I’ve sort of given up on keeping track of Apple rumors (which is why I cheerfully ignore most of ’em and never write about them here). But here’s Josh Topolsky of This is My Next with a snapshot of the current thinking on the question “When will we see the next iPhone and iPad, and what will they look like?“
Tag Archives | Apple iPad
New Flipboard: Even Better!
My iPad is bursting at the seams with wonderful applications. If I had to pick just one of them as the romantic ideal of what a tablet app can and should be, it would be Flipboard. This “social magazine”–which brings together stuff from Facebook, Twitter, and the entire Web into a wonderfully browsable package–simply couldn’t have existed in the pre-iPad era. And its user interface is a thing of wonder: an amazingly polished, fun experience that both feels like a magazine and like nothing I’ve ever seen before. It’s not just the best one I’ve seen on an iPad app; it’s one of the best ones I’ve seen on anything.
Can you tell that I kind of like this program? Well, now I like it even more. The company is rolling out an update today, and cofounder Mike McCue briefed me on it last week and gave me the chance to spend a couple of days with it before it hit the App Store.
Flipboard hasn’t changed radically, but there are a bunch of improvements that make it even more….well, Flipboardy.
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For Wi-Fi, PCs and Macs are Now a Minority
It’s a big week for interesting stats relating to Internet usage breakdowns by device. Comscore has released numbers that say that the iPad accounts for 97 percent of tablet usage on the Web–no shocker there. And cloud networking company Meraki has published some data based on device usage numbers from its customers networks:
Whenever I look at numbers like these, I try to remind myself that we don’t know how precisely they map to the world at large. But they’re still fun to ponder.
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“Why Should Somebody Buy This Instead of an iPad?”
It’s been fifteen months since the first iPad shipped. Nearly every sizable company that makes anything that looks even sort of like a computer or a phone has rushed into the market that Apple created. Many of these companies haven’t yet shipped the tablets they’ve announced. Still, a critical mass of major iPad alternatives are now here–tablets such as Motorola’s Xoom, RIM’s PlayBook, and Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1.
And yet no Apple competitor has started selling anything that clearly answers a fundamental question: “Why should somebody buy this instead of an iPad?” Sure, it’s easy to point at specific things that other devices do better (or at least differently) than the iPad, and some of the people reading this article can explain why they chose another tablet and don’t regret the move. (If you’re one of them, please do!) Still, sales figures for tablets show that when consumers compare the iPad to other choices, an overwhelming percentage conclude that the iPad is the best option.
As a reviewer of gizmos, I think that the iPad 2 is easily the best tablet on the market–and that most of the competition so far is too half-baked to be credible. As a lover of competition, though, I’m itching to see other tablets arrive that deserve to do well, too. So that question–“Why would somebody buy this instead of an iPad?”–is stuck in my head. I’ve been trying to figure out how an Apple rival can come up with a tablet that pretty much answers that question for itself. And I’ve come up with thirteen ways it could happen.
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In Case It Wasn’t Clear Already, Apple Likes to Build Software for Apple Devices
Over at This is My Next, Joshua Topolsky has a thought-provoking piece that says that Apple is going to discontinue its only major browser-based Web apps–the ones that are part of MobileMe–next year after iCloud is fully up and running. There’s a lively debate going on via Twitter between Topolsky and some folks who say that he has it all wrong: the MobileMe Web apps will survive the iCloud transition.
Even if the MobileMe Web apps don’t get the ax, the gist of Topolsky’s piece remains relevant. Apple filled last week’s WWDC keynote to the gills with news, but it was all about operating systems, apps, and an ambitious piece of Internet plumbing called iCloud. No surprise there: there’s never been much evidence that Apple is terribly interested in creating Web apps. But it loves to create traditional software that runs on hardware devices it builds.
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Disaster Averted: Apple Revises App Store Content Rules
Whew! Every time I’ve bought a Kindle book over the past few months, I’ve worried about the new iOS App Store guidelines Apple announced earlier this year, which said that app developers could only give iOS users access to content purchased outside of the App Store if the same content was available inside the App Store at the same price.
Apple takes a 30 percent cut of the money publishers make inside the App Store. So the new rule seemed to force some companies into an impossible situation–such as Amazon, which was already handing 70 percent of Kindle book prices over to publishers. Apple apparently wanted all of the remaining 30 percent for itself, destroying Amazon’s business model.
But as MacRumors’ Jordan Golson is reporting, Apple has quietly blinked. Now the rules don’t say that app developers need to match content offers made outside of the App Store inside the App Store. Companies don’t need to use In App Purchases at all. They just can’t provide a “Buy” button inside an app that makes it easy for a user to go to the Web and buy new content.
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A Quick Look at iOS 5
Engadget’s Jacob Schulman has a nice walkthrough of iOS 5’s major new features on the iPhone and iPad.
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Ten Questions About Today’s Apple News
Almost 38,000 folks turned out for Technologizer’s live coverage of Apple’s WWDC keynote this morning. We had a good time. But as the comments came in from attendees, there was clearly a serious contingent of folks who still held out hope that Apple was going to announce a new iPhone today–and who just didn’t care that much about software and services. For them, no new hardware meant that the event was a letdown.
On Twitter, I responded this way:
Dear everyone who's irate there was no new hardware: THIS WAS MUCH MORE IMPORTANT & INTERESTING THAN NEW HARDWARE.
— Harry McCracken (@harrymccracken) June 6, 2011
This was among the most news-packed Apple events I can recall, and in its own way it was one of the most wildly ambitious ones. Apple is finally making the iPhone and iPad into autonomous devices that don’t rely on a Mac or Windows PC. It wants to store vast quantities of data for us and be responsible for safeguarding it and getting it to the right place. It’s making iOS look more like OS X and OS X look more like iOS. It’s not yet clear whether all of this stuff will pan out, and people who already bristle at Apple’s approach to the world will like this new, more fully Apple-centric version less than ever. But if you think the event was a big yawn because there wasn’t a new iPhone that was a bit thinner and a bit faster, you live in a different world than I do.
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The Next Version of iOS: Predictions, Please!
[UPDATE: I’m closing the survey and compiling the results. Thanks, folks!]
At 10am PT on Monday, June 6th, Apple will hold its WWDC 2011 keynote, with news about OS X 10.7 Lion, the next version of iOS, and something called iCloud. I’ll be there in person at San Francisco’s Moscone West for Technologizer’s live coverage, joined by Ed Oswald and Techland’s Doug Aamoth for color commentary.
You can join us on Monday at technologizer.com/wwdc11, and I hope you will. (You can also head there now to sign up for an e-mail reminder.)
With less than 48 hours to go, time is running out to make predictions about what we’ll learn. We already know most of the details about Lion, and iCloud remains fairly enigmatic. So let’s focus in on iOS 5, or whatever the next version of the iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad operating system turns out to be called.
I’ve put together a survey that’ll let you make predictions about iOS 5 features and enhancements, (It’ll take you a minute or two to complete.) I’ll report on our aggregate predictions as a group before the keynote–and after Steve Jobs and company have spoken, we can see how accurate we were.
Click here to take the survey. Thanks for participating, and see you on Monday.
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Engadget Reviews Ion’s iCade
Ion’s iCade may be an iPad accessory. But it’s an iPad accessory which I feel like I’ve been longing for since at least 1980.