In case you weren’t following the WWDC news this week, Apple came out with two major products in Monday’s keynote: MobileMe and the iPhone 3G — both of which link together. MobileMe replaces the .Mac service that Apple previously offered, and brings a range of improvements.
First off, you get 20GBs of storage “in the cloud” — this is shared between e-mail, photo galleries and iDisk backup space. The new service gives you an @me.com e-mail address, which is pretty easy to remember — but the chances of you getting your desired username@me.com are slim. MobileMe also syncs everything up between your computer(s) and iPhone; Apple call it “Exchange for the rest of us” because of this.
But is it worth paying $99 a year for this service? You could use Google’s Gmail for push e-mail to your iPhone with their free IMAP service; you could also use Google Calendar for calendars (although syncing to iPhone does not yet exist); you could use Flickr, or Google Picasa Web Gallery; DropBox is a free alternative to the iDisk.
The table below shows MobileMe and all of its main competitors:
It looks like if you have an iPhone or iPod Touch, and want to keep it in sync with your e-mail, calendar and contacts — plus benefit from 20GBs of online storage — then MobileMe may be worth the $99 price.
There’s a recent phenomenon of IPTV (Internet Protocol Television) services appearing across Europe, the USA and some other parts of the world. IPTV is intended to be the next-generation of television — delivering content to a user whenever they want it, rather than traditional schedule-based TV that we’re used to today. It sounds great — but there is one major dilemma: Internet.
As I have posted before, the world needs faster broadband. Delivering short, low-quality video clips that are compressed is no problem at the moment — but when it comes into larger, even high-definition video, most users’ internet connections will struggle.
In the UK, the current leaders appear to be ISPs: BT’s BT Vision, and Virgin’s Virgin Media — both of which are terrible services. They claim to give entirely “on demand” services; as it turns out, this isn’t the case. Both services come free or discounted when you purchase the ISP’s internet service, which is appealing to the consumer. However, both services do not work at all.
BT and Virgin have tried to combine traditional over-the-air digital TV with IPTV, and it doesn’t work. For a start, the actual set-top boxes are ugly: No thought has been put into the design, and good design is key to a good product. It’s the same story with the interfaces — BT are using Microsoft (not a good choice), and Virgin appear to be using a proprietary OS for set-top boxes. The interfaces are hard to use, and rarely do what you want them to do. Also, the quality of the streams aren’t worth watching on a TV bigger than 26 inches, in my opinion. HD streams is what the next generation of TV needs, not to go back a step in quality.
TV over the internet can work, but none of the big ISPs seem to get it. I think IPTV should be left to companies who are dedicated to changing the way we watch TV, rather than ISPs who are in the game purely for the money.
More and more people are becoming regular users of the internet today; sending e-mails, making VOIP calls, chatting through video, watching YouTube, sharing photos, downloading music; the list is endless. Most of these activities require a lot of bandwidth, and most current infrastructures can only deliver between 8 and 16mbps. I’m on an “8mbps” plan from BT right now - but it’s more like 6mbps.
However, not all of the world is lagging behind in internet speeds. Japan has an average of 60mbps, Korea has an average of 45mbps and Finland has an average of 25mbps. These are average speeds, not the highest speeds. The UK has less than 4mbps average, and about the same for the USA.
There are three main options for upgrading broadband speeds:
Fiber Optic Cable
Verizon in the USA is already offering a service they call “FiOS” - but it only delivers speeds of up to 25mbps, mainly in densely populated areas. In theory, fiber optic cable can bring speeds between 50mbps and 100mbps - but it’s going to be hard to lay an entirely new infrastructure across countries.
VDSL
VDSL stands for Very High Speed Digital Subscriber Line. It uses existing copper lines, with fiber optic lines to bring speeds of up to 100mbps. It’s still pretty hard to deploy, but costs a lot less than fiber.
WiMAX
WiMAX, as you may have guessed (or not), is a wide area form of Wi-Fi. You wouldn’t need a Wi-Fi router in your home, instead you would just connect to a WiMAX transmitter which is nearby. WiMAX can deliver speeds of up to 70mbps, and can travel up to 50km (31 miles).
Sources: [BBC News], [Digg]
As an avid iPod and Mac user, the most obvious choice for buying music would be the iTunes Store - now the world’s most popular music destination online. However, I recently gave up with the iTunes Store; there are plenty of other alternatives out there offering more reasonable prices and higher bitrate tracks - with no DRM.
7Digital is the site I’m now trying. Its library is almost as comprehensive as iTunes’, but the quality of tracks is much better. I can get 320kbps DRM-free MP3s from 7Digital, for the same price as a 128kbps DRM AAC track from Apple’s iTunes Store.
There are really no advantages to buying from iTunes - the only minor one I can think of is that it’s all integrated into one piece of software. Apple don’t even let you download the song more than once - unless you contact them and plead for them to allow you to download it again. With 7Digital, and many other music stores, you can simply visit your downloads “locker” and download it again - as many times as you want - forever.
For me, PayPal is an extremely important feature. I don’t have a credit card, and therefore rely on PayPal for all my payments. iTunes in the UK does not support PayPal, 7Digital does.
The iTunes Store has improved since it startred. Apple now offer DRM-free AAC tracks at 256kbps - but their selection is limited, and the price is 10p extra. Obviously, iTunes is still the only place to buy music videos and TV shows that I can think of.
The message of this blog post is: You don’t have to stick with iTunes. There are plenty of other alternatives out there - some better, some worse. I highly recommend 7Digital for those in the UK and Europe.
Of course, you don’t have to buy music; if you feel like being a pirate, head over to the dozens of BitTorrent trackers or warez sites.
Whatever it is you do, you need to backup your data. Until recently, there was no easy way to do this on the Mac - without having to buy third party software that backed up on a schedule. Luckily, Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) has something called Time Machine built-in. Time Machine backs up everything on your hard drive hourly, so that you can “go back in time” and recover files that you may have mistakenly deleted. This works great, but takes up a lot of space. I have Time Machine backing up my MacBook to a Western Digital My Book Studio Edition - a 500GB FireWire drive.
For Windows users, Vista offers some backup facilities, but not anywhere near as intricate as the Mac’s. However, Windows users do have a vast choice of third party applications for backups.
But most of us only backup internally, to a drive connected locally to your computer. What if your house were to burn down? Your data would go with it. Fortunately, there are some solutions out there. Online backups are becoming better all the time . Mozy is supposedly a great service for doing just that, as is a free alternative, DropBox.
But online backups have one major downside for most of us: Speed. Even with today’s fastest broadband, upload speeds vary from 256kbps to 1mbps. Until fiber optic broadband with the same up-speed as down arrives, online backups aren’t going to be efficient for files over 100mb.
I haven’t really answered the question, “What is the best backup method”. There simply isn’t one right now. I would back up as much as possible, where possible - but keep it safe.
We all saw this coming - iTunes is now the top music retailer in the U.S. This means iTunes digital downloads are now surpassing physicals ones from the ex-number one Wal-mart. Whilst only 29.1 percent of all music sold is through downloads, this is still a massive achievement - expect this number to steadily increase over the years.
Via [Appletell]
When I first read this article, I thought it was an April fool’s joke - apparently not. Over sixteen major manufacturers are prototyping mini LCD projectors that can be hooked up to an iPod or mobile phone, and display content on most flat surfaces. This means not only will you have to put up with phone calls on an airplane, you’ll have the pleasure of viewing other people’s mini-projector screens.
These miniature projectors will be powerful enough to scale up to a screen of 50 or 60 inches, but using the latest LED technology to use minimal battery. They are to cost around $350 - but are expected to drop in price to $250.
I think it would be even better to see these mini-projectors embedded into devices like iPods and mobile phones, so that there’s no need to carry an extra device that just plugs into another. I can’t see this taking off though. The quality of most people’s mobile content is at such a low resolution that it would be blurred on a 50-inch screen. I think it would make much more sense just to have LCD screens on planes that you can plug your iPod into. I think this is nothing more than another useless gadget.
Read [TelecomTV]
It’s almost been 6 months since I bought my 16GB iPod Touch in October 2007, and I haven’t looked back on my old 5G video iPod since. After Steve Jobs announced the iPod Touch, I immediately checked it out at the Apple Store and decided to buy it. I’m glad I went for the slightly more expensive 16GB model, because it is almost completely full of music, videos and photos.
Some people like to think of the iPod Touch as a pointless device - why not get the iPhone instead? There are several reasons you would buy an iPod Touch over an iPhone:
- You already have a good/better phone than the iPhone
- The iPhone costs so much that you could buy an iPod Touch and a Nokia N96
- You don’t want to be forced onto one network, on a pay-monthly contract
- You want 3G or HSDPA internet access, rather than EDGE.
The list could go on much further, but I think those are the main reasons.
The iPod Touch does everything else the iPhone does, with the exception of making phone calls and SMS messages - other than that it’s a fully-functional media player, organiser and web browsing device. It even has the exact same multi-touch interface you get on the iPhone.
I also think the iPod Touch’s design is much nicer than the iPhones. The mirrored finish on the back is nice, and it’s 8mm thinner than an iPhone. With an iPod Touch you now get three options of storage: 8GB, 16GB or 32GB. At the time of purchasing, there were only the first two available - I would have gone for the 32GB if it were possible.
iPhones are great for people that can’t stand carrying around an iPod and their phone, and have the money to spend on an 18-month O2 contract. But if you want the latest phone technology, with the latest music technology, you should buy both an iPod Touch and a similarly priced phone - it will still be cheaper than an iPhone in the long term.
Twitter, in my opinion, is an amazing social network; a place where you can connect with people in short 140-character messages. Its community is mostly made up of bloggers and those who spend their lives on every social network known to man.
I signed up for Twitter over a year ago, but didn’t start fully using it until late 2007. When I first joined I was following practically no one, and I only had one or two followers. Once I started following hundreds (over 500) of people, I gained followers in the hundreds. I thank these people for taking the time to follow me back; because it’s these people that motivated me to start using Twitter on a daily, sometimes hourly basis.
Once I started Tweeting more, I realised what a valuable social network this was - it has the potential to be so much more, but I’m happy with Twitter the way it is. Twitter has recently become a communication tool for me - almost replacing IM in some cases. Some people hate it, some love it. Those that hate it are either baffled by the fact that you publish what you’re doing to the rest of the world, or just see Twitter as a time-waster.
Feel free to follow me on Twitter, and I’ll follow you too.
Forget the Wii for a minute - although it’s a next-gen console, it’s not in the same league as these two consoles. The decision between a PS3 and an Xbox 360 is like Mac and PC. Different people have varied opinions on the matter; they will usually support the console they own.
I have a PlayStation 3 and love it; I see no compelling reason to buy an Xbox 360 at this point in time. The PS3 has the best graphics (in HD resolution terms, at least), Blu-ray built-in, free online play and a great selection of games. I’ll agree that the 360 has far more games than the PS3, but this is simply because the Xbox 360 has had an extra year of time for developers to make the games for it. I think the PS3 has a great future ahead of it - we’ve already seen a number of promising games confirmed for release this year. Blu-ray winning the format is an extra bonus for current PS3 owners, because now we don’t need to buy another player. Those looking for a Blu-ray player should consider a PS3, too - although there are some cheaper ones now.
The Xbox 360 only outputs a maximum of 720p (unless you buy the ridiculously-priced “Elite” version), only plays dual-layer DVDs and you have to pay £40/year to play online. Xbox users claim their Xbox Live online experience is superior to that of the PS3 - but to be honest I’ve played both, and the difference is marginal - definitely not worth paying £40/year for.
It will be interesting to see what Microsoft does next with the Xbox 360. Now that HD-DVD is dead, they are expected to release a Blu-ray drive for the Xbox 360. Sony will become its own competition, as it has a large stake in the Blu-ray disc association.
What are your thoughts on the console war?
Stephen |