A couple of things about Apple products

As you may have noticed, Apple unveiled some new goodies yesterday. As you may not have noticed, I’ve written about two of them.

First up, FaceTime video calling in the iPod touch:

The big question is whether people want to see one another on the phone. I think the older generation hate the idea. I certainly do, but that’s because I have what’s best described as a face for radio and some really ugly friends.

And then, the sad tale of the UK Apple TV.

Badly dubbed adverts really annoy me. Faintly sinister firms make an advert for shoes or yoghurts or incomprehensible children’s toys in Germany, and instead of filming a new version for the UK they just do a half-arsed bit of dubbing that doesn’t even attempt to match the mouths to the sounds they’re supposed to be making. “Oh, who cares,” the advertisers think. “It’s only the UK.”

The Apple TV is a bit like that.

iPad the news today, oh boy

Back in January, I wrote this:

I also have a £702/year newspaper habit. Imagine if I could come downstairs in the morning, grab the iPad, and use it as a newspaper. It’s big enough so there’s still the serendipity of seeing articles you might otherwise miss, and it’s digital enough that I can get my news for free (or nearly free, depending on what the Guardian, Sunday Times etc do about online content).

Now that I’ve spent several weeks sitting on a sofa with only an iPad for company, is it a worthy replacement for print?

Not yet.

NYT Editors’ Choice: Nifty but short

I’ve found newspapers on the iPad a curiously annoying affair. They’re nice enough in the browser but irritating to use – endlessly having to return to the back button is, literally, a pain – and I’m spending much more time in Instapaper than I am on the websites on which the articles are actually published.

RSS isn’t working for me so far either. While apps such as the sublime RSS reader Reeder are good at what they do, the feeds themselves can be irritating as the same story follows you across multiple sections. The Guardian is particularly bad for this, with stories appearing in, say, the Media, G2 and Main News feeds over the course of the day.

Other newspapers don’t even try with RSS: they have headline-only feeds that are pretty much pointless. Such feeds are slower and more annoying than just visiting the website in the first place.

Mind you, they’re not as bad as the tech sites that publish a headline in their feed which takes you to… the headline! Click here to read more! Here’s the headline again, with a link to the actual site it came from this time! Sites that do this, or publications such as Wired whose iPad apps don’t render text – text! – legibly hate you. It’s that simple.

But I digress.

Flipboard: Meh. Maybe I follow the wrong people

There are a few interesting apps out there, but there are a few disappointing ones too. Flipboard is ok if you like the idea of a paper made only from the links your acquaintances are posting on Facebook and Twitter (I don’t). The much hyped Pulse newsreader excelled at showing the stories I didn’t want to read and hiding the ones I did. The (London) Times app is ten quid a month for a paper I don’t particularly like in its daily incarnation. And The Guardian iPhone app hasn’t made its way across to the iPad yet. Reuters News Pro is quite nice, if a bit newswire-y, BBC News is a bit TV-y and the Huffington Post is too Huffington Post-y.

So far my favourite is the New York Times Editors Choice app. It’s very short (it’s free) but it delivers a lovely reading experience and the serendipity of a good old fashioned bit of newsprint. I could do without the interrupting ads, mind you.

Times for iPad: lots of potential. It isn’t the Times newspaper.

The one app I’m crossing my fingers about isn’t any of the ones I’ve already mentioned, though. It’s Times, the iPad version of a popular OS X RSS reader. The iPad version has a lovely interface, but unfortunately a wee bug affecting many of the feeds I want to use means I haven’t been able to use it for protracted periods yet. I’ll get back to you on that one.

Anyone else exploring print alternatives on the iPad? I’d love to know what you’ve found.

“Flawed flagships and mediocre mid-tier mobiles”

All About Symbian is a website about, you guessed it, the Symbian mobile phone operating system. This devastating piece by Steve Litchfield looks at the flagship handsets running the OS and finds the lot of them lacking.

There are some pretty fundamental issues in the high end devices above, to be honest, some of which should have been caught by even a cursory examination by anyone with their head screwed on straight… it does rather seem as if Nokia and other Symbian partners have gone out of their way to shoot themselves in the foot, time after time – not one of the above is remotely close to being perfectly conceived (never mind implemented).

When your best friends say you’ve got a problem, you’ve really got a problem.

In other news, it appears that Apple is finally investigating the iOS 4 issues that render many iPhone 3G mobiles useless. Not only was the problem overlooked during testing – did they bother testing on the 3G? – but it’s taken more than a month for Apple to start investigating. That just isn’t good enough.

Apple’s going to bring iOS to the Mac

Never mind inventing a slightly shinier battery charger: Apple’s got big plans. I think they include giving Macs the iOS operating system, or something awfully like it.

It’s not just the Mac, either. I’m willing to bet that it’s coming to the Apple TV, too.

Apps would make Steve Jobs’ hobby much more appealing, and it would mean that all of Apple’s consumer products – iPod, iPhone, iMac, iPad and Apple TV – would share the same interface, the same apps and the same data.

The iPad as a family computer

I know, I promised I wasn’t going to go on about it but I think – hope – that this is interesting. Over at Business Insider, Henry Blodget moans that his kids are addicted to his iPad.

We got an iPad because we thought it might provide more peace and quiet during a long trip. And it did. Sometimes. When they weren’t fighting over it.

But now that the trip is over, we actually have to physically hide it in the house every day.

My experience is similar. The ladies in my life – Mrs Bigmouth and Baby Bigmouth – love the iPad dearly. My wife uses it to read the Guardian online (as promised, I cancelled the daily newspaper when the iPad arrived; news on the iPad is something I’ll come back to in another post reasonably soon), to catch up with friends and to join in on forums; although she hasn’t used it much for shopping so far, apps such as ShopStyle are superior to the traditional, browser-and-mouse shopping experience.

My daughter loves the Toy Story read-along books and various drawing, shape sorting and interactive apps. She also loves deleting my apps, which I can’t find a way of preventing: you’ll be amazed how quickly a small child can go from fingerpainting in Drawing Pad to zapping something important. Yet more evidence the iPad really, really needs user accounts.

Incidentally, whichever bright spark decided the way to clear colouring-in in the Toy Story ebooks was to get small children to shake a £400-plus computer should be taken into the woods and shot. It’s a disaster waiting to happen.

But I digress. What makes the iPad work is partly the way it’s been designed for touch from the get-go, and it’s partly the battery life. Even after hours of thrashing, I can pick it up in the evening and watch Top Gear on iPlayer without worrying that I’ll run out of battery life. If Microsoft or anybody else is serious about making an iPad killer and they don’t provide the same all-day battery life, they’ll fail. Tablets need to be things you just pick up and go with, not things you pick up and go “shit, battery’s nearly done”.

What the all-day battery gives you is a device that goes with you rather than a device that you have to go to. It’s an important distinction. I can’t use a laptop on the sofa, because I can’t get comfortable and using a trackpad to control the mouse is a nightmare. I can’t let my daughter near a laptop at all, because she’s quite keen on picking off the key caps – and even if I could stop her doing that, she’s too young to use the Mac OS or Windows to do the same kinds of things – painting, talking to animals, listening to stories – that she does on the iPad. The iPad is something you just stick on the side table or on the worktop when you’re done, and whoever wants it next simply picks it up and heads for the sofa, or the dining table, or the garden, or wherever they fancy going.

The result of all this, the problem with all of this, is that my iPad isn’t really my iPad any more.

This has never happened with any of my gadgets before. Mornings have become a finders-keepers game, with whoever gets their hands on it first ignoring the glowers of the rest of us. I only get to use it when everyone’s out, or when they’ve gone to bed. In an ideal world I’d have a second one just for me, and if I had the cash (which, needless to say, I don’t) I would buy a bigger, better one right now. It’s that good.

If you have a family and you’re getting an iPad, here are two words of advice.

Hide it.

Downgrade your iPhone 3G and make it fast again

After all my whingeing about the catastrophic effect iOS 4 has on the iPhone 3G’s performance, I’ve become quite adept at downgrading it: I tried 4.0 and downgraded, then 4.0.1, and had to downgrade that. There are a few how-tos out there but I felt that some were too complex and that there were a few issues that weren’t being raised. So here’s my take on it: how to downgrade your 3G from iOS 4.0 or 4.0.1 to OS 3.1.3.

We can’t stress this enough: the downgrade will wipe your iPhone, and once you’re back on OS 3.1.3 you can’t restore data from backups made in iOS 4.0 or 4.0.1. That means if something hasn’t been copied from your iPhone to your computer and you’ve added it since upgrading to 4.0 or 4.0.1, you’ll lose it permanently.

Apple, interpretation and the woo-hoo/boo-hoo thing

One of the interesting things about online news is that you can often see stories unfiltered. For example, if you’re interested in Apple’s iPhone antenna news conference, you can see footage of it rather than relying on someone else’s report of it. And that throws up something interesting, because there are some very different interpretations floating around.

Take the issue of Apple giving away cases. This is what Steve Jobs said (it’s just after the 25 minute mark if you’re watching the video):

A lot of people have told us the bumper solves the signal strength problem… why don’t you just give everybody a case? Okay, great, let’s give everybody a case… We’ll re-examine this in September and decide whether to keep going or maybe we’ll have a better idea.

And this is Slate writer Farhad Manjoo’s interpretation. Like me, Manjoo wasn’t at the conference; he relied on liveblogs and tweets. I haven’t linked to him for any other reason than his was the first article I thought of.

Still, if you want to be a total jerk about it and keep insisting there’s a problem with your magical iPhone, Jobs has an offer for you. ‘OK, great, let’s give everybody a case,’ he said. Happy now, whiners?

Now, it’s entirely possible that I’m the one who’s wrong here, or that I’ve completely misinterpreted the article, but I think Manjoo’s suggesting an attitude, a vibe that I really don’t get from the video. Is Jobs indulging in a bit of reality distortion during the presentation? Of course. That’s what he does. But immediately before the case announcement Jobs admits that while it doesn’t affect everyone, there is a genuine problem; the case bit doesn’t seem to have any “whiners” subtext.

I’m just not picking up the same attitude that Manjoo clearly picked up. Quite the opposite. I thought Jobs seemed frail, and tired, and less cocky than usual. But you don’t have to take my word, or Manjoo’s word, for it. You can go to the horse’s mouth and get it unfiltered.

And that’s great, but it’s also terrible. Great that you can get things in context – although of course how you interpret what you see or hear will depend on what you’re bringing as baggage, so it’s going to be your truth rather than an absolute truth – but terrible because we’re quite busy enough, thank you. Who other than the most spittle-flecked insomniac conspiracy theorist has the time to investigate every single thing they read?

I think the ability to go to the source is a good example of the woo-hoo/boo-hoo way the Internet often works.

Woo-hoo! I can do this! This is great!

Boo-hoo! I have to do this! This sucks!

Maybe Steve Jobs should start a blog

Me, on the iPhone 4 Antennagate:

Apple has arguably the most loyal fans of any firm, and if it had addressed their concerns earlier and got them on its side, this supposed scandal would have remained a minor kerfuffle. Look how quickly and how widely fake Jobs emails – “it’s just a phone” – spread. A real one sent to every Apple ID could have stopped the whole thing before it started.

Fancy a free book on building iPhone apps?

You do? Here you go, then: a free, legitimate online version of Building iPhone Apps with HTML, CSS and JavaScript. As at least one person on MetaFilter says:

This is a good book.

Fixing iPhone signal strength? There’s no app for that

Apple’s holding a press conference to talk about the iPhone 4, presumably to address the ever-worsening signal strength PR mess. I think it’s been blown out of all proportion, but that’s partly Apple’s fault:

Instead of putting their hands up and saying “hey, it’s possible to bridge the antennas at one particular point and that can make the signal drop, but that’s the price you pay for the BEST RECEPTION ON AN IPHONE EVER!” they’ve said that the reason for disappearing bars is “both simple and surprising”.

Presumably it’s simple as in “let’s make something up! Simple!” and surprising as in “we’ll be surprised if anyone believes this”. In Apple PR land an issue that can be fixed with nail polish, a rubber band or a different grip can also be fixed with… software!