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Archive for August, 2010

Apple Solves iPad Supply, Won’t See Competition Until 2012

August 30, 2010 by Chris Chester

Prospective iPad owners, rejoice! According to Apple’s online store, orders placed for any of the six iPad models are now being fulfilled within 24 hours.

In the first four months since its launch, prospective iPad owners have been met with fairly consistent delays as Apple struggled to match the considerable demand with an adequate supply from their production facilities in China. In some locations, would-be customers experienced waits of up to three weeks. And this was as recently as June.

The iPad now joins other Apple products like the iPhone with a much more customer-friendly 24-hour period from purchase to shipping.

In July, industry analyst iSuppli forecasted a “Tickle Me Elmo” type scenario for the iPad this holiday season – meaning that the demand for the iPad around Christmas will be in such excess of supply that a secondary market could pop up for desperate shoppers. It’s still far too early to tell whether that premonition will actually come to pass, but interested parties would do well to jump on the bandwagon now, while the getting is good.

Those who continue to hesitate for fear that a competitor is going to emerge from the woodwork to challenge Apple’s current dominance of the tablet space need not worry. A new report from iSuppli indicates that the iPad will not face any serious competition in its product category until 2012.

By their reckoning, the iPad will own a startling 74.1 percent of the tablet market share by the end of the year, decreasing to just 70.4 percent in 2011, before finally seeing real declines to 61.7 percent at the end of 2012.

“It’s still unlikely that any of the competitors will be able to equal the overall performance experience of the iPad,” said Rhoda Alexander, iSuppli’s director of monitor research.

Indeed, the stiffest competition to the current generation of iPads may actually come from Apple itself. The rumor mill has been abuzz with claims that Apple will soon announce a new version of the iPad with a faster ARM Cortex-A9-based processor with 512MB of RAM. The long-rumored 7-inch version is also speculated to be launched at the same time, in early 2011.

It’s no wonder companies like HP and Lenovo are going to have trouble competing – Apple may be well into their second generation of tablets before those companies are able to get the ball rolling at all.

App Reviews: Fantasy Football Cheatsheet ’10

August 26, 2010 by Chris Chester

In the last two decades, fantasy football has gone from a niche game played principally by stats dorks and hardcore football fans to a mainstream cultural addiction that has infected groups as far afield as old college roommates, offices, and church groups. Where players once had to tabulate their point totals using box scores at the back of the newspaper every week, a veritable cottage industry of websites has sprung up to do the legwork for them.

If there was one part of the fantasy football experience that has managed to elude this transformation, however, it’s the draft. Fantasy fanatics know all too well the hassle of printing out dozens of guides and projections and trying to shuffle through them to try and find a value in those arduous middle rounds. With the help of Fantasy Football Cheatsheet ’10 and an iPad, those concerns are a thing of the past.

FFC basically gives you all the tools a fantasy fanatic could need right at your fingertips. It includes stat projections and tiers for players based on their average draft position, as well as projections for the coming the year. Users can customize the draft order based on their specific preferences for individual players, and the given projections themselves are flexible based on the myriad of scoring systems that a given league may choose to use. They’ve even included BYE weeks in the mix as well as strength of schedule for drafters who like to take it to the next level. This is serious stuff here.

Even veterans of online fantasy leagues are familiar with the terrible user interface and player tracking solutions in the draft rooms of fantasy sites like Yahoo and CBS Sports. FFC is thus a handy compliment for online players as well, since you can track drafted players with ease and compare a list of available players with a wish list of your own choosing. Something about the touch screen of the iPad just makes it perfect for this task.

If that were everything the app did, it would still be worth the fairly reasonable price of $2.99. Developer 290 Design has taken it a step further though by adding features to make FCC useful throughout the season. The app gives you weekly projections based on past performance and your league’s individual scoring system, as well as start recommendations based on those projections. This is useful stuff.

With the NFL season right on our doorstep, iPad-owning fantasy football nuts will find a lot to like about Fantasy Football Cheatsheet. Check it out.

Could Apple Trigger the Death of Print Publishers?

August 25, 2010 by Chris Chester

An interesting shift is happening in the world of book publishing. When it was first announced, many expected Apple’s iPad to quickly trump the Amazon Kindle and other dedicated reading devices, helping to change the eReader landscape as we know it. According to author Joe Konrath, the iPad is succeeding at changing the publishing industry, but perhaps not in the ways that we expected.

Konrath, a full-time thriller writer, recently posted a blog that illuminated the unforeseen shifts the iPad is causing. He has observed publishers changing their approach in the last few months, opting to produce enriched eBooks as a way to replace the dwindling amount of money in the premium category they have traditionally been able to take in selling hardcover books at traditional book retailers. These enriched eBooks make use of fancy animations and even video, which makes them impossible or impractical to release on the Kindle or Nook.

The only platform that meets the needs of this new multimedia approach to book publishing then is the iPad, which as we all know handles multimedia quite well. But while the prospects for a more entertaining product are there, the market is not. According to Konrath’s observations, authors like him are able to sell as many as 200 eBooks a day on the Kindle bookstore. So far on the iPad, he’s been happy to sell just 100 a month.

Konrath summed up his objects about publishers as such: “They price their ebooks too high, give authors too small a royalty, and are adding movies that can only be played on devices that people aren’t using to read on, like the iPad.”

Left to their own devices, publishers will simply starve themselves out of the market, he suggests.

That doesn’t mean we should start mourning the end of the book. Authors like Seth Godin are starting to realize the advantages to simply self-publishing in an eBook format. Dead tree publishers are simply standing in the way. If an author circumvents the normal publishing channels, he gets to release it on his terms, with the title and cover he wants, and most importantly, keeps a majority of the revenue. It’s a no-brainer, really.

No More Pencils, No More Books

August 23, 2010 by Chris Chester

With students around the country returning to college campuses, Apple’s iPad is going to get its first large-scale test as a classroom supplement. Sales have been robust from word one, but because the tablet launched while most kids were busy studying for finals earlier this year, the coming school year is going to be important for those itching to see whether the iPad can contribute anything new to the world of education.

Across the country, schools themselves have been eager to jump on the bandwagon. Oklahoma State was just one of many universities that stamped its approval on a pilot program this year. “You’ll see this all over America in higher education,” university president Burns Hargis said. “Everybody’s trying to figure it out. My guess is it won’t be too long before these things are just ubiquitous.”

While some schools are trying to see how to integrate the iPad into the existing curriculum, others are taking a more proactive approach. According to the Baltimore Sun, the University of Maryland College Park has devised a new two-year program called Digital Culture and Creativity, which will not only look at ways that the iPad can be implemented into the classroom, but also explore it as an object of study in and of itself.

For all the unforeseen walls of the ivory tower that the iPad may break down in the future, the most obvious area for it to make an impact is by consolidating a bags-worth of books into one eminently portable device. After all, the iPad’s display is one of the best on the market for displaying the PDF format that has long been the textbook standard.

By the evolving standards of new technology, however, PDF textbooks are too static and boring. Or at least, they’re not nearly sexy enough to justify the purchase of a $599 tablet computer. That’s where companies like Inkling come in. They’re taking the content that once graced the page and jazzing it up with video and touch-based interactive elements. The result is something that resembles a game or movie almost as much as a textbook, which does a better job of engaging media-savvy kids.

“Our bet is that those tablets will change the way people consume content,” says Inkling CEO Matt MacInnis.

Of course, the more things change, the more they stay the same. For as much as the old college bookstores were known for swindling students with their gaudy mark-ups and buy-back schemes that bordered on the criminal, the switch to interactive textbooks won’t be much of an improvement.  Companies like Inkling plan on charging as much as $85 for a textbook on the iTunes store. Students on a budget will have no recourse in the used bookstore as they once did, and minor revisions in standard textbooks will be enough to justify charging full price year after year.

Appropriately enough, it’s students themselves who seem to have maintained the most perspective on the iPad and higher education.

“The iPad isn’t going to make learning in the classroom any better or worse, “ said Dany Sanchez, a sophomore at Florida Atlantic University. “At the end of the day, it still comes down to your desire to learn.”

Jailbreakers Beware: Apple is Coming For You

August 22, 2010 by Chris Chester

Apple has fired the latest salvo in its on-going war against jailbroken devices this week. According to The Register, the gadget giant has filed for a patent, titled “Systems and Methods for Identifying Unauthorized Users of an Electronic Device” that Apple claims would give the company a greater ability to lock down stolen devices. Using complex identification measures like voice recognition and heartbeat sensors, these systems would be able to identify stolen devices and deploy a number of anti-theft countermeasures.

These countermeasures, which include remote activation of an iPhone’s camera, geotagging, and erasing of all sensitive information on an identified device, are presented as benefitting the consumer. After all, who wants one’s personal information floating around the web if one’s iPhone gets lost?

Digging a little deeper into the language of the patent, however, it becomes obvious that Apple may actually have a different motivation at play here. They’re trying to implement what would amount to a kill switch.

“An activity that can detect an unauthorized user can be any action that may indicate the electronic device is being tampered with by being, for example, hacked, jailbroken, or unlocked,” the patents says. “For example, a sudden increase in memory usage of the electronic device can indicate that a hacking program is being run and that an unauthorized user may be using the electronic device.”

It was just last month that the U.S. Copyright Office released a new set of rules saying that the jailbreaking of mobile devices represented an exemption to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. While doing so already puts users in a no-man’s land in terms of warranty eligibility and customer support, this latest patent application seems to indicate the Apple will do away with this exemption by plausibly lumping jailbroken devices in with those that have been stolen. In other words, they plan to toss out the jailbreaking baby with the bath water.

Those who decided to keep their iPads jailbroken after the most recent patch officially closed the loophole may want to reconsider that choice soon. There’s no telling exactly when Apple is going to start coming after jailbroken users, but if nothing else, it’s an assertion that, whatever the law says, Apple is not going to allow consumers to use the company’s devices for any activity or application outside of those expressly permitted.

Time Inc. Figuring Out the iPad, Slowly

August 19, 2010 by Chris Chester

Frequent iPad Weekly readers will remember well back in July when reports surfaced that Apple was at an impasse with magazine publishers about how their publications were treated on the iPad. The magazines wanted to be able to utilize a subscription model via the iTunes store, as well as providing a year’s worth of free issues to subscribers of their print edition. Apple simply pointed to their stated policy of no subscriptions, perhaps wondering why the people at the magazines were in such a huff about a clearly stated company policy.

Fortune Tech reports that the two parties have finally come to an agreement. Time Inc. magazines like People, Time, Sports Illustrated, and Fortune will now be able to offer free digital editions for their print subscribers within the next 30 days.

What a great day for the spirit of compromise! It’s so great to see multinational corporations with such intelligent people coming together to… but wait, what is this? According to Philip Elmer-Dewitt of Fortune, “The publishers still can’t sell subscriptions through the App Store, which is how they would prefer to do it.”

If Apple hasn’t bent on their subscription policy, how exactly did they “make it possible” for magazine subscriptions on the iPad, in Dewitt’s words?

After downloading their free new app from iTunes, it becomes apparent. People decided to heed our call to simply replicate the magazine ecosystem set up by the far more prescient Zinio Magazine Newsstand & Reader. Instead of releasing each new issue as an app, Time Inc. realized they could just release the app once, and then charge for each individual issue within the app. Or, as was the company’s preference, allow existed subscribers to log in and get it for free.

With plans to roll out similar apps later this month for Time, Sports Illustrated, and Fortune, it seems clear that the company still doesn’t quite get it. The most customer-friendly approach would be simply to release a Time Inc. app that allowed people to purchase or subscribe to their magazines all in one place, much like Zinio does. Whoever is making the decisions over there seems to be stuck on their presence in iTunes, however, so that may take some time.

Figuring out new platforms is always a touch and go process, but in Time’s case, the company seems to want to make it more difficult than it needs to be.

App Reviews: Photoshop Express for iPad

August 18, 2010 by Chris Chester

Having access to the Photoshop Suite has become something of a necessity these days, whether for the creation of lolcat-esque image macros or just retouching personal photos before posting them on Facebook. Image editing is a task one traditionally associates with a desktop, but thanks to the release of Photoshop Express for the iPad, a free, scaled-down version of the Photoshop toolset is now available from the couch as well.

Those looking for the full slate of tools that make Photoshop the desktop standard might find themselves a little disappointed. You won’t be creating masterpieces in Photoshop Express – it allows you to crop and rotate photos and apply some basic correction sliders like saturation, exposure, and tint. There are also a handful of focus functions and special effects, but again, this is for very casual use.

Limited though the tools may be, there is a lot to like about a touch-based photo-editing interface. While it lacks the precision control and nuance that Photoshop aficionados prefer, the ability to move one’s finger across the screen in lieu of a slider and see immediate results is likely to win over many casual users who are less interested in pixel ratios and brush pallets than they are cropping and touching up personal photos.

Of course, it’s not without flaws. What’s odd is that features that go along hand and hand with casual use, such as white balance and red eye correction, are inexplicably absent. The app has also been mired with bugs since its launch. Many, such as frequent crashes when the app was launched in landscape mode, have since been fixed with patches on the app store. Adobe’s persistence in this regard is appreciated, but one would hope they would exercise such diligence before releasing the app to the public.

In spite of the flaws, Photoshop Express still comes highly recommended. The iPhone version is still the preferred venue for this sort of mobile photo editing, mostly because it’s more natural to edit photos on the same device that takes them, but having the big screen available does lend a certain degree of elegance to the whole proceeding. The integration with Adobe’s photo-sharing service and Facebook also rounds out a package that isn’t likely to disappoint, especially when it’s available for free.

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