In just 24 hours, Steve Jobs will be opening the 2011 edition of Apple’s yearly developer conference (WWDC) which will focus on:
- Lion: the new version of Mac OS X (10.7), Apple’s desktop/laptop operating system (OS);
- iOS 5: the 5th major edition of Apple’s mobile OS (iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad);
- iCloud: Apple’s 3rd attempt to crack online services and cloud computing (after Mac.com and MobileMe), as well as, should the rumours be correct, a new online music service.
As much as I love Apple’s products and my iPhone(s) (I believe I’ve owned them all since the very first one in 2007), I have recently surprised myself using Android devices as my everyday phone (my two favorite ones are the Nexus S and the Sony Ericsson Xperia Arc). Two main reasons:
- I never got used to the edgy and squarish design of the iPhone 4 (I miss the curved line of the 3G/3GS)
- I got bored of using the very same user interface for 4 years.
I therefore have very high expectations of tomorrow’s keynote, hoping that iOS 5 will finally feature some key functionalities which I believe have been missing. Make sure to read further to discover which ones. Read more…
Before the recent boom of Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, the only list of friends or contacts most people would manage and interact with was their address book. The hardcover indexed address books and the electronic databanks (remember those cool Casio devices with enough memory to store 128 contacts) are the true ancestors of your social graph. Read more to understand why I believe the address book is still very much the key to success of any social network today. Read more…
Steve Jobs just revealed the long awaited iPhone 4 during the opening keynote of the WWDC 2010 conference. Despite creating no surprises with an external design leaked all over the net for the past few weeks, Apple has once again designed an amazing product, well ahead of its competition: highest screen resolution ever (retina display), thinest body, HD video recording, huge battery life, etc… (check out the iPhone 4 product video on the Apple website).
Apple may have failed (intentionally or not) to protect the secrecy around this iPhone 4 (lost/stolen in a Silicon Valley’s pub and disclosed in Vietnam), they remain nevertheless famous for religiously keeping their products from being disclosed before Steve Jobs himself gets a chance to reveal them to the world with his very own set of “amazing”, “great” and “fantastic” superlative adjectives.
Such secrecy around Apple’s truly amazing products contributes to creating huge expectations and rumours about the next big launch. Now that the iPhone 4 is here, we surely should expect geeks and techies of the world to start blogging about what they expect or believe the next iPhone (and iPad) will be made of.
As far as I am concerned, I honestly believe that this iPhone 4 doesn’t leave much space for an iPhone 5 and I can hardly come up with innovative features that next year’s iPhone could bring (Apple has been releasing a new iPhone every year since the initial 2007 launch). But there again, we can probably count on the Cupertino’s gang to surprise us.
We could however easily expect the next iPad (there will be an iPad revision 2 one day) to bring:
- High resolution retina display
- Front camera and FaceTime video calling
- iMovie for HD video editing
- iOS 4 (with groups, multitasking, etc…)
What’s your take ? Let us know what you either wish or think (or know?) the next iPad (revision 2) and iPhone (revision 5) might bring.
Apple launched the App Store in July 2008 and has since revolutionized the mobile application industry. They have taken to the masses what used to be a niche market of Palm and Pocket PC software. Everyone now uses apps on their smartphones and 58 million iPhone/iPod Touch users are said to download 4 to 8 apps per month.
With 7 billion downloads in 2009, that’s a completely new ecosystem which has created huge opportunities for indie developers to strike rich in no time. Well that’s at least what a tiny bit of success stories, broadly relayed by the media, are trying to make you believe.
The reality of the App Market is very different and there is a steep long tail distribution concentrating most profits on a very small number of apps and developers. There are however still ways to produce quality profitable apps for the iPhone and I was given a chance today to address this topic during Buzzcity Developer Garage. Make sure to read more to view my entire presentation and download my slides !! Read more…
If you read my blog and follow my tweets, you might have noticed that I keep switching between my three favorite phones: an iPhone 3GS, a Nexus One and a Blackberry Bold 9700.
Three great devices. Three beautiful and powerful gadgets. But certainly three sources of frustrations with each their very own set of caveats and downsides such as the iPhone and the lack of multi-tasking, the Nexus and its poor touchscreen accuracy, as well as the Blackberry and its terrible browsing experience or app catalogue.
If your Telco has an affordable Multi-SIM option, it might be the end of your frustrations. Read more to find out how to seamlessly switch among your various phones without the hassle of removing the SIM card. Read more…
If you own a smartphone (some even now call them app-phones), chances are that you’re constantly looking for the best and latest apps! Here is my top-20 non game list of applications for the three devices I use on regular basis.
I use a iPhone 3GS, a Google Nexus One and a Blackberry Bold 9700: 6 of my top apps actually run on all three devices and the other 14 are either platform-specific or only run on two of my devices. Make sure to read more to quickly get the best out of that brand new smartphone you just bought 
Read more…
