Archive for apple
August 11, 2011 at 8:47 pm · Filed under Observations and Ramblings, The Future and tagged: android, apple
I have long believed that something was up with democracy. I had the feeling that it just didn’t work, and the recent stalemate in Washington certainly supports my argument. At the moment the Republicans and Democrats are trying their hardest to fill a ‘super committee’ on debt reduction with their least flexible candidates. Republicans put forward candidates for whom any kind of tax increase is out of the question, and Democrats put forward candidates for whom certain spending cuts are out of the question. huh? isn’t it supposed to be a committee designed to come to a compromise? why fill it with the people least willing to. Democracy has created a situation where we don’t get the best outcome. Too many voices all saying different things.
There is a link between Apple and Google. Google is an open democracy with many companies and developers collectively adding to the Android platform. Apple’s iOs is a closed system, dictated to a large extent by Apple. I get frustrated when I hear people saying ‘Android is growing faster than iOs’. It isn’t. It reminds me of the J2ME days where you have to make many versions of applications for phones (see there was a work angle). Android’s openness is not doing it any favors.
Anyway I’ll stop now and refer to this article, which sums it up pretty nicely.
October 20, 2010 at 1:54 pm · Filed under Tigerspike Innovation Lab, Work Related Stuff and tagged: android, apple, steve jobs
I was reading this post about Steve Jobs commenting on Apple’s quarterly earnings. From our experience building apps for Blackberry, Android, and Apple, his comments were really spot on. He is basically telling it exactly like it is.
The comment that he made on smaller tablets being lost in an in-between world was very true. What technology people fail to realise is that once something is too big for a pocket, it can be as big as a notebook. It doesn’t need to be small anymore, so the mid size just won’t work.
I won’t reiterate any more of the points, but to summarise for the non tech person: compare the Apple store with any other store that sells mobile phones, and you can see the vast difference – how Apple is doing things so much better than the others. That same gulf between Apple and other stores exists under the hood too. Apple tech is such a clear winner.
August 31, 2010 at 3:16 am · Filed under Observations and Ramblings, The Future, Tigerspike Innovation Lab, Work Related Stuff and tagged: android, apple
Back in the old days (2004) we used to make games in J2ME. We found that we had to make about 15 different versions of the game because each different handset had their own way of dealing with Java. Nokia was the king back then (and still is in many markets), but even for Nokia we had 2 or 3 builds to get the game working across series 30, 60, etc… Multiply that by Motorola, Sony Ericsson, LG, and Samsung (these were the days before HTC and the other new guys) and you have an issue.
So Android was supposed to bring a solution to this with a common platform across many devices. Sadly this didn’t happen in practice as well as it did in theory. Firstly, because updating the operating system happens slower for Android – there are big blocks of people (over 25%) with Android 1.5, 1.6, and 2.1. Secondly, there are subtle differences that exist from handset to handset. In the end, while we are in a better position than we were in 2004, there is still a long way to go.
In this respect Apple is better because. a) they standardise better (to be fair its easier, because they have one device), and b) people update to the later versions much faster than Android, so making things backwards compatible is something that isn’t as relevant.
So if you are building an app, expect Android to cost more than Apple. Finding good Android developers is also harder than good iPhone ones.
What about cross platform solutions?
There are companies that claim that they have a ‘build once, port to many platforms model’. We do this to an extent, but there is still alot of tinkering. I have looked under the hood of many of those other companies (all the ones that pitch us), and their ‘clever tech that the VCs like’ never does what they preach. The closest ones I have seen dumb down the experience which means that the app suffers.
So if you are building a solution for multi-platforms, you can ‘build once’ in terms of usability (to an extent), design, and the guts behind the app (like APIs that you create), but getting the best out of each platform requires per platform builds for the front ends. There is no easy way (yet) from my experience.
January 28, 2010 at 12:26 am · Filed under Uncategorized and tagged: apple, iPad, sony
So the iPad came out. There is a pretty good video of it here: http://tinyurl.com/y9r6dnz. From first look It looks really good. But there are some commentators saying a few negative things about it (see here: http://tinyurl.com/yauynhf).
Here’s why the guys from Gizmodo and others like them are wrong.
Reality check: people who buy Apple devices are not techie people, they are everyday people. People who comment on Apple devices are techies and what is important to them isn’t to the people who are buying the products.
What is important
- First and foremost, the design. The physical design of the iPad. It looks nice and feels nice. It feels expensive. Compared to every other manufacturer except perhaps Sony, Apple’s devices look and feel nicer, and that is the number 1 thing that people care about. NOT the technical specs. This is 90% of why iPad will succeed. The techy crap is 10%. When will the techies and engineers get this?
- Cool looking functions. Things like the page turning graphics for books, and how photos are dealt with look cool. These are two big uses for the iPad: looking at pictures, and reading books. These little differences mean way more than any technical functionality. Everyday people don’t know what Flash is (or care) they don’t care that the iPad doesn’t support it, they care that looking at their photos looks cool, and works quickly.
- Speed is important and it looks like the iPad does things quickly and effectively. This matters to people. That cool looking stuff happens fast. Everyday people don’t know whether 1GHz is fast or not, they care that responsiveness is instant.
What is not important
- No camera. Ok, so it would be nice to have a camera (NB totally useless to have a high MP camera, but I assume when they add one it will be just because people wrongly think its important), but no big deal that it doesn’t have one. Maybe Apple are doing it on purpose so that they can release the iPadS with one.
- Running applications in the background. Hello!? no one who buys the iPad knows what this means or cares. Generally humans do one thing at once so who cares about doing many things at once. This is a technical issue that is utterly meaningless to the everyday people (who are the ones buying the device!). The Droid actually use this as advertising: ‘we can run more than one application at once’. So? this means zero to people. Waste of ad dollars.
- Anything that the techies think is not important to people buying the device. The iPad will sell because Apple’s stores are inviting, and their sales people are genuine and helpful. Their after sales service is undeniably better than any of the competition, and their device feels nice and does things people want to do quickly with a few nice little details.
I went into the Sony store in Tokyo yesterday, and what was cool about it was the clarity of the LCD TVs is awesome, the sound is amazing, and the 3D worlds for gaming and also TV were amazing (Sony’s design is looking very cool, which is why their products are (justifiably) more expensive). That is what people care about: ‘look at this cool 3D TV it looks and sounds amazing’, NOT ‘this 3D TV runs chip XYZ, and can do parallel processing, blah blah blah…
February 18, 2009 at 10:46 pm · Filed under Observations and Ramblings, The Future, Tigerspike Innovation Lab, Work Related Stuff and tagged: apple, appstore, nokia, ovi
This blog entry is mainly about Nokia’s Ovi store. Loosely this is an App store like Apple’s, but it promises to be availble to 300m devices by 2012.
This is big. I am a big fan of apple, but iPhone sales are dwarfed by sales of Nokias. In my opinion Apple is still way ahead in terms of the phone design and useability, but Nokia (and everyone else with varying degrees of success) are all trying to copy; and as Motorola found out, you can’t just make one awesome phone (the V3) and then sit back and bask.
What does Ovi have?
- A general app store that gives developers 70% of sales revenue (like Apple) accross 15 set price points, and charges though the carriers (after the carriers take their share (which is SHIT – carriers take 40% to 50% – there won’t be anything left!), or through credit card. Apple is way ahead in this respect, and Nokia will have to come up with some more solutions – things like Paypal will help, but one thing Nokia hasn’t got that Apple has is the billing relationship. And that matters. Alot.
- Nokia music store does pretty much the same thing as iTunes, and also streams from your PC. It also has a recommendation engine which is good, but it isn’t as cool as Apple’s iTunes Genius (neither of which are as good as last.fm)
- Nokia Friend view, which actually pits Nokia against Google (their new Lattitude service). I think that Google has a better chance, as their solution goes accross all platforms wheras Nokia’s is only availlable on S60 handsets at the moment. They both look cool though – check out the videos here.
- MOSH which is Nokia’s UGC thing which I won’t go into here.
- A games capability which Nokia will be ahead of Apple for; due to their experience with the N Gage. That said, Apple is more Wii (because of the accelarometer) and NGage is more Playstation, and I prefer Wii over Playstation. Steve Jobs doesn’t really like gaming either, so he may be missing a trick here. Games outsold DVDs this year.
Distribution
- iTunes has between 100m and 250m users depending on who you ask, iPhone has tens of millions
- Nokia say that Ovi will be on 300m devices by 2012. This is bullish, but Nokia do have 40% of the global market, and there are more than 4bn connections out there (or thereabouts), and 40% of that is 1.6Bn!
- Something else to remember is that iPhone users use their devices way more than Nokia users do – even the new Nokia devices… we will wait and see what Nokia produces to answer the iPhone. I haven’t seen anything close yet (from anyone – confirmed by our guys Nic and Simon who are at 3GSM in Barcalona at the moment)
Can Nokia get it on the handsets?
All the new ones yes – the first one is the N97 in May, but they say that they will be able to get it on the Series 40 and 60. Through an ‘on handset’ application. Getting people to download that is by no means easy.
Also remember that Nokia will start to piss the carriers off as they will theorise that they will lose revenue (the credit card part). Who knows they may gain more (i.e. their share of the carrier charged downloads), but they will fight over it – which should be fun to watch! The carriers need to invest in this stuff too otherwise they will become dumb pipes, which they need to either accept, or do something about. And it has to be something more impressive than Nokia and Apple, and Google can do. And that is a very tall order…
So will Nokia win?
Even considering that Nokia has just laid off a load of their R&D guys due to the recession (Not a good time to need to innovate and develop cool stuff) in summary: If Nokia can connect effectively with their handsets: i.e. all the lower end handsets download the application OR all new Nokias pre load Ovi AND they sort their billing out, AND the carriers don’t kill them, THEN they will have the biggest network in the world. Even if they do this – Apple will still be there, they won’t go away because they are too cool and they do things right and their design is beautiful.
But while Apple is “cooler” than Nokia. it isn’t by that much…. Finnish people never hurt anyone, so Maito on calista, Sokeri on Halpa to you!
