Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

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Category: Technology

Shiny gadgets and clever computers

  • Is Amazon working on a Kindle tablet?

    I’ll be amazed if it isn’t. Andy Ihnatko:

    A Kindle Tablet would have an instant clarity with consumers that no other tablet can communicate … not even the iPad.

    There’s a real perceptual problem with tablets. Just what the hell are they, anyway? And how is the average consumer — someone who’s by no means intimidated by new technology, but who’s in no way mesmerized by the shining shininess of its shine, either — meant to know why they would want to have a tablet and their notebook?

    Even the iPad suffers from this problem. It’s a brand-new category of computing and the differences are subtle if you’ve never spent time using one. You’ll get a clear picture if you sit next to me on a four-hour flight and ask me an innocent question about this computer on my tray table, but trust me: this solution comes with its own unique set of downsides.

    But what’s a Kindle?

    “It’s a book reader.” Sold!

    The word “Kindle” is as intimately associated with that product category as “iPod” is with music players. Amazon wouldn’t need to describe their new tablet as “magical” when they already have “Kindle.” That one word would get millions of iPad fence-sitters inside the tent. Why should Amazon even care if these folks don’t discover the web browser and the email client after a few days? Or if it’s a couple of weeks before they install their first app?

    The current Kindle is a wonderful device, and getting new stuff for it is a joy: find, click, read. I think Ihnatko’s right when he says the iPad is as much about its ecosystem as the device itself, and I think he’s right when he says Amazon has its own content ecosystem.

    This is all complete speculation, of course, but I’ve been spending a lot of time covering tablets recently and nothing really jumps out in a “never mind the iPad 2; look at this” kind of way. A Kindle tablet would.

  • The iPad 2 is £399

    That, boys and girls, is Apple waving its arse at its rivals.

    Wi-Fi only: £399 / £479 / £559

    Wi-Fi and 3G: £499 / £579 / £659

     

  • Will Twitter get shitter?

    Twitter is five, and like all good five-year-olds it’s about time it paid its way. Me, on Techradar:

    I was in Glasgow’s famous Sauchiehall Street on Saturday night. If you haven’t been recently, it’s like a Hieronymus Bosch painting where the demons wear too-short skirts or G-Star Raw. It’s genuinely unpleasant, a seething mass of drunken, vomiting and occasionally fist-fighting imbeciles.

    If you need proof that a significant part of the human race is as dumb as rocks, I can give you the postcode to prove it.

    Or I can let you see Twitter on my phone.

  • Here’s what Apple’s up to with the iPad

    Andy Ihnatko:

    Many of you were around for the transition from text to graphical user interfaces. Some of you were even around when the world shifted from mainframes to personal computers. Well, congratulations: you’ve lived to see your third revolution in computing.

    I think the good Mr Ihnatko is bang on the money: the iPad 2 is an evolutionary rather than a revolutionary step, but it’s heading somewhere very, very interesting.

    I know that Apple plans to deploy the next great leap at about the same time when everybody else is introducing new tablets that sort of do what the iPad could do in early 2011.

    At this rate, Apple has until 2012 — or even early 2013 — to make their big move.

     

  • Why should you pay more to use your iPhone as a portable hotspot?

    The latest iOS update enables you to turn your iPhone into a wi-fi hotspot, sharing your 3G connection with other devices – and even though iPhone data plans are capped, you still need to pay extra to use the feature. Why could that be? I think I know the answer.

    There are only two possible explanations.

    One, iPhone data is a different shape from Android data. It’s triangular, or maybe octagonal, and it gets stuck in the internet tubes.

    Or two, the networks are bastards.

  • ‘Contribute to my website’ is the new pay to play

    The nice people at .net magazine have a spanking new website, and one of my pieces is on it: “What are words worth”, where I… well, you saw the headline.

    In the age of social media and user-generated content, suggesting that your name on someone else’s website is “exposure” is like suggesting membership of the HTML Writer’s Guild will boost your chances of getting a well-paid agency job.

  • iPad 2: it’s about sex appeal, not specs appeal

    I’ve decided to compete with Rihanna in the international pop market, so for the last few weeks I’ve been building a rival in my shed. It’s not going too well, to be honest.

    I don’t know what the problem is. I mean, I’ve got the specs exactly right: there are bones, and guts, and teeth, and hair, and ears. In fact, my specs are better, because my Rihanna has two heads and four lungs. And yet I can’t persuade anybody in the record business to give me any money. And now it’s starting to whiff a bit.

    I think tablet manufacturers know how I feel.

    Steve Jobs nailed it yesterday when he said “technology is not enough.”What makes the iPad and the iPad 2 special isn’t an A4 processor or an A5; it’s iOS and the apps it runs. My Rihanna rival is useless, because it doesn’t sing. The iPad… the iPad sings.

    I have no idea how much RAM is in the iPad 2. I can’t remember the A5’s clock speed. The two bits of the Apple event that made me go wow didn’t involve benchmarks, or spec sheets: they were the bits where we saw the magnetic covers, which made me laugh out loud, and when we got to see GarageBand, which made me wish I were 16 again while also making me glad I’m old enough that I won’t hear the awful crap it’s going to help people create.

    In fact, rather than make me crazy about the iPad 2, yesterday’s event made me even happier about my first generation iPad. There are two things in iOS 4.3 that will make a big difference to my everyday life: the personal hotspot feature coming to the iPhone 4, and home sharing coming to the iPad. Taken together, that means my 16GB Wi-Fi iPad has just become an UnlimitedGB 3G iPad. For free.

    Any thoughts I might have had about jumping to a non-iOS device have just gone out of the window.

    Apple’s event wasn’t really about technology. Instead of banging on about the A5 processor, Apple showed us how to play the drums and strum guitars, muck about with home movies and morph nine different faces simultaneously. Instead of talking about RAM, Apple showed off Smart Covers – a mere accessory that delivers more joy than most firms’ entire product portfolios, and something I think is going to be responsible for loads of iPad 2 sales.

    What Apple gets – and what I think a lot of firms don’t – is that most people, the kind of people who are currently buying iOS devices and apps in extraordinary quantities, don’t care about specifications any more than they want to think about how their lunchtime sausages are made.

    They know what iPads are, and they like what they see, and when they see a rival tablet they’ll ask, “hey, why would I buy this instead of an iPad?” And the answer they get is gigahertz, and true multitasking, and other stuff they don’t care about.

    I can show you the problem in two videos. First, the iPad. We see books and games, and education, and fun. Not only do I want to buy that, but I want to have the kind of cool, intelligent and exciting lifestyle the ad implies.

    Now, the Verizon ad for the Motorola Xoom. It couldn’t be more teenage-boy if it took place in a black-painted room full of suspiciously crispy socks.

    Buy it? That ad makes me scared to even touch it.

  • Two months with an Apple TV

    I bought an Apple TV in an attempt to free my huge home video library from its Mac-shaped prison: I can’t be bothered unplugging everything and moving the Mac downstairs when I want to watch a clip of Baby Bigmouth, and life’s too short to burn your own DVDs. It’s been in daily use since then, so here are a few thoughts.

    It’s great if you have kids, and Handbrake
    Kids like films; kids also like scratching DVDs. Slowly but surely I’ve been using the combination of Fairmount and Handbrake to copy our various Pixar discs to the Apple TV. It takes forever – DVD ripping, no matter how good the software, is never anything but a pain – but it’s cheaper than having to buy Wall-E all over again.

    It’s surprisingly good
    720p HD video over Wi-Fi? No problem. If you absolutely, positively have to have 1080p, don’t buy an Apple TV yet. It doesn’t do it. Me, I couldn’t care less. My TV isn’t big enough to tell the difference between HD and True HD.

    It’s really good with the iPad
    The novelty of watching something on YouTube on the iPad and hitting one button to put it on the TV hasn’t worn off yet. Once iPlayer etc can do it too, things will be fun.

    It’s buggy
    I’ve never had to reboot an Apple product as often as I have to reboot the Apple TV. If I get two days out of it I’m happy. Luckily the reboot is simple and quick, but we’re not quite in “it just works” territory here.

    It can be desperately slow
    I’ve had to divide my home movies into individual years, and even then the Apple TV takes between two and five minutes to load details of a 100-clip library – not the video, just the folder listing and thumbnails. To say this pisses me off would be an enormous understatement. I don’t know if it’s the Apple TV or iTunes, and I don’t care.

    It needs iTunes
    Apple TV is crying out for a media server, I think. Having to leave iTunes running on your Mac is a pain, and I hate to think how much energy the combination of Apple TV and running MacBook Pro is using up. I hope it isn’t too much, but I’m scared to see what my next electricity bill says.

    Movies are still ropey
    Is there such a thing as a good UK video on demand service? The catalogue on Apple TV (and in iTunes, and on the Xbox, and…) is still very patchy.

    It needs iPlayer
    If Nintendo can put it on the Wii, Apple can put it on the Apple TV. This one’s right at the top of my wish list.

    It doesn’t do many video formats
    If you’re the kind of person whose television aerial is bittorrent-shaped, expect to spend a lot of time converting those AVI and MKV files to M4Vs or MP4s.

    YouTube is great, but I can’t favourite anything
    Anyone else have this problem? I’ve been getting the temporary-error message for two months now.

    I can’t see my own Flickr photos
    Flickr support is nice. Flickr support without login, not so nice. I keep my personal pics in Friends and Family mode; Apple TV can’t login to display them.

    It’s great for music
    Or at least, it is if you’re willing to faff a bit. My Apple TV is hooked to an AV receiver, which in turn is hooked to the TV. I’ve got HDMI control on so that when the TV goes off, the DVD player does too; unfortunately that means the process of listening to music without the TV is this:

    * Turn everything on
    * Turn AV receiver to Apple TV
    * Find playlist etc on Apple TV, start playing.
    * Turn off the TV
    * Turn the AV receiver back on again (it’s gone into standby)
    * Take the Apple TV off pause (it goes into that automatically)

    It’s not elegant, but it gets there eventually.

    It’s worth £101
    Provided, that is, you don’t mind swearing at it from time to time and rebooting it every few days. It’s a clever bit of kit but if you want something as simple and as reliable as a basic DVD player, get a basic DVD player.

  • Thunderbolt and iPads

    Apple’s unveiled some new MacBook Pros, and the big news is Thunderbolt, also known as Light Peak. It’s very clever, and could enable some very interesting things:

    The new Macs look like iPads with keyboards. They’re clearly the latest iteration of Apple’s current design language, but what if they’re more than that? What if the iPad-ification of OS X and the iPad-like design of the MBPs are a sign of where this is all heading?

    We’ve seen how quickly mobile processors are progressing, and it won’t be long before it’s possible to put the specs of today’s MacBook Pros into a MacBook Air-thin iPad. Quad or six-core processors, oodles of RAM and a couple of Thunderbolt ports in an iPad could produce something really interesting.

  • Bits won’t save music

    In the early 2000s, when internet piracy was killing the recorded music business, some record companies had an idea. “Let’s keep doing what we’re doing,” they suggested. “But let’s do it with slightly better sound quality and a much bigger price tag”.

    Enter DVD Audio and Super Audio CD. They offered better sound quality than CD, and they were miles ahead of the 128Kbps MP3s being swapped on Napster and Kazaa. But as formats they’re footnotes, loved by the odd audiophile and completely ignored by the mainstream.

    Meanwhile, piracy continues and the business of recorded music appears to be in terminal decline. Not to worry. Some record companies have an idea.

    “Let’s keep doing what we’re doing”, they’re suggesting. “But let’s do it with slightly better sound quality and a much bigger price tag.”

    I think I’ve heard this song before.

    More cowbell

    This time it’s not about a physical format; it’s about a bitrate. Labels are considering providing music in 24-bit format, and they think we’ll be willing to pay more for it.

    We won’t.

    There are three reasons for that. The first is that people who don’t currently pay for 16-bit music on CD aren’t suddenly going to go “woah! Eight more bits! I renounce my piratical ways!”

    The second is that there isn’t that big a difference between 16-bit and 24-bit anyway, especially not if you’re listening on Apple earbuds, through your Xbox 360 or via your mobile phone.

    I’m told that the key music provider for The Kids these days is YouTube, which happily combines points one and two: we’ve got a generation whose expect music to be there for free, and they’re listening to it on crappy laptop speakers.

    The third reason is that a lot of popular music is so ridiculously compressed that better quality files will actually make it sound worse. I once listened to Oasis’s debut album on a stupidly expensive bit of audiophile kit, and the recording was so harsh it felt like my ears were being stabbed. The Red Hot Chili Peppers’ famously overcooked Californication sounds progressively worse the better the audio equipment, and any music that’s been involved in the the loudness wars will suffer from the same problem.

    It’s not all bad, certainly, but music that’s been tweaked to sound really loud on clothes shops’ PAs, Capital FM and YouTube is not music that’s going to enthral you with its subtlety and grasp of dynamics. For the overwhelming majority of popular music, moving to 24-bit won’t make the slightest bit of difference.

    What we’re seeing here is an old music business strategy: take what you’ve got and try and sell it in a slightly different wrapper. It worked with CD, so they tried it again with DVD-Audio and Super Audio CD. That wasn’t so successful, and I’m willing to bet that 24-bit downloads won’t be either.

    I blogged a link to some graphs about the decline of the music business a few days ago. The message from the numbers is simple: the music business profits depend on albums, and nobody’s really fussed about albums any more. Boosting bitrates – and upping prices – won’t do anything to change that.