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Greetings From iLine 2011

Posted by Harry McCracken on October 14, 2011 at 5:20 am

Once again, Apple is releasing a new iPhone. Once again, I’m in line at the crack of dawn at the Stonestown Galleria in San Francisco. This time I’m here with my wife Marie, who’s excited about upgrading from an iPhone 3GS to a 4S. We’ve been here for an hour; there were around 40 folks here when we arrived, along with a few phantom lawn chairs.)

There may be Apple Stores where iLines are still festive, even circus-like affairs. Not this one, at least so far. There are no kids dressed as iPhones. And Woz isn’t here. Just a lot of rather quiet people. And some Apple employees, who have already been consulting with people about carriers, capacities, colors, and the many and varied virtues of Applecare.

I’ll let you know if any excitement breaks out…

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Film is No Longer Film

Posted by Harry McCracken on October 14, 2011 at 4:14 am

Salon’s Matt Zoller Seitz reports on yet another analog artifact that’s given way to a digital substitute: Movie cameras.

Theaters, movies, moviegoing and other core components of what we once called “cinema” persist, and may endure. But they’re not quite what they were in the analog cinema era. They’re something new, or something else — the next generation of technologies and rituals that had changed shockingly little between 1895 and the early aughts. We knew this day would come. Calling oneself a “film director” or “film editor” or “film buff” or a “film critic” has over the last decade started to seem a faintly nostalgic affectation; decades hence it may start to seem fanciful. It’s a vestigial word that increasingly refers to something that does not actually exist — rather like referring to the mass media as “the press.”

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Hey, Let’s Start Planning iOS 6

Posted by Harry McCracken on October 13, 2011 at 9:17 pm

In a strange way, there’s something exciting about the fact that mobile operating systems such as iOS and Android are relatively immature, and still lacking some features that people really want. If nothing else, it certainly allows their makers to release upgrades that are a big deal, since there’s no lack of worthwhile stuff to add. (With Windows and OS X, there are far fewer obvious holes; a cynic, in fact, might contend that those OSes would benefit from having fewer features.)

I’m enjoying iOS 5 on both both my iPhone 4 and iPad 2. But as I use it, I’m also reflecting on the missing features I still crave. (One example: More serious font support, such as the ability to add my own typefaces.) And over on Twitter, I asked my pals for their iOS 6 wish lists, and got lots of nifty nominations–most of which sounded like things that Apple might plausibly add, and only a few of which were (coughcoughFlash) painfully obvious.

After the jump, a few dozen of them–thanks to all who participated in this brainstorming exercise.

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Microsoft Does Another Deal Over Android

Posted by Harry McCracken on October 13, 2011 at 11:24 am

Microsoft has struck a deal with Quanta, the giant contract manufacturer, to license its patents which may be violated by Google’s Android and Chrome OS. (I knew that Microsoft had been doing these pacts for Android, but wasn’t aware that it thinks that Chrome OS also rips off its intellectual property.)

Jay Green of Cnet reports:

As Android has grown and surpassed Microsoft’s mobile-phone operating systems in the marketplace, the company has targeted handset and tablet makers that use the Google operating system. It’s racked up a laundry list of licensees in a little more than a year, starting with longtime partner HTC. Just last month, Microsoft reached an Android licensing agreement with Acer.

I’m not criticizing Microsoft for its dealmaking. For one thing, I’m not a patent lawyer, so I don’t have a stance on the legitimacy of its claims against Google’s products. For another, aggressive licensing is probably less depressing than what the rest of the industry is doing: Attempting to sue everybody else’s pants off. But considering the company’s lack of success with Windows Phone so far, the possibility exists that it’ll slowly devolve from a product company into a patent-licensing one–and that would be sad.

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Woz Speaks

Posted by Harry McCracken on October 13, 2011 at 9:03 am

Dan Lyons of Newsweek has a good, unedited interview with Steve Wozniak:

I took a year off from college to earn money for tuition. I was working as a programmer and I told the company that I knew how to design minicomputers. This exec said “If you can design one, we’ll get you the parts.” So I designed a very simple computer, and they got me the chips. I was working on it with a friend, Bill Fernandez. We were in his garage building this thing. Bill said “You should meet this guy Steve Jobs, he’s at our high school and he knows about this digital stuff. And he’s played some pranks too.” So Steve came over. We talked about what pranks we had done. Then we started talking about music. I was turned on to Dylan, reading the words and analyzing them. We agreed Dylan was more important than the Beatles because he had words that meant things. He was serious. He was not just about enjoyment. We started going to Dylan concerts together. We would go through music stores looking for Dylan bootlegs. We found some pamphlets with Dylan interviews, and then we drove down to Santa Cruz to meet the guy who wrote the pamphlets. He showed us some rare pictures of Dylan and we listened to some rare music of Dylan.

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iOS 5 is Great. Don’t Rush to Get It!

Posted by Harry McCracken on October 12, 2011 at 11:48 pm

One of the top two or three advantages that the iPhone has over Android handsets has nothing to do with new handsets. It’s the fact that when a new iPhone is imminent, owners of old iPhones can upgrade to the new version of iOS as soon as they like. Lack of fragmentation is a wonderful thing.

Apple released iOS 5 on Wednesday. It’s excellent–and Dan Moren’s Macworld review is an excellent summary of what’s new and worthwhile. If you have a recent iPhone and/or an iPad, get it–the new notification features alone are a huge deal, and they’re just the beginning. But taking your time about the upgrade is a perfectly rational strategy.

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RIM’s BlackBerry Outage is Getting Worse, Not Better

Posted by Harry McCracken on October 12, 2011 at 1:00 pm

The BlackBerry e-mail outage that has been impacting parts of Europe and the Middle East for days has now crept into the U.S. Here’s Ina Fried’s report on a conference call RIM held to (sort of) explain what’s going on.

I’m not an expert on e-mail back-end architecture, and it’s possible that BlackBerry’s overall uptime remains excellent. But these sweeping outages have happened before. Isn’t it a major problem for RIM customers who run their own BlackBerry servers that they’re still so dependent on things working properly up in Canada?

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Sony, Bring This Android-Powered Walkman Over Here

Posted by Harry McCracken on October 12, 2011 at 12:13 pm

One of the ongoing mysteries of consumer electronics is why the enormously popular iPod Touch has its market–touch-screen media players that can run apps–pretty much all to itself. (I still think you could make a nice Windows Phone-powered Touch competitor; Microsoft apparently isn’t interested.) But at Sony’s booth at CEATEC in Tokyo last week, there was a row of Walkman devices–and one of them, the NW-Z1000, is the Touch alternative I’ve been wondering about.

It’s got a 4.3″ display and runs Android–and while the user interface is in Japanese, limiting my ability to judge it, it looks quite nice. It’s coming out in December in Tokyo, but Sony apparently doesn’t have any plans to bring it to the U.S. I’d love to see see it get here, if only to see how it would fare against the iPod Touch.

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Sony Attacked, Not Hacked

Posted by Jared Newman on October 12, 2011 at 11:35 am

Sony has another security headache on its hands, but don’t call it a hack.

According to the official Playstation blog, some entity was trying to sign in to users’ accounts on the Playstation Network, the Sony Entertainment Network and Sony Online Entertainment, using “a massive set” of login data obtained elsewhere. The attackers likely got a hold of a large username and password database, and were trying to see if any of those logins worked on Sony’s networks.

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