injunctions like the one that was temporarily in effect in Germany last week, becoming permanent before the EU sorts everything out.

Whether or not there will ultimately be a settlement, like the one they achieved with Nokia over similar FRAND patents, only time will tell. All Apple can do for now is continue the careful, iterative defense.

Mueller's whole article, which delves into the patents and legal issues in great detail, is worth a read.

Source: FOSS Patents, x2

Samsung has aired another of their good-natured iPhone attack ads, which should be an occasion for merriment and ego-deflating good fun. Yet once again the commercial feels like it missed it's mark. Rather, the whole series of commercials still seem awkwardly in search of a mark. This one stars the latest in Samsung's broad-range of devices, each separate by a different Galaxy monicker and roughly 0.25-inches of screen size, the Galaxy Note. It's something that can't quite make up it's mind between being a phone and a tablet -- I'm not going to call it a phablet -- and that's either the best of both worlds... or the worst. The jury is still out. How big is it? 5.3-inches of HD Super AMOLED big, baby. (Yes, that's exactly inverse the iPhone's traditional 3.5-inches.)

It's also got a stylus.

Now, I'm not religiously opposed to a stylus -- I'm an artist by trade and I've used several types of stylus on the iPad since it came out. However, a stylus by itself is not a differentiator. It's what you can do with it that's a differentiator. It's all about the software. I'm also not going to deny that, for some things, a bigger screen is not just bigger, it's better. Hey, I've got a 9.7-inch iPad and Steve Jobs spent over an hour in 2010 telling us what that meant in terms of the type of apps it could run.

But Samsung never makes the case for either in their Galaxy Note commercial. They never show off a lick of innovative, compelling software in the whole damn ad. They're too busy, once again, making fun of iPhone users. (Not iPhones, mind you. iPhone users.)

This time we're giddily missing the Super Bowl (presumably on the west coast because it's still light outside) by standing in line for an iPhone launch (which never happens any time near Super Bowl time), and the massive size and pen-ly charm of the Galaxy Note makes us break out into the worst Van Halen-meets-the-Simpsons-style tribute number. Ever.

They're copying the spirit of the old Get a Mac ads without any of the substance. Shocking, really, given their history.

Samsung couldn't have used any of those multi-million dollar minutes to show us the advantages of the Galaxy Note having such a big screen? To show us how absolutely killer a stylus makes the mobile experience? They flashed some photos, doodled on the screen, and did the equivalent of a FaceTime call. The motorcycle jump got almost as much screen time as the software.

And that's disappointing. Google's Galaxy Nexus commercial showed you can highlight Android hardware and software features in a compelling way. Samsung shows you can mock iPhone users, call us baristas, and convert us to the world's biggest ass phone just by waving it at us.

The girl in the commercial sums it up best when she says, "I don't know what to believe anymore." As much as Samsung bashes the iPhone, they give no reason to believe in the Galaxy Note.

If you want to court iPhone users, don't do it by making fun of us or insulting our intelligence. Do it by making us jealous of your phone... er... tablet... er... phone.

Is 2GB really all it takes now to be considered a "top 5" iPhone data user by AT&T and have your data throttled down?

AT&T now seems to be throttling iPhone users on grandfathered, unlimited data plans when they hit a paltry 2GB of data usage. We all know AT&T has been threatening to throttle iPhone users on unlimited data plans for quite some time now. AT&T announced data throttling last August and started implementing it last October. Since then we've heard from some of our readers that they were getting throttled down to 2G EDGE speeds. And it seems to be getting even more egregious.

As a rational person -- and long time customer -- I had a hard time believing it. I've been using anywhere from 4 to 8 gigabytes a month since October and never received any warning from AT&T. In fact, I told everyone in our AT&T forums that I had not yet received the infamous text message from AT&T, accusing me of being a "top 5%" data users.

Until yesterday.

Smartphone customers with unlimited data plans may experience reduced speeds once their usage in a billing cycle reaches the level that puts them among the top 5 percent of heaviest data users. These customers can still use unlimited data and their speeds will be restored with the start of the next billing cycle. We're writing because you are in the top 5 percent of heaviest data users for this billing cycle.

It came in just as I approached 2GB. That's what apparently qualifies as a "top 5%" here in Chicago. 2GB. Two days before the end of my billing cycle.

I immediately called AT&T and asked them -- 3 of them over the course of several hours -- two simple questions: Why, all of a sudden, after previous months of heavy use, did I receive this message and why, when I am paying for "unlimited" data am I being crippled just at two gigabytes?

They had no answers for me.

So I began to think about it some more and realized the previous few months I was using my unlocked Galaxy Nexus. Did that have anything to do with flying under the radar? Or did I simply switch back to my iPhone 4S around the time AT&T decided to take these new, overly aggressive tactics?

Or is there simply no consistency or rationality with how AT&T is going about their data throttling? Do some people, depending on the area and month, get away with 5 to 6 gigabytes with no issues while some are getting nailed at 2 gigabytes? Is 2 gigabytes the new magic number based on all of the complaints in our forums and responses that I received on Twitter?

Whatever the case may be, it sure seems like AT&T is putting the screws to unlimited iPhone data users, trying to push us into giving up our grandfathered plans and pressure us into taking one of their new, limited, tiered plans instead.

And that sucks, plain and simple.

AT&T offered a service, we signed up for it, we paid them for it, and now they're reneging on the spirit if not the letter of that service. They're breaking faith with their customers.

Maybe they don't want our particular type of user any more, maybe they'd rather we go somewhere else, but if they're willing to do this to one group of users, they'd do it to any group of users, at any time. And that's a terrible way to run a business.

Unlimited data plans were sold to iPhone users from day one. AT&T needs to stand by them. If they want us to switch to tiered plans, make those plans better. Offer free tethering, or make 4G LTE exclusive to those plans and wait for the iPhone 5 to drive demand for it. Make them so attractive we can't wait to switch. Don't do it by making our existing plans worse.

But AT&T has unlimited data users right where they want us, and they seem to be pulling out all of the stops to get rid of us.

Have you gotten throttled for using 2 gigabytes yet? Did it get you to switch to the new, tiered plans? And how does it make you feel about being an AT&T customer?

We'll likely get a new iPad 3 sometime this March and an iPhone 5 later this summer or fall, but will either or both of them run on the new, ultra-fast 4G LTE (Long Term Evolution) networks? And if they do, will LTE be built into every device, or will there be special models made for just those networks that support it?

Right now there's only one iPhone 4S and it runs on both GSM/HSPA+ and CDMA/EVDO Rev. A, on every carrier that offers it. That's a change from the iPhone 4 that debuted as GSM/AT&T only and later had a different model, with a different antenna, released for Verizon. Likewise, the iPad 2 still doesn't come in a unified model, having on version for AT&T/GSM and one for Verizon alone.

So, while Apple has moved to unify their manufacturing for iPhone 4S, they have in the past, and still to this day, made separate models of iPhone and iPad to handle different network technologies.

And they could do it again for LTE.

Size and power consumption

Previous generation LTE chipsets were deemed unusable by Apple due to their size and battery-draining power demands. Early Android LTE handsets like the HTC Thunderbolt bled power at an almost comical level. Early devices were also chunky, but soon thinned out again and grew in length and width instead of depth, like the Nokia Lumia 900, letting larger screens take advantage of that extra space.

While rumors persist of a 4-inch iPhone 5, it's hard to imagine that Apple would let the iPhone 5 casing grow very much if at all just to accommodate an LTE radio and its battery. And they wouldn't put one in the iPad 3 now if they weren't planning on putting one in the iPhone 5 later. The phone is still the flagship, for now.

Qualcomm is releasing new chips, however, and it's possible they'll have one ready in time for the iPhone 5 that's small and power efficient enough to meet even Apple's demands. Let's grant for a moment that that proves true. There's still a much bigger problem when it comes to LTE.

Availability

Verizon has a decent U.S. LTE roll out, claiming coverage in 190 markets of varying size. AT&T claims 26 markets with large scale deployment not complete until the end of 2013. Sprint will have 4 markets on LTE by mid 2011, but it will likewise take years to roll out nationally.

Internationally things get worse. Both Rogers and Bell have a handful of LTE cities each. In Europe and Asia there are a smattering of cities, but many huge markets are still years way.

LTE simply isn't very common yet, and Apple is the company that didn't even add 3G to the iPhone until the second generation version launched in 2008.

Models

Would adding the expense -- both component and engineering -- of an LTE radio, along with any remaining size and power demands, make sense to Apple if there are so few markets able to make use of it? Apple sold the one-iPhone 4S-model-to-rule-them-all faster and further than any other handset in the history of the business, getting it into more countries, on more carriers, for more users than ever before. Would that be possible if the iPad 3 or iPhone 5 similarly included LTE all in one model?

Instead, what if Apple kept the current radio stack in place for the iPad 3 and iPhone 5 and but also launched separate models for LTE in the markets where they make sense, like the U.S., Canada, and those European and Asian countries that support it.

Not all LTE operates on the same frequencies, so engineering even an international LTE radio wouldn't be dead simple, let alone a GSM/CDMA/LTE across all bands. Letting HSPA and CDMA continue to do what they do now, in markets that don't have other options, isn't a bad idea.

But if complexity and scarcity are still the case, why worry about LTE at all in 2012? Why not just wait until 2013?

Verizon

The current iPad and iPhone run at up to 14.4mbps on AT&T and GSM carriers. They run at 2-3mbps on Verizon's CDMA network. Apple went out of their way to avoid calling the HSPA+ iPhone 4S a "4G" phone last year, knowing if AT&T and others claimed it as such, Verizon's version would be made to look less-than by comparison.

That hasn't hurt Verizon's sales yet -- iPhone 4S set records on every carrier including Verizon, eclipsing devices with bigger screens and LTE radios on the same shelves -- but it likely hurts Verizon pride. With the best LTE deployment in the U.S. and a desire to use it that's so strong Verizon reportedly won't let Windows Phone and BlackBerrys on their network without LTE anymore, how happy would they be to sit on CDMA for another year, to again have to market an EVDO Rev. A iPad 3 and iPhone 5?

Apple could pull the trigger on LTE in 2012. In most markets they don't need to, but in the U.S. in general and Verizon in specific, there's reason to consider it. Doing two models -- HSPA+/CDMA for most of the world and LTE for Verizon and the other carriers that support it -- wouldn't be unprecedented for Apple, and could indeed be the best of both worlds.

This was our Macworld. Other Macworlds were different. But this one was ours.

Macworld | iWorld 2012 was not the event of old, where Steve Jobs put sneaker to keynote stage and introduced us to everything from the iPhone to the MacBook Air, and where Apple's massive booth, and the massive booths of countless accessory makers, filled Moscone to capacity.

Apple has held their iPad keynotes -- and just recently the education event -- outside of Macworld, at a time and place of their own choosing. And CES has made a concerted effort to steal away the accessory booths, and now has more iPhone and iPad cases in their halls than any person, sane or otherwise, would ever want to walk through at any one time.

Some would say they tried to take the heart from Macworld, but all they took was the keynote and the bigger booths. Macworld's heart, it turns out, was never in either of those things. It was in the community. And it endures.

Those who only ever bothered to fly in for the keynote and fly out again no longer bother. Those who only scoured the booths for deals no longer show up to scour. Now it's the dedicated media who stay the week. It's the fans who show up and want to find out about what's going on. And we all had a great time.

After dealing with travel delays, Leanna and I arrived on late Thursday and enjoyed only the briefest glimpse of the show floor before it closed. But Macworld didn't end at Moscone. That night we met up with a veritable who's-who of fellow Apple bloggers and journalists, developers and designers, accessory makers and advertising/PR reps. We drank, we ate, we shared stories and opinions -- we shared Macworld.

The next two days we hit the show -- hard. We recorded a bunch of videos and a ton of interviews you'll see over the course of the coming weeks. And those two nights we kept meeting up with our fellow Apple enthusiasts, our community.

Because that's what Macworld is and really always was. A reunion of those who cover and create and consume the Apple experience. A homecoming.

That's not to say everything is perfect now. It isn't. Macworld has transformed into Macworld|iWorld and turned from a traditional expo into a modern fan event. But they haven't fully embraced that change yet. A lot of the talks, a lot of the panels, were filled with the same Mac pundits that have always filled them. Just like Macworld has added iWorld, the agenda needs to add the energy and insights of the new iOS-centric generation. Don't lose the old guard, but add the new blood. We'll all be richer for it. Likewise, build on the smaller accessory makers and the developers, the kickstarters who don't fit in at CES, and the indies who want to network with each other and with their most enthusiastic consumers in a way WWDC could never allow.

The new Macworld|iWorld is just getting their footing. Just like we envision iMore to be the ultimate online site for iPhone and iPad enthusiasts, Macworld|iWorld is aiming to do that for the entire Apple community in the real world. I expect great things ahead. So great, in fact, I don't really miss Apple or the big accessory makers at all anymore. So many things, smaller, more delicate, more unusual things have blossomed in their absence. If IDG can keep up what they've started, if the community can realize the benefits of coming together like this, of being a community together like this, there will be many more amazing Macworld|iWorld events to come.

And I for one can't wait to attend.

There's an interesting debate taking place about the merits and virtues of modern electronic books like Apple's iBooks or Amazon's Kindle books and their traditional counterparts -- old fashioned paper bound and proper.

They're qualitatively different, inarguably. The feel of board and cloth and leather is warm and textured compared to the crisp coolness of glass, aluminum, and plastic. The gentle sound of pages flipping is vastly different than a tap or swipe or click. The sharp smell of a fresh new novel or musky scent of an old tome exists in a different dimension from the relative sterility of chips and displays.

Yet the weight, permanence, and nostalgia of traditional books can be a disadvantage when it comes to carrying them, correcting them, and moving the state of the art of knowledge forward once again.

Ben Brooks laments this, almost romantically.

I can tell you from first hand experience that the reading experience is very different on each of the different mediums and that’s why the distinction matters to me. I don’t care which version you bought because it changes what you read, but I do care because it may not be the same as the book I read (sometimes in the minor content differences, but always in experience and layout).

Marco Arment does not, functionally.

When I start reading, the form of the book quickly disappears. Just as I don’t notice the individual letters in each word, I stop noticing the layout, the font, the paper, the binding, and every other physical artifact because I’m focused on the writing.

Dieter Bohn thinks we're getting ahead of ourselves.

With ebooks, we're still looking at the equivalent of the day after Gutenberg printed his first Bible. We need to decide which paper book "specs" are important and ensure that they get recreated in our new digital world. We also need to ensure that these digital equivalents are at least as free and unfettered as paper books are now. We've already surpassed paper technology in a number of areas. However we are not giving nearly enough attention to the very things that made paper books flourish in the first place. The most important specs are the ones you take for granted.

Here's the thing -- once upon a time we passed down our stories between generations. Then we carved them into stone, brushed them on papyrus, illuminated them on scrolls, and eventually pressed them into print. We lost the voices of our parents, the lines of our hand, the power of our art, the uniqueness of our craft. But we gained volume and the democratization of information. Beauty gave way to volume.

Each transition has been painful. Each transition has been decried and denounced. Yet, inexorably, the new has overtaken the old. Even if it's never fully supplanted it. We still tell stories. We still practice calligraphy. We still work at leading and kerning. iBooks and eBooks won't wipe out traditional books any more than non-traditional books wiped out message mediums older than they. Those mediums will shrink, perhaps, and become the providence of craftsman and collectors, enthusiasts and artists, and the very same folk who still enjoy wooden toys, vinyl albums, and pre-iPhone phones.

Meanwhile, iBooks, Kindle books, and other forms of digital books will continue to crawl out of the primordial ooze and make more content more available to more people (and children) than ever before. And perhaps they'll recapture some of the magic of mediums past, the way Audible has voice and InDesign has done digital press.

iBooks, Kindle books, and their ilk are not perfect, not yet and maybe never, but they're the future. Until the next transition.

Probably like many of you, I received my new Google Privacy Policy via email this week, and while couched in language about creating a more "beautiful" experience for us, the users -- read: products -- it's also clearly about Google leveraging their popular services like Search and Gmail to help their new services, like Google+, become competitive with Facebook and Twitter.

Because Facebook and Twitter scare the shit out of Google and when companies, like people, are scared they do dumb things.

Google in particular, once the brash, brazen upstart that gave the proverbial middle finger to old, portal-style search sites and promised to always deliver the best results, not just the best Google-owned results, is struggling with their inner demons now. They don't want to be replaced by social search the way their authoritative search replaced Yahoo! and Alta Vistas of old.

I've riffed before that any company sufficiently large is indistinguishable from evil. As they grow, as they face competitive pressures, the interests and agendas of their shareholders, stakeholders, and executives increasingly and more noticeably diverge from the interests of their users. From us.

They, like many of us, become the parents they used to despise.

Why does this matter to me and why am I posting it on iMore, an iPhone and iPad focused site? Because I'm a huge user of Google services and iPhone and iPad users in general are huge users of Google's services. We use Google Search, Gmail, Maps, YouTube, and other services every day. We give Google massive amounts of personal information. We give them our trust. And that absolutely means we have both the right and obligation to hold them to that trust.

According to Sarah Lacey at PandoDaily, Google's new, "don't be don't be evil" direction has become a concern even for many Googlers past and present, and the silence surrounding it is stymying even internal PR.

Good. This shouldn't be easy. It should be messy and public and painful, and if Google wants to keep getting and using our data, they should keep earning that privilege.

Hopefully the rumors of Larry Page not wanting to hear any opposition to their new Google+ strategy are false, and like Apple and Facebook have sometimes done in the past, Google's more unpopular new policies will be reversed, and soon.

Check the source link below for more on the issues surrounding Google's new, more publicly evil direction, and read on for the new privacy policy in full.

More: Page Rage Escalates As Google Cancels Twitter Android Meeting

Dear Google user,

We're getting rid of over 60 different privacy policies across Google and replacing them with one that's a lot shorter and easier to read. Our new policy covers multiple products and features, reflecting our desire to create one beautifully simple and intuitive experience across Google.

We believe this stuff matters, so please take a few minutes to read our updated Privacy Policy and Terms of Service at http://www.google.com/policies. These changes will take effect on March 1, 2012.

One policy, one Google experience

Easy to work across Google

Our new policy reflects a single product experience that does what you need, when you want it to. Whether you're reading an email that reminds you to schedule a family get-together or finding a favorite video that you want to share, we want to ensure you can move across Gmail, Calendar, Search, YouTube, or whatever your life calls for with ease.

Tailored for you

If you're signed into Google, we can do things like suggest search queries – or tailor your search results – based on the interests you've expressed in Google+, Gmail, and YouTube. We'll better understand which version of Pink or Jaguar you're searching for and get you those results faster.

Easy to share and collaborate

When you post or create a document online, you often want others to see and contribute. By remembering the contact information of the people you want to share with, we make it easy for you to share in any Google product or service with minimal clicks and errors.

Protecting your privacy hasn't changed

Our goal is to provide you with as much transparency and choice as possible, through products like Google Dashboard and Ads Preferences Manager, alongside other tools. Our privacy principles remain unchanged. And we'll never sell your personal information or share it without your permission (other than rare circumstances like valid legal requests).

Got questions?

We've got answers.

Visit our FAQ at http://www.google.com/policies/faq to read more about the changes. (We figured our users might have a question or twenty-two.)

Notice of Change

March 1, 2012 is when the new Privacy Policy and Terms will come into effect. If you choose to keep using Google once the change occurs, you will be doing so under the new Privacy Policy and Terms of Service.

Please do not reply to this email. Mail sent to this address cannot be answered. Also, never enter your Google Account password after following a link in an email or chat to an untrusted site. Instead, go directly to the site, such as mail.google.com or www.google.com/accounts. Google will never email you to ask for your password or other sensitive information.

iOS devices combined -- including iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch -- may have outsold Android devices combined -- including Android phones and tablets -- by a narrow margin last quarter. During the Q1 2012 Apple conference call today, Tim Cook pegged the iOS device number at 62 million. Android numbers are harder to come by, but last month Andy Rubin said 700,000 were now being activated a day. Given the prior two months were likely less, the following month perhaps more, it probably works out to 60 or 61 million.

During the same call, Tim Cook also revealed that the Amazon Kindle Fire had no affect on iPad sales, far he can tell. Sprint ultimately paid dearly to get the iPhone on their network in order to remain competitive. Verizon announced their results today, and revealed that slightly more than half of their smartphone sales were iPhones.

Apple has long dominated their competitors in terms of smartphone profit share but recently Android was assumed to have a big lead in market share. I've long discounted that, saying it's irrelevant.

And nothing that was announced today changes that.

Apple released the iPhone 4S last quarter, almost 3 months later than many people anticipated. There was massive pent up demand for the iPhone 4S and it sold gangbusters. But Apple probably isn't releasing another new iPhone this quarter. Or next. Or the one after that. But there will be new Android phones. Maybe not next quarter, but certainly the one after, running Android 4.0 and likely once again upping the spec fight.

Carriers, who can control Android in ways Apple will never allow them to control iPhones, will push these new devices heavily -- like they did the original Droid and a plethora of devices since -- and many buyers, geek tweakers and feature-phone replacers alike, will buy them.

The market share trends and figures will change and likely change again.

But they'll constantly be irrelevant. Because they ultimately don't matter.

Earlier this month I walked into an Apple Store with scratches on my iPhone 4S screen and walked out 30 min. later with a new iPhone 4S and a stern lecture about taking better care of my gear. And without paying a dime.

Last week Apple released iBooks 2, iBooks Author, and iTunes U, taking the first steps towards mainstreaming digital education.

Just this week, as is almost always the case, I downloaded apps with UI so well designed, UX so thoughtful, they made me smile and delight in using my iPhone and iPad again.

The best devices, the best software, the best service. That's relevant. As a consumer, that's what matters. Not Apple's numbers. Not Google's numbers. That's what all companies should be fiercely fighting over. Delighting us. That's the metric they should all be measured by.

That should be the competition.

Almost immediately following Apple's education event, the internet was filled with claims that Apple's textbook plan will never work. Namely, that the current $500 entry price of an iPad is unreasonably expensive for schools or parents to afford.

No shit.

Apple is not stupid. The publishers are not stupid. Yesterday's announcement was just the beginning, just a gimpse of what we can expect to see in the future. Baby steps. Take the timing of the announcement, for example. January is midway through the normal school year and months before the anticipated iPad 3. It was laying the groundwork.

Selling textbooks for $15 a pop to schools and students who can afford a $500 iPad may not sound like a promising business model, but Apple knows how to make money and, if there's one thing we can all agree on, it's that publishers are greedy. $15 is less than $40-$70 for traditional books, but when it's $15 for each student, each year, it starts to add up, coming very close to a $50-$70 book shared by 5 students over 5 years.

Apple famously runs the iTunes music and App Stores just above cost. They make their money on hardware sales, but it takes great content to drive those hardware sales. Apple also has longstanding relationships in education and has offered education discounts to schools and students alike.

My guess is that in addition to the anticipated iPad 3, Apple will also introduce an affordable iPad specifically for education. Perhaps it will be an iPad 2 discounted the way previous generation iPhones have been discounted for a few years now. Or perhaps it will be a special model available only to educational institutions. Apple doesn't need to make their traditional margins off the sale of such a device; they'll make some money off textbook sales, and they'll get far more once future generations are hooked into the Apple ecosystem.

Either way, it seems more than a little short-sighted to attack Apple on pricing so early in the process. Apple computers once tens of thousands of dollars and now a new MacBook Air starts at $1000. The original iPhone cost hundreds of dollars, now the iPhone 3GS is free on contract. Prices come down. Technology becomes democratized. It's happened with Apple for years; it seems silly to think it won't happen this time as well.

Now excuse me, I need to go work on a textbook of my very own. Using iBooks Author. You know, the extremely accessible, really powerful new ebook creator Apple just released. For free.

At Apple's education event they announced two initiatives: iBooks 2 and iBooks Author designed to bring textbooks into the digital age, and an all new iTunes U to create and share lesson plans, and follow and complete course work. As education initiatives from publicly traded companies go, they're big and bold -- but they're also just the beginning. There will be struggles and successes, breakthroughs and missteps. And while many of us here at iMore and Mobile Nations could speak about the implications from purely technical and business standpoints, we're lucky to have several teachers and educators, past and present, on staff. They were kind enough to share their thoughts on Apple's new initiatives, specifically and importantly where they impact most -- our kids in the classroom.

Seth Clifford

Apple's move to advance our shamefully archaic system was met with a lot of debate on Thursday morning. On one side, we heard from utopian education advocates (myself included to some degree), extolling the virtues of a centralized e-textbook platform, and Apple's commitment to engaging our youth. On the other hand, I had a few spirited conversations with those who feel that by making great educational opportunities "expensive" (meaning only upper-class schools may even be able to apply these new techniques, leaving inner-city and less-privileged districts behind) Apple has driven a wedge between the haves and the have-nots, making education less democratized and less accessible to all. Personally I feel that both sides have points, but quite honestly, nothing is fair. Education has, in the past decades, grown more and more to be the bastard child of the federal budget, despite the headline-grabbing initiatives that get introduced to fanfare and few results. Kids are taught only to pass tests, so that funding can be applied to districts who have "earned" it. Kids are getting the short end of every stick they see in school, and nothing is changing. And what if Apple's entire move here is not about changing the entire education system, which it most likely understands is irreparably flawed, but rather to disintermediate education the way it did carrier control with the mobile market? What if Apple's ultimate play (with products like iBooks Author) is to put education back in the hands of students (and the actual individuals they interact with on a daily basis), obviating the need for a bloated, antiquated system in much the same way that it saw the carriers as a necessary evil in bringing iOS to the hands of users?

Certainly not every district is hopelessly broken, and not every kid's education suffers at the hands of an ever-shrinking budget. Children who seek out learning will always learn, and those who do not will make their way in the world. It has happened for years and will always be the case, no matter what costs we apply. Apple's attempt to shake up a system so mired in early 20th century standards is merely a shot across the bow of a huge vessel that's been in motion for as long as any of us can remember. It will not be panacea to all the ills of our society, nor should people expect Apple to fix every problem. Apple is a business; they exist to make money and sell merchandise. Those who are decrying its attempts to make learning better are missing the bigger picture. Should we all shun this advance because only rich kids might get a chance to use it at first? Education needs disruption, and all it takes is a cursory look at the developing countries of the world to know that mobile computing is the future for our society. Not everyone will get an iPad or an iPhone, but at some point, everyone will be exposed to learning in a better, mobile capacity, and we'll have Apple to thank for jumpstarting the efforts of those who would sit idly and let our children continue on the endless march to mediocrity.

Seth worked for five years as a computer instructor in a public middle school (grades 6-8), for six years with kids with autism, and was a member of district-wide technology planning committees.

Alli Flowers

All that was missing was the old tagline - this changes everything. Again. In a way it does. But before I explain why I think it might, I must explain why it won't - at least not yet. So I must begin by stating that I take exception with Phil Shiller's comment at the beginning of his presentation when he stated that iPad is, amongst other things, affordable. In today's economy, $500 is just not what I would define as affordable. This thought will temper what follows.

Instead of bridging the digital divide, programs like Apple’s will only serve to deepen the chasm. Is a $15 textbook a great deal? Heck yea! The text I’m supposed to teach from costs $65, and that doesn’t include the workbook. But we hold onto our textbooks for seven years or more. Our school system (the largest in the state), can’t afford to purchase new texts for each subject at the recommended five year increments. Could we afford to purchase iPads for each student instead? It’s doubtful. Besides, even though you would then be looking at a tremendous discount for the textbook (and workbooks would be rolled right into the new format, right?), that’s still a lot of money.

Some of the concerns I’ve often heard about providing all students with iPads include the fear that student iPads will be stolen. I don’t believe this is as big a deal as other factors - if everyone has one, there will be no one left wanting one. The bigger concern is how children take care of their belongings. Most of my students have broken their cell phones at least once. How would we take care of broken iPads? Would we need to spend twice as much as what is needed to cover the student body so that when someone does break (or misplace) his iPad, we can replace it, like we do with a textbook? Can we demand that a family pay to have a $500 iPad replaced, when they can’t currently afford a $65 lost textbook fine?

But I rant. I love the very concept of iBooks Author. The potential here is limitless. For those of us who already prefer using custom content, the possibilities here are limitless. I have not used a textbook this year, and my students haven’t minded at all. I prefer providing them with small lessons and activities on the Smartboard so that they remain engaged, but aren’t overwhelmed. Would I like to give each of my students my custom designed text with practice activities? Heck yea! Do I see it happening any time soon? Probably not. On the other hand, I have an iPad and I can still use this valuable tool. There is no reason I can’t share the screen of my iPad with my students by connecting my iPad to my Smartboard either through an HDMI connection, or by placing the iPad under a document camera. Do I really want all my students touching my personal iPad? Not really. They are not concerned enough with the well being of other people’s property. And if you’re merely showing students the screen of an iPad, you may as well be showing them a traditional textbook. If they’re not the ones using it, the point of it being interactive is lost.

Ahhhhh...interactive textbooks. Again, the concept is brilliant. To have all my videos and exercises (with instant feedback!) in one place is a dream. But it’s a dream for a teacher. I have been lucky enough to both teach and facilitate several distance learning classes over the last three years. Distance classes can be great, and they do what Apple is proposing, but on a computer via a website. The biggest downside is the required Internet connection. The difference in our online course offerings, and the interactive texts presented yesterday by Roger Rosner is small. Each course is packed with links to videos, java games, and Flash activities (that will, no doubt, be replaced by HTML5 activities). Are the students more engaged with the material presented in their online classes? The average student is not. And the below average student simply needs a teacher to fill him with the information one to one. Just yesterday I had a student ask if he had to watch the whole video - referring to a 6 minute video presenting the Industrial Revolution. Really? I cannot believe that students will be more engaged watching a video on the iPad than on a laptop. And digital content won’t be changing for a while.

As a secondary teacher, I cannot speak to iTunes U. However, I have used it for my own professional development several times and love it. I will definitely be using it more often as a stand alone app.

In summary, yes, I love the basic concept of all Apple is doing for education. However, by making it all Apple centered, they are restricting America’s promise of a free and accessible education. The privileged will get Apple products and a better education, and those who can most benefit from a good education will be left out.

Alli is a high school teacher.

Leanna Lofte

I'll admit that the Apple Education Event has left me feeling a little giddy inside. As an educator, interactive textbooks on the iPad, iTunes U on the iPhone and iPad, and iBooks Author all make me very excited.

I've spent a little time in a few textbooks in iBooks and I have been nothing short of impressed. When talk of these interactive textbooks first began to surface, I was concerned that they may not run very well and be a little laggy, but boy was I wrong! Content? Fantabulously engaging! Obviously the text hasn't changed, but textbooks filled with multimedia such as slideshows, videos, 3D diagrams, and quizzes - definitely a game changer.

I teach at a small community college and will be doing everything in my power to get those in charge on board with iTunes U. I am planning to use a website for my courses this semester to post course documents and videos, but iTunes U does it much better than I could on my measly little website.

Last, but definitely not least, I am very excited about iBooks Author. One of my not-so-little lifetime goals is to write a Calculus textbook (yep, I'm that crazy), and iBook Author gives me some hope of actually achieving this goal. I've only spent a little time with the app, but have been able to do so much with it. I plan to actually start writing some mini books to have available for free as supplementary material for my courses. I have a real passion for teaching, and iBooks Author will help me be the better teacher I strive to be.

I know, I sound like a raging fangirl right now, but I truly am excited about all this news. Is it perfect? No. iPads filled with textbooks may not be in the classrooms tomorrow, but the first step to making that a reality has happened. Good job, Apple.

I'm also starting to believe those rumors of low-budget iPads may not be that farfetched after all...

Leanna teaches math at a California college.

Keith Newman

I've been a teacher for 12 years now, and I remember having a hokey tablet PC hooked up to a projector 10 years ago. Apple's move towards the educational experience is breathtaking. I love what I am seeing and feel that the impact of such tools in the classroom is probably what education needs at the moment (besides parents who actually care, but that's a whole other article). Motivation in the classroom is possible with old-school means but let's be honest, retention is at its all time lowest for this generation. Apple is attempting to speak the "student language" in the classroom for the first time I can remember. It's nice... it's refreshing... it's not going to work.

I'm not trying to be negative, but these tools in the classroom need SERIOUS monitoring. Remote Desktop is a must for me when I have kids in a Lab or have a computer cart; otherwise, it's Twitter and ESPN videos all period long. As of now, there isn't this type of software to overlook iPad carts. It's one thing for a student to not be on the correct page and goof off, that happens everywhere; now we are giving the entire class, whom the majority are doing the right thing, a tool to entice them to not be on the right page.

Cost is also a factor. Yes, I know we aren't getting free iPads. Districts will have to spend that money upfront to save money on the back end. I understand. However... iPads get lost. They get stolen. They get broke. Each one costs the district $500 to replace. Students in my poor, urban school district do not have the money to replace an $80 textbook let alone an iPad.

I want to see this happen. I really do. But realistically it won't happen with Apple prouducts. Their devices have way too much of a markup for this to be economically fesible in an urban school district (that is already in a financial crisis of $629 million dollars). I do see this happening realistically with an OLPC tablet that's not as swanky as Apple's but is far more accessible.

Keith is a high school teacher.

Chris Vitek

As an educator, I am really excited about the potential that eBooks have, along with the interactive potential of having textbooks on an iPad. I am happy that Apple has decided to push the envelope, and I am eager to see college textbooks publishers join in the effort. It looks like Apple has really tried to make the textbooks as interactive, engaging, and as learner-centered as possible, but a lot will depend on how strongly publishers pursue this. While I think there are some hurdles to overcome, I hope that with Apple pushing publishers and authors along it will only get better. I have seen some publisher's attempts at interactive eBooks, and for the most part, they have been disappointing. If publishers and textbook authors can really use the tools Apple has provided, then I think that eBooks may be the future of textbooks. One thing that would be great to see is a teacher's version of the book, that would enable teachers to incorporate the material into teaching lessons (such as putting material in a PowerPoint or Keynote slide).

With iTunes U (which I am sad to say I have never really looked at) it looks like Apple is trying to steal business from Blackboard. I will admit that I have doubts about online learning (I am a little old-school and feel that classroom interaction is an important part of learning). I do use online features to supplement a course, however, and will certainly take a look at iTunes U. I wonder if it can be integrated with school systems so that only registered students can get access to the course (I know our administration won't want to offer all our courses online for free). But it looks like a promising option for online courses and for some course content.

Chris is an assistant professor at a Texas university.

• Complete coverage of Apple's education event

If you're browsing Wikipedia, Reddit, or some other sites today and notice it's either blacked out or otherwise differently-functional, don't worry, they haven't gone down, they haven't been hacked, they're just protesting some wrong-headed U.S. legislation known as SOPA and PIPA (and I'd ask kindly they add ACTA to the list).

In a nutshell, Hollywood considers us all content thieves and their inexplicable hostility towards their own customers has caused them to expend tremendous time, effort, and money trying to get the U.S. government to cram through anti-consumer legislation that doesn't really fight illegal and unlicensed content distribution, but sure does trample individual rights, fair use provisions, and in general the whole concept of due process. To combat this, people who actually know what the internet is and how it works have applied equal and oppositional force back, up to an including today's black out. Fear of informed, engaged citizens has caused some politicians to rethink their support of these bills (though why they supported them to begin with should be a question asked pointedly and repeatedly come reelection time). But there's more work to be done.

Intellectual property violations are real. More than a decade ago I walked into a store in Hong Kong and saw a book I'd spent years researching, photographing, and writing photocopied and offered up for discount sale. I've been creating content most of my life. I understand it's value. It's Hollywood that doesn't -- that inflates and infantilizes it, that makes reasonable protection impossible in the face of their unreasonableness.

The defensiveness of movie makers and music labels, of myopic media throwbacks, of technophobes and all but disintermediated middlemen should never be put before the rights of the people who -- by the way -- are the very consumers who buy their products and provide them the very money they spend to lobby for such insane legislation to begin with.

Apple broke this conundrum years ago with iTunes: Make things easily available and price them fairly.

How about we make that the law?

Source: Wikipedia SOPA and PIPA resource page, Wikipedia ACTA page

There's been a lot of companies lately selling glowing Apple logo mods for the iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S. While they may look extremely cool and make your iPhone stand out from the rest, you should also take into consideration how these work and the potential risk they pose to the functionality of your device. This is much different than using authentic or safe parts for a DIY mod or repair.

First we will state the most obvious - it will completely void your Apple warranty. Opening your device in any unauthorized way will void your factory warranty with Apple. So if your device is still in warranty, I'd stay away from this.

If your iPhone is out of warranty, there's still concerns to consider. Accelerated battery drain will be an issue. While many of these companies claim there is minimal draw on power, there is still extra power being consumed. An extra light source will always pull power. So yes, you will see more battery drain than without the modification installed.

My biggest concern is how these light mods actually function. They use the existing circuitry in your iPhone to draw power, specifically the LCD cable. This is where the glowing panel pulls power from. Not through the battery but by pulling power through a connector that is already being utilized for something else. In this case, your screen. There have already been reports of washed out LCDs due to glowing mods.

I also don't recommend putting stray components in your device that aren't held down in an appropriate fashion. Your device is designed to pull the correct amount of power from the battery. Your logic board is also designed to handle hardware a specific way. In a worst case scenario, you could potentially short out your logic board.

There's too much room for error with these types of products and not enough information on them. Not to mention the error that can take place if you don't have any idea what you're doing when installing these modifications. You could end up breaking another component in the process, or even worse, break a connector off the logic board. Until a modification can be created that pulls power directly from the battery opposed to using existing circuitry, I won't be giving my thumbs up.

About a year ago I wrote a post explaining why you don't have to kill multitasking apps in iOS. iOS 4 had been introduced, bringing multitasking to iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad, and because Apple added the ability to jiggle and close them in the fast app switcher, some users decided to do just that. All. The. Time.

We're on to iOS 5 now, we have some new players like Newsstand in the multitasking equation, and apparently the community is just as deeply divided as ever on the issue, even developers, even Apple Geniuses. So Frasier Speirs has put together a post of his own on the subject of iOS multitasking misconceptions, and while he ultimately proffers the same thesis as yours truly -- you really don't need to manually manage apps in iOS -- he goes into far more detail about the whys and wherefores.

Regardless of how you feel, whether you think you should leave absolutely all task killing safely to Apple, whether you think you should purge every app, every time, or whether you're still on the fence, take a read of Speirs' article and give it some consideration.

Source: speirs.org

The late Steve Jobs called 2011 "the year of the iPad 2" and almost a year after it was introduced, almost 2 years after the original iPad was introduced, it remains a product selling in the tens of millions with absolutely no competition in sight.

And that's a shame because, as a consumer, the one thing I want most is strong, meaningful competition for the iPad.

It's become a cliche to say "there's no tablet market, there's only an iPad market", but like most cliches there's more than a little truth to it. Very few people want a tablet. Not in the 10 years prior to the iPad when Microsoft sold Tablet PC to almost no one, and not in the almost two years since when Apple's competition has tried to differentiate themselves by being more like PCs.

The simple truth is, the iPad was never designed to be a tablet. It was never designed to be a PC crammed into a slate form factor. Like they did with command line on the Apple II, and graphical interfaces on the Mac, and multitouch on the iPhone, Apple strove to make something that was more mainstream, more accessible than what had come before. It just turned out to look like a tablet.

For many people, PCs -- personal computers -- are anything but. They're complicated, impenetrable stacks of boxes and webs of cables, with mice that never move right, buttons that never click right, windows that hide other windows, programs that make little sense, and files and folders that are as frustrating to find as they are to figure out how to use. They're like cars back in the days when you had to be a mechanic to own and operate one, and very few people did.

The iPad is the opposite of that. You turn it on. You click home. You tap an app. You click home. You tap another app. You know where you are and if you get lost you're always only a click away from getting back to some place familiar. It's more approachable. It's more understandable. It does 80% of the things 80% of the people need 80% of the time and that, it turns out, is a huge swathe more than most PCs could ever do for most people.

That's why Apple is selling a so many of them, and why their competitors aren't.

To compete with Apple, everything from RIM's PlayBook to Google's Android Honeycomb tablets offered more specs and more desktop-class power. To the exact people who wanted anything but.

Powerful multitasking metaphors don't help people who think their internet is gone because their browser is lost behind their word processor. Flash doesn't help mainstream consumers who have no idea what it is, even if their more obscure web video sites don't play without it. Tegra II processors don't help wives who just want to know why their messages won't scroll without sticking and stammering. Bezel gestures and on-screen widgets don't help people who just, for once in their technology plagued lives, want simple controls, for a simple screen, that does one app at a time and does it very, very well. Copying the iPad's look won't help when the software running it doesn't work with anything approaching the same simplicity or feel.

Apple understood this back in 2005 when they started work on the Safari Pad concept, and while even they didn't full get it when they made it manifest in 2010, they got it enough to release the iPad, and they got it even more in 2011 with the iPad 2, iOS 5, and iCloud.

It's not about being thinner, or lighter, or faster. It's not about specs or about content. It's about experience. And now, as we enter 2012, as Apple is poised to release an iPad 3 with a Retina display that runs mobile software even better than GarageBand and iMovie, not a single one of their competitors have gotten that yet.

Until they do, until Amazon or Google or someone else puts the mainstream customer first, every year for the foreseeable future will be the year of the iPad.

Our very own Seth Clifford, he of the iOS and mobile design podcasts, took a second look at how Amazon's Kindle Fire stacks up against Apple's iPad 2, now that the Fire has gotten its first, much-needed software update.

As a nerd, the Fire is a waste of time for the most part. You're limited by the choices Amazon's made in the hardware and software, and getting stuff done around those choices is possible, but probably not worth your time unless you really feel like poking around. People have been hinting at how great a CyanogenMod build would be for the Fire, so you may want to go that route eventually, but then again, why not just buy another Android tablet if that's what you want it for? Surely if you're willing to hack to that end, you can save yourself some time with other hardware. But I guess there's the challenge too.

As a normal person, the Fire is pretty good. Seriously. The software update (which auto-installed minutes after I unboxed the Fire) made a big difference in responsiveness. Prior to that, half my button presses didn't even register and scrolling was pretty lame. If you're comfy with Amazon's selections, and you don't mind a few weird moments (like always tapping the screen to do everything), you probably won't mind it too much. There's plenty to do and it's laid out clearly for you. If you use the device in the manner Amazon has envisioned, you'll be fine. It's when you stray outside of that use case that you face some resistance. My guess is that most Fire owners won't make that choice.

Seth's far more forgiving than I. Too much about the Kindle Fire -- from the ill-position power button and the lack of volume buttons, to the laggy video, to the way the software is designed almost entirely as a giant front end for Amazon's e-commerce engine, to its bizarre lack of content outside the U.S. -- is like finger nails on a chalk board. It shows a lack of care and concern, and if they can't think this stuff through beforehand, I have little faith in their magically fixing it in the long run. Here's why -- it's Amazon-prioritized, not user-prioritized, and I value my time and sanity far more than the $300 difference between a Fire and even a base-price iPad. (Your use cases and priorities may be different, of course.)

Check out Seth's complete comparison for more.

Source: SethClifford.me

While jailbreaking already provides tons of functionality, there's still room for improvement and expansion in 2012. Last year I did a list of jailbreak concepts Apple should implement and low and behold, they implemented quite a few of them. But that's part of the game. Part of what spurs more innovation is creativity and pushing boundaries. And at the end of the day it's really the user base that is the most useful when it comes to helping developers out. They can't create it if they don't know we want it. So this is our list of the top 5 things we'd like to see jailbreak accomplish in 2012.

A jailbreak for A5 devices

We already know pod2g is working on this. While we will most likely get one in 2012, I'm not excluding it as one of the biggest wants for many users. We just received an untethered jailbreak for A4 and older devices. Hopefully a jailbreak for the iPad 2 and iPhone 4S aren't that far behind. While an untethered version would be epic win, I'd take a tethered version for starters.

Cydia updates

While Cydia is probably one of the most used apps on my iOS devices, it can become rather frustrating at times. Saurik made some updates to Cydia in 2011 but nothing to get too excited about. Cydia could use a facelift and some speed enhancements.

While it may not be at the top of saurik's list right now, I know Cydia is frustrating for many users on a day to day basis. Not to mention the organization of packages is rather daunting for many new jailbreakers. They have no idea where to start or what apps they should be downloading. Sure, they can always come to TiPb but for those not familiar, how about adding a jailbreak starter pack in Cydia? I know several new users revert back to stock quickly out of confusion and frustration.

I'd like to see Cydia step up its game to show users what jailbreak is all about. It isn't about pirating apps and installing illegal software at all. It's about enhancing and customizing your experience.

More iPad compatible apps and tweaks

While there is support for jailbroken iPads, it's very minimal. I'd really like to see that change. As of right now, I really can't find a good reason to jailbreak my iPad. A lot of this could have to do with the lack of support for current iPad 2 users. Jailbreak developers may not want to put the time and effort into supporting the low number of jailbroken iPads.

Hopefully a jailbreak for A5 devices will create more interest in jailbreaking the iPad. Even though there are a few good reasons to jailbreak the iPad, I'd like to find a reason I can not live without. I'd like to have a reason or find a jailbreak application compelling enough to make me not want to live without my iPad being jailbroken.

If I'm missing out on some to die for jailbreak utilities for iPad, please let me know. I've yet to find them.

More support updates from developers

After iOS 4 was released, Cydia was plagued with tons of apps and utilities that were never updated to support it. Even though jailbreak tool after jailbreak tool was released supporting almost every device on the market, tools were left to collect dust. Some of them were actually very useful utilities that I really missed using after updating. Things like changing keyboard styles were little tweaks that were left untouched for months.

Some developers are extremely good about updating their tools. Others are not. Where that happens, I'd really like to see new jailbreak developers step up and come out with new solutions. Heck, just improve upon someone else's idea. It seemed as if the jailbreak community was left with a ton of tools that were left in limbo. A package may work, it may not, it may just crash your springboard. I'd like to see less of this.

Maybe this is something that needs to come bundled with updates to Cydia. This is another reason jailbreak may be off-putting to some new users. They download tweaks that aren't compatible with their devices and when it isn't stable, they restore and never give jailbreak another chance. We need to avoid experiences like this as developers.

A more unified jailbreak process

This one may be asking a bit too much but heck, I'll throw it out there. While redsn0w and tools like it are pretty user friendly to begin with, there are tons of tools out there and that's confusing to new users. What tool do they use? Is one not compatible with their device? Programs like ipswDownloader aim to make it easier for beginners, but a lot of beginners won't know what an IPSW is let alone what the tool does, where to find it, or know why they need it.

If jailbreak developers could come together to make a great tool that accommodates all users, I think the jailbreak community would see a great benefit and many more users. I see tons of people in my office every day that bricked their device or jailbroke it with an incorrect tool. I also see people that searched and researched jailbreak online, became overwhelmed, and would rather come and pay me to do it correctly than mess something up themselves. I know there are tons of other users out there that are put off by the overwhelming amount of information and tools out there. Working together to find a way to make the process more streamlined would be time spent that would pay off in the long run.

Bottom line

I think my overall outlook on jailbreak is this - people buy Apple devices because of the experience and the ease of use. If jailbreak complicates things too much, they'll stray away. Of course there will always be power users and ninjas that will put in the time to make it work. But the bottom line is that most iOS users just want their device to work and work well. If jailbreak developers can find ways to make the process and overall experience better, I think they'd see a lot more users willing to give it a try or a second runaround.

What do you guys want to see jailbreak developers aiming for in the coming year? Let us know!

This is post number 6000 for me here at TiPb, and I wanted to take the opportunity to say thank you. Thank you to our wonderful community, to everyone who participates and shares and discusses here on the blog and in the Forums, on Facebook and on Twitter. You're the first, best, and only reason we're here.

The site has changed a lot since I started -- not the least of which was the transition from the original name of Phone Different to theiPhoneblog.com to TiPb.com -- and we're continuing to change and evolve and grow, to bring you more of everything you love about iPhone, iPod touch, iPad, and Apple TV.

We've been iterating our design so we can better highlight what we think matters most, and let you more easily find the stories you care about and skip the ones you don't. From news to apps to accessories to how-tos to critical issues to pure fun, we have a diverse array of subjects to cover every day and a diverse audience to care for, and we're always looking for the best ways to meet and balance those obligations. The ability to have big, widescreen stories and videos, and smaller, more numerous excerpts on the home page is one thing we're experimenting with. The power boxes at the bottom are another -- carefully curated by subject matter, we hope they let you get to the latest stuff you care about, quickly and easily.

The Forums have grown considerably as well, both in the number and range of topics we've added to the conversation. Technologically, we've done huge upgrades as well, bringing TiPb almost fully inline with the functionality enjoyed by other Mobile Nations network sites.

Speaking of which, we've added fancy new Mobile Nations headers and footers to TiPb and all of our sites, so if you want to keep up-to-date on not only iPhone and iPad, but Android and Windows Phone, BlackBerry and webOS, you're always only a click away from the latest and greatest content and coverage in the industry.

We've also ramped up the production and scope of Mobile Nations broadcasting, bringing you some of the best live shows and audio and video podcasts on the internet for everything from iPhone and iPad Live to great new shows covering many more aspects of our increasingly rich and complex mobile lives.

On a personal note, I'd like to thank Dieter Bohn, Kevin Michaluk, Marcus Adolfsson, and everyone at TiPb and Mobile Nations past and present for this opportunity: to work with the best and the brightest in the business, and to share with our community what is inarguably the most exciting time ever in the history of mobile and personal computing.

And we're certainly not going to slow down. We have more to come. Much more. I deeply love this community, this site, and this network, and together we're going to dent our corner of the universe. Hard.

Please don't hesitate to contact me with any feedback, any time. Tell me what you love, what you hate, and what you want more of. You can reach me via email at rene@tipb.com, on the forums at Rene Ritchie, and on Twitter @reneritchie.

Here's to the next 6000!

Rene

According to 9to5Google, the reason Google Wallet is nowhere to be found on the upcoming Android Samsung Galaxy Nexus is because... wait for it... Verizon has blocked it. That's worth repeating. Google has allowed a carrier to prevent users from having a Google app on a platform marketed as being open, on a device meant to be the very flagship, the beacon of that openness.

If this story turns out to be accurate, it wouldn't be the first time Google has caved to Verizon. They've turned their backs on the net neutrality principles they previously held dear, for Verizon. They've betrayed their users by allowing crapware to be indelibly pre-installed on Android, for Verizon and other carrier partners. They even allowed the delay of Galaxy Nexus in the country in which they're headquartered, more than likely for Verizon.

And none of that would be a problem, none of it would even be noteworthy except that Google has used openness -- complete openness -- time and again as a weapon against Apple -- a way to turn users away from iOS and rally them to Android. And now, as then, it's deliberately misleading at best and a flat out lie at worst. It's said in a way that suggests it's better for end users when it's not. It's said in a way that suggests it puts control in the end user's hands when it doesn't. It puts in back in the carrier's hands. It's better for the carriers.

With the corruption of the Nexus line, it's not even "openy" any more. It's less than openy.

If you use Android rather than iOS because you like a choice of hardware form factors, or prefer the deep integration of Google services, or its UI better fits the way your brain works, or you just flat out think it's better on any or many levels, that's fantastic. If you use Android for philosophical reasons and a fundamental belief in it being nobler and more open, you've been bamboozled. Again.

Update 1: Google has confirmed that Verizon asked for Google Wallet to be excluded from the Galaxy Nexus [CNet]

Update 2: Verizon says they're not blocking Google Wallet, they're just not letting it on the Galaxy Nexus. Wait, what? [Android Central]

Source: 9to5 Google via Android Central

Justin Williams from Carpeaqua breaks down the egregiously horrible user experience involved in just trying to get an issue of GQ, Esquire, or Sports Illustrated magazine loaded on the iPad.

Reading magazines on the iPad is an exercise in frustration. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. As great a device and, more importantly, platform as Apple has created, magazine publishers have done nothing short of fumble the snap in their own end zone.

Williams provides a list of 10 things publishers can do to help improve things, and it's a good list but it doesn't address the core problem -- publishers are the wrong people to fix it.

The record labels didn't create iTunes. Apple did. The record companies still, to this day, over a decade later, don't understand the fundamentals of selling content in the digital age.

Jim Dalrymple of The Loop nails it:

The first rule of any business should be “don’t piss off your customers.” Many publishers are failing.

Imagine if, instead of iTunes we had the Warner Brothers app, the Harry Potter Movie app, the U2 app, and a myriad other, fragmented, experientially challenged, old-model ad festooned crapware.

It would be untenable. It is untenable.

Forget publishers. We need iMagazine.

Source: Carpeaqua via The Loop

Carrier IQ is software that manufacturers and/or carriers stealthily embed in mobile devices in order to collect everything from location to behavioral (usage) data. How much data they collect, and to what level of granularity, it's hard to tell, as is what they do with it both locally on the device and transmitted back to their servers.

It's in the news recently because it's been discovered on Android and iOS devices, but Carrier IQ, and stuff like it, have been used for years. Knowledge is power, after all, and the moment a company can do something that they think gives them tactical advantage, they likely will.

They might use it to try and detect crashes, loss of signal or packets, or other technical information that could help them make better products or services. They might use it to see which OS features you use most and least often, how you typically enter or exit apps and features, how many apps you download and how often, and for how long, you use them. They might sell this information to to partners and third party developers so they can improve and adjust their products, or learn about their competitors' users. (I explained how this works in more detail a while back in regards to Siri.)

They might anonymize it, aggregate it, and runs metrics or analytics off terabytes of the stuff. They might drill down to a single, known user, Person of Interest -- or Big Brother -- style. We don't know, and that's a big part of the problem. Lack of disclosure leads to uncertainty about the motives and that leads to feelings of violation.

Does that mean it's wrong to feel violated? Certainly not, but right now a lot of the attention is being focused on Carrier IQ and that's a lot like blaming a gun -- what you really want is the shooter. It's the carriers and the manufacturers who are implementing Carrier IQ.

And they're not alone. Think some game companies don't monitor your behavior while you're playing, figure out when you leave the game, then try to adjust levels so you keep playing longer? Think apps don't provide accounts and online services so that you get online and use them, and they can compile data based on your usage.

At the end of the day, they really don't care who you are, it's just collateral damage from figuring out how to take more of your money. That's customer insight and it's being done more and more often, in more and more sophisticated ways. Carrier IQ is just making headlines, but it's a much bigger, much more important issue than any one vendor.

You want the shooter, and you want to know why and at what they're shooting. And you want them to tell us up front what exactly it is they're packing onto our devices.

Sources: Android Central, chpwn

Disclosure: I worked for many years in cutting edge customer insight analytics

No one outside of Apple, and likely very few inside of Apple, if anyone at all at this early stage, knows what the 2012 iPhone will be called. For the sake of convenience and familiarity, we've been using iPhone 5 (or whatever Apple ends up calling it).

But Apple can call it anything they want. iPhone 4G. iPhone 4GS. iPhone 4GS Mark II Epic, LTE X. (Okay, that's very unlikely, but the point is it's their phone, their name.)

There's no logical reason they couldn't call it iPhone 5 either. The model number will be 5,1 after all, and for most mainstream customers the logical number after 4 -- even after 4S -- is 5. Mainstream customers don't know, and don't care, what generation the device is. Nor should they.

Apple doesn't really care either. They've used 3 twice and 4 twice now. They could easily use 5 twice next. They still call iOS 5 on Apple TV "software 4", after all.

Marketing has nothing to do with reality and everything to do with perception and presentation.

There will almost certainly be a new iPhone next year, but until they officially announce it and it's name, we'll be using iPhone 5.

Now that we have the iPhone and iPad, the next great unicorn to chase seems to be an Apple television. Not the Apple TV set top box, mind you, but a full on elegant glass and aluminium object de panel art from Jony Ive and co. Something to hang on our wall and banish cables and crummy cable boxes from our living rooms once and for all.

When last we got analyst-fueled Apple television rumors, it turned out to be the 27-inch iMac. This time, however, we have a nebulous passage from the just-released Steve Jobs biography to properly set the chase in motion:

“He very much wanted to do for television sets what he had done for computers, music players, and phones: make them simple and elegant. I’d like to create an integrated television set that is completely easy to use,’ he told me. ‘It would be seamlessly synced with all of your devices and with iCloud.’ No longer would users have to fiddle with complex remotes for DVD players and cable channels. ‘It will have the simplest user interface you could imagine. I finally cracked it."

Interface is only one of the things Apple will have to crack, however. Content is called king for a reason. A gorgeously designed, cunningly coded TV set only goes so far if you can't get your sports, your specialty channels and special events, and everything else cable and satellite currently has an locked up in their oligopoly.

Bloomberg, however, has added another face to the chase:

Apple Inc. (AAPL) is turning to the software engineer who built iTunes to help lead its development of a television set, according to three people with knowledge of the project. Jeff Robbin, who helped create the iPod in addition to the iTunes media store, is now guiding Apple’s internal development of the new TV effort, said the people, who declined to be identified because his role isn’t public.

Now don't get me wrong -- from 2007 to 2010 I went from a Treo 650 to an iPhone 4S yet my TV has pretty much the same crappy Scientific Atlanta PVR. If any dinosaur of an industry needs to get hit by the Apple meteorite and turned into the fossil fuel of the future, it's television. The idea of an Apple engineered and programmed television is enticing -- though my wallet threatens to punch me in the nose at the mere thought of lining up every year for that multi-thousand dollar product launch. It's just trickier to see what an Apple television would be to a current Sony or Samsung set, as opposed to what an iPhone was to Treo or iPad to Tablet PC. It's tricky to see what it would do that an Apple TV box couldn't, aside from being neater and tidier.

Of course Apple probably has all sorts of products in the lab. Their success, however, has come from not shipping something until they knew how to go to market with it. The Apple TV is called a hobby for a reason, and at $100 it can easily afford to be. iPhone took Apple years to bring to market, after all. iPad years more. Conceivably Apple could pull the trigger on a television as soon as 2012, but until Tim Cook and co. show it off on stage, just like chasing unicorns, it's just flights of fun and fancy.

Source: Bloomberg

Thanks to the quick Camera access and power of Siri as a virtual assistant, iOS 5 and iPhone 4S are more convenient than ever -- but they also leave you open to everything from pranks to data theft. We've talked about this extensively on the iPhone Live podcast but it's worth repeating here.

Double clicking the Home button and tapping the Camera icon bypasses a Passcode Lock and instantly lets you take pictures. You can't access anything else, but if you leave your iPhone unattended, a friend or passerby can easily prank you by taking an inappropriate picture (from innocuous "funny faces" to to full on "junk attacks" -- don't ask.) If you have Photo Stream enabled, that prank picture can quickly propagate to all your other iOS devices, your PC, and your Apple TV, and the only way to remove it is to delete the entire stream.

You can't currently disable the fast Camera access. You can disable Photo Stream by going to Settings, iCloud, and toggling Photo Stream to Off.

Holding down the Home button to activate Siri also bypasses the Passcode Lock, and while Siri is prohibited from doing things like deleting contacts or performing web searches without the lock code being entered, Siri can still call numbers, delete alarms, and perform other tasks unencumbered. If someone knows a contact's name, they can get access to their email address(es), phone number(s), etc. Even if they don't know a contact's name, because relationships can be set, they can simple ask for "mom" or "boss" and get the data that way.

Friends and strangers alike can also prank you by telling Siri to address you by some funny or rude name.

You can disable Siri's Passcode bypass. Go to Settings, General, Passcode Lock and flip the Siri toggle to Off.

Convenience and security are always at opposite ends of any feature list. Each individual has to decide for themselves how much convenience they want and how much security they're willing to give up for it. (Some people choose to not even use a Passcode Lock, after all.)

Disabling Siri's Passcode bypass reduces its speed and ease of use but increases its security. You can't just hold a button and start talking to have Siri take an email, for example, while you're driving. You have to enter the unlock code first, and perhaps each time depending on your settings.

Unfortunately, Camera access and Photo Stream need to wait for Apple to provide an easy off-toggle, and a way to delete individual pictures from the stream. Disabling Photo Stream contains any pranks, but means you lose the backup and multi-device replication of the feature.

In the meantime, the best practice is, of course, to never leave your iPhone unattended, especially around people you don't know -- or people you can't trust not to prank you.

Tomorrow Apple releases iOS 5 to the public and while millions will rush to grab it and bring iTunes' servers to their knees, I for one will be taking a pass. At least for now. The reason is simple -- I'm not willing to give up my beloved Jailbreak.

I like being able to put more apps in the dock than Apple allows. I like being able to respond to texts without having to go back to the Messages app and change my settings with a swipe. I like being able to leave gaps on my home screen and I like seeing cool FX happen when I swipe from one screen to another.

And while Rene was showing me the admittedly cool looking new Notification Center in iOS 5, he couldn't preview email right from the pull down the way I could with my Jailbreak notifications.

There's already a tethered Jailbreak for iOS 5, but I need my phone to work for work, so tethered isn't an option for me. There are rumors an untethered Jailbreak for iOS 5 might be coming soon.

That's what I'm waiting for. And that's why I'm not updating to iOS 5. Yet.

Anyone else on #TeamJailbreak waiting with me?

Siri isn't a voice control system. Nobody uses those, and Apple wants something everybody will use. First, they value user experience, second they value differentiation from other platforms, and third, certain business models are predicated on having very large user bases. That's where the revenue streams become complex and the profit becomes really interesting.

Let's say iPhone 4S has Siri and it looks cool and it makes people want to buy it. Apple, being well managed and having good hardware margins, makes money on the sale. Then people start using Siri and feeding it incredible amounts of demographic and behavioral data. Apple, being smart, can use all that demographic and behavioral data to develop a high level of customer insight, allowing them to make better and better selling products and services.

But there's more. If Apple chooses to adopt a Google-style business model, they can aggregate and anonymize that data and sell it to advertisers and marketers. That turns the customers into products, something they tried -- and have thus far failed -- to do with iAds in apps. Siri moves it to the OS level and while it won't display ads, it will collect data that can be fed back into iAds, or other advertising and marketing platforms.

Google already pays Apple to be the default search engine on iOS for that very reason -- to sell ads against search results. The App Store, however, reduced the amount of searches being conducted on mobile. (As Apple has proudly announced during their events -- unlike desktop, people aren't spending their time in search, they're spending it in apps.) That started to cut out Google but didn't cut in Apple.

Siri cuts in Apple. Queries issued through Siri go to Apple's servers. Apple gets the data on who's issuing them, when, where, and in relation to what else. Without building a search engine of their own, Apple steals away what makes search so valuable. And because they're doing much more than search, they can monetize against much more than just search results.

But there's yet more. Because Apple becomes the intermediary -- the walled gate -- between their customers and the internet, traditional internet services lose all visibility into their customers. They don't see iOS users running queries, they see Apple running queries on behalf of iOS users. Tons and tons of them. That loss of visibility means internet services lose the very customer insight Apple has gained -- they lose the ability to make better and better selling products, and to monetize individual users.

Apple has already done this with the App Store and iOS subscriptions. App Store developers often don't know who their end users are, and traditional print media was livid when Apple made the sharing of demographic data opt-in for end users. Sure, account logins can mitigate this somewhat but often make for a worse user experience and there's no guarantee end users will make accounts for every app that wants them. (Just like not everyone sends in the warranty card for that printer they just bought at Best Buy or Staples.)

With Siri, that extends Apple's intermediation to internet services as well. So, increasingly, if companies want to get customer insight back, it will become easier to just go to Apple and get it -- meaning buy it. To the best of my knowledge Apple doesn't offer that now for App Store developers and they may never offer it for internet services tied to Siri, but it's a business model they could choose to explore. It turns the partners and suppliers into customers, and again opens the door to yet another entirely new business.

But there's even more. With Apple as intermediary, they don't just get the customer insight for one service, they get them for every service that goes through their system. That includes both complementary and competing services. If visibility into your own users is valuable, how valuable is visibility into your competitors' users, and their demographics and behavior?

To make it more tangible, Coke has no idea who buys a can of their tasty beverage at the local QuickyMart. But QuickyMart does, with ever-increasing granularity. And if they choose to, and they know how to derive proper customer insight from it, they can use it to better stock their shelves and increase their profits. And they can sell it to advertisers who want to reach their customers. And they can sell it to Coke, who wants to better understand the end consumer to improve their own profitability. And they can sell it to Doritos who wants to be bought alongside Coke, and they can sell it to Pepsi who wants those customers to buy their tasty beverage instead.

Again, Apple may never choose to get into this type of business, or like iAds they may not do it well, or they may get into some or all of it in a very different way. Customer insight, however, opens the door to an increasingly important and valuable revenue source, and Siri opens the door to customer insight.

Disclosure: My previous job was at a cutting edge customer insight analytics company.

Almost all of Steve Jobs' appearances, talks, and keynotes are memorable in one way or another. Below are some of those that resonated with us the most over the years, the ones we've watched again and again, and the ones we've gleaned the most insight from, such as we can, into the mind of the man behind Apple.

Memory & Imagination: New Pathways to the Library of Congress: Computers are the bicycles of the mind.

1997 WWDC Q&A

1997 Think different spot, "Here's to the crazy ones", narrated by Steve Jobs

2005 Stanford Commencement Address.

2010 Special Event, Steve Jobs introduces the iPad

2010 WWDC Keynote, Steve Jobs introduces the iPhone 4

2011 Special Event, Steve Jobs introduces the iPad 2

2011 WWDC Keynote, Steve Jobs' last.

2003-2010 D: All Things Digital, full videos of Steve Jobs interviews (They don't allow embeds so click/tap the link and go watch them. They're extraordinary.)



People have been talking about how the current Siri voice leaves a lot to be desired. We joked on [iPhone Live that we might want, Darth Vader, Mr. T or Laura Croft as the voice. But I think that we missed out on the most fitting voice of the iPhone. The greatest memorial to Steve Jobs and all of those who loved him so dearly would be to allow Steve Jobs to live on as being the voice of Siri.

Steve has always been the heart of Apple and the iPhone and it only serves purpose that he also be its voice. Yes it would take a long time to work through but wouldn't it be worth it?

And if Apple somehow feels it's not appropriate, perhaps Jailbreak developers could make it so?

Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple and the guiding mind behind iPhone, iPod touch, iPad, iTunes, and an astounding amount of other modern technological marvels, passed away yesterday at the age of 56.

Statements and stories have flooded in from around the world and all over the internet. Below, the staff of TiPb and the Mobile Nations network share their thoughts, memories, and respect for the man who shaped the modern consumer electronic world.

Georgia, TiPb.com

If there is anything that we can learn from the death of Steve Jobs it's that we need to make sure we live for the moment and do as much as we can with the time we are given. Though Steve is no longer with us, his legacy will carry on. I did not expect to be as affected by his passing as I have been. There is something that made me feel secure with having Steve at Apple, and his spirit can not be replaced.

We're here to put a dent in the universe.

You did, Steve. You did.

Seth Clifford, Iterate.tv

There isn't much I could say about Steve's influence on the world that hasn't been said better already. I wasn't expecting to be as impacted by his passing as I found myself last night and again this morning. But I was, and I started to think about why I felt the way I did. I came to the conclusion that everything I do today - from the actual work I do on a daily basis, to the way I think about the quality of what we create, to the places I want us to go as a company - has in some perceivable way been shaped by Steve. A child of the 80s, I loved Macs, and when I was old enough to afford my own, it was around the same time he came back to Apple and began to reshape the face of the company. Since that point, I've watched as his vision brought new life not only to Apple, but to the entire technology industry. My formative young adult years were spent in awe of the places he was taking us, and with each release, we inched closer toward a better way of doing things. There were hiccups along the way, stops and starts, but the vision always persevered in spite of everything. Now, with the mobile landscape looking the way it does, thinking back to those early machines and the original Macintosh's goal of bringing computing to everyone, it's clear that he succeeded in that intention. Every single day, the good things he wanted us to feel as we use our technology touch my life in quietly profound ways. And every single day forward, I will pause and think about how compromise was not a part of that plan. Steve's guiding principle was to do great things, and while we don't always succeed at that, neither did he - and it's the journey (and the willingness to keep pushing forward) that really matters anyway. I will genuinely miss him, and I thank him for everything he did in the name of the user.

Ally Kazmucha, TiPb.com

I've immersed myself in technology ever since I can remember. I was always fascinated by the way things work and how things could be better. Steve Jobs understood that things can "always" be better. He was a visionary and his own worst critic. I always admired that in him. Back in my college days I remember seeing the Stanford Commencement speech on the internet. One quote stuck with me from then until now -

"Everyday when I wake up, I look into the mirror and ask myself, "If I was going to die tomorrow, would I still want to do what I'm going to do today?", and if the answer is no too many days in a row, I know I need to change something."

It's a quote I've tried to live up to. Since then, I've almost completely turned a hobby and a passion into a career, I'd say that quote has impacted my life in ways I'm not even capable of explaining. So I'll continue doing what I love to do as that's the best way I know to honor one of most creative minds of this century. He may be gone but so many of the ideas and innovations he brought to life will continue to inspire generations to come. You will be sorely missed by all.

George Lim, TiPb.com

To Me, Steve Jobs was more than the Co-founder of Apple and the Co-founder of Pixar. He was a man, who took life with both hands and went for the ride.

Despite, being adopted, getting kicked out of his own company, and being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, he lived on, showing that no matter what the situation, you can remain positive and achieve great things.

As a result he went on to return to Apple and turn it into the company it is today, and found my all time favourite animation studio, Pixar.

His view on 'not wasting life' didn't really hit me until I watched his 2005 speech at Standford University when he uttered the words:

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.

It was at that moment I knew I needed to "do something".

Now, I haven't quite left my full time job in a shop, I now write for TiPb and host my own online tech show. Doing things I love, Video Production and Writing.

Thank You Steve.

Leanna Lofte, TiPb.com

In a job interview I had a couple years ago, I was asked that if I could meet one celebrity, who would it be? Without even giving it much thought, I promptly replied 'Steve Jobs'. The job-search committee was slightly taken aback by my response because he wasn't a celebrity in the conventional meaning of the term. Well, in my eyes, Steve is the greatest and most influential celebrity of my time. Unlike other celebrities, Steve actually had and will continue to have a great impact on my life.

I miss you, Steve. Thank you for not only being an incredible innovator, but for being an inspiration and example of perseverance and following your dreams.

Kevin Michaluk, Founder of CrackBerry.com

As much as we like to poke at Apple whenever we get the chance on CrackBerry, Steve Jobs was an amazing visionary and inspiring leader who made a significant impact upon the world in which we live. Our deepest sympathies go out to his family and loved ones.

Keith Newman, PreCentral.net

Say what you will about Steve Jobs... whether you loved him or hated him, it is undeniable of the impact he had on our modern society. His return to Apple marked a new era of design and functionality the rest of the industry wished they could capture and often tried to replicate. Sure he was known to fanboys as the savior and to the haters as the devil but his business savvy and cutthroat business decisions created an empire. You will always see his true friends speak dearly of him and that is what strikes me most. He was a guy who was doing a job that was fueled on his dreams and imagination; they might have been absurd to conventional thinking and against every fabric of sound business models, yet, he still prevailed on top of it all. I offer his family and friends my condolences during this hard time. Having lost my mother at 47 from cancer, the thing that helped me through it all was remembering her during the strongest periods of her life and always keeping that in my heart. Steve, thank you for your innovations that keep pushing our world closer together through technology.

Phil Nickinson, AndroidCentral.com

Explaining to my 5-year-old daughter what I was watching on TV (and, Jesus H. Christ is CNN horrible), Mia, who uses an old iPhone 3G as an iPod, asks me:

"Daddy, since he died, will my iPhone not work anymore?"

No, Mia, it most certainly will.

Chris Oldroyd, TiPb.com

Steve Jobs quite simply changed my life! His vision and astounding ability to give us what we needed even before we actually knew what we needed was amazing. The world has lost a gifted individual and is a much worse place today because of that. I will never forget the first time I heard him say "The iPhone". Little did I know what it would lead to. Thank you Steve.

Chris Parsons, CrackBerry.com

Between last night and today, I have heard so many people state what Steve Jobs meant to them and their lives and it has truly been amazing. I've always recognized that we all live and we all die but I never realized the passing of Steve Jobs would have this much affect on myself. I work on a MacBook Pro all day long, I write about iPhones and iPads often and much of my livelihood as I know it -- is because of the products him and the folks at Apple have created. Steve Jobs was simply put.. amazing. I encourage you all to donate to your local Cancer society.

Andrew Wray, TiPb.com

It's difficult to find the right words to describe some of the emotions that I've been overwhelmed with since learning of Steve Job's passing. Feelings of sadness, nostalgia, deep inspiration and happiness all come to the surface when watching some of Steve's greatest moments on stage. He had such a way about him. That all-too-magical reality distortion field. I don't believe we will have another opportunity to see a man as great as Steve Jobs emerge within our lifetimes.

For all of this, I am truly grateful that I was able to be on this earth to watch Steve work his magic with Apple, NeXT and Pixar, bringing amazing products to the world and truly revolutionizing the tech industry. And more than once. His legacy will live on forever through Apple and I'm sure we'll all think of Steve every time we use one of his products. We'll miss you, Steve. Thanks for giving us the world.

Rene Ritchie, TiPb.com

My first computer was an Apple II. My first website was created on the classic Mac OS. Day in and day out, my work, my play, and my life is enabled by Macs and iPhones and iPads and the apps they make possible. Steve Jobs inspired and informed all of that. He is indelibly and inexorably at the heart of modern technology.

We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

A master story teller, he methodically crafted a legend not of words or epics but of consumer electronics and software. He is why Apple is the brand and passion it is today, why industrial design matters, and why software is increasingly accessible to the mainstream.

He stood at the crossroads of technology and liberal arts, of glass and aluminum, of bits and bytes, and by sheer act of will forged them into something greater than any of their parts -- tools that work for us rather than requiring us to work for them.

Relentless visionary, consummate showman, genius businessman. His loss hurts but his life will inspire, always.

The end of act two came far too soon, and act three suddenly, brutally sooner still. Part of me wonders what another 30 years could have brought us, but the other part knows what Jobs himself elucidated so well:

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

We'll never get another "One more thing..." from you, Steve, but you've left us the only thing that really matters. Your legacy. Thank you for that. For everything.



With the announcement of the iPhone 4S, many people are saying they'll skip this generation of iPhone and wait for the iPhone 5. But is there really a difference between what Apple announced as iPhone 4S and what they would have announced as an iPhone 5? If they'd used that name instead, would reaction have been any different? And now that they've gone with iPhone 4S, does that mean you'll have to wait until 2012 for an iPhone 5? Yes and no. There will no doubt be a new iPhone in fall 2012, but I do doubt Apple will call it "iPhone 5".

Let's take a look at the names of each of the iPhones that have been released thus far:

• 1st generation: iPhone
• 2nd generation: iPhone 3G
• 3rd generation: iPhone 3GS
• 4th generation: iPhone 4
• 5th generation: iPhone 4S

It needs to be pointed out that the 3G and 3GS names had nothing to do with the generations of the the iPhone. These suffixes were named after the cellular technology associated with those devices. The added 'S' was Apple's way of saying that the iPhone 3GS was a faster, new and improved iPhone 3G.

Then came the iPhone 4. Now, this iPhone was named after its generation. The fourth generation iPhone with the name iPhone 4 made perfect sense. In fact, many assumed, myself included, that Apple would be using this naming scheme from then on out.

Then they announced the iPhone 4S. Just as with the iPhone 3GS, the 'S' implies that the iPhone 4S is a faster, new and improved version of the iPhone 4 - which it is. It's a perfectly fine name, but it throws a wrench into their naming pattern.

Some might argue that it only makes sense to name the 2012 iPhone the iPhone 5, when in fact, it doesn't make any sense. What exactly would the 5 stand for? Nothing. So what then, will the 6th generation iPhone be called?

Perhaps iPhone 6? No, this doesn't fit the scheme, because it skips 5. What about iPhone LTE? Quite possibly, but this may leave out some networks who aren't quite yet on board with LTE. My prediction? iPhone. Just iPhone.

Look at the rest of Apple's product line. There's the iMac, MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, iPod, then iPhone 4S. The iPhone 4S sticks out like a sore thumb, and Apple must be planning to drop the suffix to the name eventually. I believe the perfect time for them to make that move will be with the sixth generation iPhone.

This is, of course, is my own speculation. Now tell me yours. What's your prediction for the next iPhone's name?

If you're a jailbreaker you're probably wondering what the iPhone 4S and iOS 5 GM mean for you. And if you plan on upgrading, will you be able to jailbreak? As with any new software or hardware release, we can't be too sure of what this means for jailbreak but here is what we do know:

• The iOS 5 GM can be jailbroken via Redsn0w 0.9.9b3a, but it will be tethered (unless you have an older boot rom)
• We will most likely have to wait for a tool to be updated to support new hardware
• If you jailbreak, you'll miss out on the OTA updates that come with iOS 5
• A jailbreak for the new hardware will most likely be tethered at first just like recent beta jailbreaks for iOS 5

After iOS 4 dropped we saw an untethered jailbreak but we waited quite a while for another untethered solution on iPhone 4 under iOS 4.2.1. As with any new software and hardware, we'll really have to wait for the jailbreak community to get their hands on the new stuff before we know anything for sure.

What I can say is if you rely on an unlock, you'll probably want to wait to upgrade until a software unlock is released. You can always turn to options like Gevey if those tools are updated. But those are somewhat illegal and, ya know, frowned upon.

The Let's Talk iPhone event is now over and we officially have the iPhone 4S, Siri, iOS 5, iCloud, and several other cool new features to be excited about.

But what about what we didn't get?

What about all those iPhone 5 cases we saw mysteriously pop up over the past several months? While Apple announced a good amount of hardware improvements to the iPhone 4S, the update still left a lot of people underwhelmed. In some ways, this is understandable given Apple had more time than ever between launches to come out with a new device.

A lot of people were still holding out for a new design. Apple also seems to be attempting to deter cries of antenna-gate this time around with a newly designed antenna system with a technology known as "intelligence switching".

Likewise, there was no LTE radio for faster internet speeds, not even real HSPA+ at 21mbps or 42mbps. The proper LTE chips that Apple would need to keep battery life and thinness won't be ready until 2012, but why no HSPA+ at this point?

Many people also wanted an alternative to the glass back of iPhone 4. Aluminum, like the iPad, was a frequent rumor. So whether you love the all glass front and back design or not, you're stuck with it for at least one more year.

While I didn't mind the general design staying the same I really was holding out hope for a larger screen. With a flooded market of Android phones boasting screens of 4" or more, I really would have liked to see the new iPhone step up to compete with that. While the screen on the iPhone 4 and 4S are gorgeous, they really are on the smaller side when you look at the competition. I'm expecting at least 4" next year.

We also heard rumors of Apple implementing NFC into the next generation iPhone. Yet there was no mention of NFC and as far as we know, the iPhone 4S won't be supporting it. Given this would be a pretty cool feature, I don't really think it was a deal breaker for a lot of folks just yet.

iOS 5 announcement was clearly Apple's flagship announcement this year. Features like iCloud, iTunes Match, OTA backups, and others will come to the older devices, but Siri will be iPhone 4S exclusive.

That, Cards, and Find my Friends were the only new software announced alongside iPhone 4S, however. While we can't expect another 200 new features, was Cards really the best use of Apple's time? Sure they can use it to sell some prints but what about an Airport Utility app? A Files app that does for documents what Photos does for images? An improvement for the Maps app, perhaps? What about FaceTime over 3G? Panoramic photos?

Add to the list no Steve Jobs appearance, no "One more thing..." and there's lots to gripe about. Don't get me wrong, Apple certainly brought a lot to the table yesterday, but they left a lot off as well. Were there any killer features you really wanted that you didn't get?

Usually I get the one word editorials around here, but this time it's my podcast co-host, Seth Clifford who's grown tired of miss-set expectations, of media hype and backlash, and for the reality distortion field that no longer comes from Apple, but is all too often directed at Apple.

On the heels of what many are describing as the cataclysmically disappointing iPhone 4S announcement yesterday, the internet is rife with tales of Apple's inevitable post-Steve descent into oblivion. Why, the mere suggestion that Tim Cook has bungled his first big show is enough to send bloggers the web over into paroxysms of glee, breathlessly recounting every misstep, every missed opportunity, and every underwhelming demonstration onstage at that emotionally vacant press event.

But today, after the smoke's cleared, I'm just tired. I'm tired of the outlandish expectations the media creates. I'm tired of contrarian backlash, built on incorrect assumptions about how an extremely successful company needs to operate to continue on the path to further success. There simply isn't any way to even view Apple announcements through any lens of reality anymore, and it's tiring.

Now go read the rest of it.

Source: Seth Clifford

I had a chance to chat with Kirk Yuhnke of ABC15 about today's Let's Talk iPhone event. Check it out.

Source: ABC15 via @KirkYuhnke

Hi guys I am Craig Fox and I am the founder of @JailbreakCon (formerly MyGreatFest) and I'll be doing monthly column for TiPB to help keep the community informed about the planning of our next event, currently due to be in the USA summer 2012, California to be exact.

But before that let me start the posts off by telling you what has happened in the 11 months since its inception and how the first event ran.

Our first event gained some very influential speakers after the acquisition of Jay Freeman (Saurik), such as P0sixninja, Aaron Ash, Carsten Heinet (iFile), James Whelton (iPod nano hacker) and the iDroidproject.

I won't bore you with all the silly stuff like booking tables and chairs etc, I will just say it's taken a lot of planning and a lot of hard-work from our brilliant team of talented coders/designers/planners/promoters to bring it all together. It's safe to say I could not have done this without the team behind me the whole way, they have been the biggest help -- and until the day of the event we had not even met each other in real life! From start to finish we worked hard to make the event the best fun for all attending, and to make sure it was the best possible show for everyone in the community.

Onto the day of the event, it began with a very assured talk from Aaron Ash (his first public tech talk) and it got us off to a brilliant start. If there was one thing that stuck in my mind from Aaron's talk, it's that I wanted this event to focus on. When he spoke about Barrel's downloads, and that only 1 in 70 were purchased, it made an impact on the problems of piracy faced by the Jailbreak community.

Next up was p0sixninja and iOPK. It was Joshua's first ever public talk, and he did an extremely good job and gave the audience and press the advantage of some great posts after the event with the talk of 5 exploits in the Chronic-dev bag.

Just before the iDroidproject came on stage we did a massive giveaway -- over £2500 worth. It was a rucksack full of goodies including an iPad 2 won by Charlie Ford (he left a very happy chap). We took everyone's phone number at the event and then I asked John Freeman (Sauriks dad) to choose a number at random, and we then rang that number.

That was a great way to get everyone seated and all attention to the stage for the iDroidproject. Straight from the get go these guys (Team of 6 if I remember correctly) gave a great talk for and showed some stuff I never thought I would ever see on an iOS device.

We ran a lot of giveaways through the day, including a big games tournament that was run by our main sponsor Diabloskinz.com on Gran Turismo 5. We wanted to make sure the day wasn't boring and a constant sit down affair, we wanted all our events to be a massive social event, fun and for all ages.

After the iDroidproject, up stepped Carsten Heineit (iFile developer). His talk was very in depth on the workings of iFile, and again the piracy issue facing all these developers, Carsten offered anyone at the event a license even if you had a cracked version on your iDevice. He finished his talk with a great quiz on the previous talk by giving away iFile t-shirts. (That night he also demonstrated the best dance moves that I have ever seen!)

Up next was James Whelton, a young Irish lad who burst onto the Jailbreaking scene with his hack on the iPod nano 6G. His talk was excellent and it shows the platform this community can give any young developer. From that one hack he has now set-up his own business and is doing coding dojos for kids all around his our native Ireland. We are definitely looking at holding these dojos at our events with James at the stern.

After a short break, we had the star of the show, Jay Freeman ( Saurik). What can I say about Jay that you don't already know? He's a genius, an extremely nice guy, and the most approachable guy at the whole event. He arrived the earliest of all the devs, waited outside and spoke with the queue for the whole time it was there. His talk was a very "Get to know me" oriented, and I think thats exactly what the community needed to do -- to learn about the time and effort that goes into cydia and everything he does. He said something to someone attending the event that, "This was the event he was nervous about, as he actually cares a lot about the attendees" which is great for us (The community) .

Now we look forward to planning the next event which is set for California, summer 2012. We already have a lot of speakers in place, and are beginning the planning of the event. The team has jumped straight into the offline work and its all go. I urge all the readers of TiPB to follow @JailbreakCon to stay updated in the coming months. And be sure and check back here for team JailbreakCon's column. We'll keep you posted!

Thanks a lot guys.

Craig Fox ([@flawlessfox)(http://twitter.com/flawlessfox))

After I wrote my editorial on setting expectations I got a ton of tweets and comments and emails from people who really, truly want to believe Apple will be releasing a full on, big screen, metal back, different looking iPhone 5 this Tuesday at the Let's Talk iPhone event. They're talking about how competitive the market is now as opposed to 2009 when Apple did just that with iPhone 3GS. They're saying it's Tim Cook's first big event and he can't afford to disappoint. They're pointing to case leaks in Asia and supposed case SKUs in the US. They looking at the 15 month gap between devices and wondering how on earth Apple couldn't release a brand new iPhone 5 this year. How one earth they could "just" release an iPhone 4S.

It's like Mulder vs. Skully from the old X-Files show. (Wikipedia it, whipper snappers.)

Mulder is driven by emotion. He wants to believe. Scully is ruled by science. She's a skeptic. And that's where we are right now.

Like I said, I want to believe. It's such a compelling story. It would make for such a spectacular announcement. It would fill my fanboy heart with a soaring glee that would make me near impossible to deal with for a month or so. It would be like Christmas and my birthday rolled into lottery winning day in gadget form.

I want to believe... but in the last few days, looking at the leaks, listening to trusted sources, talking with other bloggers who are listening to their trusted sources... I just have to be the skeptic.

If Apple has truly pulled a fast one on the bloggers and the sources, if they've kept a full blown iPhone 5 secret from spy shots and manufacturing leaks beyond that case mold, then kudos to them. Well played.

If not, then we're getting iPhone 4S and we can gather back here in October 2012 for that (or some other) iPhone 5 and dance this little jig again.

Now the differences at this point are mostly cosmetic. Both devices would have a dual-core Apple A5 Cortex A9 processor. Both would have an 8 megapixel camera. If there's a RAM bump or storage bump, both would have it. The only differenced between the rumored iPhone 4S and iPhone 5 are screen size (3.5 vs. 3.75 or 4-inches), perhaps thickness, and the material of the back plate (glass vs. not glass/maybe metal). That's it. Either phone would be as specced out and as competitive as the other.

It's just the perception that will be different, and that certainly counts.

But I'm not going into Tuesday expecting anything beyond that iPhone 4S, iOS 5 and Assistant, some new iPod touches, and the usual stuff that goes with that type of announcement. I'm not Mulder this year, much as I truly wish I could be. This year, I'm Scully.