“We have a clear shot at being the number three platform on the market. We're not just another open platform on the market, we are BlackBerry.”
…yes, and that's why you are in a financial (and marketshare) pit right now too. Your brand is almost worthless and you can't even ship a device on time.
RIM, Are you even looking at the same market I'm looking at? Nobody wants Blackberry. Your niche has passed and you haven't found a way to make yourself stand out. You're comfortable being the next best thing against the iPhone and Android, but you don't really have a reason anyone would choose you.
Good luck, RIM. Perhaps instead of making ridiculous statements, actually work on re-branding yourself and shipping a phone. Make yourself 'cool' again. You're in desperate need of a re-brand (hey, maybe takea pageout ofMicrosoft's book) and you need to move away from locking users into ecosystems. BBM is not a killer product anymore.
Just don't act like 2012 is the same as ten years ago, we aren't that dumb.
However, looking at the above chart, the Windows Store is growing by under 100 apps per day. Thus, at its current rate, given the time until Windows 8 becomes generally available, we can expect around 5,000 apps to populate its virtual shelves. Remember, however, that not all will be available in all places. Thus, under 5,000 apps for everyone.
Assuming another spike on launch day, say, of four times the boost that Windows 8 enjoyed when app submissions were opened, and we have a tally of around 7,000. That, in my view, is disappointing.
Alex is right. We should have seen major interest by developers who want to get in now before launch…. but we're not. I was thinking about this, and I am wondering if it's because there's no devices that developers can see and feel.
Windows 8 doesn't get you excited on a desktop machine, or even a laptop. You have to see it on a touch-first device to really understand how great it could be, and Microsoft (as well as their partners) being so quiet on the hardware front, rather than getting the Surface out there early seems to be extinguishing any interest.
I don't know what Microsoft is expecting to happen on day one here. I mean, it's been two years since Android tablets launched and we've not seen many killer apps at all. Why would anyone care about another platform?
Okay, it's not quite the same, but if this isn't “Metro-inspired,” I don't know what is. Myspace just found a love of big, beautiful squares. And I like it. They used to be partners, you know.
Oh, and it seems to take the rest of it's influences from… Pinterest. Who would've thought a mashup of Pinterest and Metro would look like this? It's not ugly, that's for sure.
Update: Someone pointed out that it looks like Google+ for iPad. Yeah… pretty much.
There's a new fad here in New Zealand, and it's one generated by no more than a soft drink company. It's personalized Coke bottles. I kid you not.
Not only is this the most stupid, frustrating marketing campaign ever, it's also sheer genius. My Facebook feed, for the last two weeks since this idea was silently launched to market has literally been inundated with my friends pulling duckfaces next to a bottle of drink with their name on it.
It's actually insanely genius, and the comments endlessly consist of “WHERE CAN I GET ONE?!” Apparently Coca-Cola did this a year ago over in Australia, but I didn't hear of any major social media impact due to that. As well as three rounds of “generalized” names with a fluttering of rare names, they did generic relationship bottles like “sister” and “boss” there; here in New Zealand they're doing “mate” and “friend” too.
Whilst I hope this doesn't go on forever (you can't get a bottle without a name on it right now, nor does my Facebook feed ever have a moment without someone publishing a picture of them), I wonder if they had even anticipated how well this would go.
What would be interesting to see would be if there is much of a spike in sales due to this. I can't imagine how big this would be if it hit America. The true genius here is the fact that they've turned something that is inherently not personal into something that is personal overnight.
I feel like my life is an eternal cycle of “Hey, maybe that new phone will have a great battery life!” ….And then finding out that it actually only lasts like, five hours in the real world. I might be a heavy user, but it seems like the only company who's gotten battery to a point where it's something you don't need to worry about too much is Apple.
Right now, I'm waiting for the Lumia 920 to see if the story there is something different… but I'm trying to not get my hopes up too much. That said, I don't think it could get much worse than my HTC One X.
Taylor herself was impressed with Sony Corporation’s technology, how it helped her to tell the story of her song through the best visual, audio and video experience and ultimately create a deeper, and more intimate connection with her fans.
Interesting article from a few days ago showing Sony trumpeting that Taylor Swifts We will never ever get back together is the first music video to be shot in 4K, using Sony's new camera technology.
At a guess, they probably gave these cameras to Taylor Swift's director to use for free in return for the video.
Since there's not much content out there at all right now for 4K TV's (you know, since you can't actually buy one), and that devices will available in stores in October, I expect this music video will be the demo reel of choice for retailers when they go on sale.
As someone who consistently finds themselves losing hours of time online learning about the latest and greatest new thing, I often find that I learn everything there is to know about a skill but never actually learn it.
The internet is a boundless black hole of information about literally every single thing that could be useful to know, it's easy to go on an information binge. It's natural to want to be well informed.
People want to know what kind of running shoes, distance and regularity is the perfect combination to start running 5KM. They want to know everything about the best windsurfing equipment and waves. They want to know how the entire software stack works from top to bottom before even writing that first piece of code. They want to learn all about how Google does their business – from top to bottom – before even starting their own.
Analysis paralysis can be hard to overcome. I often find myself researching skills I always wished I could have in the real world, but never actually doing anything about them.
What I've learnt, though, is that none of that research or hours spent reading about a topic matters. None of it. As the hours go by, the law of diminishing returns effectively nullifies everything you've learned. Instead of sitting in a dark room staring into a screen, get out there and do that thing you've always wanted to do.
It's hard to grasp how massive the world is and how many possibilities there are if you're sitting on a computer. Instead of investing hours of your life into the internet to get a grasp on how it works, just go try it. Greatness takes practice. Hard work. Getting your hands dirty.
Today, the iPhone 5 went up for pre-order in New Zealand. Not via Apple, only via carriers right now. The prices are pretty steep, and I wanted to look at whether or not the plans actually offer any value vs other plans on offer.
I didn't realize how expensive things get until I made a nice spreadsheet to see it all, so it's good to visualize it this way. A couple of things to note:
You can't buy the iPhone on 2degrees, so I assume full handset pricing with their cheap plans
Some plans don't have an equivalent so I substituted the closest plan within $10
Green indicates the best of whatever metric
This doesn't factor in early termination fees
This is based on RRP of the 16GB iPhone 5 (the most popular model)
Update: I've added the maximum Early Termination Charge to the table
I've deduced a few things from this:
It's expensive to buy an iPhone outright (or in general) and use a similar plan over two years on another network, so contracts seem to be the way to go if you can commit.
Telecom doesn't seem to understand how important data or SMS is to iPhone users and only gives a boatload of minutes instead.
The lower the plan, the cheaper it is to actually buy the phone outright and just go on prepaid (observe the $59 Telecom plan VS 2Degrees' $59 off-contract)
Vodafone doesn't have the iPhone on offer without a plan of $80/mth or more.
It's still the case that if you want more than 1GB of data, you're going to need to spend well over $100. I had hoped this would change soon.
I can't believe how exorbitant it all actually is over two years, and how little these plans actually change year after year. I could buy a small car for this much money.
I don't think this is official, but regardless, this is awesome and I kind of wish Nokia's marketing department had thought of this. I can't wait for the Lumia 920 to hit market.
I want to explain why I've decided not to buy an iPhone 5, rather than fighting off people on Twitter. I've decided not to buy the iPhone 5 because Apple still hasn't improved the way that I can interact with their phone. It's just the same thing, again.
The iPhone 5 hardware is incredibly gorgeous, and has some pretty impressive new features to match, but Apple hasn't addressed the one thing that's always bothered me about iOS. The iPhone just isn't personal. It doesn't know me and allow me to adjust it to make it my personal phone. I don't think they understand that their end users aren't a big faceless group of people.
Everyone has one, and they all look the same. Go out in a public place, right now. Look around, and observe all the people tapping away into their iPhone. They are literally everywhere you turn.
When you review phones on a regular basis, you go down one of a few paths. You either go down the path of most who crave big numbers on paper to make their smartphones incredible, or you are worried about how the phone improves your life (the hardware is still important, but in different ways). I want my phone to know me. I want it to be personal to me, and I want it to feel like it isn't just another device that gets pushed out once a year. I don't think Apple truly understands how personal the phone can be to the end user.
When Nokia made it's announcement about the Lumia 920 last week, I wasn't too impressed, but I've been doing a lot of thinking about Windows Phone 8, and it hit me all of a sudden when I saw this video published by Microsoft which illustrates my point perfectly.
The thing is, Microsoft gets it. They're completely right. Live tiles make the technology disappear.
Windows Phone may have been riddled with a slow launch and a few missing features, but they truly understand how a phone relates to an actual person. It's something the user is going to spend a lot of time with, and Microsoft understands that it should try as hard as it can to intimately get to know the user. Windows Phone 8 takes this even further.
They do this through a combination of basic stuff too. Customizable colors. Big pictures of their friends. Social Integration. Start screen customization. The list goes on and on.
I was an early adopter of Windows Phone 7, and had one of the first handsets released to the world, but I grew tired of the platform because updates were slow and unexciting (and generally just added features everyone else already has) and there were a lot of applications coming out I really wanted to use on other platforms, so I switched. Despite that, I want to point out that I don't think I've ever been happier with how consistently well Windows Phone works.
It's not about specifications; they shouldn't even need to matter anymore. How many gigahertz or cores a phone has, or memory it has onboard is irrelevant. We're at the point where it doesn't matter at all and I don't care about that stuff.
Android may offer customization, but my experience with it so far is the manufacturer skins are horrible, and third party widgets and apps that actually look remotely good on the platform are few and far between. It's tiringly inconsistent.
With the announcement of Windows Phone 8, Microsoft has all of its eggs in one basket. Their feature set matches that of competitors. They're in a position to finally be able to influence the market for good, and I am gunning for them. It doesn't matter anymore if all the major applications aren't there yet. This phone is good enough to stand on it's own, and because of that the applications will come.
I want Windows Phone 8 to succeed, because Microsoft is the only one who truly understands that end users are real people.
