A iPhone 3GS Fan Favorite - The Oleophobic screen

Who would have thought that one of the fan favorites of the new iPhone 3GS would be the oleophobic screen. iPhone and Touches are notorious for building up oils from fingers and body parts. The 3GS oleophobic screen makes it much easier to wipe off oils and smudges. Hopefully the oil obsessive compulsives can get some sleep now.

Steve Jobs Back at Apple - Does it Matter?

Although not confirmed by Apple, CNBC is confirming that Jobs is back on Apple's campus. As far as Apple goes does it really matter? The depth of Apple's talent runs so deep that the company's vision is no longer dependent on one man. During the last few conferences and media updates without Steve we've seen a very impressive lineup of Apple product managers. Apple's CFO, Peter Oppenheimer, who has run the ship from the top is a smart and savvy corporate executive. Steve is absolutely a positive figure at Apple, but if there's one thing his leave has shown us is that Apple is poised for success with or without Steve.

Apple Expert Improves Apple Support Experience

I recently contacted AppleCare for a support issue related to Boot Camp. Creating new problem tickets with any vendor is always a frustrating experience. Calling any vendor regarding an issue typically involves going through a half dozen voice prompts. If, and that's an if, the vendor's automated system understands your voice or touch tone response the first time (or at all) you may get routed to the correct location. Apple now has a new process for opening support issues that I found to be very easy and straightforward. The new service is called Apple Expert. It allows you to open a technical issue online and then have Apple call you at the time you desire to speak to a representative. You can have them call you immediately or wait until a later time. The call is routed to the appropriate team to address your issue based on the information you provide. Apple is not the only vendor to use call back technology like this, but it is great to Apple bringing the service forward for users.

AT&T Becomes the Laughing Stock at Apple’s Developer Conference

In today’s keynote at the Apple Developer Conference the new tethering and MMS features of 3.0 were discussed. While dozens of countries around the world will have the ability to take advantage of both at the launch of 3.0 in a few weeks the US will not be one of them. That’s because AT&T won’t be ready to launch these services until the end of the summer. This further fuels the fire that AT&T’s 3G network is bottlenecked by iPhone users. Users across the country have complained of slow 3G speeds as well as switching between 3G and EDGE. When conference attendees were told AT&T would not be ready until the summer there was a flood of laughter. It seems preposterous that Apple would release features their major US carrier could not support at launch. Tethering I can understand, but MMS? Give me a break. Apple didn’t even provide a good reason why there would be a delay on AT&T’s behalf. If you don’t have a reason there is nothing to say. AT&T looked bad today.

Apple Releases iPhone 3GS

Apple’s latest phone, the iPhone 3GS, was announced at the 2009 WWDC today. The S stands for speed. The design is the same as the first 3G, but there are major speed improvements. Launching applications, viewing attachments and viewing web pages has improved. The phone is ready to deliver speeds of 7.2 Mbps once carriers are ready. The phone ships with a new 3 megapixel auto focus, white balance and exposure camera. To improve picture taking you can tap on the screen to force the phone to focus on specific areas (i.e. like a face for flower). The ability to take pictures in low light settings has improved and an auto macro feature can take picture of objects up to 10 cm away. One of the long awaited announcements was the ability to capture video. Video capture is at 30 frames per second VGA with audio. No HD quality videos on this phone. Once videos are captured there is a way to “scrub” and trim the video to just the content you want. Videos can then be shared via Email, MobileMe, YouTube and MMS. Hey! What about Facebook? It will be interesting to see how video capture will be built into applications. Another new feature available only on the 3GS is Voice Control. You can use your voice to make calls based on the names of people in your address book as well as control your music. Battery life, the nemesis of the iPhone, was also improved. The phone will be available on June 19^th.

Features like video capture, voice dialing, longer battery life are what I call “about time” features. Other smartphones have had these features for some time now. I was disappointed to not see a camera on the front of the device. Face to face conversations will become pervasive in the future and the lack of second camera is likely a cost issue as well as a bandwidth concern for AT&T. Other than the video capability I don’t see existing 3G iPhone users trading up to this device. It’s not compelling enough. If you are an original 2G user from the first generation ending your 2 year contract the timing couldn’t be better.

iPhone 3.0 Available June 17th, 2009 With New Features

iPhone 2.0 came out less than a year ago with the launch of a Software Developers Kit for building applications. Since that time, developers have created over 50,000 apps available in the App Store. With a user base of over 40,000,000 iPhone and iPod Touches the App market space is huge. 1 billion apps have been downloaded as of April 2009. You can thank the free applications for contributing to that statistic. During the Developer’s 2009 keynote Apple showed a short video featuring developers telling their story about developing for the iPhone as well as customers declaring their love for their application. It was a fascinating video to get developers thinking 1) I could be one of those developers selling millions of applications and 2) I would love to have people talking about how much they love my application. A little positive physiological warfare on the developer mindset.

The iPhone 3.0 feature list was somewhat rehashed from a few months ago, but with some new entries. Now you can rent and purchase movies from the iPhone. Audiobooks and TV shows available as well. Parental Controls were improved to include movies, TV shows and applications. Tethering is available for those vendors that support it. Still no reference to the availability of Flash. Auto fill now finally available to remember user names and passwords for web sites. A really cool Find My iPhone feature was announced. It’s a service available to MobileMe customers for a fee on a yearly basis. Using the service via MobileMe you can view the approximate location of your phone on a map. You can send it a message with a special audible alert regardless if it is in silent mode. What a great way to drive revenue!!! Details remain as to how long the alarm stays on. You can also send a remote wipe command to delete all data. In general with the 3.0 release there are lots of the minor features yet to be discovered. In an important confirmation from Apple we know that “free apps remain free”. Developers have to be careful about their pricing model out of the gate with Apple’s stance on this. Push notifications are finally ready to go with three types: text alerts, numerical badges for icon and custom alert sounds.

Lots of great benefits all around with the 3.0 release. Application developers will produce even more amazing applications with the 3.0 SDK. User satisfaction with the device will continue to sore. All that being said, there are many features you can find on a Blackberry but not on an iPhone.

Apple Previews OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard at WWDC

Windows 7 is just another Vista according to Apple. There’s a lot of truth to that. Microsoft can’t escape the registry, DLLs and other poor decision choices that plague the Windows OS. Contrast that to where Apple is with their operating system. Apple’s Leopard 10.5 is fantastic. It’s loaded with features and stable as can be. At Apple’s developer conference today, Apple provided more information on Snow Leopard, the next release of the operating system. The past few versions of OS X have been loaded with user features. With Snow Leopard we are likely to see less of that. Snow Leopard is about building upon Leopard to build a better Leopard. Snow Leopard will focus on refinements, new technologies and Exchange support. This OS is not a full-blown enhancement in many respects, but provides the right next steps in the evolution of the OS.

Refinements: Don’t expect any big changes in areas like the Finder however it will be rewritten in Cocoa for better performance. The Finder has a few enhancements with magnification control of icons and the ability to view documents or movies based on an icon. The existing Stacks feature handles large contents better by allowing you to scroll through the contents of Stacks. Clicking on a folder in a Stack view keeps you in the Stack view as opposed to opening the folder in the Finder. Very handy. Other upcoming changes will include faster cancellation of actions, put back from trash, custom search scope and other developer benefits to enhance the experience. Expose is being built in to the Dock to provide easy access to application windows. Dock Expose even retains its position when switching between applications. Copying text from PDFs has vastly improved by detecting the makeup of a document to allow for better selection techniques. Hand gestures on the track pad will be incorporated with next character prediction for some languages. Mail speed has improved in basic areas. The new QuickTime user interface on the player has greatly improved and looks more like playing a DVD. Safari 4, when used with Leopard Snow, has full history search based on the text of pages. That feature can be used with Spotlight. Really cool.

New Technologies (for techies): Snow Leopard will complete the effort of moving the OS to 64 bit. All of core system applications will finally be upgraded. New hardware has brought about the need to better address OS basics. Multi core processors are one of those areas that can be optimized especially with processors including more cores. Apple has created Grand Central Dispatch as a means to increase performance using multicore processors. This will be an important topic for developers of applications with high demands on the CPU. Not much response from the crowd as they try to figure out what this exactly means. On the video front Apple introduced OpenCL to replace OpenGL. Apple created it as an open standard and they have the buy in from all the top graphics manufacturers.

Exchange Support: Exchange support will now be built into Mail, iCal and Address Book. Mail uses auto discovery to find Exchange servers based on login credentials. Viewing Office attachments works with Mail’s quick view even if you don’t have MS Office installed. You can do things like accept calendar items in Mail and search the Exchange Global Address List in the Address Book. On the back end you have to have Exchange 2007. Apple points out you get Exchange connectivity without having to buy Outlook like on Windows. Ouch.

Snow Leopard’s pricing is set at $29 for users upgrading from Leopard. Getting users to Snow Leopard is an important, but not critical upgrade to provide support for the next generation of applications. Leopard Snow doesn’t offer many bells and whistles at this point and is unlikely to before the final release this September. The price point tells it all in terms of what the perceived value will be to users.

Apple Improves MacBook Laptop Line

With the current trend of new Apple customers purchasing laptops it’s no surprise that Apple has invested so much effort in reinvigorating their laptop family. The new 15” MacBook Pro is the continuation of the build out taking on some of the features found in the 17” MacBook Pro like a built in battery. The new battery provides an impressive seven hours of battery life. The new batteries have 3x longer recharge length compared to the previous version. Most users will go five years before the need to replace the battery. An SD card slot was finally added. Sometimes Apple is just late to the game and the lack of SD card was one of those areas. The MacBook Pro will sell for $300 less than the prior 15” at $1699. Some of the more expensive models include the NVIDIA GeForce 9400M and the GT. Users will have the ability to choose between faster graphics or longer battery life. The 13” MacBook was rebranded officially as a MacBook Pro. It now features improved battery life, up to eight GB of memory. The LED backlit keyboard is now standard and Firewire 800 is included. Only $1199 after the $199 price drop. The MacBook Air also received updates and significant price drops.

Apple clearly felt sales pressure from a weak economy as well as recent Microsoft attack ads to reduce pricing. Hardware is an evolutionary process and the current lineup of Apple laptops looks great. The new line is incredibly friendly in the environmental space. Businesses who “care about the environment” need to consider if running Windows on Apple hardware might make sense (without ever getting in to Mac OX).

WWDC 2009 Predictions for the iPhone, OS 10.6 and Steve Jobs

Apple's keynotes are always something to look forward to and tomorrow should provide lots to talk about. If past keynotes are an indication of future keynotes you will see fewer topics with more depth. Other than covering the iPhone and Snow Leopard I wouldn't expect many if any other announcements. Here are some thoughts.

We are almost certain to see new iPhone hardware. Video capture capability, which has long been limited by hardware, should now be available. I would expect battery life to improve with the new hardware as well (this is also being reported in other places). Doubtful that 3.0 will bring about significant battery improvements on prior versions. We will be treated to a few examples of how Apple redesigned their notification process based on their previous formal testing of high volume push notifications. Notifications are one of dozens of 3.0 upgrades the public has yet to hear about in any substantive way and I would expect some of these items to receive more focus. Some of those features were likely half baked a few months ago when first discussed and will be ready for show time. Features like copy and paste will likely be meager bullets on slides. I expect Apple to announce more mouth dropping App Store statistics (thoughts on stats from 3.0 media event) and will boast App Store features and added benefits. Expect to see lots of vendors demonstrating their products. The iPhone will continue to lack the desired features for business I have brought up in the past.

Expect to see the first quality look at the new OS 10.6. This conference is an important time to begin the hype on "Snow" so expect to see lots of "goodies".

I don't expect any announcements on Steve Job's return.