The tablet craze, HP-tablet, I mean...

Gizmodo just published the summary of last night's keynote by Microsoft's Steve Ballmer and man it looks gorgeous (at least in the marketing video).

Now the tablet craze starts to make more sense. If the print media industry want an electronic distribution media (and they should by now), then they must create an open standard that allows all players in the market to create devices for that content to be distributed.

The print media want content to be king and distribution channels to be commoditized (just like TV was). That's the only way to guarantee that they have an advantage when it comes to defining prices and being in charge of the business model.

Believing that Apple will come and save them by creating a closed system and a single distribution channel (iTunes) which does not even work outside the major markets (US, UK) is just crazy and in many aspects it would be suicide for the Print Media. They already realize that the competition for them is the Internet, and there's no limits to how that gets distributed. If they limit their content they will loose audience.

I for one would like to have my news delivered to me electronically, but on a laptop not a tablet...

In the meanwhile, enjoy the video!

Apple on unfair claims in advertising

Part of being a cool company is that you respect your customers. This is not a show of respect by Apple. Seriously, this is just used car salesman tactics. Apple, shape up!

Why Apple should watch out or lose it's newly acquired customers

Apple had a considerable amount of credibility when they started they iPod "offensive" some years ago. So much credibility that people were willing to overlook critical customer-back stabbing such as the iTunes being DRM ridden, the iTV (ooops, apple TV) being more expensive in Europe even if there's no content for it at all in most countries (seriously!) or even the latest MobileMe quality problems, not to mention the least than honest statement by Apple about the "push" feature in MobileMe.

Now, they've stooped to a new low. They have started outright lying (or "hiding the details" if you listen to PR).

Apple, come on! We love your products, but there's only so much back-stabbing we can take! Get your act together and start honoring your promises of creating great products for those of us that have a "digital life". Seriously, our patience is running out...

The iPhoto conundrum

Like me many people have bought their first mac lately. Like me they've also been very happy with the whole package (hardware + OS + software). But here's the problem: if you have liked the iLife suite as much as I do you are probably running out of space in your MacBook Pro (MBP) even if you have a larger disk...

With iTunes at 16Gb and iPhoto at 17Gb I'm running out of space! What can I do?

In the hope that one of you may have found a solution here's a call for help! Help me figure out how to have the pictures I want with me all the time, but at the same time have the disk with enough space to install the dev tools from apple (which also take some more Gigs).

Here are some of the plan's I've hatched to solve this conundrum:

Plan A - The home-made solution

Summary: Store the iPhoto library on an external HD and carry in the laptop only the last few "rolls".

This is the first solution that came to mind. I would copy the whole library from iPhoto to an external RAID 1 HD (see how here), and the just have the latest "rolls" of photos with me in the laptop.

This is such a simple solution (for someone that understands the concept of iPhoto library, which may not be all of us) that I'm baffled by the lack of support for this in iPhoto out of the box! I mean, you do have to do a lot of work just to get this done. Apple, listen up!

Plan B - The web 2.0 solution

Summary: Copy all the photos to Flickr Pro account.

This idea just came to me while updating my Flickr library. I've updated to Pro account a few months back, and while thinking about the iPhoto problem it came to me that Flickr offers unlimited storage for the Pro account. And to be honest, Flickr is getting up to speed pretty fast. If it was not for the fact that you may not have Internet connection all the time I'd probably have started to use Flickr as my main photo library organizer.

The further downside of Flickr is that as you accumulate photos in the service it takes quite a while to download them back to your laptop if you want to have them offline.

How about you? Have you solved this problem? Leave your comments below.

Apple vs. Nokia, spot the differences

Being in Finland I'd love for Nokia to continue to be a big player in the mobile phone and mobile Internet access market. I lover their N810 device (just don't get why they did not put a GSM chip in it...), and have been a loyal customer of their mobile phones.

But that is about to change (and I'm not talking about me being a customer). Indeed, more and more Apple is showing Nokia how late they are to the "consumer" game and to the whole "digital life" ecosystem. It's not enough to have a product, you have to have the right product, the one your customers want. Check this article for a comparison of Nokia's and Apple's stores in London. The pictures in the post say it all...

Adaptive Path discovers Apple's Mojo, but Toyota got there first

In a post called "Apple’s Design Process Through a Keyhole", the blog over at Adaptive Path mentions one technique used at Apple when designing product. The basic idea is that in Apple, designers come up with 10 possible designs for a new feature (and I bet more than 10 for a new product). Then diligently choose the best 3 and then continue to iteratively improve all 3 options they chose for some set period of time. Once they have worked for a while in all 3 options they finally decide on 1 and perfect it.

Even though this seems to be "amazing" and "innovative" for the folk at Adaptive Path (and I bet they are not the only ones thinking that way), this is actually a very old technique called Set-Based Concurrent Engineering (SBCE, also in software).

This technique is similar to techniques used in brainstorming sessions where participants are encouraged to generate many ideas (broaden the horizon), improve on them incrementally by "using" other people's ideas and enhancing them (improve on other's ideas), and finally to select the most appropriate idea for implementation (narrow and select).

Set-Based Concurrent Engineering is also used to ensure quality when a team (or set of teams) must meet a hard-deadline (as in a deadline that cannot be changed) with a solution that is much better than if you would just go with your first impulse/idea and try to improve on that.

One of the key advantages for Apple in using this technique, is that when they get to the 3 mid-step ideas they actually have syntethized all of the best points of all the other 7 ideas into those select 3. And then they still improve on those!

Good to see that Adaptive Path picked up on this technique, I hope that many other UI/UX people start paying attention to this old, but proven technique!

Nokia is missing the bus, why the N96 is not good enough

Disruptive technologies don't always come with revolutionary new technology or feature-packed packages. And this is no different with the iPhone/Nokia debate going on today after Nokia failed to impress with the announcement of the N96 multimedia phone.

The fact is that Nokia is missing the bigger point and the proverbial bus. One year after the launch of the iPhone, Nokia should be following on the heals of Apple and presenting a credible alternative to the second largest selling smartphone in the US market as of Q4/2007. But no, they just packed another set of features (already hard to use or even find in the older models) into another phone that could be said to be "more of the same".

With this play, Nokia is missing the point illustrated by the Hard Drive business in the 1980's. It is not "more of the same" that will change the market and gain market share. It is innovation! Not technological innovation, but useful innovation.

As Christensen put is in "The Innovator's Dilemma":

Generally disruptive innovations were technologically straightforward, consisting of off-the-shelf components put together in a product architecture that was often simpler than prior approaches. They offered less of what customers in established markets wanted and so could rarely be initially employed there. They offered a different package of attributes valued only in emerging markets remote from, and unimportant to, the mainstream.

What's most amazing is that there's already an S60 "touch" which is the operating system that Nokia uses in their smartphones.

Today, if you want a decent Internet phone from Nokia you have little choice: the bulky Communicator/E90, the "Blackberry Killer" E61i/E62 or the ugly E70. None of these phones comes close to the elegance, size efficiency or usability of the iPhone, and none of them competes with the iPhone in the "player" market for iPhones (music/video/etc.).

I wonder when Nokia will wake up... Probably not too soon judging by the time it took them to release their "Blackberry killer": 7 years!!!!!