As Steve Jobs unveils the latest Apple creation (or re-creation) the sceptics are out in force ’slating’ the iPad (no pun intended) before it even goes into full production. But where will this reincarnation sit amongst all our other techno- gadgets, and is it likely to be one step too far in an already overcrowded marketplace? Will its niche in the market remain just that – a niche market composed mainly of Apple junkies?
There are a number of pointers that may indicate that Apple/Steve Jobs may have the thinking right on this one (again). We know that there are already a plethora of similar devices all vying for our attention, but with perhaps one big glaring difference. All the tablets, e-readers, Kimbles and the like have never quite hit the mark when it comes to simplifying usability. When the The iPhone entered the mobile device fray it was initially met with a mixed reaction(apart from the Mac devotees who embraced it straightaway) – yet it has revolutionised mobile phone ‘architecture’, leaving others slightly lagging despite all their best efforts.
The iPad incoroporates all the ‘touchy feeliness’ of its pocket predecessors with touch screen, drag, flick, etc navigation but now in a larger format, which has to be better for typing and thumbing the pages of e-books.
But why (I hear you say) does the paperback continue to prevail? Maybe its to do with the tactile way we can browse a book And its certainly not through the want of trying by Sony, Amazon et al.
Mr Jobs and co’s philosophy has always been to build devices with the end user user experience in mind rather than fill it full of gadgetry. Exactly the reason why the iPhone became such a hit leaving other devices playing ‘catchy-uppy’.
End our love affair with the mouse? - Never!
Perhaps we have now become too attached to that little slidey object by our computers and now is the time to embrace the touch-screen with both fingers. ( If champanzees have mastered it I’m sure we can in time. )
Seriously, its high likely all the appealing ‘ergonomics’ of the iPhone will work beautifully in a bigger device and entice us even more.
Size matters
I think the iPad’s achilles heel may in fact be its size (I bet they thought long and hard about this). Again it all depends what we use it for, although for a portable its a tad heavy to pop into your trouser pocket, but perfect for a college or office bag, which perhaps indicates the target market. However I can see major advantages of having a bigger device for car journeys - maps, web browsing, watching movies etc .
Conclusion
Will the iPad find a place in our lives alongside the other techno-toys? – too early to say perhaps. It might be trying to do all things quite well but none really well. And its market share will only ever be marginal. Nevertheless, I have to admit that I still want one – in the certain knowledge its probably going to be damn good.
Some (stolen) stats
9.7 inch display
Touch screen
1.5 pounds, 1/2 inch thick
1 ghz apple A4 chip, 16 to 64 GB flash storage
WiFi 802.11n
Bluetooth 2.1 +EDR
Speaker, Microphone, 30-pin connector
Accelerometer & Compass
10 Hours of active battery life, 1 month of battery life on stand by
Earth-friendly!
Every iPad has WiFi support, some models have 3G support
lack of built in camera and 3G support as standard. There is also
iBooks store interface just like iTunes.
Turn pages by swiping, just like a real book
Interface very similar to the iPhone, but bigger. Flick and touch controls throughout
New version of iTunes specific to the iPad, flick controls
iBooks is next. This is where Apple tries to take on the Kindle
iWorks for the iPad.
“The gadget is a premium mobile device, not a computer; as such we see some iPod Touch buyers stepping up to the iPad, but consumers looking for an affordable portable computer will likely stick with the MacBook line up,” said Gene Munster of Piper Jaffray.
Analysts also believe the gadget could cannibalise the e-reader market, currently dominated by Amazon’s Kindle and Sony’s Reader.
A 32GB iPad will cost $599 (£376) and a 64GB will cost $699 (£439). Apple has given no hint about exact UK prices and final costs may be higher than direct conversions suggest.
Can only run one application at a time – major weakness!
(stats courtesy of BBC technology pages and others)
Following on from a previous post about the way Google is responding to social networking, Google has included hot topics and hot searches as part of its trends service at: http://google.co.uk/trends , although only hot topics is available at the moment in the UK.
Trends
If you’re not familiar with Google trends, its a powerful tool that gives a graphical rep of most popular search topics and terms over a 5 year period. So if you wanted to compare market growth for example between companies, brands etc you can quickly generate a 5 year graph based on their related search terms. OK, as a data mining tool it could be argued that using Google’s search entries might return flakey results but it cannot be ignored mainly because of the sheer volume of the empirical data that has been indexed. Add in the ability to quickly analyse by region, sector and be be able to include Boolean searches for up to 5 terms then this becomes very powerful market research tool. (There is also Google Insights for more in-depth analysis.) If its used in conjuction with Google’s keyword tool to identify exactlywhich terms are being typed in the most its not difficult to envisage the benefits for online businesses. The issue is how this information will influence what we do and how quickly we can respond.
Now add into this mix Hot topics and Hot searches. The emphasis here is identifying the fastest growing trends (rather than the volume of searches overall) However the main difference is in the speed of search data being compiled- hot topics/hot searches results are compiled daily and hourly respectively whereas a standard Google search compiles results over a longer period. So essentially Google trends is showing what people are looking for now (i.e., sudden peaks in interest) . (The difference between hot topics and hot searches – the former focuses on the news orientated trends whilst the latter algorithm reflects actual searches)
Google’s HOT Topics and Hot Searches
As mentioned in a previous post this is a response by Google to the immediacy of social networking ,while keeping the distinction with overall longer term search trends. Hot topics trawls the social networks etc looking for the ‘most buzz’ i.e. keywords and phrases that are on the ‘up’ in terms of popularity. Its probably best to think about these like the pop charts – for example no 1 in the top 10 Hot topics is ‘haiti telethon’ which reflects what is a happening now. How does this work? very crudely the data is ‘normalised’ so that figures are not actual search numbers but compared against an average of current searches (a bit like stand dev). So if there is a sudden peak in interest the height of the peak moves the topic up the charts
Hot searches by contrast reference the number of Google searches for those topics. Both of these indexing services operate over a very short time frame (hours rather rather than the ussual weeks or months) making them a very rich data mining resource for businesses. E.g., e-commerce sites could make use of the latest Hot topics and searches for latest fashion trends, music music realtime (well, almost) .
If you try and keep ahead of the game its probably having a play with some of the advanced tools also. While they are kept as a separate service from Google’s main web searching tools it will be interesting to see if they remain that way as other services have now crept into the listings on to the main search page (shopping, news etc)
What are the opposition doing? Well Yahoo is calling it ‘Buzz’ and Bing has created what appears to be clone – its actually a ‘mashup’ pulling its data from Google trends and spits out its top results using its own algorithm. Inevitably results differ considerably as you would expect, although Google as the NO 1 search engine continues to be the trail blazer.
Remember to log in to your Google account to get the most out of Google’s tools. Go have a look and play at:
Excuse this hastily written post but this Govt website recently caught my eye.
The beta release of a Public data website at : http://www.data.gov.uk looks to be a bit of a watershed in terms of accessing public data. Tim Berners Lee is heading up the project team in what could be a very powerful data source that can be tapped into using RDF . (Resources description framework)
The BBC’s article explains a bit more about the politics and the drive for transparency. It looks like its essentially aimed at those wishing to develop 3rd party apps that can process the data into a more readable and searchable format . I suspect there will be great interest by those wishing to develop applications to make sense of the enormous quantity of publicly held data (which is where RDF comes in).
Who will benefit? I’ve no doubt companies will want to develop offer quick access to relevant data (e.g. a way to easily search and access local govt planning applications). The potential here is enormous but there are one or two concerns – I would hope that the service would come under some sort of license similar to GNU to stop profiteering. Secondly, its one thing creating an online facility for churning out all this public info, but perhaps questions will be raised about the interpretation and privacy of data if it is so readily accessible.
It could also be argued its better for this data to be in the public domain especially with the mood for accountability in the public sector. Anyway the site is definitely worth worth a look at, if only to see how this data could impact on us as individuals – or possibly as a resource for our businesses.
