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.

Up until a short time ago I fully expected a redesigned iPhone 5 from Apple this coming Tuesday, complete with bigger screen and thinner profile and everything else the case leaks suggested. Now, due to a variety of factors, I’m expecting an iPhone 4S — that name and the same basic design as the current Verizon iPhone, with an Apple A5 dual core processor like the iPad 2, an 8 megapixel rear camera (and hopefully a FaceTime HD front camera), and perhaps some extra RAM to really let it fly.

Apple has done this before, of course. iPhone 3GS was exactly the same casing as iPhone 3G, but with better chips and a bigger camera, and it sold fantastically well. Heck, iPhone 4 in its current configuration continues to sell fantastically well. And Apple is not a company that typically changes just for change’s sake.

Sure it’s been 15 months since iPhone 4 hit the market, and Apple’s had more time than ever before between generations, but that doesn’t mean they’ve spent that time on hardware.

First, the Verizon iPhone has only been on the market since February and that might have contributed to the fall rather than summer refresh schedule. iOS 5 is also a huge update, especially iCloud which Apple likely does not want to be a repeat of MobileMe. And if even half the rumors about Assistant turn out to be true, that will be the big story next Tuesday.

Apple has said numerous times that software is their key differentiator. If an 8GB iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S are the only iPhones introduced next Tuesday, they’ll be putting their money where their mouth is like never before.

Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to see Tim Cook holding up the iPhone 5 from those case leaks. I just no longer expect him too. Unless Apple’s managed to pull of a miracle or misdirection, unless a lot of sources have conned a lot of bloggers, we’ll be getting iPhone 4S. And if not, at least I’ll get to be surprised instead of disappointed.

2011 is the year of the iPad 2, not the iPhone 5. That, it seems, might have to wait for next year.

What if, instead of iPhone 5 or iPhone 4S, Apple decided to call the new device iPhone 4GS? Confession: I used to love those old Marvel What If? comics, like what if Captain America were discovered today, or what if Conan appeared in the 20th century, or what if Jean Grey didn’t die? (You know, before they retconned that into redundancy.)

So let’s pretend for a moment that there’s no big new redesign this year and that means Apple doesn’t want to go with iPhone 5 as the name, and iPhone 4S just doesn’t do it for carriers who, now touting HPSA+ as 4G are eager to slap that faux-logo on every box they can. AT&T and others would almost certainly want to market an HSPA+ iPhone as 4G, the way they do their other HSPA+ phones, so having 4G or 4GS in the name would be perfect for them.

Of course, Verizon (and potentially Sprint) don’t have HSPA+ networks, and the new iPhone likely won’t support LTE 4G until next year. That would leave Verizon at a significant marketing disadvantage. Would Apple be willing to do that to Verizon? Either before or after Verizon took Samsung’s side in the ongoing Apple vs. Samsung patent dispute?

That’s the problem with “what if” speculation — it can get out of hand quickly. iPhone 5. iPhone 4S. iPhone 4GS. iPhone 4G. Anything is possible when no product has even been announced yet — and no announcement has even been officially announced yet.

Personally, iPhone 3GS always sounded un-Apple-like to me — like a way to recover and get back on the generational tract. I can’t see them going with iPhone 4GS unless they’re backed into a similar branding corner, but would it make sense, given the HSPA+ carriers, to have 4G in the name?

Yesterday I drove to my local Apple Store to pick up my Mac Pro, which had had it’s processor board repaired. I got there about 6:20pm, picked it up, and returned to the parking lot at 6:40. I opened the rear driver’s side door, eased my Mac Pro onto the floor, and then wondered why there was broken glass on the seat. It took a moment to realize the answer — the rear passenger side window had been smashed open. It took only a moment longer to realize the worse news — my laptop bag, containing my MacBook Pro and iPad 2, and my camera bag containing my Canon T2i, fast 50mm lens, and 35mm lens had been stolen. Looking around I saw several other adjacent cars had been similarly broken into, and a few minutes later the owners returned and discovered similar theft of their laptops and other valuables.

I called the police. They took a report. They marked it as “will not investigate” due to the lack of cameras in the parking lot. I called my insurance company. Twice. They took a report. Twice. I called all the IT people I work with and had my passwords reset and my keys revoked and replaced.

Because I use Find my iPhone, I could try to track my iPad. (Unsuccessfully; it had been powered down.) I could also issue a remote wipe (though it would be helpful if Apple recorded the location just before it wiped). Because I keep most of my home directory in Dropbox, I didn’t lose any data. (Though I dearly wish Dropbox could remote wipe the files of a lost or stolen computer — or can it and I’m just unaware?) Because I use 1Password I can quickly replace any logins with new ones that are just as gnarly, just in case.

I wish I could just watch GDGT to see who adds my gear, then use Gowalla to track them down, but the truth is most stolen property is never recovered.

My car window will be replaced, good as new. Some portion of my gear will be covered by insurance, though probably not enough to replace it all. The loss of time and the feeling of violation will frustrate for a long time to come.

It did serve to remind me that, despite the inconvenience, security and redundancy are urgently important.

If you haven’t installed Apple’s free Find my iPhone service, do it now. If you don’t have both a local backup (iTunes is fine), make one now. If you don’t have a remote backup (iCloud might be fine come iOS 5), make one now. And make it a habit to run it every day or couple of days so you never lose too much data. Unlike gadgets, that’s irreplaceable. (I’d also suggest a good password manager.)

John Gruber of Daring Fireball has put up an interesting post debating marketshare vs. profit-share numbers in the good old Android vs. iPhone feud. He comes to the reasonable conclusion that the criteria for defining “winning” can vary, and that not all are equally valid. To wit — money is the way you keep score in business.

If we count all the money in Apple’s pockets from iOS devices vs. all the money in Google’s pockets from Android devices (and throw in ODMs like HTC, Samsung, and Motorola for good measure), Apple’s clearly winning. Heck, if we count the amount of customer satisfaction, the amount of iPhones sold vs. any other handset,, etc. you can find any number of reasons to rationalize the iPhone as winning.

And that’s fine. But I’d argue it’s wrong. Apple isn’t winning.

Apple’s already won.

Apple and the iPhone won years ago, when Google hit the brakes on their BlackBerry and Windows Mobile Standard competitor and began cloning the iPhone, when RIM and Microsoft stumbled their way towards Storm and QNX, and Windows Phone, when Palm went webOS, and Nokia burned their platform.

The smartphone now looks, feels, and acts nothing like it did before the iPhone, and that’s because of the iPhone. Reviews now compare, contrast, and dub “killer” every new hero phone on the market to only one thing, and that’s because the iPhone redefined the market.

And in tablets, the enormity of the victory is even more ridiculous. 18 months after launch it still has not a single rival. No one is breathing down the iPad’s neck. No one is even breathing in the same hemisphere.

Whatever happens in the future, whether Android becomes the Windows of mobile, whether Rim or Microsoft surge back to the top spot, whether Apple trips and falls and one day becomes a shadow of its current success, Apple has set the standard and shaped the industry.

Every time a finger pinches or swipes a big capacitive touch screen, every time the modern web is functionally rendered, every time an app is easily purchased from a built-in store on any device, it concedes that the battle now can only be fought for the next generation.

Because for this generation, Apple has already won.

Coda: We live in a world where the flagship front-facing QWERTY BlackBerry has a capacitive touch screen, where Microsoft has a functional mobile web browser, and where every platform has an app store — and Android has more than one. If you don’t think that’s because Apple won this generation, you’re nuts.

We’ve been arguing for while now here at TiPb about whether Apple will leave the iPad as a singular product, the way iPhone and iPod touch are, or transition it to a product line, the way MacBooks are?

So far Apple has resisted even leaving last year’s model available as a cheaper 8GB entry-level model, the way they’ve done with the iPhone since iPhone 3G and experimented with one year with the iPod touch 2.

There were rumors earlier this year that Apple might push up the release iPad 3 (or iPad 2 Pro) to this fall, resulting in two iPads being available — the still current iPad 2 and the more expensive, Retina Display version. According to TiPb’s sources, however, has since moved iPad 3 back to the traditional spring release schedule, perhaps because those Retina Displays can’t yet be produced cheaply or consistently enough to meet Apple’s demand.

When iPad 3 is released next year, will Apple take the opportunity to leave iPad 2 on the market, perhaps at a cheaper $399 for 8GB price point? That’s a small step towards making a product into a product line.

The bigger leap would be multiple screen sizes. 7 inch tablets have been released by Samsung and BlackBerry, was going to be released by HP webOS, and rumor has it will soon be released by Amazon. None other than Steve Jobs has said Apple doesn’t like the 7 inch size, that it’s not a great experience, that it required people to shave down their fingers. But he also said people didn’t want to watch video on their iPods and we all know how that turned out…

What about a bigger screen size? Samsung already makes pretty much every sized tablet from 5 to 11 inches — in 1/2 inch increments! — but much larger tablets still haven’t really been tested. If rumors of Apple stretching the Retina Display on iPhone 5 to 3.7 or 4 inches turn out to be true, could they try to stretch the rumored Retina Display on an iPad 3 (or iPad 3 Pro) to 12 inches? I know, speculation based on rumors stacked that high is the blogging equivalent of playing Jenga on top of unicorns riding on rainbows, but…

That’s about the only other factor I can see Apple exploring. They don’t even disclose processor or RAM details, so a product line based on those things don’t really make any sense — you’ll never shop for an iPad the way you shop for a Dell. Part of Apple’s strength and success has always been its crystal clear product lines. Right now there’s one iPad and all you have to choose is front color, storage size and Wi-Fi or 3G.

Next year, could it be budget iPad 2 8GB or iPad 3 (by color, size, and radio), or could it be more? 7 inches for highly mobile readers, 9.7 inches for general purpose multitaskers, and 12 inches for professionals who push pixels or productivity? Next year, could the iPad go from product to product line? If the iPad is increasingly becoming the future of mainstream computing, will it have to?

The mobile space has never been more relentless. It’s like Galactica — no matter how successful your last jump was, you have only 33 minutes to spin up again before the Cylons arrive and try to wipe you out.

And like Galactica, Apple now faces a new, evolved generation of competitors, some of which have taken their form, some of which are every bit as relentless as Cylons (and coincidentally share the same machine motif.)

While it seems like just yesterday that Steve Jobs held up the original iPhone on the Macworld 2007 stage and showed off full screen, multitouch iOS (then iPhone OS) for the first time, since then Android has officially launched, PalmOS was replaced with webOS, Windows Mobile was replaced with Windows Phone, and BlackBerry has just begun a transition to a new QNX base.

When that’s done, at roughly 5 years of age, iOS will be the oldest of the major mobile platforms on the market.

Now Apple has money, they have mindshare, and on a phone-to-phone, manufacturer-to-manufacturer basis they may even have a lot of the marketshare. But just like Apple’s competitors can’t bring specs to an experience fight, Apple can’t mistake device battles for a platform war.

The App Store remains the mother of all nukes in the mobile platform space, but for how long? Today’s refinement and maturity can lead to tomorrow’s stagnation and bloat. What has grown to appear all but unassailable in the market one generation can be quickly eclipsed by a big innovation in the next. (Just look what iOS did to everything that came before.)

Unlike Palm, who let PalmOS wither and Microsoft who condemned Windows Mobile to obsolescence, Apple has a history of not only competing against the industry at large but against their own past efforts as well.

On the eve iOS 5, we have more incremental feature improvements coming our way, along with the far more ambitious move to iCloud. It’s keeping up a relentless pace of innovation meant to keep a legion of competitors from catching up. But will that be enough maintain Apple’s lead into 2012, given that competitors like Android’s Ice Cream Sandwich, BlackBerry’s QNX, Microsoft’s Windows Phone, and potentially even Amazon’s next Kindle are increasingly less than 33 minutes away?

After reading the news Precentral.net broke about Palm once again being split into separate software (likely to wither) and hardware (likely to die) units, it made me wish we could get a new show on FOX this fall called “Jobs’ Business Nightmare”. Just like the Gordon Ramsay cooking show, Steve Jobs could tackle another bumbling, downward spiraling tech company each week, shake them up, reorganize their product matrixes, and turn them back towards the path to success. Just like he did with Apple. And he could miraculously do it all in 44 min. Just like Ramsway.

HP could be the pilot.

“Apotheker, come here. 2 seconds. Listen to me. You’re in denial. You’re ruining webOS. You’re ruining it. Donkey.”

I’d watch.

Apple released iTunes Match, their iCloud-powered music locker service, into beta yesterday and immediately — and rightly — it’s been Zapruder-ed by every eyeball online, especially when it comes to whether it downloads music, streams it, or both. And confusion and conflation have followed.

Sure, technically there’s a difference between downloading a song to your local iPhone, iPod touch, iPad, or Mac or Windows PC and playing, and streaming that song directly to your device from iCloud. But many downloads will start playing before they finish and most streams will cache locally to prevent hiccups due to the ever present irregularity of internet connections. The lines are blurry, and made even blurrier by the music industry who wants to nickel and dime Apple, and consumers, at every turn.

(It’s fair to say that if the music industry acted 20 years ago the way they act now, CDs would have been licensed per-player. You want to play that CD you bought in your car and in your living room? Pay us again! You want to play it in your bedroom? PAY US!)

As it stands, Apple technologically and no doubt contractually doesn’t want anyone to know or care about whether or not iTunes Match downloads or streams from iCloud. The same way Apple doesn’t discuss things like RAM, my guess is they’re not going to specify exact behavior for iTunes Match.

You’ll hit “play”, Apple will take care of managing the local/iCloud relationship. Just like they don’t think my mom should have to worry about file systems on iPad, they probably don’t think she should have to figure out download vs. stream. It should just work.

Once iTunes Match is stable and out of beta, no doubt every geek and their packet sniffer will pour over it, parsing out every nuance of the stream vs. download behavior, and keep us updated when Apple tweaks it and makes changes to it going forward.

Meanwhile my mom won’t worry about whether or not she’s synced the Lion King Musical soundtrack, or how many GBs she has left. She’ll just hit play and listen.

(Or she would if they released the damn thing in Canada.)

Newsflash: Steve Jobs wasn’t anti-openess. He was and is anti-sucky products. Since Jobs resigned as CEO last week, and ended his second act at Apple, the usual linkbait articles have sprung up calling on the “new Apple” to embrace openness (or more accurately, openy-ess), and once again proven their dogged determination to misunderstand Steve Jobs, Apple, and the nature of successful consumer electronics products in general.

The thing is — the world hates extremes. It hates them almost as much as consumers hate extremist products. Because consumers, like the world, understand them for what they ultimately are — ploys, formed by agenda and molded from BS. They’re bills of goods. Kit craft.

Apple observably has little time for that. They’re too busy making great products. To them, “open” and “closed” were and are tools, and they tend to pick the right one for the right job in the right context.

Flex your flux capacitor (or turn on your TARDIS) and jump back a few years and you’ll see Steve Jobs, barely at the beginning of his second act, talking about Apple’s then-licensed Mac OS and the power of open ecosystems.

Flashback to 2007 and you’ll hear him talk about the sweet a development solution that is HTML5 (then Web 2.0 + AJAX)

Likewise you need only to surf with Safari to see Apple’s open approach to WebKit (which also powers Google’s Chrome and Android browsers, HP Palm’s webOS, and much of mobile. You need only look at the BSD UNIX underpinnings of OS X and iOS, and their continued developments to see a host of open projects and initiatives from the supposedly closed Apple, including Darwin, OpenCL, and more. You need only look… beyond the rhetoric.

Apple is no more completely closed than Google is completely open. (Seriously, pick up your Neo FreeRunner and search for http://www.opensource.apple.com/ sometime. Except you can’t. Because Openmoko failed as hard as Closedmoko would have.)

Corporations aren’t about black and white, they’re about green. They closely guard what makes them money and open up what makes their competitors money. They try to dominate where they can and fragment where they can’t. Apple keeps their shiny, high-margin boxes every bit as closed as Google keeps their billion dollar ad engine, and Apple keeps their IE-shattering WebKit every bit as open as Google keeps their Windows Mobile-busting Android (ironically, more so — see Honeycomb.) Even Palm, with their proprietary webOS and BlackBerry with their new QNX-based OS “opened” up to developers in almost every way conceivable.

You need look no further than their reasons for being. Apple wants to make products that delight consumers, with highly commoditized apps and services, enough to own most of the profits in the known universe. Microsoft wants to have a PC running the latest Windows license on every desk, pocket, wall, and robot, that make billions off the backs of commoditized, barely sustainable hardware OEMs. Google wants to serve a lucrative ad to every eyeball, on every commodity box running every commoditized platform.

And each of those approaches comes with some benefits and some drawbacks. 3 star Michelin restaurants aren’t diners or vice versa, and we can enjoy them both without either being more like the other. In point of fact we have to. Because nothing can be everything.

Apple no longer licenses their Mac OS to clone makers, and HTML 5 is no longer the primary development platform for iOS because those products sucked and those web apps just weren’t good enough.

Sorry, but it’s true. Apple tested them and chose them for extinction or demotion. Perhaps, like bellbottoms, they’ll get another chance for dominance one day but not today and likely not tomorrow. Apple under Steve Jobs was, and Apple under Tim Cook is, way too smart for that and way too focused. And guess what? Not coincidentally, way too successful. So is Google, which is why, marketing aside, they’re not really that open either. (What’s the make command for Search again?)

It takes a carefully considered, carefully mixed formula to craft a great product. It takes knowing which elements benefit from open sourced, community driven innovation to make them powerful and robust, and which need a strong, guiding, singularly focused — and yes, closed — will to make them truly usable and enjoyable.

So sure, the usual suspects can write the usual manifestos about Apple being closed (and stir up the usual, reliable linkbacks). And why not? Their editors are obviously open to it no matter how much the product sucks.

Former Apple CEO Steve Jobs giving the commencement speech at Stanford in 2005, and new Apple CEO Tim Cook giving the commencement speech at Auburn in 2010.

[Stanford on YouTube, Auburn on YouTube, thanks Dave.]

In resigning as CEO of Apple today, Steve Jobs takes on the role as Chairman of the Board. In that regard, tomorrow will likely be no different than yesterday. Not for Apple, not for us. Except it will be totally different. We’ll still be able to buy iPhones and iPads, we’ll still get iOS 5 and iPhone 5 this October, we’ll still be delighted, and things will still be magical. They just won’t be the same. Steve Jobs has ended the greatest Second Act in the history of a technology company, arguably of any modern business.

Act One saw Steve Jobs co-founding Apple and helping to mainstream the command line interface and the first successful personal computer with the Apple II. He went on to make the graphical user interface popular with Macintosh. Then Apple showed him the door.

Intermission was when Jobs founded NeXT and bought and nurtured Pixar.

Act Two began when Apple started to fail and fail hard and they bought NeXT and brought Steve Jobs back to the company. He went on to launch the iMac, iTunes and iPod, OS X, Apple Retail, iPhone and iPad.

Taken apart, any one of these accomplishments would be astonishing. Taken together, they’re almost unmatchable. They’re world changing, or as Jobs himself might put it, universe denting. He became the personification of Apple, the incarnation, every bit as iconic as the logo. They seemed almost inseparable.

But Jobs was and is not a force of nature, he’s human. His health required him to take not one, but several leaves of absence. He survived pancreatic cancer. He survived a liver transplant. And like even the greatest of heavyweight champions, battles fought, even won, take their toll.

For all his taste and all his vision, one of Steve Jobs’ greatest assets has always been his strategic genius. From the timing of product releases to the timing of his medical leaves, his positioning of Apple executives on stage and within the company has been as meticulously planned as any iPhone or iPad introduction. He’s not holding onto power or position for their own sake. He’s handing over the company in carefully considered steps. He’s leaving on his own terms, even naming his successor — Tim Cook.

Cook takes over one of the most successful, affluent, and influential companies in the world, and he takes it over at its prime. Apple right now is firing on all cylinders. It’s earning record profits after record profits, and a lot of that is due to Cook. He is the best logistics guy in the business, the best COO. But CEO is not COO, and that begs the question — does Cook continue on as COO with some CEO duties, or does Apple start looking for a new COO? It’s often asked if Apple can go on without Steve Jobs as CEO, but equally important is can Apple go on without Tim Cook as COO?

Steve Jobs is the visionary, the man who almost willed into existence the consumer electronics future. Tim Cook is the man who made those visions manifest, who masterminded getting those products onto the shelves with as little waste and as much profit as possible. They’ve worked together in those roles for over a decade, and with spectacular results.

Will competitors see an opening? Will HP quickly un-cancel the TouchPad? Likely not, at least not for a while still. Changes at Apple do not miraculous make for new competing products. Will partners test for weakness? Will a carrier try to strong-arm some crapware onto the iPhone? Again, likely not, not without getting hit so fast and so hard their towers feel it.

Because Steve Jobs hasn’t gone anywhere. He’s changed titles and offices, moved from CEO to Chairman of the board, but he’s still there to lend his vision to Tim Cook’s implementation. He’s still there as part of the strongest team in consumer electronics, with Jony Ive, Phil Schiller, and all the rest. He’s still there to say no when he has to and to help guide Apple, not towards the second star on the left and straight ahead until morning, but straight to the center of liberal arts and computer sciences that has served them so well yesterday and will keep serving them well tomorrow and beyond. And the reason for that is simple:

For Steve Jobs, as much as this is the end of Act Two, it’s also the beginning Act Three.

After Apple introduced the iPad I wondered out loud on iPad Live whether it would leave any air in the room for eventual tablet rivals. It turns out I might have been right, but also might not have been right enough. The iPad, and now iPad 2, might not have left any air in the room for any hardware rivals, tablet or PC.

HP is not only killing off their webOS hardware and looking to license the software, HP is spinning or selling off their laptop and desktop computer business as well. Why?

The tablet effect is real and the TouchPad is not gaining momentum in the marketplace.

And since we know there’s no tablet market, just an iPad market, the real meaning there is pretty clear.

I was a PalmOS user since the Visor and while I never owned a webOS device, I have tried them and liked them and it’s disappointing to see HP cut and run like this. Sure it’s easier to say “make better hardware” or “get better carrier deals” or “ship more mature products faster” and really difficult to do, but that was the job HP signed up for.

Maybe Amazon or Facebook, or a jilted Android manufacturer will pick up webOS and show HP what a company of will can really do?

Keep reading PreCentral.net for ongoing coverage and let us know — did Apple and the iPad kill HP’s hardware business, and who would you like to see run with webOS?

Why would Google pay $12.5 billion for Motorola? It cost them 18 months of their profits. It’s 3 times what Apple, Microsoft, and a consortium of others paid for Nortel’s patents. It’s 10 times what HP paid for Palm. Hell, Google is guaranteeing twice as much in break-up penalty alone as HP paid for Palm. Why would a smart company like Google, one that’s already sunk untold resources into an OS they essentially give away for free, spend so much of their capital on a single Android licensee for whom profitability is a somewhat distant memory?

Patents is the throw away line, the canard Larry Page foisted at the end of his blog post and the sound bite rival Android ODMs repeated, Stepford-like when welcoming Motorola’s new overlord to the Open Handset Alliance table. Were Motorola’s patents worth 3 times Nortel’s? Were they worth 10 times Palm’s? (Especially considering Apple and Microsoft are already suing Motorola and Palm’s patents are such that there hasn’t even been a whisper of patent-suit in their general direction?)

Likewise set top boxes. Apple calls Apple TV a hobby. Google TV could, perhaps, charitably fall into that category as well. Granted, getting Android software onto the actual cable box is more compelling than an iOS box in addition to a cable box, but the key word in all these equations is “cable”. Both traditional land-based cable companies (most of which are monopolies) and satellite companies, (which are duopolies or oligopolies), have vested interests in control and content and they’re the ultimate arbiter in which boxes they offer and to whom. (TiVo and Windows Media Centers with cable cards haven’t fought their way out of that paper bag yet either.) Is that business worth $12.5 billion?

Let’s get Oliver Stone about this for a minute and look at a) where Google makes their money, and b) the historical reason for Androids existence and continued development.

Google makes their money from advertising — monetize eyeballs and attention — traditionally off desktop web based search using their AdSense and AdWords engines. The world is moving to mobile, however, and Google being the brilliant company they are, and a one-trick pony being the danger that it is, they’ve expanded into email based advertising (Gmail), bought into video based advertising (YouTube), finally made a credible beachhead into social networks which could be advertised to (Google+), and have previously bought a leading mobile advertising company (AdMob) to help diversify and position themselves for the future. It’s still one pony, but it’s learning more tricks.

Android was created by Andy Rubin and team — the folks who originally brought you the Sidekick — and bought by Google in a move somewhat at odds with Google’s previously web philosophies (which likely accounts for the parallel existence of ChromeOS). While Android doesn’t directly allow Google to make money in their traditional way, it provides a platform where Google can do just that. Historically that’s important because pre-2007, mobile was owned by RIM’s BlackBerry, Palm’s (and PalmOS’) Treo, and by Google’s rival, Microsoft and their licensed Windows Mobile platform. Those, mostly front-facing QWERTY devices with incredibly bad browsers (Blazer, Pocket IE, etc.), defined the industry so much that early Android devices looked exactly like them. And intentionally so. Someone familiar with a Treo or BlackBerry or Windows Mobile Standard device could put one down, pick up an Android, and push aside (no NOC or ActiveSync), get a familiar mobile experience.

That was important to Google because, while they owned advertising, they had no control over the screen needed to display those ads. Conceivably, at some point, Palm or RIM or Microsoft could pull a switch, wall a garden, and lock Google out of a mobile OS as quickly and completely as Facebook has locked them out of a growing portion of the web. (This was never as much of a concern on Windows, which owns most of the desktop market, as it’s been subject to such regulatory scrutiny that Microsoft likely couldn’t ever do wall up IE, much less Firefox, Opera, or other alternatives.)

Android gave Google a mobile insurance policy — if any of those then-dominant companies cut them off, Google could pour ad-bucks into replacing them with Android.

Then the iPhone happened, and not only did it revolutionize the smartphone market, it put a useable browser in a smartphone for the first time. Google was so into this idea that then Google CEO and Apple board member, Eric Schmidt, briefly took the stage with Steve Jobs at the iPhone introduction to show Google properties would be right there with it.

Google also immediately stopped efforts at launching a BlackBerry or Windows Mobile Standard clone and began work on iPhone clones. (Much to their credit — it took most competitors years to come to that realization.) They did that because, once again, regardless of how good a browsing (and advertising) experience iPhone (and subsequent devices like iPod touch and iPad) were, Google didn’t own them, and that meant they were now one exclusive search deal with Yahoo! or Bing away from being marginalized from the biggest thing in mobile.

Then, even though Apple owned mobile browsing, Apple introduced the App Store which repackaged the web from browser-centric to app-centric, and into a place much more difficult for Google to present the traditional ads that made up most of their revenue. (Buying AdMob helped, though Apple’s back-and-forth policies on what data could be collected and shared didn’t.) It wasn’t Facebook bad for Google, but it wasn’t good.

So Android became even more important, though at equal and opposite cost. To drive adoption and win market share, Google gave Android away for free, under a very manufacturer- and carrier-friendly Apache license. Verizon licensed “Droid” from George Lucas, put together a great ad campaign with some well differentiated hardware from Motorola, while HTC and Google collaborated on the Nexus One, and suddenly Google was back in the mainstream and geek-centric mobile games. (Honeycomb, not so much as it is but as it will be after a few more iterations, was a very similar response to iPad and its share of mobile web traffic.)

But manufacturer- and carrier-friendly Apache licenses are bastards to deal with in the real world. Verizon put out a phone with Google stripped out and Bing stripped in, destroying the very reason for Android’s existence in the first place. AT&T locked out sideloading. Manufacturers secured bootloaders. Carriers everywhere began pre-installing crapware. China forked Android. Could Verizon one day do the same? Could Amazon? vOS or AmazonOS with Bing everywhere, and Google forced to bid for placement on the very platform they’d spent their resources developing and promoting? (Hey, the JooJoo2 — sorry, Grid 10 — reduces Android to a kernel with Amazon appstore and Bing search sitting on top of the revenue layer.) Companies like Skyhook even tried to take Google out of the data collection loop, resulting in the first real, public example of Google retaliating with what Android power they still had left (and also resulting in a lawsuit from Skyhook questioning how Google wields that power.)

At the same time, Samsung started to grow their own OS with Bada, HTC was making Windows Phones, and Motorola bought a company that could, conceivably, give them their own version of webOS one day. (While HP made some noise about licensing webOS itself.)

Meanwhile Microsoft and Apple began suing Android ODMs, Microsoft in an effort to make Android more expensive and Apple in an effort to make it less usable. HTC agreed to pay Microsoft $5 a unit, making it a credible threat. Apple hasn’t achieved much of anything other than temporary — and overturned — sales injunctions but that could change. While Google makes little off Android handsets today (conversely, Apple owns 66% of mobile profits), making nothing is much, much worse. The idea of losing “free” and losing the UI candy and UX touches that make iPhone so popular once again showed Google that even with Android it still wasn’t in control of its own destiny.

Google still lacked a manufacturing arm that could, if everyone and everything else turned against them — if Samsung forked Android or went all in on Bada, if HTC switched to Windows Phone, if LG inked an exclusive deal with webOS or rebuilt it themselves — produce mobile products that still offered great value and great experience and did so with Google’s software and services inextricably and irremovably backed in.

Ladies and gentlemen, we give you Motorola.

Sure, there’s some risk that, with the Motorola deal, Google will alienate licensees and, ironically, drive them exactly where Google was afraid of — Bada and Windows Phone and webOS, etc. But Google has shown time and time again they’d rather be secure in and of themselves even if it costs them a partner (like Apple on iOS, Skyhook and mapping companies, etc.)

Motorola brings a second pony to Google’s show, a gateway to potentially Apple-like hardware profits in both mobile and set top boxes that also happens to have some patents. But most importantly –

Like Android has been from the beginning, it remains today — insurance for Google, and in that regard, Google just doubled down and upped their policy by $12.5 billion.

Apple has proven time and time again that they’re driven to innovate regardless, that they can successfully compete against themselves, but nothing drives them to innovate and compete faster and in a more focused fashion than a successful rival. Sadly, when it comes to iPad, rivals are proving anything but successful at the point.

• Sprint has canceled plans to launch a WiMax BlackBerry Playbook citing lack of interest from enterprise customers. [WSJ
• Best Buy is rumored to have only sold 25,000 of the 270,000 HP TouchPad’s they received in stock, and that number might not include returns. AllThingsD

Meanwhile the Galaxy Tab 10.1 from Samsung can now once again be stocked in the EU, but the Motorola Xoom LTE update has been once again delayed, this time until fall, and we’ve yet to get sell through numbers in any meaningful volume for any of the them.

Part of this is certainly the unbaked nature of virtually all iPad competitors to date, so perhaps the race should now switch from who can ship a rival tablet first, to who can make a much better, much more compelling tablet at a much better value first?

Bad news for everyone if the answer to that continues to be “nobody”.

We’re getting a lot of questions from Jailbreakers and would-be Jailbreakers both on iOS 4.x and iOS 5 so we figured it was time to once again take a look at the state of iPhone, iPod touch and iPad Jailbreak. Here it is:

If you still have an untethered Jailbreak on iOS 4.3.3 or below and want to stay untethered, don’t upgrade just yet.

If you’ve already updated and you currently have a tethered jailbreak on iOS 4.3.5, you’ll probably have to stay tethered until the release version of iOS 5 drops this October.

Why not? Because if they release an untethered Jailbreak based on an exploit in iOS 5 beta, Apple could easily patch it in the next beta and it’s back to square one.

I’m currently on iOS 5 beta and personally can’t wait to have my jailbreak back. iOS 5 is a major improvement but I still miss apps like Mail Enhancer and SBSettings. I’d much rather wait and have an untethered jailbreak for the iOS 5 final release than a quick fix now that Apple kills off during the beta.

There’s a lot of back and forth going on in the debate about patents — and by conflation, trademarks and copyrights — these days. Everyone has an opinion, pro or con, informed or emotional, engaged or dismissive. And that’s good, because like it or not, the current patent debate matters.

It’s easy to think that patents are something that should only concern the mega-companies and the lawyers, the rich and the litigious. But they concern us all. Today’s abstract patent case is tomorrow’s loss of a gadget or an app. Already Apple has a temporary injunction that prevents Samsung from resupplying Galaxy Tab 10.1s in most of Europe. If it’s not overturned soon, a consumer walking into the store in Germany may not be able to buy the device they want to buy. Likewise, Lodsys’ lawsuits against developers has caused some to consider removing their apps from the US market. That means a consumer going to the App Store might not be able to buy the software they want to buy.

Patents, and the ongoing lawsuits surrounding them, matter to consumers not just in the abstract sense that we should all take an active roll in shaping the societies in which we live, but in the real sense that that they directly relate to what we can and can’t buy.

And we don’t have to be experts, versed in every facet of patent law to understand that, or to be righteously indignant about the current state of patents, any more than we need to be a physicist to worry about nuclear proliferation or social scientist to worry about civil rights. Its impossible for everyone to understand everything about every issue. It’s impossible for those charged with making and enforcing our laws to understand everything about every issue.

But we understand something. We see crazy patent after crazy patent granted years after the ideas have become public, ignoring prior art, ignoring obviousness, and we see the gadgets and apps we want distracted and derailed by crazy lawsuit after crazy lawsuit, and we — the non-patent-law-educated-public — understand that something is broken.

“Perception is reality” is a cliché for a reason — public perception certainly can sway and shape reality, and the court of public opinion can sometimes be as influential as the court of law. Right now, whether you agree with the current patent system or not, there seems to be a general public perception, at least among technology enthusiasts, that the system isn’t really serving the public interest. Ideas seem to be rushed out simply to be patented and bought, sold, and licensed as commodities. The USPTO seems to have almost abdicated its role in determining the validity of patents and simply grants almost all of them, preferring to let companies and individuals determine validity through costly, time consuming, and disruptive litigation. And some companies seem to be willfully infringing on patents just because they think they’re beyond the law. To us, the uninvolved but ultimately affected technology enthusiasts, it absolutely seems broken.

Whether there’s a way to fix it or not isn’t the point. Whether companies should be amassing giant, nuclear stockpiles of patents to deter lawsuits, whether non-practicing entires (often trolls) should be allowed to sue independent developers, whether the USPTO should grant patents with so much prior art my grandmother would find them obviously flawed, whether one giant company should be able to misappropriate the work of another, whether you even care about patents isn’t the point and isn’t important. The discussion is the point. The discussion is important. The discussion matters.

The discussion matters to the companies that make our gadgets, to the developers that make our apps, and to us, the consumers, who ultimately get those gadgets and apps — or not.

This is and issue that will shape and define the industry we work in or simply the technology we love, not in the abstract but in reality. And this discussion absolutely matters.

[Recommended reading: Nilay Patel, Marco Arment, Mark Cuban]

One of the questions we’re getting asked increasingly often is how many betas Apple will put out before the official iOS 5 release. There’s no way to know, of course, because Apple is a secretive company that almost never pre-announces anything. However, with past behavior being a fairly good indicator of future behavior, we can look at previous iOS beta cycles and try to determine a rough schedule.

From 2008 through 2010 — or iOS 2 (iPhone 2.0) through iOS 4 — Apple held an iOS Preview Event in March or April, announced a bunch of new software features for iOS, and seeded a beta to developers. They seeded additional betas roughly every 2 weeks thereafter. From 4 to 8 betas were seeded, sometimes with no new betas for up to a month before WWDC, where Apple showed off a few more features. Final features were usually tied to whatever new hardware they were announcing for the next-generation iPhone, which historically debuted at the WWDC event. At the same time, Apple would make a Gold Master (GM) seed of iOS available to developers, and announce a date for the final iOS release — typically around the same time as the next generation iPhone release — late June or early July. Then the big day would come and everyone would hover their mouse pointers over the iTunes update button, and wait for Apple to pull the trigger.

This year, however, there was no March/April iOS Preview Event and iOS 5 was announced at WWDC 2011 instead. So all bets are off.

There will probably still be around 8 betas, and there will probably still be a few more features shown off at Apple Fall Event, to coincide with the expected iPhone 5 announcement. There will probably be an iOS 5 GM seed released that day for developers, and then assuming everything goes well, an official iOS 5 general release for everyone around the same time iPhone 5 goes on sale.

We’ll only know for sure when Apple sends out invitations for their Fall Event and we get an actual date. It could be as early as mid August or as late as mid September. Last year it was September 1. The two years before that it was September 9. In 2007 it was September 5.

So iOS 5 beta 5 could be the last beta, and Apple could go silent until early September, or we could see another beta or two between now and then as they continue tweaking and testing. Here are the timelines past:

• iOS 2: previewed March 6, 2008, 8 betas, released July 11, 2008
• iOS 3: previewed, March 17, 2009, 5 betas, released June 17, 2009
• iOS 4: previewed, April 8, 2010, 4 betas, released June 21, 2010
• iOS 5: previewed June 6, 5 betas to date, released ?

We’ll expect more only if and when we see it.

We’re getting a ton of email about apps showing up in the App Store that say they’re compatible with iOS 5, and readers/listeners wondering how that could be since iOS 5 isn’t public yet. Here’s the thing — developers are not currently allowed to upload anything to iTunes Connect (the App Store backend) that uses the iOS 5 SDK and iOS 5 APIs. However, they may be able to make changes within the iOS 4.x SDK, using iOS 4.x API, that also just so happen to fix compatibility issues with iOS 5. In other words, they might be able to code around problems in iOS 5 for existing apps, but they can’t code new iOS 5-specific functionality.

There will likely be cases where devs can’t fix something using the iOS 4.x SDK as well, regardless of how clever they are. So we’ll once again remind you, if you’re using iOS 5 and a specific app doesn’t work right, not to leave a bad review. iOS 5 is only available to developers testing apps, not to users complaining about them. Wait until after iOS 5 is released to the public this fall before you start getting on anyone’s case.

Apple implements an interesting layered user experience in both iOS and OS X. They’ve always done this to some degree; early on with Mac OS X, UNIX gurus could live comfortably in Terminal while those raised on the GUI of classic Mac and Windows would feel right at home in Aqua.

With iOS 4, Apple’s mobile platform added similar layers of user experience. While an expert user could double click home to open up the Fast App Switcher, or hide multiple apps into a single Folder, casual users could keep using the iPhone or iPad perfectly well without ever exposing either of those UI elements. iOS 5 adds Notification Center to the mix. Experts can click and pull and expose greater pro-level features while someone coming from a feature phone can use iPhone as little more than a phone that plays music and takes pictures. And both can be perfectly happy.

OS X Lion even adds an iOS-like upper layer with LaunchPad, so now the UNIX geek in Terminal and the GUI user in Aqua can finally give their parents, kids, and non-computer savvy family and friends an iPad-like app launcher to use, compete with auto-save, restore, and a host of other, far more humane features.

Making computers more and more mainstream is something Apple’s done from Apple II, through Mac, to iPad, and it’s something they’re continuing to invest in for Lion, and iOS 5. And their market share seems to indicate it’s paying off.

Apple just might have had the iPhone nano — or whatever you’d prefer to code-name the second, lower budget version of the iPhone family — ready to go as early as WWDC 2011, though they chose to make that keynote focus exclusively on OS X Lion, iOS, and iCloud. What people mean when they talk (or leak) about iPhone nano is still unclear, however. Just like “Apple is working on a TV” ultimately turned out to be a 27-inch iMac, and Apple’s “interesting ideas in the netbook space” ultimately turned out to be iPad and the 11-inch MacBook Air, what “iPhone nano/budget iPhone” turn out to be will no doubt be difficult to predict in advance but obvious in hindsight.

Today, BGR reported:

According to our source, Apple will indeed be launching a prepaid / lower cost iPhone this year. We are told the handset will retail for no more than $350 without contract. Ready for the really interesting part? It’s entirely possible that the low-cost iPhone will in fact be the iPhone 3GS. [[BGR]http://www.bgr.com/2011/07/18/apple-to-launch-low-priced-iphone-for-350-iphone-4s5-end-of-summer/)

We’ve long speculated that iPhone nano might be a stripped down iPhone 3GS, same lower resolution screen and lower cost, high volume, components, but a smaller, tighter, refreshed package. Again, that’s pure speculation but based on iPhone nano not being a straight up iPhone 3GS. (Or just a new name for the discounted iPhone 4 when iPhone 5 goes on sale.)

Apple has been tremendously successful at dominating the high end, premium phone market, and have grown by adding Verizon as a carrier. They’ve also done a good job in grabbing those who transition from feature phones to smartphones; an ever increasing number. That last group is hugely important, as are emerging markets. Low cost options are important to them, but so are low cost plans. Apple could make an iPhone nano free on a 2 year contract but AT&T and Verizon voice and data plans make that difference negligible when it comes to total cost of ownership (Saving $100 when you’re spending $2000 is nice but not transformative.)

Cheaper plans on alternate carriers in the US, and certainly internationally, are one way to address this. (The other is a non-app phone, but it’s hard to see Apple pull a ROKR again.)

Either way, it’s going to be interesting to see if Apple finally decides to pull the trigger on a second class of iPhone, and how they choose to market it. iPod nano became the best selling MP3 player in history. Could that lightning strike again in the smartphone space?

Over a year and a generation since Apple mainstreamed the tablet with iPad and many are still not certain there’s a place in their life for a device that’s in between the smartphone and the laptop. And that’s very much how I felt. Sure I used my iPad a lot when I first got it, but then iPhone 4 came around and I went back to using that more. Then the new MacBook Air took over a lot of what I’d been using my iPad for, and I started to wonder — is it really necessary? iPad 2 brought me back for a time but it was still hard to see exactly where the bigger, keyboard-less screen fit into my life.

Then I realized my problem. I’d been trying to use the iPad instead of my iPhone or MacBook, and there were seldom times when it was more convenient than the former or more powerful than the latter. But then I notice something. Slowly, step by step, little by little, I was starting to use my iPad in addition to my MacBook.

There would be a video a wanted to watch, an article I wanted to read, a web site I wanted to browse, and instead of bringing it up on my MacBook and interrupting whatever else I was doing, instead of bring it up on my iPhone and compromising with the small screen, I grabbed my iPad. Even when I plug my MacBook into a cinema display, I often fill both screens with web dev tools or have Photoshop and Illustrator/InDesign hogging a lot of screen real estate. I could use Spaces, but more and more I’m just grabbing my iPad.

Recently John Siracusa highlighted an article by TechInch that cast the iPad as the microwave to the PC’s traditional oven, and in my case that feels apt. For quick, simple tasks, it’s easier and faster.

Zach Epstein, writing for BGR, said that his favorite tablet was the BlackBerry Playbook and did a great job listing the reasons why. He also challenged me to reconsider why I liked and used the iPad 2.

I realized it while working on way on my MacBook, with Netflix playing next to me on my iPad, or some articles queued up in Instapaper, or some feeds ready in Reeder, or a game I want to sneak a few minutes on while waiting for a render or a server. Sometimes even with my email or a web site I’m developing, so I don’t have to switch back and forth while I’m working.

It’s a second screen, but an independent one, and that’s the perfect place for it in my life, at least for me, for right now.

Jonathan Geller, the Boy Genius, reports that Mike Lazardis was convinced of BlackBerry’s superior design and feature focus, long after the proverbial ship hit the not-so-proverbial iceberg:

Picture yourself sitting in an executive briefing at Research In Motion. You’d hear Mike Lazaridis unequivocally state time and time again that BlackBerry smartphones would never have MP3 players or cameras in them because it just does not make sense when the company’s primary customers were the government and enterprise. “BlackBerry smartphones will never have cameras because the No. 1 customer of ours is the U.S. government,” Mike Lazaridis would say in meetings. “There will never be a BlackBerry with an MP3 player or camera.”

Compare and contrast with Steve Jobs who put sneaker to stage at WWDC 2007 and showed off the original iPhone, a device that eschewed the design of the market leaders of the day, RIM’s BlackBerry and Palm’s Treo line. Unlike almost everyone else at the time, the iPhone dropped the keyboard, and replaced the stylus with the finger and multitouch. RIM?

“When you hear Mike talk about the latest and greatest, it’s been the same thing for ten years: security, battery performance, and network performance. RIM has positioned battery life and network performance for years. People are not concerned with iPhone battery life,” one source told me. Network performance, to Mike, trumps any innovation a device like the iPhone offers. “Mike is convinced people won’t buy an iPhone because battery life isn’t as good as a BlackBerry,” a different source said. Mike apparently is in disbelief that people can use over 15GB of data on their iPhone and Android devices, and he feels that people will buy smartphones based on network efficiency, even though carriers with tiered data plans in developed markets love customers who use monstrous amounts of data.

Never mind that they eventually, reluctantly backtracked and shipped camera totting, MP3 rocking, Bold-ly branded, type-on-glass BlackBerrys of their own. They failed to see where the market was going, dismissed where it was, and seemed to only angrily react to where it had long since been. (And whether or not management has come to the personal realizations necessary to turn that around remains unclear.)

To their credit, Google rapidly switched Android from a BlackBerry clone to an iPhone clone. To their detriment, RIM just kept making BlackBerrys, the same ones that owned the world in 2006, long after the world had moved post-2007.

Steve Jobs, meanwhile, probably isn’t waiting on anyone to obsolete the iPhone. He likely has all of Apple working on doing that themselves.

[BGR]

Lately we’ve been seeing a lot of rumors about iOS 5 and whether over-the-air updates will affect the ability to jailbreak. Regardless, I think there are some misconceptions about the Jailbreak community being spread around the blogsphere lately, even as link-bait or and well-intentioned rebuttals that take the bait and provide the links.

This isn’t that. I’m not going to reward negative attention seeking. I’m just going to reiterate why I think jailbreak greatly benefits all iOS users, Jailbreak and otherwise, and trust people are smart enough and critical enough to read all the opinions and decide for themselves.

Innovation

First off, the jailbreak community is extremely innovative. I’ll go out on a limb here as I have many times before and insist that there are Apple employees walking around Cupertino with jailbroken iPhones in hand. Why you ask? Because they’d be stupid not to keep up with all the bright minds and ideas floating around the jailbreak community.

We already know Apple hired Peter Hajas, the creator of MobileNotifier, right before the announcement of iOS 5.

We can debate all day why Apple made that move but I personally see a striking similarity between the new iOS 5 notification system and Peter Hajas’ design for MobileNotifier. Notification Center gestures are also quite similar to the InfoShade feature of the popular jailbreak app, LockInfo.

Free R&D

Let’s face it, the jailbreak community has had a lot of great ideas. A lot of these same ideas end up trickling down into later iterations of iOS. Sometimes Apple manages to make them their own. Other times, they are blatantly copied, like Wifi Sync. Greg Hughes, the creator of the jailbreak version of Wifi Sync, had submitted his version of the app to the official App Store well over a year ago. It was rejected and then quickly found its way into Cydia. A year later, we see Apple unveil their version of wireless syncing. This time, they didn’t even bother to change the icon. What you see on the left is Greg Hughes’ Wifi Sync icon compared to Apple’s. See any similarity?

Apple is a secretive company. They can’t and won’t publicly test future versions of iOS years in advance. With Jailbreak, they get hundreds of thousands of people testing all sorts of apps, interfaces, and experiences, and Apple can see which ones work, and cherry pick all the best and brightest and most successful ideas.

Warranty out

It has been implied on several occasions that jailbreaking will completely screw up your device and Apple will be stuck eating the cost when you bring it in for warranty repair.

I really can’t begin to point out how many things are wrong with that statement. Let’s start with the obvious…. Apple will not service a jailbroken iPhone. They will simply turn you away. I do not know many jailbreakers that aren’t aware of this fact. That is their right and jailbreakers understand this.

Next, there is nothing a simple restore won’t wipe away. I have never seen an iPhone, iPad, or iPod rendered useless from a jailbreak gone wrong. I’ve seen some that get stuck in a recovery loop but sticking it into DFU mode and doing a stock restore always fixes the issue. I run a small tech company locally and we offer jailbreak and unlock services. We also troubleshoot tons of devices a week. We actually receive just as many users with stock issues as we do with jailbreak issues if we want to be honest here.

Freedom of choice

I can’t speak for the entire jailbreak community but I can speak for myself and those I know that jailbreak. I do not pressure others into jailbreaking. I don’t want to and frankly I don’t need to. We may joke about it around the forums and have #TeamJailbreak and #TeamPure battles during podcasts but that’s as far as it goes. In fact, I am always hesitant when someone asks me to help them jailbreak due to the amount of questions I’ll probably get for the next several weeks. I know many others who sometimes feel the same. I’m not saying I’m never willing to help but I do believe users who want to attempt jailbreaking should at least have some basic knowledge or technical understanding of iOS.

Bottom line, if someone sees Jailbreak, they know if it interests them and if they want to try it, and they know if it looks difficult or stressful and want no part of it. To think otherwise gives them far too little credit.

Jailbreakers buy software too

Sadly, I can’t say piracy doesn’t happen. It does. On iOS. With music and movies. It happens. But it doesn’t mean all jail breakers steal any more than it means all PC users steal (PCs come already jailbroken, that makes it even easier, right?).

Most of the Jailbreak users purchase apps just like stock users do. They not only purchase applications from the App Store like the rest of the population, but from Cydia as well.

There are tons of developers that will tell you that jailbreakers that steal apps make up a very tiny portion of their user base. Ironically, a lot of the jailbreakers I know end up being some of the biggest sticklers about not stealing applications and money out of developers’ pockets.

Why? Because most of them are developers as well.

Apple benefits in the end

Not only does Apple get a pretty large user base to test on, they have an extremely talented group of developers to keep their eye on. I don’t think Peter Hajas will be the last jailbreak developer to join Apple. Nor will iOS 5 be the last iteration of Apple’s latest and greatest to “borrow” ideas from the jailbreak community.

I do not see Apple going out of their way to block out jailbreakers in future iterations of iOS. Will they close exploits? Sure they will. For the safety and privacy of their users in general. The jailbreak community will always find a way in. If it’s coded by a person, it can be cracked by a person. And the game will continue. Until people grow bored or Apple gives us all the functionality we desire.

The main goal of the jailbreak community has always been to provide more options to power users who would like more control than Apple would like to give us. In return, we may deal with a little bug here and there or a few resprings. If you choose not to deal with that, that’s okay too.

But going against the grain doesn’t make this community evil or snide. It just makes us different. We are aware that we make up a very small portion of iOS users. We’re okay with that and never pretend to be the majority.

We don’t need to use link bait in order for Apple to pay attention to us. You can safely bet they already are.

Previous years have seen Apple’s annual fall music event showcase iTunes and iPod in decreasingly spectacular fashion, last year’s exceptions being the iPod touch 4 with cameras and the all new, all iOS-powered Apple TV. This year could be very different, with the possibility of Apple introducing up to 5 new iOS devices to the family at roughly the same time. It would be unprecedented, but so was no new iPhone back at WWDC 2011 in June.

1. iPod touch 5

If anything would usually be considered a safe for the fall music event, it would be a next generation iPod touch. For the last four years, Apple has introduced a stripped down, non-3G version of the same year’s iPhone wrapped in iPod touch clothes. So this year we’d expect an iPod touch 5 with an Apple A5 system-on-a-chip (SoC) and enhanced cameras. (Along with fierce demands for 128GB option to finally retire the iPod classic, of course.) Since WWDC 2011 came and went with no new hardware, however, and we don’t have a new iPhone 5 to base a new iPod touch 5 on, that challenges all preconceptions.

A new iPod touch definitely makes sense for the lucrative holiday season, but with so much else on their plate, it could end up being massively over-shadowed at best.

2. Apple TV 3

Last year’s iOS and Apple A4-powered reboot of the Apple TV in a rental, streaming model at the low price point of $99 turned their previous set top box strategy on its head. An Apple TV 3 (or whatever a 2nd generation of the 2nd generation Apple TV would be called) is certainly a possibility for this fall, especially if the new Apple A5 chip could boost it to a true 1080p powerhouse. Would Apple have 1080p streaming content in place to support it? Would any other new technology, like AirPlay mirroring in iOS 5 make more horsepower make more sense? Quite possibly. There’s every indication this is Apple’s “hobby” entry into the living room app and console gaming market and they’re going to want to hit it hard before competitors catch up. Again, it feels like a safe bet but one Apple could just as easily hold off on for another cycle.

3. iPhone 5

Unlike the last 4 years Apple didn’t introduce a new iPhone back at June’s WWDC 2011 so it feels like we’re overripe for one. The general assumption — and a lot of rumors — indicate this fall we’ll finally see it. Whether the delay was due to Verizon contacts, iOS 5 delays, or hardware production lead times, Apple probably needs to get a refresh out the door just to keep up with competitive pressure from Google, expired iPhone 3GS contracts on AT&T and other contracts, and the increasingly fashion-concious mobile market. Thinner, lighter, faster, these aren’t the things Apple’s TV commercials tell us matter most, but they’re probably the things that will change the most for iPhone 5. The dual-core, ARM Cortex A9-powered Apple A5 processor is probably a given. An 8 megapixel, 1080p rear camera and FaceTime HD front camera feel likely as well. More RAM, 64GB of NAND Flash storage, and a larger, 3.7-inch screen, are on a lot of wish lists as well. (Hopefully 3D isn’t, and we’re still probably a year away from LTE 4G.)

The big question is whether or not it will be a major redesign or just a streamlined iPhone 4. Rumors have gone both ways, which isn’t unusual given Apple typically tests both less and more ambitious prototypes during the design face, and field tests camouflaged units as production gets closer. I’m guessing we’ll end up in between. A tweak, but not a major overhaul. Not yet.

4. iPhone nano

iPhone nano rumors have been around as long as… the original iPhone. There’s an iPod nano, after all, and it’s the most popular model in the industry. Every other manufacturer makes multiple models, so why not Apple? If they want to move into greater demographics and emerging markets, it’s a logical move. Just like Intel Macs and CDMA iPhones, they’ve probably had an iPhone nano, and other variants, deep in the Apple labs for a while, waiting until they felt was the right time for release.

With that in mind, we keep hearing it’s done, it’s ready, and it’s just waiting on Apple to pull the trigger. What “it” is, however, remains a mystery. Just like neither the iPad nor 11-inch MacBook Air are Netbooks, collectively they effectively address — and eviscerate — the netbook market. Apple is as notoriously hard to predict in advance as they are seemingly obvious in hindsight. A barebones feature phone is probably out of the question given the size and power of the App Store and iTunes ecosystems, but could a stripped down, 3- to 3.5-inch iPhone 3GS in new packaging work for the ultra casual and emerging markets? The lower resolution but still compatible screen and the other components, now enjoying huge economies of scale, make it an interesting idea.

(Georgia’s still hoping the iPhone nano is a watch that “AirPlays” iPhone information to a more convenient screen.)

5. iPad 2 HD/Pro / iPad 3

Whatever you want to call it, Apple really could release another new iPad this year. Since they called 2011 the year of the iPad 2, iPad 2 HD or iPad 2 Pro (given the MacBook Pro and Mac Pro branding) makes more sense, but either way we might just see a new tablet with a Retina Display this fall. It’s not an obvious choice, given how it will have only been 6 months or so since the (original) iPad 2 shipped, and since the “pro” market for iPads hasn’t even begun to be established. But Apple doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Component pricing and production yield rates could mean a 2048×1536 iPad can’t be produced at Apple usual $499 price points, at least not any time soon. And while competing tablets from Samsung, BlackBerry, and HP webOS have failed to gain any real traction, they’re going to keep coming. Getting a Retina Display iPad out on the market soon, before anyone else is even anywhere close, just makes competing that much harder, and going with a “pro” level price for those who want and can afford it protects Apple’s low cost of entry on the regular iPad 2. It would be a tactical gamble, but Apple has often been utterly fearless when it came to those.

Whether “pro” also means LTE, USB, SD, or any other acronyms you want to throw at it, and whether it mandates a newer battery or even newer A5 chipset remains a really interesting question.

6. There is no 6

Rumors of Apple television sets continue to swirl, and there are always other product areas Apple could and one day probably will explore (maintaining growth takes work). However, the last time rumors popped up about an Apple television, TiPb heard it was a 27-inch iMac and low and behold, that’s what we got. Could the latest round of rumors be a harbinger for a 32-inch iMac? No idea. The television business is low margin and everything Apple typically isn’t. That’s not to say they couldn’t revolutionize it the way they did smartphones, but I don’t think they’ll do it this fall.

Just over one year ago, Apple launched iPhone 4. Typically that would mean a newer, shinier iPhone would have taken its place by now, and it’d be that iPhone we’d be talking about. But not this year. This year there won’t be a new iPhone — an iPhone 5 — until fall, and that means iPhone 4 is still, one year later, the flagship iPhone on the market.

We’ve reviewed the original AT&T/GSM iPhone 4, we’ve reviewed the Verizon/CDMA iPhone 4. We’ve even reviewed the flipping white iPhone 4. We looked at iPhone 4 after 3 months on the market and we’ve written post after post about it, day after day, over the course of the last year.

So how does it stack up? Is the A4 still a good chipset? Is the Retina Display still the best screen in the business? Is the industrial design and fit and finish still above and beyond all other contenders? Is it still on of the best phones on the market?

We put the question to the staff here at TiPb and the greater Smartphone Experts Network, and here’s what they had to say.

Georgia

How do I feel about iPhone 4 one year later? I have to say that the iPhone4 is still one of the most esthetically pleasing, most beautiful phones on the market. Yes, there are phones which are faster and have larger screens but the iPhone 4 is still competitive, the retina display is still industry leading, and the battery life is just amazing. Add to that its ease of use and the massive App Store, and the iPhone 4 is still ahead of the game. That it’s still, one year later, and one of the best selling phones on the market proves that.

Does Apple have to release the iPhone 5 soon? Probably not. But they will, because if you are not the ones pushing the envelope you will end up being the one licking it.

Cody Allison

One year later and iPhone 4 is still an amazing device. I have friends with other phones and none of their devices are in nearly as good a shape as mine. The iPhone 4′s design and quality is top notch and stands next to no other device. The picture quality is still far better than other phones. Even the front facing camera captures amazing photos, and with FaceTime and the Retina Display, it is still the best mobile device on the market. As for software, Apple is always good about releasing updates and bug fixes. Having a company that stands behind their product is definitely something to consider when purchasing a new phone. With the incorporation of Apple TV’s AirPlay, and soon to be released iOS 5, I believe iPhone 4 is still the best phone on the market.

With iPhone 5 just around the corner, I am very interested to see what direction Apple will take with it.

George Lim

When the iPhone 4 was first announced, I was blown away. The revolutionary retina display and 5MP/720p camera was enough to wow me. I upgraded from my iPhone 2G to the iPhone 4 on day one and to this day, there are still parts of the phone that surprise me and make me think, “Am I in the future?” I still use the HD camera as my primary video camera, saving money on a new dedicated video camera, yet still being able to produce HD quality videos for YouTube. The incremental software additions, like tethering and Game Center, makes the phone even better than when it was initially released.

I’m extremely happy with the iPhone 4, and with iOS 5 just around the corner, its going to get even better. Unless the iPhone 5, completely blows me away (which it will), I’ll happily stick with my iPhone 4.

Matt Miller, Nokia Experts

It’s now been a year since the iPhone 4 was released and during that year I have had the opportunity to spend a lot of time with Symbian, Android, Windows Phone 7 and BlackBerry and I have to say if there was an iPhone 4 on T-Mobile USA I would have one in my hands right now. I tire of Symbian’s lack of great apps and old UI, Android devices always stalling or freezing after the 4-week honeymoon period, rather lame hardware of the current Windows Phone 7 devices, and old OS and lack of apps on BlackBerry. The iPhone 4 is a fantastic smartphone and the only thing holding me back is the carrier availability.

Most of why I used other devices (notifications, OTA updates, etc.) are nearly all addressed in iOS 5 and Apple may be able to satisfy people with just an update. Then again, we now expect a new iPhone every year so let’s see what Apple has in the iPhone 5.

Ally Kazmucha

I typically have extremely bad phone ADD. I’ve somewhat grown out of that over the past few years. I’m quite surprised that over a year later, I’m not dying for a new phone (yet anyways). As excited as I am for the iPhone 5, I think the iPhone 4 has kept me pretty content. I’ve found the camera to be more than sufficient for a camera phone and the speed to be more than what I need at most times. Even jailbroken, I’ve had no lag issues with my iPhone 4.

I also think my iPhone 4 has held up better than any of my other iPhones, with or without a case. At first I was nervous about the front and back being glass but I haven’t had any issues. I did, however, have to have my iPhone 4 swapped twice for a faulty sleep/wake button. Not sure if this says anything about build quality or I just had bad luck twice. Either way – I think the iPhone 4 is still topping the smartphone market for a reason. Most smartphones being released now are still contenders to the iPhone 4. RIM still hasn’t caught up and Android is still an extremely fragmented platform. While I’m excited to see what the 5th hardware iteration will bring with it, I’m perfectly content with my iPhone 4 until then.

Leanna Lofte

It’s been a year since the iPhone 4 was released and it’s still the best phone on the market — but it’s a year old. In a world where consumers like to have the “newest and greatest”, Apple needs to take the role of “newest” and launch the iPhone 5. I absolutely still love my iPhone 4, but the novelty has worn off and I’m ready for something new.

Kevin Michaluk, Fearless Leader of Smartphone Experts (and CrackBerry.com)

Has it been a year already?! For the mainstream consumer, the iPhone 4 still hits on all fronts: easy to use software, beautiful, well-built hardware and a supporting ecosystem that helps you get the most of the device (iTunes, App Store, etc.). For the average person, the iPhone 4 really is still “good enough” and for the near future I think it’s a device people will keep buying as long as Apple keeps selling it. They shouldn’t rush on the iPhone 5 – they should release it when they feel it’s truly a better device. Others may be catching up on specs, but Apple is still leading the experience pack and is still in fashion and will be for the foreseeable future.

For the tech savvy, the operating system is getting a little boring so I am looking forward to the changes in iOS 5 (though I’m pushing for a homescreen experience that does more than just launch apps – maybe we need some widgets?) and I can’t help but think it’s time the iPhone come in some additional sizes. Though the resolution is amazing, I can’t help but wish the iPhone had a bigger screen. After using Android devices with 4.3″ display, it seems small.

Keith Newman, PreCentral.net

This is the first time I can recall that the iPhone 4 has become technologically irrelevant to me. The current innards of the device are at a point where using it feels clunkier than ever. Sometimes it just can’t get out of it’s own way when trying to app switch or refresh. Than again, it’s a year old device with an anemic 512 megs of RAM.

Why so negative? Actually I’m not… those are just facts.

The other facts are it is still one of the sexiest devices I have ever held and used. In the land of black slabs (and technically, this device is one), it’s the metallic curve of the iPhone 4 that sticks out the most. The machine cut buttons… the double sided glass panels… hell, even the bottom speaker grill and screw assembly looks slick. Which is why I am worried the next iteration of the iPhone will have a hard time topping the 4 series. The technology will be there… the A5 (or maybe even the rumored A6) chip, more RAM, a better GPU perhaps and thus the burden of a one year old device trying to be cutting edge will be relieved. (It’s a shame since the iPhone 4 got hurt with product cycles this time around, it’s now the kid on the block that’s got to keep it all together for an extended period.)

But I don’t think from anything rumored to this point will be able to beat out the pure svelte that is the iPhone 4 design.

Phil Nickinson, Android Central

If there’s ever phone that could weather a launch as tumultuous and under as much scrutiny as the iPhone, it’s the iPhone 4. The radical design (glass and metal? Who knew!) might have brought some technical challenges, but that hardly slowed sales, did it? No, the iPhone 4 refined and extended the platform, doing so in a way that kept it fresh and exciting.

Consider this: No one can deny that the Motorola Droid was a wildly popular phone when it launched in late 2009. The Droid 2 launched in fall 2010 with little fanfare, and only a minor spec bump. The Droid 3 is on its way, but will it suffer the same fate?

That’s the difference between Apple and, well, just about everybody else. Controlling the hardware, software and, maybe more important, the message — Apple’s able to release devices on its terms, just like it always has. Whether apple releases the iPhone 5 this summer or fall is moot. It will be met with the same fervor whether it’s released in two weeks, two months, or sometime next year. And the longer it takes, the more the excitement grows.

Chris Oldoryd

When I first realized that there would be no iPhone 5 announced at WWDC I was utterly horrified. Having always updated my iPhone every year this just seemed so wrong. After the furore had died down inside me, it actually dawned on me that this iPhone 4 is still a top draw phone. What do I really need from an iPhone 5 that this one can’t already do? The screen is still stunning; the device is still very fast. It does everything I need it to do and it does it well.

When I get asked by friends if they should wait for the next iPhone before buying, it is no longer an easy question to answer. Before the iPhone 4 was released the 3GS was ready to be upgraded. The iPhone 4 however is still a current top of the range phone. I would still recommend it above any other handset available right now. Apple will have to give us something very special with iPhone 5 to outshine this beautiful iPhone 4! Will I upgrade? Of course. Do I have to upgrade? No.

Chris Parsons, CrackBerry.com

Here we are, one year after the launch of the iPhone 4, and it still reigns as one of the top devices on the market. Although Apple could likely ride out the success of the iPhone 4 a bit longer, iPhone users are looking forward to the next big launch from Apple and rightfully so. With Android moving fast, around Apple must keep momentum going and introduce something more than incremental changes this time around.

Rene Ritchie

I’ve used iPhone day in, day out over the course of that year, from iOS 4 at launch to iOS 5 beta now. And thanks to that last part, when the screen lights up, I still light up with it.

Don’t underestimate the power of regular major software updates rolled out — on the same day — to all on-market devices. iOS 4 made a lot of iPhone 3GS users happy last year and iOS 5 on an iPhone 4 will once again make users locked into a contract or looking for a cheaper option feel like they have a brand new phone anyway.

Okay. A software update can’t give iPhone 4 an LTE radio or 3D display or dual core processors or a kickstand. But it doesn’t need to. Perceptively, iPhone 4, one year later, is absolutely still competitive with the latest and greatest competitive devices on the market, and while it’s missing some specific features, it’s still best in class at others. If you want a phone works for you rather than you having to work for it, iPhone is still your go-to device.

But here’s the thing — nothing lasts forever and mobile has never been more competitive. iPhone 5 needs to come, and it needs to come soon enough and be impact-ful enough to keep up Apple’s hardware momentum.

You?

Your turn! What do you think about iPhone 4 one year later? And how much pressure do you think Apple should be feeling to release iPhone 5?

Apple’s iOS 5 built-in a lot of new, basic functionality previously filled by 3rd party App Store apps, which effectively “Sherlocked” those apps, rendering them redundant in a post-iOS 5 world. Or did it? There’s a world of difference between basic functionality that serves the needs of only the most casual user, and advanced functionality with enough control and features to satisfy a hardcore pro.

What Apple did with iOS 5, as with previous generations of iOS, is take away the entry-level business of several prominent 3rd party apps, but still left them with the premium, higher order market. While it’s always dangerous creating an enterprise based on glaring functionality holes Apple will almost certainly fill at some point in the future, there’s just as much opportunity building a great product that Apple’s entry into the space can benefit.

Here are a 5 apps (and a couple things more) I think could make that case.

Instapaper

Marco Arment’s excellent read-it-later client, Instapaper, which strips away everything but body content from web articles and lets you store it on his web service and access it via a paid iOS app, at first glance, looks threatened by Apple’s new Reader and Reading List features in iOS 5 for iPad and iPhone, and OS X Lion Safari. However, as any long term Instapaper user knows (and Arment himself will tell you), Instapaper goes far beyond the bare-bones, Readabiliy-derived, bookmark-synced implementation Apple is providing. Arment uses the example of how Apple baking RSS into Safari and Mail hasn’t hurt dedicated RSS readers like Google Reader, Reeder, NetNewsWire, etc., and it’s not a terrible. While Google’s entry into navigation (with the free Google Maps Navigation) was met by a similar response from traditional turn-by-turn navigation vendors, Instapaper isn’t a recurring monthly charge or a massive up-front expenditure. It is well regarded and has a devoted install base, and more importantly it has a passionate and creative developer who’s probably as happy to occupy the high end against Reader/Reading List the way MacBook’s occupy it against cheap netbooks.

Arment was smart, however, to drop the free version before Apple launched Reader/Reading List.

Camera+

Just like Apple put a hurt on HDR (high dynamic range) app makers with iOS 4, the addition of Twitter integration, gridlines, and basic photo editing tools will be challenging for App Store apps that previously filled those post-production and easy sharing niches. There’s an especially bitter irony here for Camera+, however, as the Lisa Bettany-driven, Tap Tap Tap built, filter-filled shooter was previously removed from the App Store for using a private API that enabled the volume button to be used as a shutter switch — something Apple has now added as default to the built-in Camera app in iOS 5. Whether you consider that fair or foul, in a post iOS 5 world, Camera+ still offers those previously mentioned filters. And as for the elements iOS 5 does include, some still seem to prefer Camera+’s implementation. So neither Camera+, nor other popular apps like Hipstamatic or Instagram are in immediate danger.

(Ironically, Apple’s iBooks did much the same to Tap Tap Tap’s Classic following iOS 4 [Hat tip, @arnoldkim])

LockInfo

LockInfo, the brilliant lock screen information and pull-down notification manager by David Ashman, was the primary reason I jailbroke under iOS 4.x. iOS was (and still is, outside the iOS 5 beta) a modal, interruptive bag of notification hurt, and LockInfo was my salve. With iOS 5′s Notification Center, however, Apple has taken almost direct inspiration, offering both the lock screen info and the pull-down notifications that made LockInfo so indispensable. But again, Apple is — so far — only covering the basics. As Ashman told us during our video interview at WWDC 2011 there’s a lot that LockInfo does that Apple’s Notification Center still doesn’t do. LockInfo provides quick access to full mail texts, for example, and has a plugin architecture for extensibility. Those who only need very basic, unobtrusive notifications will be fine with Notification Center. Power users will still want LockInfo’s fuller feature set.

Todo

Whether you’re a fan of Appigo’s Todo, or of another app like Omni’s OmniFocus, Cultured Code’s Things, you probably thought there was no way Apple would ever enter their space. They hadn’t in 4 versions of iOS, after all, and since Steve Jobs has assistants to manage his lists, there was a slim chance he even noticed the gap. (That’s a joke, I know he doesn’t code the entire OS himself. He has people for that too…). Enter Reminders in iOS 5. Time aware, location aware, it will help you get things done whenever, and wherever you need, and unlike Things it offers sync — with iCal, after a fashion — from day one. But it’s rather spartan. It does what it does simply and elegantly (if you like paper textures), and that’s about it. One-trick list-making apps and alarm apps are in a lot of trouble, but deep, highly productive, nerdy apps like Todo and Omnifocus, and even more able alarm apps like Due will still be required for more complex time management. Even Omni’s premium price probably won’t cause them too many problems since at that price people who get OmniFocus want OmniFocus, they don’t want Reminders.

[$4.99 - iTunes link]

Kik

BBM (BlackBerry Messenger) is such a platform lock-in for RIM that it’s not surprising astute developers made direct messaging apps for iPhone, including Kik, Whatsapp, and the now Facebook-owned Beluga. That’s probably the very reason Apple introduced iMessage in iOS 5, to provide platform users the ability to quickly, easily, and cheaply text each other. (Roshambo’ing the carriers by building it into the previously SMS/MMS-only Messages app was no doubt the cherry on that feature Sunday.) But here’s the thing — Kik isn’t a platform owner, so they have no vested interest in locking their users into a platform. Instead, they want to lock them into the app/service, and so they make them cross-platform (though RIM has pulled Kik from BlackBerry App World due to a legal dispute). This means, while they’re still proprietary and you’re still locked in, you can message people on non-Apple mobile devices, and if you ever switch to a non-Apple mobile device (perish the thought), you can bring your contacts with you. BBM might eventually go cross-platform, Twitter might one day supplant messaging apps, or — please, oh please — someone might actually build a great service with non-proprietary pipes on top of Jabber (or something similar), but for now only iOS-to-iOS only users will have any incentive to switch.

Jailbreak

Right before the WWDC 2011 keynote I asked Saurik, founder of Cydia, if Apple was out to make Jailbreak irrelevant. He didn’t think they could, and neither did I, but Apple is certainly going through the list of compelling reasons to Jailbreak and checking them off in the stock software, at least some of them, at least to some degree. I already mentioned LockInfo, but Apple still doesn’t offer any form of quick actions, like BiteSMS does for responding to text messages without having to switch to the Messages app. Apple doesn’t offer quick access either, like SBSettings does for toggling Wi-Fi, Blue Tooth, Airplane Mode, etc. Apple doesn’t offer themes beyond wall papers. And like a host of other apps do for a host of other features Apple can’t or won’t yet support. Nor do I think Apple wants to kill Jailbreak. Aside for their not going out of their way to kill recent exploits (with the exception of easily targetable malware vectors like web-based PDF attacks), it gives Apple a free expert mode and public test bed — an incubator to see ideas and metaphors tried out on a scale their own secrecy would never allow. They have to have some way of vetting features for next year’s iOS 6, right?

Android

As I was writing this article, Seth Weintraub joked that, with iOS 5, Apple tried to Sherlock Android. It’s fair to say that however many checkboxes Apple was trying to take away from Jailbreak, they were trying just as hard to take them away from Google’s competing OS. While Android’s “openness” is disingenuous, their relative freedom and powerful feature set are inarguable. You can still do more on a stock Android device than you can on a stock iPhone, but the gap narrowed with iOS 5. (Ignoring for the moment rooting vs. Jailbreak which is a different conversation). Android still has widgets, it still has skins (a mixed blessing but an important one to many users), it still offers tons of customization options, and hooks into the OS Apple will probably never provide. It’s a different OS, operating under a different model, but that will no doubt appeal to a different type of user. And most importantly for iOS, it will keep pushing Apple to check off those boxes and narrow that gap even further.

Who’s Sherlocking who?

With iOS 5, Apple certainly killed the low-end, casual market for a lot of iPhone and iPad apps. (Just like they’ve done with previous generations of iOS, including Installer for Jailbreak when they released the App Store with iOS 2.) For the best-in-class, however, for the premium apps with the pro-level functionality, it’s possible Apple’s entry into their space will validate their functionality and introduce them to a much larger audience. Only time will tell if they ultimately lose any sales to the new built-in apps, or gain even more customers due to increased awareness. But this has happened before and it will happen again, and the really savvy developers will have positioned their really great apps to take full advantage, and perhaps kill a certain lucrative segment of the built-in apps’ user base.

After a brief flirtation with pock marks, Apple embraced into the linen texture in a serious way with iOS 4, making it the background for both the multitasking fast app switcher dock, and for the open view of folders. Both of these UI metaphors were supposed to be “behind the scenes”, with the iOS screen literally opening up to reveal them. With that was meant to convey the padding beneath the armor or the t-shirt beneath the jacket, who’s to say? In the iOS 5 betas, however, Apple has gone all in on linen. While iOS 4 kept linen subtle and dark, iOS 5 brings lighter shades as well. You can find it as the background to the welcome screens when you update or re-install the OS. You can find it behind the new Notification Center when you swipe down from the title bar. Also, for the first time you can find it in OS X as well, in beta for Lion.

That makes it noticeable. Which is interesting. Texture is a Good Thing. It exists everywhere in nature and our eyes are used to it. Our eyes expect it. As long as it is consistent, it almost disappears, something we feel more than see in the overall richness of the environment around us. We’d notice if it wasn’t there — something would seem off or amiss — but we shouldn’t notice if it is there.

And that’s where linen may be crossing the line for me — I’m noticing it. Rather than a background that’s contrasting and setting apart the foreground of the UI, rather than something my eyes ignore as they fall on the icons and buttons, it’s becoming something my eyes fall on.

Though it hasn’t come anywhere near that point yet, it does remind me of brushed-metal and the dark days of Apple design, before Leopard restored stately gray subtlety and consistency to the OS X UI. (So does the iCloud, LaunchPad, and associated conical gradients icons shown off at WWDC 2011, even more viscerally.)

It’s possible I’m just noticing linen because it’s new (though I’m not the only one). It’s possible Apple will change the quality and quantity of it’s use during the betas. Or it’s possible linen is the new brushed-metal.

Apple has now aired a series of three iPad 2 commercials, the first of which clearly states up front that it’s not about specifications, it’s about experience. They go on to show how different people, in different walks of life, can use, benefit, and enjoy the iPad in a multitude of easy to understand ways. Verizon has aired a couple Android tablet commercials during the same period, and these focus on Flash, chipsets, and radio technologies.

Apple/iPad: “When technology gets out of the way everything becomes more delightful.”

Verizon/Android: “Your wife will love the dual core Tegra 2 chipset.”

Apple/iPad: “If you ask a parent, they might call it intuitive.”

Verizon/Android: “4G LTE upgradeable.”

Check out the videos after the break. Apple has shown how to sell tens of millions of iPads but apparently even Verizon still can’t hear them now.

We’ve known for a while now that iPhone 5 won’t be coming out this month, as it has for the last four years, but this fall, when iOS 5 is also scheduled to ship. Whether one delayed the other, or Verizon contracts, component shortages, engineering hours, a deliberate decision to change the launch schedule, or some combination of factors caused the delay, we may never know, but now rumors suggest new Macs are similarly on hold, this time waiting on OS X Lion before they ship.

Steve Jobs has always stressed that Apple is a software company, and has several times quoted Alan Kay’s “People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware”. They make beautiful boxes out of glass and aluminum and stainless steel and plastic, but as recently as WWDC 2011, Jobs called software their “soul”.

iPhone has always been tied to major new releases of iOS (previously iPhone OS), the two launching together with precise regularity. (iPod touch has almost always coincided with an iOS x.1 release, and iPad launched with the unique-to-iPad iOS 3.2, and iPad 2 came with the more modest iOS 4.3).

New Macs, however, were seldom if ever tied to new OS X releases. Users who bought new Macs on or around OS X launches would get a free upgrade offer or a DVD in the box, or something… less than coordinated.

But MacBook Airs with ThunderBolt ports and Sandy Bridge processors might just be on hold for Lion now.

Apple hasn’t always had luck with big, coordinated releases. They — and their servers — struggled under the same-day iPhone 3G, iOS 2, MobileMe, and App Store release back in 2008. But they have kept their mobile releases in a row.

There was little chance we’d see iPhone 5 announced with WWDC as shipping in June with iOS 4.3, upgradable to iOS 5 in the fall, and if rumors of Macs waiting on Lion pan out, could Apple be moving to an even more tightly integrated hardware/software model? Could we see a day where OS X and iOS releases are coordinated so features that bridge both, like iCloud, “just work” as desktop and mobile both come on line?

[Apple Insider]

At WWDC 2011 Apple once again “borrowed” a lot of great ideas from the Jailbreak community and gave them to iOS 5, including lock screen info, notifications, WiFi sync, volume buttons to take pictures, and a lot more. That’s not a bad thing — I even asked them to do exactly that this year. Whether you jailbreak or not, whether you realize it or not, the jailbreak community benefits all iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad users — pure and jailbreak alike.

Follow along to find out why.

For years, the common argument against Jailbreak (aside from the DMCA, from which Jailbreak was granted an exception last year) was stability — it could make your iPhone buggier, slower, or crash more. The jailbreak argument is typically functionality — it could let your iPhone do far more than Apple does out of the box. The great news, and the real secret here is, everyone benefits from Jailbreak.

Jailbreak to iOS

Over the years, several jailbreak applications and tweaks have slowly trickled down the pipe and found themselves becoming a core function of iOS at some point or another. For old school jailbreakers, they’ll remember Installer fondly. Installer just recently made its way back to iOS as well. It truly was the first official App Store. I remember downloading games and programs to my iPhone first gen through installer on iOS 1.x via Installer and AppTap. Then Apple came along with iOS 2.x and the official App Store. Installer even had page dots when you accumulated more than one page of apps. This was an idea that went straight to iOS 2.0. It wasn’t a similar concept, it simply appeared in iOS 2.x with the exact same functionality.

While Apple practices a pretty rigorous app approval process, the jailbreak app stores continues to allow developers to submit applications that Apple would not allow in the official App Store. A lot of would be rejects seem to find their way into iOS as core features later on.

Prime examples of this are jailbreak apps such as MobileNotifier, which looks strikingly like the notification system Apple showed off at WWDC 2011. Coincidentally, Apple recently hired Peter Hajas as an iOS and frameworks employee.

Other developers such as Greg Hughes, the creator of Wifi Sync, have also seen their applications later crop up in iOS. His iteration of Wifi Sync is very simliar to Apple’s newly announced iCloud wireless sync and backup feature that’s slated to appear this Fall in iOS 5. His version of the app was rejected by Apple previously.

Creativity and innovation

Since the release of the first generation iPhone, the mobile industry has come a long way. A huge part of that was due to the fact that the first generation iPhone was not like anything currently on the market. It lit a fire underneath other manufacturers such as Palm and RIM (ok, maybe not RIM so much). We also got Android out of Google which has become one of the hottest smartphone platforms on the market.

The jailbreak community is full of young and talented developers that more often than not, land jobs at these companies or create programs and tweaks that eventually become the heart and soul of each respective platform. Whether Apple gives it to us or not, the jailbreak community always seems to find a way to make it possible. I have yet to see a company produce a device that meets every consumer’s wants and needs. Some may argue that’s why we have choice. While that’s very true, we still crave a mobile OS that will fill our every need. While that may not yet be possible, independent developers strive to innovate and provide unique solutions through other channels. These innovations eventually crop up in official releases which are then built upon even further.

Jailbreak developers have the ability to create individual solutions. Apple has the ability to refine those even further and produce a product that benefits mainstream users in a way that even the most novice user can understand. So while jailbreak may not be for everyone, a lot of the innovation and creativity is already done by the time Apple decides to refine it and slap an “i” in front of it.

And the cycle continues…

Even if iOS 5 has everything you could possibly want in a mobile OS, next year Steve Jobs will walk on stage again and unveil that “next great thing”, and you’ll want it. Odds are, the jailbreakers out there already have it in their hands. We are, in some ways, beta testers. David Ashman, creator of LockInfo, has already stated he’ll be back next year with an even greater version of LockInfo. Independent developers won’t take it lying down. They’ll simply bow and accept the challenge laid in front of them with more excitement and motivation than the last time around.

So whether or not you plan to jailbreak the next iteration of iOS, you can rest assured Steve Jobs and all the folks up at Cupertino already have.

There’s some debate as to whether or not Apple will keep the MobileMe web apps, like Mail, Contacts, and Calendars around after the transition to iCloud. Some have heard no, that Apple will trash them and go 100% apps. Others have heard yes, that Apple will keep them around.

No one outside Apple seems to know for sure. For our part, TiPb has heard there will indeed be web apps in iCloud. At the very least, you’ll need a way to access Find my iPhone, Find my iPad, and the forthcoming Find my Mac over the web. Apple has also poured significant resources into the SproutCore-powered Mail, Contacts, and Calendars app — including a major update to Calendars recently — and it’s hard to imagine them flushing all that effort.

Whether Photo Stream will take over for Photo Galleries, whether Documents in the Cloud will replace the wishy-washy iWork.com, and whether or not the App Store and iTunes store get Web-to-Device push remains unknown.

Even if the native iOS and Mac apps are used far more often, having the web apps as backup is a pretty important feature. We expect Apple to clarify before iOS 5 launches and iCloud comes out of beta this fall.

We go through this every year, so apologies for not posting it sooner, but once again we’d like to remind everyone not to leave bad app reviews based on crashes or other “bugs” under iOS 5. Why?

Because iOS 5 is in beta. You’re not supposed to be using it for anything other than testing your apps. Developers can’t even upload iOS 5-compatible binaries to Apple right now, so there’s nothing they can do about it, nor is there anything they should have to do about it.

So if you went ahead and installed iOS 5, you’ve given up your rights to publicly review apps until the fall. You’re under NDA. You agreed to it. That’s it. That’s all.

Geek up, bear it, and save your snark for the fall — when devs will be able to, and need to, support iOS 5 for all your apps. Then if they don’t, let them have it!

[MBarclay via Daring Fireball]

This year at WWDC 2011 Apple announced iMessage, a BBM-like instant messaging service built right into the SMS/MMS app. They also built Twitter right into the OS, for clip sharing in Safari, Photos, etc. and come this fall, authentication for the official Twitter app and others. Last year at WWDC 2010 they introduced FaceTime, a video calling service that existed first in the Phone app, then later in its own app on iPod touch, Mac, and iPad. Back in 2002, Apple introduced iChat, an instant messaging service that eventually gained video calling and video conferencing support, as well as desktop sharing and more.

iMessages is proprietary and only on iOS right now. Twitter is proprietary but cross-platform. FaceTime is a collection of open standards that Apple has promised to release the specs for but hasn’t as of yet. It’s also iOS and Mac OS X only right now. iChat uses both proprietary (like AIM) and open (like Jabber) protocols, with different level of feature and functionality support depending on which you use (though you can use more than one). It’s Mac only, but the protocols can be used in other apps on other platforms.

iMessage and FaceTime can both use the same Apple ID, and I can launch into FaceTime via a button in iMessage, but they don’t really work together, not the way Skype calls and chat do, for example. Twitter is treated like a separate systems, and iChat is an island all its own.

I can’t iMessage someone on Mac or Windows. I can’t iChat someone on iOS unless they install a 3rd party app like BeeJive or AIM, and I can’t easily switch between text video/voice in the same app.

iChat on Mac OS X could conceivably become a blended iMessage and FaceTime client. Change iChat’s name to iMessage and have FaceTime calls as easy to launch from Mac OS X (and hopefully Windows one day) as they are on iOS. Add a similar way to switch back from FaceTime and things might “just work” better.

However, Apple seems to be improving the iChat app in Mac OS X Lion all on its own, with no iMessage or FaceTime support in sight. So that doesn’t look like an immediate possibility.

Hopefully Apple is working on this, and we won’t have to wait for iOS 7 and Mac OS X 10.8 to get a grand, unified messaging system.

Back on March 1, I tried to imagine what we’d see in iOS 5. Unlike preview years, however, there was no iOS 5 event in the spring. Instead, Apple will now be previewing iOS 5 in June, at WWDC 2011. As in this monday. So I’m revisiting my list, updating it with the latest news and rumors, and wondering what Apple could do that’ll be big enough to make us forget the lack of a new iPhone introduction this time around.

So what will iOS 5 bring? We’ll give you our want list, after the break.

Apple ID activation (via iCloud account?)

Right now before you can use a new iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad you (or the store where you bought it) have to tether it to iTunes on Mac or Windows and “activate” it. How 2007. Android just needs a Gmail address. webOS just needs a Palm profile. Facebook phones (you know they’re coming!) will just need your @facebook.com address. Apple has millions and millions of iTunes IDs, Apple IDs, and MobileMe IDs. Let us use those — or better yet, unify those first and then let us use our unified Apple ID — an iCloud ID perhaps — to activate our iOS devices.

Moreover, just like when you login to MobileMe for the first time on a new Mac, let iOS immediately check the iCloud and download our preferences. Let us type in that ID and get our mail, calendar, and contacts accounts, Wi-Fi setups, and all our other Settings synced down to our device.

If we lose our iPhone or iPad, or simply update to a new one, we should be able to login with our Apple ID and immediately have our phone restored to a personalized, working state. Sure huge media, apps, games, etc. will still require iTunes tether to sync, but give us a basic on-device, online way to start.

(Seeing as how the facial recognition login is still likely a few years off…)

Contact and status aggregation (and Twitter integration?)

Once we have the one Apple ID to rule them all, we need a saner way of handling all the other IDs and accounts. Facetiously I’d say just copy webOS’ Syngery. Seriously, however, between email, IM, Twitter and Facebook status, contact information, and all the different online stores with often conflicting data it’s annoying and unworkable to keep them all sandboxed and separate. We’ve been asking for this on iOS for years now as well.

If we know a contacts online account, let us enter it. Then pull in their profile information and status, silo it so it stays internally separate, but present it back to us in a unified view.

Facebook is presenting email, IM, SMS, etc. in a unified Facebook message system now and while it’s still a little kludgy it shows how the boundary between different communication forms are breaking down. Apple is great at “hiding the pipes” (the backend data sources that bring information into their apps) and showing the user only a single clean, consistent UI. They’re doing that now with unified inbox in Mail — regardless of which account an individual message is in, we see them all in the unified inbox. It would be great to see Apple expand this not just across email accounts but across protocols.

If I bring up Leanna, let me see her latest emails, Twitter and Facebook status, IM’s, SMS, etc. all as “messages” (hey, let 3rd parties hook in so I can see Foursquare, Instagram, etc. if she offers them and I approve them on my device.) Then thread them and let me reply back to them automagically using the proper protocol.

We’ve heard rumors now that Twitter will be deeply integrated into iOS 5. An additional way to share photos, perhaps. A communication protocol to peer email and SMS, potentially. iOS’ answer to BlackBerrys BBM, even. That’s all fine for Twitter but Twitter isn’t the sum total of internet chat. We need more.

App state sync (via iCloud?)

Taking it one step further, right now if we use an app on iPhone and then go and use the same app on iPad — even if it’s a universal binary — there’s no persistency of state. Unless the developer is syncing on their own or with a popular web service like DropBox, there’s no way to get to your latest data from different devices. Apple could provide a consistent method for doing this.

We’ve asked for it before when it comes to games — let Game Center sync our game progress between devices. If we get to a certain level in Infinity Blade on iPhone we want to pick up iPad and keep going from that level. But really, a general app state sync API would be even better. When iOS saves the information locally, push it up to the cloud and the next time the app is launched on any device, check the cloud for the latest state.

Given Apple has now announced they’ll be showing off iCloud services, but haven’t uttered a peep about what those services will include, it could be a logical fit for state syncing too. (Like the Data Center, until we know what it’s for, it’s for everything, right?)

Untethered firmware updates (via Airport/Time Capsule?)

Wireless sync and software updates are the dream. Zune tried the former and Android and webOS already do the latter. The size of iOS updates — the entire firmware re-installed each time — require such a solid internet and power connection that tethering to iTunes is often the right choice.

But rumor has it Apple might be using their Airport Extreme + hard drive combo, Time Capsule, to stage firmware updates. Since they’re plugged in and on ethernet, much like the Apple TV, they could presumably load up and make firmware updates available on-device, like Apple TV already does.

Even more interesting would be a trickle update, where tiny binary files containing the just the updated bits would constantly become available when online. A bad trickle update could kill your device, so there’s a lot to be concerned about still, but that certainly seems like a better future, and one Google’s Chrome experiments with today.

App store upgrades

Originally I wanted App Store trials, subscriptions, and upgrades. To be able to download an app or game, try it for a short period of time, then decide to buy it and if the developer offers a really compelling upgrade, pay for it without having to buy a whole new “2″ app would be fantastic for users and developers alike. Over time, with freemium and $0.99 apps with in-app purchases the need to demo has lessened for me. And Apple has already announced subscriptions — to much controversy — but upgrades are still needed.

iTunes knows what apps we’ve bought. We know it knows because when we try to buy a paid app we’ve already bought, iTunes tells use we’ve already bought it and that we can download it again for free. Why can’t the same system be used to determine, for example, that we’ve already bought Tweetie 1 and hence we can download Tweetie 2 at an upgrade price. Apple could allow developers to set that upgrade price in iTunes Connect, an extension of how they can set universal sale prices today. We’ve seen some strange screens pop up that seem to indicate Apple is at least experimenting with the idea, but why not pull the trigger? Again, it’s more overhead for Apple but the customer experience boost would be enormous.

Note: With Lodsys now filing suit against developers for using in-app purchase as way to upgrade from free/lite to full apps, the need for real, App Store handled demos is back.

Media streaming/re-downloads

Apple has been all over the news with iCloud and it’s music element — all labels on board, movie studies in negotiation… but for what? Will we simply be able to stream and re-download everything we’ve bought on iTunes, like we can re-download apps today? Or will it be a locker like Google and Amazon offer, and amnesty for everything who’s ever “shared” a file?

I’m guessing the former, at least at first.

File handling

Similarly, it’s still vexing to try and get your documents onto iOS, to make sure you have the latest version, to be able to edit it and seamlessly save it back to the device and cloud. For years we’ve asked for a Mobile Finder app, or more recently a Files app, that would work like a system-wide repository for documents the way Photos works for videos and images.

Most users don’t need file system access the same way they don’t need everything running in the background all the time. What they need is the functionality file access provides in a way that’s robust and usable on mobile devices.

In that way a Files.app would give us access all our documents the same way we go to the Photos app or call up the picture picker in a 3rd party app today. (Yes, pretty much what Apple does in the online-only iDisk app.)

Good on-device handling is only one piece of the puzzle, however. We need to be able to round-trip the documents from our Windows or Mac PC and our Google or iCloud. Right now we can do some of that, sort of, in a painful and convoluted way. Apple is addressing some of this in the new Mac OS X Lion preview with AirDrop — a way to move files between Macs as easily as iOS moves video and print jobs with AirPlay and AirPrint. There are also hints of improved WebDAV-based sharing in OS X Lion Server. But that all still sounds disjointed and overly complex.

Something that combines the Files.app idea with AirDrop, supported on iOS, Mac, and PC, and able to sync with a far more robust, speedy, and reliable iDisk or WebDAV would be grand. While I don’t expect Apple to include support for DropBox, Box.net, Google Docs, etc. letting the user configure them in a WebDAV-like manner would be outstanding.

Open Files.app. Add a sync source if you want one and have one. Let any app, including iWork, Docs to Go, QuickOffice, etc. open, edit, and save back the files. And keep them in sync. (Oh, and add similar cloud sync options to Photos.)

And again, this is the place for a nebulous, “let iCloud handle it” comment. Going from Keynote on Mac to iPad to iPhone could be transparent under a system like that.

System-wide Voice Control

Apple introduced basic VoiceControl a couple years ago in iOS 3 for iPhone 3GS letting us place calls or play music. Google trounced this with system-wide voice commands in Android starting with the Nexus One last year. Apple needs to take the lead back here. There are lots of rumors that Apple will use their SIRI acquisition to bridge the gap but SIRI isn’t voice control any more than it’s a search engine. It uses voice recognition to tie into popular, existing search engines to provide basic, intelligent services for users. Steve Jobs has called it Artificial Intelligence. SIRI could be a robust extension of voice control and a way to “synergize” multiple sources of online data, but Apple needs to deliver the underpinnings and that’s new, home-grown tech.

With rumors of a massive Nuance partnership at work, it looks like the people who bring us Dragon Dictate could be making this a reality. Finally.

Elegant notifications

Apple’s current badge, sound, and popup notification system — virtually unchanged since 2007 — is so unwieldy that it’s difficult to imagine Apple built it knowing 3rd party apps and push notifications were in the pipeline. Android is less obtrusive but can become messy quickly, webOS far more elegant, and while Jailbreak has offered several interesting alternatives for iOS, none of them seem like an Apple solution.

And we need an Apple solution. The status quo is untenable. If you’re on the phone or playing a game and one — or so help you many — popups appear you have to view them immediately or dismiss them forever and you can’t even hang up your call or do any basic screen command while that model dialog remains on screen. It’s like being a prisoner. And if you dismiss it out of annoyance you may not even remember what it was for later, and you have no workable way of finding out.

More than just a better system for staking and packing notifications, we need a better way to interact with them. Like Ally said, BiteSMS for Jailbreak runs rings around the current iOS Messages app. That might not be the model Apple implements, but it should be the spirit.

It’s the last truly gaping, galling deficiency in iOS. It’s the last huge item other mobile OS use to poke fun. It just has to be fixed. Fortunately Apple hired the man who designed the webOS notification system so that’s reassuring.

It took 3 years for copy/paste, 4 years for multitasking — 5 should be notifications.

We’ve heard Apple is working on it. Apple hired Rich Dellinger, the guy who architected notifications for webOS almost a year ago. My guess is we’ll get it, but we’ll get it on Apple’s terms — meaning just like how multitasking wasn’t the traditional method but addressed a lot of user facing issues, iOS 5 notifications won’t be like Android or webOS or Jailbreak, but will address a set of common needs.

Theme Store

Georgia said this well; Apple doesn’t need to do themes the way Cydia or BlackBerry does. At least not at first. They could provide their own set of 4-6 themes to start the same way they offer templates in Keynote or Pages. They could sell them in a Theme Store and once the process was hardened, slowly open it up to 3rd parties.

There’s a lot of money to be made in themes. Apple likes money. Users like themes. It’s simple math, even if implementing it is complex.

I don’t think we’ll see it in iOS 5 but hey, we’ll need something to look forward to for iOS 6…

Apps

iWork for iPhone… got dropped in a PR this week. iMovie for iPad and GarageBand came with iPad 2, as did PhotoBooth. There aren’t a lot of signature Apple apps missing from iOS anymore, with the notable exception of a real iPhoto or Aperture for image editing.

Apple will be sticking with Google for Map Data but we could see a new Maps app, using Google new vector tiles and Placebase and Poly9 or other differentiating technology would be great. Even at the amazing pace Apple has updated and released a lot of the iOS apps there’s still so much that could be done with the built-in and App Store apps that we could easily fill another post. (And likely will!) but this is another area to watch come iOS 5.

A new weather app — one with landscape mode for more details — would be good as well. Anything left untouched since iOS 1 really needs some attention…!

NFC, maybe in a discreet mobile payments app, could appear but that feels more like a fall and iPhone 5 announcement.

Conclusion

While Apple is secretive they’re also cyclical and subject to the laws of physics and economics, which means they’re somewhat predictable. This year’s iOS will fill some gaps, shave off some rough edges, surprise and delight us with a few killer features, and disappoint us with a couple inexplicable misses.

If Apple shows off iOS 5 tomorrow our guess is 2011 will be the year of notifications, cloud, and a lot more. What are your guesses? More gestures? Web-to-iOS push? What?

Today is Dieter Bohn’s last day with TiPb and the Smartphone Experts Network. Up until today, our editor-in-chief, Dieter founded TiPb — then PhoneDifferent — for SPE, recruited yours truly and most of the other staff at our sibling sites, and taught us how to run sites, communities, and generally be better bloggers than any of us could have imagined.

Dieter’s going to take a short, and much deserved vacation, but then promises to be back with new endeavors. On behalf of Georgia, Jeremy, Leanna, Ally, Chris, Andrew, and everyone here at TiPb, we wish him well! Our good buddy Kevin Michaluk will be stepping in to help fill his big, blond shoes, and Derek Kessler is taking the reigns over at PreCentral. Phil at Android Central and Dan at WPCentral… well, you’re still stuck with us.

We’re going to miss Dieter terribly, but we’re also incredibly excited at what’s coming next for SPE. It’s a new start for everyone, and we can’t wait to share it with you.

Amazon has an Android Appstore to compete with Google’s Android Market, and according to The Loop they’ve just released a Mac Download Store to compete with Apple’s Mac App Store, so how long until they decide they want to be in the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch space and try to buy Cydia, introduce a Jailbreak app store alternative all their own, or try some fancy HTML5 web app store?

iOS is theoretically a closed garden, yet Jailbreak and HTML5 apps are both alternatives, the latter even officially supported by Apple. Cydia has shown there can be commercial alternatives. Google has shown there can be great web apps. Playboy has shown there can even be subscriptions outside the app store.

Amazon is starting to feel their strength and, like when they launched CloudLocker without label support, they’re getting less shy about showing it. Their international support isn’t great compared to Apple’s, but if they fix that most of the other pieces are already in place.

Would Amazon buy Cydia? I doubt it. But iOS is far too lucrative a market for Amazon not to be considering attacking it in some way.

[The Loop]

Nilay Patel of This is My Next (and formerly of Engadget) has written up a terrific breakdown of the ongoing Google/Skyhook lawsuit, which alleges Google interfered with Skyhook’s location tracking business by unfairly using their control over Android licensing.

At the very least, it’s now extremely clear that Google plays a major role in Android device development, to the point where Andy Rubin himself approves and denies requests from OEMs. It’s also clear that Google places tremendous value on collecting location data, and it acted swiftly when it determined Skyhook’s deal with Motorola might threaten its ability to collect that data. Hell, one of the headings in Google’s summary judgment brief is “Skyhook was not entitled to deprive Google of its contractual right to collect location data on Motorola Android devices.” Can’t say it much plainer than that, really. And Google’s doesn’t hesitate to use its muscle to get what it wants from OEMs — it revised Samsung’s app license to specifically require Google location services be installed and used by default. Whether or not Google’s behavior is anti-competitive is a matter for the court to decide, but it’s definitely aggressive.

Emphasis is Patel’s. To be frank, I don’t have any problem with this in general. I wouldn’t even call it “evily”, just “businessy”. Google is a public company in a highly competitive space and the drive to succeed is enormous. So is the desire to maintain quality and reduce fragmentation.

But here’s the thing — Google so constantly, consistently, and competitively misrepresents it as “open” and “good” in contrast to Apple’s “closed” and “evil”.

At Google I/O last year, Google’s Vic Gundotra played the 1984 card against Apple, saying in essence they created Android because they feared a future where one man (Steve Jobs) and one company (Apple) controlled the mobile space. He said that, apparently, knowing the exact same thing applied to Andy Rubin and Google.

What should be particularly galling for Android users (of which I’m one — Nexus One specifically) is that Rubin and Google will use this power to prevent Motorola, Samsung, and Skyhook from interfering with Google’s ability to ensure themselves a great data collection experience on Android, but they’ll do nothing to prevent manufacturers and carriers from denying customers a good user experience by locking bootloaders, locking out side loaders, installing crapware, and otherwise ruining Android’s increasingly good handsets.

Google will step in to prevent their own loss of data, but not to prevent the loss of “openness” to their end users. At the same time they were calling Apple closed, decrying Apple’s lack of choice, and implying Apple was evil, Google was keeping their proprietary apps and their license as weapons, denying location data service choice to their partners, and acting… if not evil, then certainly “evily”.

We’ve already established Android isn’t open, it’s “openy” and once again that’s fine — it’s just no different from Apple except for the areas in which they choose to focus.

And it’s one more in a long list of examples as to why you should never buy a phone based on philosophy. You should buy it based on being the best phone for you.

Now go read Patel’s full article, linked below.

[This is my Next via Android Central]

There are some alleged 7th-generation iPod nano prototypes floating around the internet that show it just might be getting a camera this fall, something the 5th generation had but the current iPod nano lacks. Aside from Apple having to modify the clip so as not to interfere with the camera, is this really something we want?

What I’d much rather see is an alleged prototype floating around that shows a Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, NFC or some other type of short-range radio. Because I don’t want my iPod nano to be just another crappy camera (looking at you iPod touch and iPad 2!) — I want it to be a really smart watch.

We’ve been talking about this since the current nano launched and Steve Jobs “joked” that an Apple board member wanted to wear it as a watch. I did too. So did many others. It’s create a whole cottage industry of iPod nano watch band adapters and accessories. But really the current nano isn’t optimized for the job. It’s not finished.

If it had Bluetooth we wouldn’t have to use wired headsets (especially the hateful Apple earbuds). Sure, we’d lose FM radio (the wire serves as the antenna) but we’d also lose a cable running up our arm as well. More than that, we’d gain the ability for a nano watch to interface with our iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad.

Instead of reaching into my purse or pocket every time I get a text message, event reminder or notification, I could just glance at my iPod nano smart watch, which seamlessly received the transmission and echoed it from my iPhone. And once the connectivity is there, who knows what else Apple — and developers! — could come up with.

One day I fully expect my iPhone and iPad to seamlessly integrate with my entertainment center, my fridge, my car — my entire home and life. Things like Apple TV and AirPlay, and the accessory program started with iOS 3 show bits and pieces of what needs to be a cleaner, more organized, more well rounded solution.

Google is hard at work on this, and HP has shown off notification transfer on webOS, so Apple can’t afford to fall behind. Maybe the iOS 5 preview at WWDC this June will give us some hints?

In this context, an iPod nano smart watch is just another bit or piece in the puzzle, but darn if it isn’t one I want this year!

[Alleged iPod nano 7 with camera via AppleInsider]

For strange reasons beyond my comprehension, not all of you out there in the TiPb nation can join us when we record our iPad Live or iPhone Live podcasts at 9pm EDT on Sunday and Wednesday nights… so we’re experimenting with offering the video later as well. (This would be in addition to our regular audio RSS and iTunes feeds) There are a lot of bugs to work out still (could the audio delay be any longer?) but if enough of you are interested, let us know and we’ll keep at it!

(You should really show up live though, that way you get to join in on the show, ask questions, correct us when we’re wrong, and sometimes win fabulous prizes!)

Note: Due to YouTube’s length limits, we’re breaking it up into four 15 minute segments. First one is up top. Let us know if you want the rest! Also, what would your preferred format be, YouTube like this, iTunes video, something else?

Apple’s latest ad wants you to buy a $500+ tablet computer that runs App Store apps. Apple wants to sell you shiny things to make money.

Google’s latest ad wants you to store personal details about your child’s life, from birth, on their servers. Google wants your data so they can sell it (aggregated and anonymized, of course) to others to make money.

Taken in that context, Apple’s ad might be obnoxious and highly commercial, but Google’s is downright creepy.

That’s not an Apple fanboy perspective, that’s a privacy fanboy perspective. And it’s not iPhone vs. Android either. iPhone users use tons of Google services, including Gmail, Maps, and Search, and YouTube built in, and Voice, Latitude, etc. available via apps. Given over a 100 million iOS devices, we’re a huge part of Google’s user base, and a valuable part. And for the record, I haven’t liked some of Apple’s recent ads either.

But I do think about how each company makes money and what they have to sell to make that money. Apple makes almost all their money selling hardware products — selling to you. Google makes almost all their money selling advertising — selling you. (Or in this case, your child. Seriously.)

I’m not telling anyone to stop using Google, far from it. I’m a huge Google user myself. What I’m saying is this is not really a good ad.

(Note: As Apple ramps up iAds, this’ll be a concern for iOS users as well.)

Both videos after the break.

UPDATE: Again, I’m a huge user of Google services — this is not intended to scare anyone but simply to inform users, so users can make better informed decisions. Convenience and security are always at odds, and choosing the convenience of free cloud services like Google’s sacrifices the security of your personal information. I currently find that an acceptable compromise. If you don’t have a problem with it either, than good for you. Enjoy. As long as we all know the deal.

I spent a couple hours this weekend trying out the BlackBerry PlayBook and Android 3.0, Honeycomb-powered Motorola Xoom tablets. I’d tried the PlayBook and seen the Xoom before at CES 2011, but both were unfinished at the time and I was interested in seeing what the shipping versions were like. Unfortunately, the shipping versions were still unfinished, or more properly, unbaked. They reminded me of cookie dough.

Cookie dough has all the right ingredients, so much so that people can and do enjoy it in its raw, unbaked state. They nibble at it, lick it off mixers, and eat ice cream filled with chunks of it. And why not? It’s delicious… In nibbles and licks and chunks. But no matter how good it is in small doses, you inevitably wish someone would just bake it already.

That’s how I ended up feeling about the PlayBook and Xoom. The BlackBerry tablet actually shipped without native email, calendar, or contacts support, with a browser that goes from smooth as silk to struggling, to crashing even with 1GB of RAM under the hood, and with a power button that challenged and annoyed many seasoned reviewers. The Motorola tablet had to wait on, or is still waiting on, software updates to enable USB and MicroSD, and a round-trip back to Motorola to have the LTE radio swapped in.

A trip to App World on the PlayBook yielded startling few apps in many categories despite the device supporting very nearly every development platform this side of Logo. The Xoom likely had far, far less. I couldn’t verify that, however, as it hadn’t been logged into a Google account so I couldn’t access the Android Market, or email client, or many other apps, which in and of itself is a blisteringly bad user experience. (Show us the store, just don’t let us buy anything. Show us the apps, just leave them empty. You know, like Apple does.)

The PlayBook for it’s part provided a fairly consistent, often buttery-smooth OS experience. Inspired by webOS no doubt, but realized as something unto itself. But it’s not a BlackBerry OS experience and someone coming from a Bold 9700 won’t have the same instant connection to a PlayBook that an iPhone user would have to their new iPad. (In fact, given the experience of the PlayBook, every BlackBerry user should be required to take back 50% of the nasty comments they’ve made in the last year about iPad being a “toy”).

The Honeycomb experience, while often spectacular, was far more disjointed, with different parts working in different ways. That the trademark lack of consistency has persisted to Android 3.0 makes me think webOS designer-come-Android UI savior Matias Duarte either wasn’t given enough time to work on the UI or isn’t being allowed the impact he should, both of which are troubling thoughts. It’s far more of a desktop-style interface than iPad, and could allow for a lot more power, but it’s caught at the moment between that desktop UI and tablet conventions, between where Android on smartphones was and where it wants to be. It’s unfinished to the point that Google has taken the unprecedented step of breaking from their “openy” model and not releasing the Honeycomb source.

The PlayBook and Xoom have so much potential, so many great ingredients, but no fit and finish — they were just put out on the shelves without seeing any time in the oven.

Say what you want about Apple — and we all say plenty — but most of the time they nail the fit and finish. They don’t provide all the features everyone wants, they try to control the experience to a sometimes untenable degree, but what functionality they include and systems they design are mostly elegant, easy to use, and fully baked. The email, calendar, and contacts worked even if you didn’t own an iPhone. The dock port and 3.5mm headphone jack were functional out of the box, and it didn’t need to be sent back to Apple to have the radio swapped out. (Insert antennagate joke here.) They even chose the embarrassment of 10 month white iphone 4 delay rather than releasing a product they deemed unacceptable.

Maybe RIM and Google/Motorola felt compelled to release their tablets before they were ready. Maybe they value impatient investors more than the people who buy their products. That’s too bad. You can’t just bolt on polish like you can an LTE radio, or integrate customer experience like you can a secure email client. These values have to be part of the corporate culture and development cycle from day one. (Apple likewise faces similar struggles to add functionality like fast app switching, something webOS got right from day one.)

There are a lot more tablets coming, from RIM, Motorola, and many, many — many — others. But as I’ve said before, the competitors can’t just bring specs (or content) to an experience fight, and especially not when they’re unbaked.

The white iPhone 4 is probably launching tomorrow. I say probably because you wouldn’t know it from Apple. After being announced and showcased at WWDC 2010 — some 10 months ago — and then being delayed, delayed again, and unceremoniously removed from every product and store page since, the white iPhone 4 is yet to return. You can’t see it on Apple.com. You can’t find it for pre-order at Apple Online. Apple hasn’t even seen fit to put out a press release saying the white iPhone 4 is finally going on sale tomorrow.

Could everyone have gotten it wrong and Apple isn’t going to pull the trigger tomorrow or this week even? We’ve seen the white iPhone 4 show up in online inventory systems in Europe, the US, and Canada. We’ve seen reports of the actual boxed devices arriving at resellers — even getting sold prematurely. Given that’s why Apple doesn’t like unreleased products sitting in uncontrolled inventory, it’s hard to imagine it not going on sale and soon.

Could Apple be embarrassed it took so long and just want to get the white iPhone 4 out the door with as little fuss and attention as possible? Apple is a company, not a person. They don’t have emotions, they have sales goals. Not announcing is not how you move product, especially not product you’ve spent significant time and money to bring to market. Especially not product that a percentage of your customer base has been waiting for.

Could Apple simply not want hype or crowds or excitement or lines this time? Given the difficulty in bringing the white iPhone 4 to market, could they not have ramped up production capacity? We’ve seen with previous launches that Apple doesn’t like to send potential customers home disappointed. By not announcing the release they limit the amount of people who know about it, artificially constraining demand to meet existing supply.

I’ll be heading over to my local Apple Store tomorrow. Hopefully there will be some white iPhones for sale. Hopefully there will be enough if a lot of you folks do likewise (though it doesn’t look like you’re planning on it.

Apple is suing Samsung, in part for copying the look and feel of iPhone and iPad for their Galaxy S line of phones and tablets. The suit involves both patents and trademarks. This has led to some questions and some backlash.

Should Apple not compete rather than litigate? Patents exist to offer protection; trademarks must be defended or they’re lost. Apple is a public company that has to represent the interests of its shareholders. While Apple has previously brought patent litigation against both HTC and Motorola, this is the first time they’ve sued for trademark infringement, the first time they’ve alleged that their look and feel has been stolen.

Didn’t Apple copy the look and feel of Samsung’s F700? No, of course not. While the F700 was announced at CeBit 2006, it wasn’t shown until after the iPhone debuted at Macworld 2007. In any event, devices like the 2005 Palm LifeDrive predate both, and other devices used rows and columns of icons, and handheld formats going back further still. Apple’s suit isn’t about a rounded rectangle with a grid of apps, it’s about a multitude of design decisions that they believe, taken together, cross the line into infringement.

What about Steve Jobs saying great artists steal? Jobs didn’t say that, he quoted Picasso who said that. Neither were referring to copying, however. They were referring to ideas. “Make it simple” is an idea worth stealing. “Make it look like X” is not. Inspiration is one thing, the tiny details of execution another. Neither Apple nor Picasso were known to work in tracing paper.

Looking at the Galaxy S line and the TouchWiz UI skin, it’s hard to argue Samsung didn’t deliberately try to make their devices look like Apple’s. “Knock offs” are a common strategy in many markets and across many product types. They work. Sometimes people even prefer them to the originals. However, they sometimes run afoul of the law.

Is the Samsung less a Captivate or Fascinate and more a Replicate or Duplicate? That’s what the courts will have to decide.

Today Apple released both iOS 4.3.2 and iOS 4.2.7. The first was for almost all iOS devices except the Verizon iPhone. The second was for the Verizon iPhone. Like iPad last year, which shipped with iOS 3.2 and didn’t unify with the rest of the iOS family until iOS 4.2, the Verizon iPhone shipped with iOS 4.2.5/4.2.6 and won’t unify with the rest of the iOS family until some future update, perhaps not until iOS 5/5.x.

Yet despite this fragmentation — or more properly bifurcation — of the iOS software, Apple still delivered both updates at the same time, across the world, and across both major US carriers, AT&T and Verizon.

Compare this with Google who took weeks and weeks (and weeks) to bring Android Gingerbread to their own phone, the Nexus One, and even then released it as a trickle update that took weeks more to become available to all devices (including mine.) And that’s nothing compared to how long it’s taking for non-Google Android phones to get Gingerbread, to even get confirmation from their manufacturers and carriers that they’re in fact getting Gingerbread.

Compare this with HP/Palm webOS where despite Palm’s previous assurances, older devices probably won’t get webOS 2.x, and even the just released Palm Pre 2 on Verizon sounds like it might never go from 2.0.x to 2.1, never mind a unified release across all devices, on all carriers, at the same time.

Compare this to Windows Phone which, despite Microsoft’s claims of speedy and steady updates, pre-update updates have caused havoc, actual updates have been delayed, and everyone from the community to Microsoft itself seems frustrated to the point of fuming.

There’s no money in free updates. Carriers and manufacturers would typically prefer you get the new software by buying new hardware. Google and Microsoft have to contend with this carrier and manufacturer disinterest. HP/Palm has to deal with carrier aspect. All of them have to deal with partners who lack incentive because they don’t believe consumer good-will and customer service alone constitute incentive.

Apple has to deal with this as well. But they don’t care. Since 2007 they’ve pushed out update after update, whole new iOS versions, major point updates, and minor bug and security fixes alike. They’ve been relentless.

Even over the last 2 years, with different branches for iPad and iPhone/iPod touch and now for most iOS devices and Verizon iPhone, they’ve kept pushing them out. They’ve been unstoppable.

That’s what Apple customers are used to now. And it’s something the competition is letting become a competitive advantage.

When Steve Jobs called the original iPad “magical”, there was some collective eye-rolling and amusement in the technology community (even among some of the TiPb staff.) Now, Steve Jobs is far from a silly man and Apple has one of the savviest marketing teams in the industry, so why did it feel like there was such a disconnect between the word “magic” and the iPad?

Probably the same reason the original iPad’s success caught so many by surprise. No one, not analysts, not journalist, and I’m guessing not even Apple saw 15 million sold in 9 months, or lineups on launch day that skewed so far from the typical early geek adopter demo.

As many have said before, Apple knew they had something but they weren’t quite sure what they had yet. iPad 2 made things a bit clearer. Some decried it as an incremental improvement, much as they decried the original iPad as a “just a big iPhone”. Those are both true statements as far as they go but they miss the point because being a better iPad and being a bigger iPhone are the point.

In a recent interview, The Daily Mail and Apple Senior VP of design, Jony Ive discuss this:

the iPad reminds me of Arthur C Clarke’s remark that ‘any technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic’. I mentioned this to Jony and he told me they were thinking exactly that when the iPad was going through the studio.

It’s why Apple doesn’t disclose RAM and GPU of a dozen other technical details about their mainstream, mobile devices, and why they focus so much on experience (rather than raw specs or content). It’s why Steve Jobs can’t help but smile through every iPad demo — he’s having fun. Using the iPad is fun. The experience is fun.

That’s why iPad 2 is thinner, lighter, and faster. Not because those are good technical bullet points, but because it makes the experience better. When the scrolling is smooth, when the frame rate is fluid, when web pages don’t need to constantly reload, when any of a million little things that could pull you out of the browser or app — that remind you you are using a device — are gone, the experience is better. The experience is more fun.

My mother and sister both bought iPads last week (my sister upgraded from last year’s.) The next day my mother’s newspaper was later (as usual). Normally that would cue a polite but firm phone call. That day, however, my sister found my mother happily sitting and reading the app version of the paper on her brand new iPad 2. Today my sister called me to tell me about the baby shower she filmed and edited on her iPad 2. Both are, for lack of a more delicate term, not computer savvy. Both require frequent tech support, even after switching from PC to Mac. They don’t for iPad. (One of the most amazing acts of modern computing I’ve seen recently was a 2 year old showing his grandmother how to use his family’s iPad.)

At no point did any of them, mother, sister, grandchild, grandmother ask anyone about RAM or CPU or OS or any of that. They didn’t care (or cared only that they didn’t have to care.) They didn’t even ask about the aluminum and glass because it was effectively invisible to them. They didn’t have to manage. They only had to use it, and while “advanced” can be argued, it was more than sufficient.

For many people, people who aren’t tech savvy, who look at multi-componant PCs from Big Box retailers with a mix of horror and humiliation, who struggle with the discomfort of being bound to a desk, the disconnection of keyboards and mice, and the daunting complexity of legacy computing concepts, it’s liberating. It’s empowering. It’s magical.

Go ahead, roll your eyes, be amused, mock if you have to but then consider this — what better design goal for iPad could Apple have possibly had?

UPDATE: Apple has just said exactly this in their first iPad 2 commercial, We Believe.

In January 2007 Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone. Summer 2007 he announced its release date and “sweet” web apps to go with it. In Fall 2007 he introduced the iPod touch and iTunes Store app. Spring 2008 brought iOS 2 (then iPhone OS 2.0) and the App Store. Summer 2008 saw iPhone 3G and MobileMe. Fall 2008 was iPod touch 2. Spring 2009 was iOS 3. Summer 2009 was iPhone 3GS. Fall 2009 was iPod touch 3. January 2010, iPad. Spring 2010, iOS 4. Summer 2010, iPhone 4. Fall 2010, iPod touch 4 and Apple TV 2. Spring 2011, iPad and…

Nothing. Maybe.

Momentum is a fickle thing. You can gain and lose it in the blink of an eye. For four years iOS software and hardware have been setting the pace for mobile. From a single app-less iPhone in 2007, iOS has grown to encompass iPhone, iPod touch, iPad and Apple TV and a host of supporting software and services. The original iPhone was a true revolution, obsoleting then market-leaders Palm, Microsoft, RIM, and Symbian. They never saw it coming, denied it was happening, and then failed for years to frame anything close to a coherent response. And while they were spinning, Apple hit them again with the App Store. And again with the iPad.

Windows Phone has rebooted but is still in early days and has struggled to provide timely updates. Even with HP’s deep pockets and huge reach Palm has been slow to get new devices out the door. BlackBerry is counting on a tablet to bridge the gap between their phones of the past and superphones of the future. And Nokia is in the middle of a shotgun wedding with Microsoft. With the Verizon iPhone in the US and white iPhone 4 slated for spring, Apple could easily skate another 3 months in that competitive landscape.

But not in a competitive landscape that includes Android.

Originally shown off as a BlackBerry or Windows Mobile Standard competitor, Android rapidly changed focus post-iPhone and came straight at Apple. While the G1 was clearly unfinished they began to hit their stride with Droid. Half way through iPhone 3GS’ product cycle, Nexus One actually took the lead in some areas. An inspirational device, it was way ahead of previous Android phones and showed where the platform was going for the next year. iPhone 4 was Apple’s answer.

According to rumors, however, Apple may not preview iOS 5 this spring and may not introduce an iPhone 5 this summer. If these rumors turn out to be true, Apple will be facing 15+ months without a new phone or major OS update, and 3+ months of relative stillness in the incredibly fast moving market.

Meanwhile, Google’s “openy” Android will just keep coming. While Nexus S turned out to be more summation of the past year than indicator of the next, spring has sprung seemingly a dozen more with dual core, LTE, and 3D. Whether any of these new Android features are particularly compelling or not, they’re still new features, new phones. They’re still news.

Come June AT&T and other carrier contracts will be up and for the first time in 4 years there won’t be a new iPhone to drive renewal. For the first time people who just want a new iPhone, the way they’ve been accustomed to getting each year’s new fashion, won’t have one waiting for them. Existing owners accustomed to a software refresh, a breath of fresh air into their older devices, won’t be getting a major new version of iOS. Developers won’t have had several months with new APIs and won’t have a slew of new apps ready to take advantage of them.

Whether or not finishing Mac OS X Lion has caused a delay in iOS 5 the way iOS has caused delays for Mac OS X in the past, whether or not a delay in IOS 5 has caused a delay in iPhone 5, whether or not there are issues with components or engineering, or absolutely nothing but Apple’s will to schedule it so, for the first time since 2007 we’re facing… a break in Apple’s pace.

Momentum is a fickle thing. Come June there may be no lineups, no race to iTunes’ update button.

What then?

People with good sources at Apple are saying there will be no iOS 5 preview this April and no iPhone 5 in June and that might be so. However, many of the reasons being giving to support this idea are just… nebulous at best.

First, they aren’t “delays”. You can’t delay something that’s never been announced. We’ve already gone over why Apple not announcing hardware in the WWDC press release is meaningless — they never have announced hardware in WWDC press releases but have never-the-less shown off the new iPhone there ever since 2007.

There’s been some talk that with the Verizon iPhone launch, Apple doesn’t need “another” launch so soon this year. However, the Verizon iPhone launch was US only. For the rest of the world — and make no mistake, Apple sells globally — the Verizon iPhone launch was very literally a non-event.

A white iPhone 4 launch would be international but would also be for existing hardware — hardware originally announced in June 2010. It will make some buzz and get some sales, but it probably won’t provide significant enough momentum to really place-hold a June iPhone 5 launch.

What strategic reason could Apple have to delay iPhone 5? They aren’t waiting on LTE anymore than they waited on a Retina Display to release iPad 2. LTE is primarily a US-only, Verizon-only story and nothing to risk tens of millions of international unit sales on. Is there a feeling nothing besides LTE is “big” enough for an iPhone 5 bump? I’d argue an A5 chipset (2x performance, 9x graphics) is as significant as the bump from iPhone 3G to iPhone 3GS. Add in a 4-inch screen, HSPA+ radio (which would have wider support than LTE), metal back, etc. and Apple could easily release that in June as a much more impressive update. (Just don’t call it iPhone 4S.)

Would breaking with their past June release schedule change things up and keep the competition off balance? Maybe — if they released earlier than June. Releasing later doesn’t seem to provide as big a disruption, not when Android devices are already shipping or about to ship with NFC, dual-core chipsets (and built-in espresso makers for all I know…)

Same with iOS 5. Citing the “preview the future of OS X and iOS” line as an indicator we won’t get an April iOS 5 preview this year the way we got an April iOS 4 preview last year. (Because it will only be previewed at WWDC). However, Mac OS X Lion has already been previewed — has already been released in beta in fact. If OS X can be previewed before the WWDC “preview” then certainly so can iOS.

Apple could release this fall or they could release next year. They could be whispering that now to re-set expectations, or even just to throw said competition off guard. Apple could release iPhone 5 and iOS 5 at the September iPod + iTunes event but why would they? What advantage does it give them?

[Thanks to Phil Nickinson for the video suggestion!]

Will we get an iPhone 5 in June? We’ve gotten a new iPhone announced at WWDC every year since 2007 yet right after Apple announced this year’s WWDC rumors started to fly it would be new hardware free. Could these rumors be based on inside information, or could it just be en vogue to predict delays on all Apple products? iPad 2 was delayed, right? Only no, it wasn’t. Now rumor has it iOS 5 is delayed and iPhone 5 are delayed. Only will they be?

If there isn’t any inside information at play here than the crux of the “iPhone 5 delayed” rumors is Apple emphasizing software and not hardware in their WWDC 2011 announcement press release. Apple puts out one of these WWDC announcements every year, so let’s take a look:

• WWDC 2010: Apple emphasizes iPad development and iPhone OS 4 (iOS 4), we get iPhone 4 [PR link]
• WWDC 2009: Apple emphasizes Snow Leopard and iPhone OS 3.0 development, we get iPhone 3GS [PR link]
• WWDC 2008: Apple emphasizes OS X Leopard and iPhone OS X, we get iPhone 3G [PR Link]
• WWDC 2007: Apple emphasizes OS X, we get iPhone (pre-announced at Macworld) [PR link]

All those press releases emphasized software, no hardware, and yet we still got a new iPhone. Every year. So again, if Apple isn’t leaking news that there’s won’t be an iPhone 5 at WWDC in order to re-set expectations, then a WWDC press release in and of itself is meaningless as an indicator.

Rumors are fun. Rumors fill news cycles. However there’s a growing pattern of rumors about Apple product delays that just seem… increasingly inorganic. Rumor. Link. Smash rumor. Link. Rinse. Repeat.

iOS 5 and iPhone 5 may well be delayed. But I’ll believe it when I don’t see it.

UPDATE: Both TechCrunch (which has a mixed record) and the Loop (which has a good record) are saying no new hardware, including no iPhone 5, at WWDC this year.

UPDATE 2: John Paczkowski from All Things D is also suggesting expectations be re-calibrated.

Google won’t be releasing the source code for Android 3.0 Honeycomb any time soon. (For an excellent overview of why that is and what it means, see Jerry Hildenbrand’s article over at our sibling site, Android Central.) What makes this interesting for TiPb is that, for a while now, Google has used the term “open” as a hammer to differentiate themselves from Apple, iOS, and the iPhone. From Eric Schmidt’s “completely open” quips to Vic Gundotra I/O smack-talk to Andy Rubin’s now-ironic tweet, it’s been clear from the start that “open” wasn’t a development philosophy for Google so much as a business and marketing strategy. It was a brilliant if disingenuous move that rallied many hardcore free and open-source software advocates to their cause (and platform) and got a bevy of tech writers to skewer Apple for being equally and oppositely “closed”.

That it was business and marketing rather than philosophy was fairly clear from the start — “open” is such a nebulous term to begin with. Open to whom and in what way? Even if we restrict ourselves to open-source, Android was never Stallman-class open, GPL licensed and patent unencumbered. It was never even Mozilla-class open, where the source was freely available even during development phases (most of us couldn’t download, compile, and contribute back to Gingerbread before the Nexus S debuted). It was Google-class open, which meant it was only released when it benefitted Google, and only really meant for manufacturers and carriers. We’ve spoken about it plenty of times here at TiPb, and so has Android Central. (Phil Nickinson and I even did a special podcast on it back in October.)

It’s kind of like that popsicle you get at the corner store — it’s not chocolate, it’s chocolaty. Android was never open. It was openy.

That’s fine. It’s even good. It let Google make the arrangements they needed to make with manufacturers and carriers to get Android accepted and deployed at the scale it enjoys today. An Android that didn’t let manufacturers lock down bootloaders and carriers lock out sideloaders, that didn’t allow for bloatware and feature removal, wouldn’t be the number one fastest growing phone OS on the planet. (webOS, though proprietary, is arguably far more meaningfully open to developers and users than Android, but didn’t get anywhere near the carrier support.)

Likewise, if Google has open-sourced their search algorithms, AdWords and AdSense code, and internal infrastructure programming it would likely have been bought by Oracle instead of being sued by them.

Apple’s the same way. They protect their revenue streams — their interfaces and designs, products and presentations, and they open source WebKit and a large number of other ancillary projects. Both are for-profit companies after all, tightly controlling the areas they dominate with proprietary code and fragmenting those they don’t with free software. Google simply chose to deliberately use (is mis-used) the term “open” as a way to counter-program Apple…

And because of Honeycomb it’s come back to bite them in the @$$ this week.

That’s too bad. Android is a fantastic OS and is getting better and better with each iteration. It’s powerful, customizable, and functional in ways iOS simply can’t be at the moment. (Hopefully Matias Duarte will soon give it an interface to match, if Google can get those 40 shades of blue out of his way.)

It’s just not now nor has it ever been “open” — it has been and remains “openy”.

Now that Schmidt can’t get away with “completely open”, Gundotra needs to fear for a future of his own creation, and Rubin’s make command will error out with file not found, maybe we’ll get less rhetoric from Google and Apple both. Ultimately I don’t care who’s more open or more integrated — I just care who makes me the better phone and tablet.

There’s been talk of an Amazon super-Kindle running Android OS since… about 5 minutes after Steve Jobs left the stage following the original iPad introduction. Now that Amazon has launched their Appstore (TM in contention), that talk is heating up again. And why not? It’s an obvious play. I’d be surprised if Amazon hasn’t had one in the labs for a while now (just like I would have been surprised if Facebook hadn’t been working on a phone…)

Amazon has content like iTunes, including (in the US at least — and more on that in a moment), ebooks, movies, TV shows, music, and now apps. They’ve made hardware before with the Kindle line.

But they’re hardly the only one.

Sony makes phones, owns a movie studio and record label, and almost everything else in place to launch a similarly competitive offering but they’ve been struggling of late and don’t seem to be that Walkman strutting, Trinitron innovating Sony of old. Samsung, however, is coming on strongly with their Galaxy S range of devices in assorted sizes and their Hub media services.

What Amazon has is a single login, credit card holding advantage. Both Google and Facebook could probably match Amazon on logins but they’re internet based advertising companies (what they sell is users’ attention). Amazon is an internet based commerce company (what they sell are goods). That’s an important difference. Most importantly, Amazon has the only checkout system in the world to rival iTunes, in terms of both one-click ease of use (Amazon actually patented one-click) and sheer number of credit cards on file.

Even so, they will be “just another Android tablet”. It’s no coincidence all these competitors — real and rumored — are being built on Android. Google has done to mobile what Microsoft did to PCs — make an OS that’s so great OEMs and VARs can’t justify the effort, investment, and resources necessary to make their own mobile OS anymore. (That’s a good sign for the maturity of the space, though a loss for those of us still hoping to see more innovation like a true Facebook or Mozilla mobile OS.) That means that market, skin, and branding aside, Amazon (and others) will benefit from huge economies of ecosystem but will also have to face competition within their own platform and struggle for differentiation and attention in the market. (They’ll also be facing internal tension since they’re providing Kindle and other apps for their competition — Apple doesn’t make iBooks or GarageBand for Android.)

Let’s say for the sake of argument Amazon’s brand is big and strong enough to really stand out from the pack –it still only gives Amazon some pieces of the puzzle.

Apple is offering an almost 360-degrees of integration. Everyone else has some part of that same story but no one else has all of it yet. RIM and HP/Palm have integrated hardware/software but lack the global checkout system of Apple or Amazon. Google has great services but their checkout is lackluster, their content still in process, and they’re almost always at the mercy of their hardware and carrier partners. Microsoft also has a desktop OS and previous consumer electronics like Xbox that could help with a halo effect, but none of them provided the existing accessory base and upgrade path iPod did, and Microsoft’s entire mobile strategy has been slow to the point of abdication. And almost no one else has anything like Apple’s retail stores.

So while upcoming mobile competitors will be bringing specs to an experience fight, Amazon and their hugely successful ecomm business will at least be bringing content as well. But it’s still an experience fight.

At the end of the day — or more appropriately at the moment of consumer decision making — you can’t match Apple on content any more than you can match them on specs. You have to match them on the feeling of the person in the Apple Store, hands-on with the device, absent any distracting logos on the bezel, easily obtaining and joyously not only using apps, but having the device become the app.

It’s a visceral response from mainstream consumers, an ability to engage with technology in a new, more understandable and incredibly intimate way that’s selling iPads, and that’s what needs to be competed against.

Manton has an interesting post up where he theorizes that a lot of the problems we’ve seen in the App Store, from the across the board 30% revenue cut Apple requires for paid apps, to in-app purchases, to iAds, and now subscriptions can all be traced back to Apple’s decision to host free apps for free. In other words, that the cost of approving, hosting, marketing, and delivering free apps is high enough that Apple is struggling and stumbling to make enough off paid apps and content to cover it.

When Steve Jobs said it, offering free apps for so little seemed almost foolish, like Apple was compensating for the high 30% by giving too good a deal to free apps. Why not charge some hosting fee? Or why not give up exclusive distribution and let free apps be installed directly by the user without forcing everything through the App Store? Unlimited bandwidth, promotion in the store, and everything else just for the $99 dev program fee was a pretty good deal. And now I wonder if Apple hasn’t been backpedaling ever since, trying to make up for that mistake.

So in order to run the App Store at just over break-even — as Apple reports they during their financial results — they need to earn enough off paid apps to defray the cost of free apps. They also have to make sure they don’t lose revenue — they can’t let developers offer free apps, shouldered by Apple, with ads that make money for Google or that use subscriptions or other forms of outside payments as a way to circumvent the revenue sharing. (Which is why we said from the beginning Apple couldn’t charge less than 30% for subscriptions or every paid and in-app purchasing app that could would just switch to subscriptions in order to keep more of the revenue.)

Are free apps a burden? Apple doesn’t say so it’s difficult to tell. It’s possible the cost of approving, hosting, marketing, and delivering all those free apps while not insignificant is easily covered by paid app purchase. (I’m not counting profits from hardware sales because Apple is going to want App Store to be profitable, if only barely, on its own.) If it is, then Apple certainly didn’t make a mistake and their platform has benefited tremendously from having free apps in the ecosystem. If free apps are costing Apple significant money and resources, however, and if that cost is increasing as they reach milestones like hundreds of thousands of apps and billions of downloads, then what does Apple do?

Manton’s answer is for Apple to allow side-loading of apps — to allow developers to sell and users to install apps from outside the App Store on iOS the same way they do now on the Mac. That would take the hosting burden away from Apple… but it would create a new burden on consumers.

Sure, it would be a good answer for some developers and power users but certainly not for all of them — even most of them. Many developers value the trust relationship Apple has created for users. Successfully creating a place where users feel safe and secure enough to buy an app and know they won’t get malware or be defrauded, and can delete it easily if they don’t like it is invaluable (even if not always valued.) That simply didn’t exist before the App Store (it certainly wasn’t the case with Palm OS and the Treo, which was side-load heaven and mainstream user hell.)

And not to be too cliched about it but if my mother couldn’t find an app on the App Store she would either simply not realize it existed or bug me to help her side load it. (Or she would call me asking if “Amazon Kandle” was safe to buy via “PayPul”.) That’s not an Apple solution, and it’s a crummy mainstream experience overall.

So what is the answer? Getting rid of free apps and creating a baseline of $0.99, like iTunes music of old, doesn’t seem realistic. The genie is out of the bottle. Given how Apple has added in-app purchases, reversed their policy and allowed in-app purchases in free apps, added iAds, added subscriptions, they certainly don’t seem to have found it yet.

[Manton via Daring Fireball]

I’ve come to a realization: I hate my Apple earbuds. They’re more like a medieval torture contraption for my ears than a comfortable manner in which to listen to music. Apple has Jonathan Ive and some of the most sought after designers in the world on staff, taking chunks of glass and metal and molding them into a devices that aren’t just phones or players or tablets but works of art. Yet the standard earbuds that come with these beautiful pieces of art are ungainly, ill-fitting, and just plain annoying to wear for any length of time.

Here’s the the thing — the Apple earbuds are just way to large for a smaller person’s ears. After a few songs, the large round earbuds start causing me a good deal of pain. I end up with the choice of either suffering through the pain or placing them so lightly in my ears that the earbuds are about to fall out (not that they don’t fall out eventually anyway!)

The shape and size of the earbuds for iPod and iPhone has not changed in years. The diameter and roundness of the earbud is not anywhere close to ergonomic. You would think that over the years, and with all the complaints, Apple would have redesigned them into something more inspired. Even the Apple mouse has been shown more love over the years! To add insult to injury you can buy some Apple in-ear headphones for $80, which means that someone at Apple knows that this would be preferable to the circular torture disks that come in the box.

Now it’s not all bad. For a pair of stock headphones I do find that the sound is acceptable and, since the introduction of the iPhone, Apple has added a mic and control button with increasing amounts of functionality. It’s just that they get so much right it’s especially frustrating when they get something wrong for so long.

So am I just being difficult in wanting them to also be comfortable enough to use for more than a few songs? How do you feel about your Apple stock headphones?

Last night word broke that AT&T was sending SMS messages and email to customers who didn’t have tethering plans but AT&T suspected were tethering via Jailbreak apps like MyWi. In their messages, AT&T offers 3 choices:

1. Stop tethering
2. Voluntarily change to a paid tethering plan (and lose unlimited data if you were grandfathers in)
3. Be forcibly changed to a paid tethering plan by AT&T (and lose unlimited data)

It’s still uncertain if and how AT&T knows if a customer is tethering via Jailbreak. Theories include everything from deep packet inspection to use of WAP vs. ISP pipes to counting TTL numbers, to “they’re bluffing” and simply targeting high bandwidth users.

Regardless, AT&T seems fairly serious about it this time. We heard from one reader who called in and tried to explain away high data usage on Netflix and other streaming media services, only to be told the AT&T tethering team would look into.

Tethering team?

While AT&T is able to charge what they want for any services they offer, it hits incredible unfairness buttons in consumers when they feel they’re being charged double to use the same bits. With unlimited plans it’s somewhat understandable — AT&T’s network would likely collapse in a puddle if everyone tethered all the data they could. With a 2GB plan, however, bits should be bits. How about this?

1. Offer tethering for free on the 2GB plan
2. Offer an extra 2GB for $15.
3. Offer reasonable overage charges beyond that.

It lets bits be bits, it offers a fair way for power users to get more data, and it provides fair protection from the heaviest 1% of users who would put a huge hurt on the network.

(Disclosure: I’m on Rogers, they’ve so far offered tethering for free on any account with 1GB – 6GB of data a month since iOS 3, and personal hotspot is now free as well since iOS 4.3.)

Have you spoken with AT&T and their tethering team yet? What’s your situation right now?

Chris posted Apple’s new “if you don’t have an iPhone” ads earlier and they didn’t really work for me. Apple usually nails their marketing and these were somehow… qualitatively different. Watching them again I think I figured out why. These weren’t commercials for apps, music, or books, not entirely at least. These were, in their latter halves, commercials for App Store, iTunes Store, and iBooks Store. This wasn’t Apple differentiating solely based on their playing, listening, and reading experiences. This was Apple showing off their massive and still growing content catalogs, and the ease with which that content can be acquired and enjoyed. And that’s fine in theory but in practice they just didn’t seem to come off as well as past commercials. At least not to me and I’m an admitted enthusiast.

When the original iPhone launched, Apple’s commercials focused on internet and activities that could be done on the phone — the web, email, iPod, maps, etc. They showed you what you could do and most importantly, how easily you could do it. The second part was key. Hardly anything they showed was new to existing smartphone users but in practice, but the UI made it better and more accessible than ever before. And Apple wanted to show that.

Following iPhone 3G and the App Store, Apple began their famous App for That series which continued with iPhone 3GS and App for Everything. Again there was some brief education about how to use the App Store in the commercials, and some crowing about the huge and growing numbers of apps available, but the focus was undeniably on the apps.

By iPhone 4 competing platforms began to get competitive app catalogs and Google’s Android Market was gaining momentum, so Apple shifted back to features like FaceTime, Retina Display, battery life, etc.

Since competing phones have or will start to match those iPhone 4 features, however, I wondered what Apple would do next. I thought they might go back to apps, specifically games like Infinity Blade that hadn’t shown up yet on rival platforms. I think they still might. I wouldn’t be surprised to see an Infinity Blade, Real Racing 2 HD, or more likely a GarageBand commercial for iPad 2, and when the Apple A5 chipset presumably hits iPhone 5 this summer, I’d be surprised if we didn’t see just that. Apple has made it clear they’re “post-PC” and re-framing the debate from specs to experiences. They’re also really good at writing really good mobile software, which can’t be said about everyone in the market — yet.

But that’s not what Apple did, at least not in these commercials. There was a brief Two is Better than One stint to launch the iPhone on a second US network, fun-house mirrored by Verizon and AT&T spots, then they went right back to features but shifted to ecommerce — App Store, iTunes Store, and iBooks Store. No one else has that diversity of content in one place, in as many countries, available with one-click ease under a single account login. (Sony should but they’re lost in the wilderness at this point, Amazon might when they launch their app store and link it to MP3 and Kindle, and Philp Berne says Samsung does though I’m not sure it’s iTunes level yet.)

Like battery life, Apple’s online marketplaces aren’t obvious choices for a commercial. I’m not sure how many consumers weigh which phone has the best stores before buying. Sure, like great battery life it’s what lets you do what you want to do — play, listen, watch, read, but it comes off as being Apple-centric and not consumer-centric. They’re ads for stores and not for stuff, and those never seem to come off as well.

The iPad 2 is out and while many have figured out what iPad 2 they should buy or whether or not they should upgrade from the original iPad, I’ve decided to pass on the iPad 2. That’s right, unlike most of our staff, I plan on sticking with my original iPad. Hit the break to hear my reasons for not jumping on the iPad 2 bandwagon.

It isn’t my main device

I know a lot of users can get away with just an iPad. This simply isn’t a viable solution for me. I have two devices that are vital for me. The first is my actual Mac. The iPad 2 still can’t replace it. I spend a lot of time writing, uploading images, working in Creative Suite, and editing video. While I may be able to write and edit video on an iPad, I can’t do a lot of the functions I do everyday. Not to mention I can whip out an article on my Mac a lot faster than I can on the iPad. It’s more than usable but for lengthy pieces, an iPad just won’t do.

Until the iPad can stand on its own without relying on a physical computer, it shouldn’t be considered a replacement even for the modest user. Apple does claim it’s an “in between” to be fair. I guess I just haven’t found an “in between” use for it yet within my own ecosystem.

My second essential device is my iPhone. I depend on it to conduct business on a daily basis. It also does most of the basic functions an iPad can do. Sure the iPad is more comfortable to type on and you have the advantage of having a larger screen but it essentially runs the same software. While I may “prefer” reading news feeds and books on my iPad due to the better screen real estate, my iPhone gets the job done just as well. The difference is I could do without the iPad, but I can’t do without my iPhone.

I’m not a heavy gamer

I know there are a lot of hardcore iOS gamers out there. From what I’ve read and seen, the iPad 2 is aimed at you. The graphics improvements and speed enhancements seem to put it over the edge when it comes to gaming. My idea of gaming is playing Tiny Wings and Angry Birds. While Infinity Blade and other games look awesome on the iPad 2, I just never really sit down to play them all the way through. Heck, I’m a huge Harry Potter freak and I’ve yet to even finish Lego Harry Potter. So for me, the gaming improvements aren’t a huge selling point. Angry Birds works just fine on my original iPad.

Wait, my iPhone 4 already does that

Like many of you, I also own an iPhone 4. Apple has added FaceTime to the iPad 2. While that’s all good and fine, my iPhone already does it. I barely use it now so I don’t see this being a feature I would necessarily jump up and down over. And all the features of iOS 4.3, yeah I can have those too. I actually still find myself picking up my iPhone a lot more than I do the iPad. I really only use the iPad when I want to read lengthy content or watch a video. On our recent trip to Florida, it was definitely more enjoyable watching movies on the iPad during our flight than on a tiny 3.5″ screen. But again, my original iPad plays movies just fine.

There’s a jailbreak for that!

Come on, you knew I was going to say it at some point! And in this case, the one feature I would actually find useful I already have on my original iPad. That feature would be display mirroring. There’s a nifty little jailbreak app called Display Out that will give the original iPad this capability. Jailbroken iPads have had this capability since just shortly after the launch of the original iPad. You don’t need an iPad 2 if you’re willing to jailbreak.

The original version can be had on the cheap

If the differences between the first generation iPad and the iPad 2 aren’t a huge deal to you, you can pick up an original iPad at an amazing price. Not only did Apple drop the prices by $100, but tons of people are trying to off them all over the internet. Apple also has refurbs available online that are another $70 off the original price. Now we’re talking almost $200 off the original price.

We had one iPad in our home for almost a year now. It’s always worked out alright as both of us work opposite schedules. Plus we both have iPhone 4s. If one of us is on the iPad, the other just jumps on one of the many other devices we have floating around. We each have our own pages on it with our own folders. It’s always worked out just fine but now I’m actually thinking of picking up another one. (Just picked up a 32GB refurb from Apple for only $429.) In the Chicago area, I’ve seen 64GB wifi models of the original IPad going for as little as $450 on sites such as Craigslist. And most are in mint condition, if not almost brand new. These are devices people paid $700+ for not even a year ago. So if the new features of the iPad 2 aren’t terribly important to you, you may save quite a bit of cash picking up a lightly used original iPad from someone locally. The iPad 2 may have an edge but no one can deny that the original iPad is still a very capable device.

Pass

I guess my main point is that I really haven’t found a compelling reason to upgrade to the iPad 2. A higher resolution display or a higher storage capacity may have convinced me. I already assumed we wouldn’t see a resolution increase just yet. Display cost is still an issue which would make it hard for Apple to stay at the same price points. Not to mention formatting issues for already existing applications. I’m hoping for iPad 3 we will get both of these things. But until that time, I’ll stick with the original.

It occurred to me recently that Apple is successfully reframing the market so their competitors look like they’re bringing specs to an experience fight. From hammering “post PC” in their iPad 2 introduction to the time spent on GarageBand and iMovie, Apple was clearly trying to not only raise expectations for what mobile devices should look and work like, but how they should be considered. They’re a feeling, an interaction, a smile, a riff, a clip. They’re jazz.

2x faster, 9x better graphics, thinner, lighter. Apple said that much but beyond dual core and Apple A5 we didn’t get the name of the CPU or GPU, much less how much RAM was wrapped around them. Contrast this to the Tegra-touting, Qualcomm-carrying on competition and they’re pretty much having two different conversations at this point.

It’s safe to say everyone is beginning to understand the velocity of tablets but so far only Apple has proven to understand the direction. That may soon change but until it does, checkboxes won’t be sufficient to differentiate from or compete with the feeling of using an iPad. At least not for the tens of millions of consumers that make up the mainstream.

When Steve Jobs announced iPad 2 on Wednesday he listed a lot of great features and numbers but perhaps none as impressive as the release date — March 11, 2011 in the US. That’s less than 2 weeks between announcement and release.

Last year it took longer. The Original iPad was announced in January and released in early and late April (Wi-Fi and 3G respectively). As a new product and category Apple needed to give developers time to create apps, and they responded with roughly 5000 ready at launch. This year Apple doesn’t need that runway. There are already 65000 iPad-optimized apps in the iTunes App Store. This year Apple just ships.

That might not sound impressive until you consider Apple is poised to deliver iPad 2 — their second tablet — before almost all of their competitors have shipped even a single one.

There have been 10 years of tablet PCs, championed by none other than the equally iconic Bill Gates of Microsoft but they’ve been almost meaningless in the consumer market. Their desktop Windows UI was simply never optimized for tablets. Samsung shipped the 7-inch Android-based Galaxy Tab with fairly good results but even Google stressed the OS was not tablet-ready yet. Same goes for the myriad of small Archos tablets over the years. It took until 2011 for Google to release the first tablet version of Android, Honeycomb, and only Motorola has shipped a Honeycomb-based tablet, the Xoomt. Even that — according to my friends at Android Central — is unfinished, still waiting on a USB fix, Adobe to deliver Flash, and will require a mail-in hardware update to enable LTE. (To be fair, iPad 2 won’t ever have USB, Flash, or LTE.)

HTC is bringing out a tablet that will use Sense on an earlier version of Android while LG, Samsung, and Toshiba have announced Honeycomb tablets but no firm release dates or price points. (Samsung is reportedly now re-considering the Galaxy Tab 10 post iPad 2 announcement.) Palm has shown off their TouchPad but it won’t ship until Summer and likewise has no pricing yet. RIM’s 7-inch BlackBerry Playbook is also coming at some point, perhaps as early as spring, but also still absent pricing.

Every single one of these was announced before iPad 2 and almost none of them will ship before iPad 2. Almost all of them have some or many specs, power, and flexibility that outclass iPad 2 but none of them have the number of apps, the level of design, the supporting ecosystem, or the overall experience of iPad 2.

I’m not a huge fan of Apple’s heavy “post-PC” push — was the Apple II a post-mainframe? — but like we discussed on the Android Central podcast last night, Apple has reframed the discussion from one of technology, one of processors and checkboxes, to one of experience, one of interactivity and imagination. (Feel free to substitute magic and miracles if you simply must.) My mom doesn’t care about processors or megapixels, she cares about swiping smoothly through her photos and seeing her family over FaceTime. My 2 year old godson knows nothing about frame-buffers to RAM but delights in paging through his story books and crashing cars in his racing game. Me, a blogger and geek, I do care about those things but when I’m streaming video or sword fighting or using remote desktop, you know what? I utterly and completely forget I care.

Not to get all Jony Ive but the experience is really that immersive. The device vanishes. The OS vanishes. It simply becomes what you’re using. It is a TV. It is a gaming console. It’s an uncluttered window into the Web. It’s physical manipulation of productivity and creativity. It’s digital clay.

Last year I went to an Apple Store the day before iPhone 4 launched and people were in there, oblivious, buying iPhone 3GS. Yesterday I went to an Apple Store and people were coming in and asking to buy iPad 2 — which is still a week away from going on sale in the US.

The message was made for mainstream and mainstream has gotten the message. 15 million of them in just 9 months for the original iPad and who knows how many for iPad 2?

For the most part the competition aren’t even on the market yet, and it’s unclear how they’ll differentiate themselves from iPad 2 — and from each other. The Optimus pad will try 3D. HP will try webOS and their enterprise power. RIM will try the BlackBerry card. But in order to counter-program Apple they’ll need at least one killer advantage and an incredibly compelling story. They need to convince mainstream consumers to buy them instead of iPad — first not to buy iPad, then to buy them rather than another not-iPad. Fringe use cases and loyal enthusiasts aside, that’s a tough sale, especially when Apple will have iPad 2 in Apple Stores and dedicated Apple areas in many big box retailers. Motorola, HP, HTC, Samsung, RIM, etc. have no stores. Sony does, and they have content as well, but they have no Tablet (gone is the Trinitron and Walkman Sony powerhouse of old.) Competing tablets have a huge, uphill battle to wage and win.

That’s when and if they ship.

Apple is shipping on March 11.

Sure Apple showed off a lot during the iPad 2 event but they didn’t give us everything we wanted, now did they? While I can’t tell for sure yet if I got my smaller bezel (I’ll be measuring down to the millimeter!) there are some hardware and software features that are obviously missing in action.

We’re going to go over them after the break!

Hardware

Steve Jobs said iPad 2 was incredibly thin but Apple didn’t lose anything because of it. Maybe so but there are several things we didn’t gain either.

Retina Display

iPad 2 is the same 1024×768 resolution as the original iPad. In other words we can still see the pixels. No doubt Apple is working on a sweet Retina Display for the iPad… we just didn’t get it today. Maybe it was too expensive. Maybe they can’t produce enough of them yet. Maybe they just need to hold something back so we upgrade to iPad 3 next time. What ever the reason we didn’t get it.

Stereo Speakers

We got a new speaker design and maybe the bigger area will lead to better sound but we didn’t get the Beats by Dr. Dre treatment the HP TouchPad is getting. It doesn’t look like we even got real stereo speakers. For a company with its roots in iPod audio that’s a strange thing to keep missing.

ThunderBolt/USB/SD ports

While MacBook Pro got the really fast new ThunderBolt I/O, iPad 2 didn’t. It didn’t get a built-in USB port or an SD card slot either. Once again the Dock remains the only data port on iPad. At least the Camera Kit will let you get a big dongle for USB and SD. Lack of PCI Express architecture probably keeps ThunderBolt off the roadmap for the foreseeable future though… (Hey, at least we finally got an HDMI adapter!)

High quality cameras

iPad 2 looks like it has the same video cameras as iPod touch 4, not the much higher quality still camera sensor of the iPhone 4. 720p is fine for HD video but 720 pixels high isn’t great for a still image. Is this another case of Apple going for thin over function? iPad 2 might not be the every day shooter for every body but something comparable to the coming Android tablets would have been nice.

LTE/4G radio

Okay, LTE isn’t going to be ubiquitous any time soon but even if you have it you won’t be able to use it on iPad 2. We’re not even sure how fast the HSPA radio is yet.

128 GB option

Double density NAND Flash has been available for a while now. Maybe 64GB is enough of an option for most users but for those who want a ton of video or high quality audio 128GB would be appreciated. At least iPod classic can breathe a sigh of relief until September…

3D

No I don’t want it but some people outside LG might and there’s no 3D display and no 3D cameras. Again I don’t care but someone might.

Bezel gestures

Thinner or not there’s no gesture area on the iPad 2 bezel. Apple has patents on this (and on touch sensitive casings) but they’re still not using them. In fairness even the HP TouchPad isn’t using a gesture area and the BlackBerry PlayBook is faking it with a 1 pixel detection border but the Sony PSP2/NGP is using case gestures. Just saying…

Software features

Apple didn’t match all the specs of competing tablets but their strength is software, right? Let’s take a look.

iOS 5

We didn’t get any hint of iOS 5 and that means a lot of software features we were expecting didn’t show up either. Notifications, Theme Store, Apple ID activation, user accounts, voice commands, etc. are all still missing in action and waiting on an event later this month or next.

MobileMe and iTunes.com

Maybe MobileMe is waiting on iOS 5 but we didn’t hear anything about improvements there either. Same goes for iTunes.com. We did get Home Sharing but the cloud was a no-show. No Find my Friends, no streaming media, no DropBox killer. Nothing.

Conclusion

iPad 2 is a good update. I’d say it’s even better than the iPhone 3GS was to the iPhone 3G since the design improved as well as the internals. But it wasn’t an iPhone 4 level update. It was more expected and less exceptional. The above is what I think was missed. Let us know what you think was missed in the comments below!

While in previous years Apple has debuted products like iPhone, MacBook Air, and iPad in January and done an iOS preview in March, this year’s iPad 2 launch event is March 2, leading some to believe Apple will eschew a separate event and introduce iOS 5 on the same day. So, just in case Apple goes for the 1-2 combo punch, just in case Scott Forstall takes the stage to “blow away” developers and users with what’s next, we want to be ready.

Apple begs the question — what will 2011 be the year of? We’ll give you our want list, after the break.

UPDATE: We’ve updated the article in anticipation of WWDC 2011, check it out!

Back in November I tried to imagine what Apple might present as iPad 2. So now, with the iPad 2 event scheduled for next Wednesday, March 2, I decided to go back, update them with any more recent information, and see if anything substantial had changed.

Note: There’s been some debate about whether or not Wednesday will bring a “real iPad 2″ or more of an “iPad 1.5″. Apple has always been very clear about this. The original iPhone was 1,1; the 3G was 1,2; the 3GS 2,1, and iPhone 4 was 3,1. To Apple the guts — CPU, GPU, etc. — are far more important when determining generational jumps (iPhone 3G to 3GS) than case design or radios (iPhone to iPhone 3G).

By every indication we’re getting iPad 2,1 next week — a full generational jump. It may not be the extreme jump some of us want, but then some of us won’t setting for any jump that doesn’t include a vibranium/adimantium shell with full on Cerebro UI. (That’s not happening this year. Maybe not even next).

What we likely will get is enough to make an already great product thinner, faster, and yes — better.

My guesses after the break!

Size and weight

Steve Jobs downplayed the value of 7-inch tablets on a recent Apple conference call which means a) Apple will never make one or, b) Apple is about to make one. Take your pick. I pick the former, at least for now. Apple is making a big deal about how competitors can’t match the iPad’s aggressive pricing so are opting for smaller screens. Jobs also — rightly — pointed to how 9.7-inch screens allow for a fundamentally different software experience than 7-inch devices, which are closer to the 3.5- to 4.3 smartphones. So, the raw size of iPad 2 will probably be the same, as will the aspect ratio (more on that later). It will no doubt be thinner, however. Even if it’s by 1mm, Apple needs to say it’s the thinnest iPad ever when they introduce it or the keynote just won’t seem complete.

That leaves weight. Amazon has thrown down the gauntlet on form factors, claiming sunbathing lady readers can’t hold up an iPad in one hand. It’s comparing unitaskers to multitaskers but never mind that for now — it’s a consideration. However, Apple manufactures iPad out of glass and aluminum and both of those are heavier than the plastic on plastic Kindle. They’re also heavier than the plastic used for the Galaxy Tab (which I’ve said before reminds me of my 1980s Hasbro toys, absent the ability to “transform and roll out).

However, they’re not that much heavier than the similar sized Android and HP/Palm tablets announced since, even though some of those use plastic shells.

Making iPad 2 thinner will probably shave down the weight a little. There are rumors Apple is experimenting with carbon fiber as a lighter alternative to aluminum but what can they do to make the glass lighter?

Speaking of which, switching to chemically hardened glass like the back plate of iPhone 4 would be interesting as a design choice, and case makers would no doubt benefit, but a sheet of glass at that size just seems too breakable on a device like iPad.

While iPhone 2G to iPhone 3G was also a significant design change, iPod touch 1 to iPod touch 2 was less so and that’s what iPad feels like at the moment — too early in the product cycle for anything radical.

Slimmer trim, flatter back, a look that better matches iPhone 4 and iPod touch 4 no doubt, but the size and weight probably won’t change too much.

(Though it better have a slimmer bezel the way Georgia’s been going on about it — or she’ll have some explaining to do come next week’s podcast!)

Display

iPad has a 9.7-inch LED backlit, IPS panel at 1024×768, which works out to 132 pixels per inch. That’s astonishingly less than iPhone 4 and iPod touch 4′s Retina Display at 326 ppi. Will Apple go Retina Display with iPad 2? I don’t think they can.

2048 x 1536 at 9.7-inch just doesn’t seem affordable given current technology. Nor does it seem necessary. When you use an iPhone or iPod touch, due to their smaller size you need to hold them closer than you need to hold an iPad. Retina Display (pixels too small to be seen with normal vision) is relative to distance held, so an iPad would need a lower pixel density held at a further distance to still qualify it as a Retina Display. So could they go 1.5x? I doubt it. If Apple doesn’t pixel double the current display in both directions — like they did with iPhone 4 – it would be a nightmare for developers.

So I don’t think Retina Display is likely for iPad 2, nor do I think a change in aspect ratio to 16:9 is likely either. The so-called “wide screen” 16:9 ratio has always been a compromise and it wouldn’t be a good one for iPad. Yes it’s wider than the current 4:3 iPad ratio and the 16:10 ratio of some MacBooks but what content really uses 16:9? Not books. Not web pages. Not email or calendars. Not most things you’d use an iPad for, not even movies. Movies are typically much wider than 16:9 so would still require letterboxing. Only HD TV shows are consistently 16:9. If you’re making a unitasking TV viewing tablet, sure, 16:9 is the way to go. If you’re making a tablet that’s meant to do several types of media well, I’d argue the extra height (in landscape mode) of 4:3 is far more valuable.

We’ve heard Super PLS rumors as well, but not enough suppliers to really deliver panels at the scale Apple needs yet. So iPad 2 will likely get the new, bonded/laminated screen of iPhone 4, so reflectivity will be reduced, and perhaps a better, brighter, more colorful panel, but that’s probably it for the next generation.

Wireless and cellular

I won’t hold my breath for LTE in iPad 2. Apple released the original iPhone 2G with EDGE-only support so they’ve shown themselves to be immune to early cell technology adoption. Verizon and AT&T are both pushing for LTE networks but 2012 seems like a target Apple would rather aim for.

A CDMA version, especially one using the new GSM/CDMA hybrid chipset from Qualcomm is certainly a possibility. The Verizon iPhone uses that chip, albeit with the GSM part not enabled. Could Apple do the same thing, use the Qualcomm chip for economies of scale, but only enable GSM/HSPA on some models and CDMA/EVDO on others?

Certainly. Maybe even probably. But enabling it to work on both carriers would be a huge plus. It would keep the product line simple for users and give them more choice with the same device.

And it would be one way to somewhat mitigate the chance of everyone just switching to Personal Hotspot (or Mobile Hotspot on other devices) and a Wi-Fi only iPad…

Capacity

iPad, like iPod touch, is currently capped at 64GB. Increases in NAND Flash density could see that bumped to 128GB in iPad 2 provided Apple can get the chips at a reasonable enough cost to keep the current price points intact. An ultra-cheap 16GB model — or even a 2010 iPad at $399/16GB — would be attractive if $599 and $699 shifted to 64GB and 128GB respectively. (The new MacBook Airs provide 128GB and 256GB Flash options, albeit at a significantly higher price point). Content gluttons would love it but Apple has shown with the Apple TV that streaming and rental content are their future and that means they may not invest in making iPads with bigger local storage.

If iTunes.com ever becomes a reality, with full on streaming, subscription, and digital locker features — so we can get the content we want, when we want, and where we want it — we probably don’t need 128GB of storage on an iPad.

Unfortunately, I don’t see either iTunes.com or 128GB options happening for iPad 2.

Processor

Apple’s first in-house system-on-a-chip, the Apple A4, debuted with iPad and has since moved through the line to iPhone, iPod touch, and Apple TV. While Apple doesn’t disclose the speed of those other implementations, they did announce iPad’s A4 as 1GHz. Teardowns have further revealed that the Apple A4 is built from an ARM Cortex A8 CPU and a PowerVR SGX GPU.

While those are decent enough, both have been around since iPhone 3GS and both now have successors on or hitting the market. The multi-core ARM Cortex A9 and most recent PowerVR SGX would both help push a whole new level of apps on iPad. We’ve heard rumors for a while now that Apple has advised developers to start thinking about multi-core processing for their apps. That’s a good sign.

Because Apple’s rumored next-generation processor, the Apple A5 is said to include the dual-core ARM Cortex A9 CPU and a dual-core Imagination PowerVR SGX543 GPU.

RAM

Unlike chipsets, Apple has always been completely mum about the RAM in their devices. The current iPad has an anemic 256MB of RAM which is readily apparent by how often Safari has to reload tabs or apps shut down under the new iOS 4.2 multitasking system. iPhone 4 has 512MB, a significant improvement but iPod touch 4 stuck with the dismal 256MB.

More than any other under-the-hood feature, iPad 2 desperately needs more RAM to hold more web pages, background more apps, and throw more pixels around on the screen. 512MB is what the 2010 model should have had and by the time iPad 2 rolls around, Apple should be looking at 1GB. Again, they’ll probably choose to keep costs down rather than boost performance up, and they’ll need to maintain that $499 entry level pricing, but scrimping on RAM has begun to effect user experience and that’s something Apple sometimes does value more than margins.

That said, no matter how much 1GB feels like table stakes in the 2011 tablet market, 512MB is still like the safe bet.

Camera(s)

All rumors and supposed checks with manufacturers and supply chains point to Apple sourcing a camera, if not both front and back facing cameras, for iPad 2. Given their investment in FaceTime — which now runs on iPhone 4, iPod touch 4, and Mac — that makes a lot of sense.

Will it be one or two cameras then, and will they be high quality like iPhone 4 or low quality like iPod touch 4? I’m guessing we’ll get 2 cameras simply because both iPhone and iPod touch have 2 cameras. Sure it’s almost comical to imagine someone walking the streets with a 10-inch iPad taking snapshots, but 2 cameras allow for the flexibility to easily FaceTime both you and what you’re looking at. (No “intimate moments” jokes, please.) It would also let Augmented Reality apps work better on iPad.

But for those reasons, FaceTime and AR rather than photography, I see iPad 2 getting a lower quality camera than iPhone 4. Don’t get me wrong, I’d love the 5mp sensor but if Apple’s going to cut costs somewhere, a 720p video camera like iPod touch is a place they could easily do it. (And maintain room to offer a better camera with iPad 3.)

Sensors

iPhone 4 and iPod touch 4 both got gyroscopes in 2010. iPad 2 should get the same in 2011. It makes gaming and location services better and Apple’s shown they can do it. This is probably one of the closest things I can point to as a lock.

Battery and Power

The current iPad gets a phenomenal 10 hours of video playback under optimal conditions. It seems almost impossible for Apple to top that but again Apple is likely to want the bullet point in his keynote so if there’a any way for Apple to hit 11 or 12 hours — and be thinner! — they will.

Connectors

Recent rumors of USB not withstanding, Apple has shown a continued aversion to any iPod, iPhone, or iPad port other than their own, now ubiquitous, 30-pin dock connector. They’ve included USB (and sometimes FireWire) on Macs, flirted with HDMI on the latest Mac Mini, and now introduced Intel’s new 10Gbps Thuderbolt, but they’ve also introduced technology like AirPlay and now AirDrop in Mac OS X Lion, which may make HDMI as redundant to Apple’s future plans as the optical drive.

Thunderbolt is a PCI Express and DisplayPort based technology, neither of which make sense on previous generation iOS devices and probably won’t in this year’s models either.

Likewise SD card slots. Apple puts them on MacBooks now but not iOS devices. Jonathan Ive has said they didn’t put anything on the original iPad that wouldn’t be used by most people most of the time. That’s why Apple provided a camera kit, ugly dongle though it may be, rather than SD card slot for iPad. Has iPad usage evolved to the point where most people would use an SD card slot most of the time? Probably not.

As many complaints as we get about Apple not providing USB, SD, HDMI, or now Thunderbolt we get just as many if not more about Apple still requiring iPad’s to tether to iTunes to activate, update, and sync. Could Apple take that wireless as well, with AirSync?

Apple TV’s recent iOS 4.1/4.2 update shows iOS can handle on-device software upgrades, but Apple TV is permanently plugged in and doesn’t require any media, apps, or other content to be backed up. If Apple is going to require power and/or backup before updating or syncing, neither of those functions will be going wireless any time soon. (Cloud backups of 64GB iPads just isn’t realistic with current on-device radios, bandwidth and bandwidth caps, and power sources.)

So while the future is clearly wireless, that future isn’t here yet and Apple hasn’t been the type of company to patch future holes with past technology.

Conclusion

While Apple is secretive they’re also cyclical and subject to the laws of physics and economics, which means they’re somewhat predictable. This year’s device will almost always be thinner and better than last year’s device at the same price point.

So, more of an iPhone 3GS-style update but remembering how much better that S made the 3G that’s certainly not a bad thing. And yes, that’s whether or not an iPad 3 (3,1) is coming in September.

Apple can always surprise us though, both in features and especially in details. We’ll find out for sure come Wednesday but until then those were my best guesses — what are yours?

Word is the US federal government, and the always eager European Union, are looking into Apple’s new in-app subscription service. Last year, following complaints from Adobe, they looked into Apple’s ban on cross-compilers for iOS and policies on competing advertisers like Google’s AdMob. Apple ultimately reversed their decision on cross-compilers and Apple may well alter their in-app subscription plans as well but here’s the thing — why is the government looking into Apple?

Most cable companies are monopolies that can package channels in a way that force consumers to pay more than they would if they had a-la-carte alternatives. They can sell cable boxes that haven’t evolved in 10 years while making sure cablecards are difficult to obtain. They can use and abuse copy protection and can lock down your cable box to the extent that you can’t even watch previously recorded programs in your own home on your own TVs. They can set bandwidth caps low enough to dissuade users from Netflix, iTunes, and other competitive services and, apparently, can even buy their own TV networks. They have a complete lock in. Likewise PayPal can freeze your account with little in the way of recourse or accountability, pretty much doing what they want with potentially vast amounts of your money. They have total power over your cash. Verizon can lock down GPS, forcibly put un-removable Bing and crapware on their phones, and get Google to agree to horribly backwards net neutrality concessions. They own your telephonics.

How about the US and EU look into them. How about they fix them. How about they protect consumers money and public airwaves and critical infrastructure elements before they worry so much about our toys. Not to get all Aaron Sorkin on them but just because Apple is a sexy headline and trendy target doesn’t mean every time a huge mega-corporation gets upset with Cupertino the regulators need to rev up their anti-trust PR reps.

If Apple steps out of bounds, if they’re anti-competitive or abusing monopoly position or illegally restraining trade by all means, investigate them and take action. But investigate cable and carriers first. Investigate defacto banks that act with impunity and first.

Protect us first.

One of the most persistent complaints levied against the iPhone and iPad were/are the lack of multitasking. This, of course, has always been silly. However, now that BlackBerry QNX PlayBook>, Android 3.0 Honeycomb tablets like Xoom, and HP webOS 3.0′s TouchPad are set to launch, “true multitasking” is again finding its way into the bullet points of competitively positioned slide decks and ad campaigns. It’s still silly but it’s also more complicated now.

Does iOS offer “true multitasking”, does its competitors? Let’s take a look, after the break.

The no iOS multitasking myth

Going back to the original iPhone’s introduction in 2007, Steve Jobs’ demonstration clearly showed music fading out as a call came in, staying on a call while browsing the web or sending email, and music fading back in as a call ended. Those of us who had Treo’s at the time were astounded at how smooth iPhone multitasking was, and how it didn’t crash or reboot the phone once.

From launch, the iPhone had great multitasking. It just didn’t have 3rd party apps. Fast forward to 2008 and iOS 2, the App Store launched and while Apple’s own apps continued to enjoy great multitasking, 3rd party App Store apps weren’t allowed any background processes at all. This kept things nice and simple and stable for a certain group of consumers but frustrated power users to no end.

Fast forward again to 2010 and iOS 4 (specifically 4.2 for iPad) and Apple set up a system to allow App Store apps limited multitasking. Not fake multitasking. Not untrue multitasking. But limited multitasking. Apps that were transferring data could keep the connection alive in the background for a short length of time after exit to finish the transfer (like a photo upload or status stream download). Music apps like Pandora could be streamed in the background. VoIP (Voice over IP) apps like Skype to keep a process in the background to receive or continue calls. Turn-by-turn navigation apps like TomTom could keep giving voice directions in the background. True multitasking all, it addressed a huge percentage of mainstream needs. (Not all needs mind you, persistent internet connections for SSH, etc. would have been nice for power users…)

In addition Apple added a few others things to enhance the “appearance” of multitasking from a user perspective. Instead of just leaving apps running forever in the background, using battery power and system resources and requiring user intervention to manage, Apple created a way to “save state” on exit. So, the next time an app launches it’s in the same place it was when last it was used. They also (re-)set double click on Home to launch a fast app switcher dock. Hidden behind the regular dock, invisible to users who don’t need or want it, it can be called up to quickly jump between recently used apps (or to expose controls for audio, brightness, etc). Not at all “true” multitasking but important when it comes to the perception of multitasking.

It’s a compromise solution, one that tries to address the aforementioned battery life and resource issues with ease of use and convenience and while it’s not perfect and could use some improvement, it’s pretty good. (Especially when you see how fast some competing devices chew through battery life.)

It’s also something that might be addressed further when iPad 2 — with more RAM and processing power — and iOS 5 are shown off sometime this spring.

Competitive multitasking

RIM’s QNX-powered BlackBerry Playbook, HP’s webOS 3.0-powered TouchPad, and the slew of Google’s upcoming Android 3.0-powered tablets, spearheaded by the Motorola Xoom, are all more or less touting “true multitasking” as a competitive advantage over the iPad. These are the same companies and campaigns touting Flash as the “whole internet/web” and both statements are, ironically, untrue. (We won’t touch on Flash here but suffice it to say that while Flash is the most popular plugin on the web, it’s far from the only plugin on the web.)

Lest you think this partisan or apologist, Kevin from CrackBerry.com was quick to point this out back during CES when RIM first spoke about true multitasking — what functionality does it provide to the end user?

Having a movie or video game continue to animate while in card view (webOS or Playbook variety) is great eye candy but isn’t functionally any better or truer multitasking than having it save state or pause and then resume when brought back to the foreground. You can’t interact with it when in background and more importantly — you can’t interact with multiple cards the way you can with multiple windows on a PC which really does offer true pre-emptive multitasking. To the best of my knowledge you can’t watch a movie and play a game at the same time, or drag and drop content between browsers and document editors, for example.

Cards (again webOS or Playbook) are a brilliant and elegant way to visualize multitasking for end users but until you can start dragging and dropping data between them the way you can on a Mac or Windows they’re functionally no better than the fast app switcher on iOS.

iOS, in fact, used card view before either webOS or PlayBook — Pages in Mobile Safari date way back to the original iPhone — Apple simply lacked the vision to (or chose not to) exploit them throughout the OS. (Even in Safari on iPad I’d argue a tabbing system would be more functional than the grid of pages we now enjoy.)

So while I’d dearly love for Apple repatriate cards/page to the iPad multitasking OS, I’d really only love it if it came with that multiple usage functionality. And when/if that comes, I hope Apple can figure out a way that isn’t at the expense of mainstream usability. (If part of the success of iOS is attributable to Apple ruthlessly cutting away everything and anything that wasn’t simple and easy for consumers to use, is complexity creep — while desirable to power users — the best thing for the platform as a whole?)

Android 3.0 Honeycomb seems to be bringing more of the desktop metaphor to the tablet space, including more multitasking. Their user interface and user experience, however, still seem to be on the back-burner. (Apple’s priorities are almost directly inverse to Google’s in that regard.)

The truth about true

The iPad multitasks fine. webOS and the strikingly similar BlackBerry tablet OS multitask with better visualization but it’s arguable about whether or not that’s “truer” and I’d argue it isn’t. Further, I’d argue that at this point it really doesn’t matter in terms of end user functionality. Android 3.0 Honeycomb may multitask more like a desktop but that’s neither more true nor proven better for a wide swath of users. Buried in all that, however, are a few important truths. The pad/tablet industry is still in its infancy and Apple, Google, HP, and RIM aren’t anywhere near done exploring interactions and interfaces on their devices. They’re all getting better. And since there are a few really strong players (and perhaps Microsoft one day as well), consumers get choice and the competition drives all of them to get better so we consumers choose them.

Could Apple be planning to expand and round out the iPhone and iPad families by adding higher and/or lower end devices that could appeal to additional segments of the market? While the rumors have been around for as long as the iPhone and iPad themselves, the latest incarnations — a Retina Display iPad 3 in fall and a cheaper iPhone nano in summer — make the concept worth looking at again.

iPhone and iPad (and iPod touch) are currently singular offerings. While you can pay extra for more storage, and sometimes last year’s model lingers, there’s really only one version of each product. Conversely you can get two physical sizes of iMac (though the design is the same), MacBooks, MacBooks Air in 11- and 13-inch, and MacBooks Pro in 13-, 15-, and 17-inch sizes the latter of which has additional ports. On the mobile side, while Apple originally only offered a single iPod they eventually expanded the line, introducing lower price versions like the iPod mini and iPod nano, and an extremely cheap version in the iPod shuffle.

So while Apple never chose to compete with the bargain basement, razor-thin profit margins of low end PCs they did suck all the air out of the MP3 market using massive economies of scale and brilliant supply chain management to keep healthy profits at the same time.

So the question is, will Apple do with the currently singular iPhone and iPad what they did with MacBooks and iPods? Will they offer higher end, pro-style iPads and cheaper nano-style iPhones?

For over 3 years the iPhone was only available on AT&T in the US. Eventually Apple probably figured they’d sold an iPhone to everyone who wanted AT&T or were willing to put up with AT&T just to have an iPhone. They needed a new market. This week they got one with the launch of the Verizon iPhone.

Now while Apple didn’t let Verizon put an ugly logo sticker on the iPhone casing, load with bloatware, or lock down its features, they did make a major (for Apple) concession — they put in a CDMA radio. CDMA is a dying technology. In Canada Bell and Telus have already switched to HSPA+ and in the US Verizon is busy switching to LTE. And if Apple is ruthless about anything it’s ruthless about shedding dying technologies (floppy disks, optical disks, Firewire, Flash, etc.) For Apple to invest in designing, engineering, producing, and marketing a CDMA iPhone means they anticipate a huge return on that investment.

But at a certain point everyone who wants an iPhone on Verizon will have one as well. Sure the clichéd RAZR (aka feature phone) users will migrate towards smartphones but not all of them will want the iPhone’s singular form factor and not all of them will want the currently still expensive data plans that go with it. Unless Apple addresses their needs, they’ll go elsewhere the same way smartphone users who insist on a physical keyboard go elsewhere already.

Apple may not care about them any more than they care about losing bargain PC shoppers to the Acer and ASUS of the world, they may care enough to come up with nano and shuffle-esque solutions, or they may think differently enough to come up with something else entirely.

Likewise Apple may not care about the higher-end tablet market or they may decide they want to do with iPad what they did with MacBook and go pro.

The idea of an iPhone counterpart to the iPod shuffle — a phone that hooks into iTunes but doesn’t require data, just plays music and makes calls and is great to take jogging is interesting and would no doubt capture some of the massive if dwindling feature phone market. But would Apple ever want to field an iPhone that isn’t tied into the App Store and the still growing smartphone market? I doubt it.

An iPhone nano — even if it’s just keeping the iPhone 3GS around another year like Georgia suggested on iPhone Live! last night — is even more interesting. A “free” (subsidized down to $0) iPhone that can use all those App Store apps and has reached such scales that it’s incredibly cheap to produce is almost compelling. Whether Apple would want to waste any margin actually making it HP Veer small is debatable but given Jobs’ derision of smaller tablet form factors and the user hostility of shrunken UI it doesn’t seem likely. Given iPhone 4 went Retina and iPhone 5 will again raise the spec bar, a 3.5-inch 480×320 iPhone could be nano enough.

iPad pro on the other hand is enticing. If Apple can nail the economics of 2x Retina Display on the same 9.7-inch screen it could be downright gorgeous. But what else would differentiate it? Many would love a 7-inch variant but that doesn’t say “pro”, does it? Others want a version that runs full on Mac OS X but even post-Lion the Mac UI just isn’t made for touch. And an iOS that does more Android 3.0 Honeycomb desktop-style computing would have to be universal across all iPads or risk real fragmentation issues. Once an iPad, any iPad, goes Retina, it doesn’t seem likely the non-Retina, older generation devices would stick around more than a year or two anyway.

So we’re left with there being markets for extended iPhone and iPad families, price points and hardware variations that would appeal to wider user bases, just like the Verizon iPhone is doing right now. Each brings challenges along with it — some that Apple traditionally wants no part of. But Apple is great at solving challenges in non-traditional ways. Apple will stick to one iPhone and one iPad until they need (not want) to make more. Then they’ll expand in a way the rest of the industry doesn’t expect — just like when they brought an iPad to the netbook fight, and an 11-inch MacBook air to the pro portable space.