Out it fell from my shirt pocket on to the sidewalk. It was dark but
helpfully the screen lit up as it clattered on the ground. Making it
very clear that this time there were consequences to my folly even
after dozens of other drops, slips and fumbles had previously been
forgiven.

Such as it’s a magical product from Apple it still functions flawlessly.

I was able to book an appointment at the store for tomorrow morning
and write this post while looking forward to how much more resale-able
a 3GS with new glass will be in July.

Maybe there’s a little pity for a phone under the 1 year warranty and
I won’t even pay for the repair.

Posted via email from hxf148′s posterous

Update: It’s fixed. It wasn’t free. Wah Wah.

The quick answer is yes.

The price is amazing right up to the top end, which could be more here in Canada by as much as $100. It will be interesting to see what Rogers, Bell, Telus offer for 3G packages but the $499 Wifi only version is going to sell wildly. They all will.

The size and construction are perfect. It is light but durable, strong and svelte. As laptops have taken over from fixed personal computers; today will be the day we saw post laptop computing. This is what comes next. Tablets exist today, there are several small specialty markets and devices available. In a single day, following decades of internal research at Apple, more of the future has arrived.

Dozens of companies are making or will make a tablet device this year many more will make a dedicated e-reader. Several of those companies have been waiting for today, to see Apple’s move before beginning to market their own devices show as CES earlier in the month. Still even with Android and Chrome OS leading the charge every other maker has instantly slammed into a unibody aluminum hardcover powered by iPhone OS and iTunes along side a custom Apple designed processor. The introduction of the 1GHz Apple A4 is in the long term the most important announcement to be noted.

As the laptop’s eventual heir the tablet form factor fits in with how modern personal computers are actually used. It will indeed take some time before it’s prevalent but this is a watershed moment for the clamshell computer.  A matching keyboard+dock and reports that Apple’s own Bluetooth keyboard is supported addresses the concern of serious typing while proving it’s position as a personal computer evolved.

Developers are going to be instantly making their current applications support multiple screen resolutions. By the end of March most experienced developers would be ready and waiting. At 9.7 inches diagonal many released applications for the iPhone will begin to look very impressive when compared to those installed in OSX.

Apple is basically repeating history for the third time since 2000. First iPods. Then iPhones. The beginning of wednesdays presentation stated that as a business enterprise they are in a league of their own. In today’s smart/phone market though to consumer devices they dominate sales. If there was a lesson it was that everything was pretty obvious in hindsight. iPod, iPhone, iPad.

Now a 60 day wait.

Disappointments for 1.0:

- voice control not mentioned
- no camera. very sad. Helps on price but a concession to carriers and version 2
- a dongle connector (separate) for usb and SD cards and cameras
- huge bezel
- resolution

Thanks for the question Colin.

Posted via email from hxf148′s posterous

1. There will be a camera with video, a microphone and a maybe 64GB in the Touch. The screen is probably going to have the same coating as the 3GS. GPS with compass is also a distinctly possible option but might also be too expensive for Apple to include.

Camera, microphone, gps didn’t happen, 64MB and a 50% speed increase did. A little bit shocked that they didn’t announce a Touch camera today. They really pushed the gaming.

2. There will be a still only camera in the Nano and there is potential for a touchscreen here too, a mini Touch/iPhone if you will but I waffle on that.

Camera, with video and microphone, bigger screen, FM radio with VoiceOver and cheaper price points. Impressive.

3. The Shuffle is probably not going to change; if for possibly more storage and/or colour options.

I got the new colours perfect and overlooked the lower price and limited edition.

4. A distinct possibly we will see the end of life for the hard drive based Classic iPod.

The Classic lives and moves up to 160GB, same price.

5. iTunes 9.0 will be announced for general availability. Includes social hooks to Facebook, Lastfm, Twitter.

Available today (downloading now). Includes a new look, new Genius features along with the social networking stuff and app organization.

6. The Beatles will finally arrive on iTunes. Beatle(s) on stage is a possibility. They did show up for Microsoft and Rock Band. Which also arrives on 9/9/09. A CD set of Beatles music is also set to drop soon. Might be Beatles overload including preloaded iPod special editions.

Didn’t happen.

7. We will probably hear something about Project Cocktail, an attempt to return the art of music cover art digitally. If it does happen the Beatles will be a showcase for it.

It’s called iTunes LP and looks very good.

8. iPhone users in the US might finally get MMS, but probably not the same day. AT&T has three weeks to meet their end of summer promise regarding enabling MMS and tethering options. (Update: MMS will be ready September 25th)

Not covered but we knew already.

9. Finally iPhone and Touch users should expect OS version 3.1 sooner than later.

It’s out today. Includes a ringtone store, Genius recommendations for the App Store, Augmentation API’s and general improvements.

Adding it up I think I got somewhere around 6 of 9 items at least partly right. I’m happy!

Of course I am only guessing but that’s most of the fun in being a blogger turned Apple analyst. Specifically if we pick apart the guessing, I think we will see several (9) fun things from the iPod line:

1. There will be a camera with video, a microphone and a maybe 64GB in the Touch. The screen is probably going to have the same coating as the 3GS. GPS with compass is also a distinctly possible option but might also be too expensive for Apple to include.
2. There will be a still only camera in the Nano and there is potential for a touchscreen here too, a mini Touch/iPhone if you will but I waffle on that.
3. The Shuffle is probably not going to change; if for possibly more storage and/or colour options.
4. A distinct possibly we will see the end of life for the hard drive based Classic iPod.
5. iTunes 9.0 will be announced for general availability. Includes social hooks to Facebook, Lastfm, Twitter.
6. The Beatles will finally arrive on iTunes. Beatle(s) on stage is a possibility. They did show up for Microsoft and Rock Band. Which also arrives on 9/9/09. A CD set of Beatles music is also set to drop soon. Might be Beatles overload including preloaded iPod special editions.
7. We will probably hear something about Project Cocktail, an attempt to return the art of music cover art digitally. If it does happen the Beatles will be a showcase for it.
8. iPhone users in the US might finally get MMS, but probably not the same day. AT&T has three weeks to meet their end of summer promise regarding enabling MMS and tethering options. (Update: MMS will be ready September 25th)
9. Finally iPhone and Touch users should expect OS version 3.1 sooner then later.

There will be no tablet, make no mistake I want to see one, or Jobs as I postulated above. Again all of my thoughts here are in fun speculation, I have no direct sources. Further predictions of the future sees the return of Steve and the computer of tomorrow in January and/or moved off to WWDC.

Regardless of what comes to be I’ll write a follow-up next Wednesday to and we can point at what I got wrong or didn’t anticipate. Apple is nothing if not great at delivering the unexpected with great flourish.

Predictions, disagreements, comments?

Posted via email from hxf148′s posterous

Posted via email from hxf148′s posterous

Personally I don’t think the Apple Tablet will be a larger iPhone/Touch styled device. I think to look at it will give you more sense of an Apple Computer proper. That is to think of a strong aluminum frame with lines like a Macbook then giving over to the curved black backing of an iMac, minus the hard edges. Not unlike the iPhone really but an with an air of difference. I also think this device will work with Bluetooth keyboards and mice and it will run a nearly complete build of OSX, with a switch mode for the Touch OS. My last possibly wishful prediction is that while having a capacitive touch screen, it will also work and write well with a pen accessory.

In the not too distant future all these images will be novel but I’ve included a few for fun them for being fun. An image search for Apple Tablet patents gives lots of ideas for our pad computer future, beginning or announced sometime in September hopefully.

Which I guess makes sense if it doesn’t know the last heard position from the phone at all.

I’ve seen this bug before, earlier then 2.2.1 I think. It was not in any of the OS 3.0 beta builds. I am now running a 3GS with a restore/backup carried from my 3G.

Hopefully it will be fixed soon. I’ve tried different ways to reset the sync without luck. I’d be interested to know if anyone else is having similar issues? Some searching of Twitter and Google reveals some hints that I am not an isolated case.

As a possibly related aside I have also noticed that if I delete an app from the phone, it continues to exists in iTunes. When I download the app again and sync, the app is removed from the phone.

Checking the app manually in the Applications tab works around that one.

(Posted in Apple’s Forums)

I am thinking specifically about Gmail here of course as some services like Yahoo already support push over IMAP. Blackberry’s have RIM’s push technology and I think even Microsoft’s Live supports a form of instant notification.

But that does not work for me. Specifically I want Gmail (on an IPhone) to support push over IMAP but recently when they opened access to push Calendar and Contacts they did not include the feature for email. It’s very likely they will sooner then later but here’s a quick solution that has been working very well for me.

First note that you will probably want unlimited incoming SMS. A standard feature with Rogers in Canada but you situation may vary. The actual setup is extremely simple, head into your  email service settings and forward a copy of all incoming email or a filtered subset of them to your phone’s SMS email address. For Rogers the address is [your-ten-digit-phone-number]@pcs.rogers.com. Check with your carrier for their specific setup.

Once your forward is set, you are essentially done.

When you receive an incoming email, a copy will be sent out to your phone in the form of an SMS. On Rogers you don’t actually receive the email text initially but the notification message does include the senders email address and an option to reply with “Read” to get the actual message over SMS if desired.

I don’t.

I simply start up the mail application on my phone and download the message normally. A secondary tip here is that your email does not have to be checking for new mail at any interval. I set mine for manual checking and save a decent amount of battery life because of it.

In my experience with Rogers the SMS is fast. Usually coming in a second or two before or after the email actually arrives at Gmail. One potential downside is having to delete the SMS notifications from your application. If you receive a large volume of email per day this setup might not be ideal.

I’ve been using this method for about three months and until Google turns on push notification I’ll be sticking with it.

It’s great to be so excited about a movie again but May 8th cannot get here fast enough. Really, I need a IRL plot device to fling me into the future.

In case that you too might be digging on Star Trek I’ve put together some of the things that I found this week; including wallpaper images, apps, screen savers, official links, comics and other Trekker goodness.

Some of this is centric to the iPhone, which of course is the best Tricorder, and like Kirk, Spock and Bones I don’t go anywhere without it.

• System47 Best LCARS screen saver (Mac/Win)
• Star Trek (official web site)

It might be completely weird to you but I’ve got a whole page of Star Trek apps going.

• Star Trek Phaser (official app)
• Daxhotel, complete episode guide for all incarnations with images.
• iLCARS, spoof Triocoder app with animations and sound
• Star Trek Wisdom, quotations
• Trek Clock, show the time with ST inspired fonts
• ST: Countdown, a prequel comic in digital form
• ST: Archives, a collection of Trek comics also in digital form

Wallpaper:

This week Apple surprised most everyone with a new beta release for 3.0. I had been expecting that they might deliver an update before June but not this quickly. I’m impressed and hoping that it means we’ll see a beta 3 and/or beta 4 heading into the WWDC in early June.

You can read over what I thought of the first beta release before continuing.

The most welcome change with the latest beta is that throughout the OS things are faster and more stable. Not quite to 2.2.1 levels but the improvement is apparent from first touch.

I’ve still had issues with Safari’s interface slowing to a crawl when JavaScript and/or video loading is involved. iTunes is still cranky at times and is quite capable of crashing.  A major issue that I saw with iTunes is that it appears to not be able to load Audible books. They still sync to the phone from iTunes as normal but the audio book section of the player will not show the books for playing.

Being right in the middle of a book (The Wheel of Time) I was aghast and resorted to buying a second copy via the iTunes store and happily that one syncs/shows/plays without issue. Audible file playback/organization has always been a weak point on the iPhone and I hope that being disabled or broken right now is apart of making things better for the final release.

One other odd issue with iTunes is that sometimes content will not play in the background. Rebooting the phone fixes this and it happens rarely.

Maps, particularly directions where things were crashing, locking up and generally being unreliable have been addressed. The app is now quick to load and smooth to use.

There is still sometimes a bit of lag heading in and out of the new Spotlight search but the results appear to be faster to load.

Mail is more stable and does not suffer drastic slowdowns and freezes. But there are still issues that keep it from being as reliable as one would expect.

Application organization is still a huge pain but on the brighter side Apple appears to have added two extra pages for applications. Bringing the total installable app count up to 176.

Beta 2 also introduces some third party application instabilities. I noticed it mostly when trying to play Wolf3D. Where Beta 1 offered no issues Beta 2 causes a crash/loss of progress every time it’s played.

I’ve noticed also that updates to the base band or some low level identifier is causing problems. I’ve had issues with Blizzard’s new authenticator and BeeJive with its anti-piracy measures both being confused by new values.

Overall this update demonstrates that Apple is working very hard to release a solid update in June and despite minor annoyances and a semi daily reboot routine (reminds me fondly of the old days and Windows Mobile) things are shaping up quickly for developers diving into things like push notification.

Myself, I finally picked up a proper book in The iPhone Developers Cookbook and am looking forward to the iPhone 3.0 OS not only as an end user but for the push to finally get something of my own up in the store this summer.