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iPad iOS 4.2 update delayed by 2 weeks, originally scheduled for Nov 11 [UPDATE]

iPad home screen in iOS 4.2

UPDATE: It appears that due to a serious last minute WIFI connection issue the iPad’s iOS 4.2 release, planned for Friday November 11,  will be delayed, and the forseeable impact is that the public release will be postponed by 2 weeks. The connection issues have been posted on Macrumors forum (here and here) as well as on Twitter and Apple’s internal discussion boards.

Hopefully this will still mean a pre-Thanksgiving launch, and we are looking forward to long awaited iPad features such as

• Multitasking (AKA fast application switching),
• Airprint and Airplay features.
• Homepage and Spotlight upgrades
• Folders
• Widgets
• Introduction of Gamecenter

For a nice walkthrough of the features, and to find out exactly what is included in the upcoming iPad release, visit our friends at TiPb and click here for the full feature list

New eMagStudio software eases publishing on iPhone and iPad

Software vendor eMagCreator has chosen to focus on iPhone/iPad publishing and have already released a new mobile version of their online publishing platform eMagStudio, which is one of the first desktop software’s which publishes directly to Apples iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch devices, using the newly developed HTML 5 based reader. The new release is the first of many initiatives towards publishing on Apples mobile devices.

via prurgent.com

I would anticipate that there will soon be several tools to publish to tablet devices that incorporate HTML5 based capabilities.

My question is how important a “native” tablet experience is to readers, compared PFD conversion solutions. Certainly the feature list for eMagStudio is impressive…

Two Biggest Tech Disappointments Of 2009

A post on ReadWrite web today outlines the “Top 10 Failures of 2009“, and the top 2 are definitely my biggest disappointments also.

Where are the Tablets?
I was hugely excited about various tablet concepts to the point of swooning every time the rumor mill turned, and having been an early adapter of Boxee and streaming net content to your large home theater TV flat screen, I bought into some of the concepts of a flat Apple or Crunchpad tablet becoming the new  couch surfing, home media center, ueber iPhone, controller, e-reader, kindle killer gadget to own.

I’m still excited by the prospect, but Michael Arrington‘s “Crunch Pad”, originally outsourced to Chandrasekar Rathakrishnan’s India company called “Fusion Garage“, evaporated at the 11th pre-launch hour, and is now relabeled  “JooJoo” as part of a completely disastrous falling out between Michael and Chandrasekar. It will likely be rendered irrelevant by years of litigation that is sure to follow the acrimonious, rapid and reality TV worthy meltdown of the US vs. India partners involved in this promising project. Rising from the ashes is not the only thing that has gone up, so has the price. (video on engadget for a high level review)

Jolie O’Dell writes in her original ReadWriteWeb post entitled “Top 10 Failures of 2009“:

All we wanted was a $200-500 flat piece of glass and plastic with some fancy gizmodgery inside so we could look at the Internet from the comfort of our couches. And what did we get? Rumors, Photoshopped gadget porn, promises – lies, all lies. We’d have been better off if we’d spent those months drawing the Yahoo! home page on an Etch-A-Sketch.

Image by Photo Giddy via Flickr

And while fresh Apple tablet rumors resurface every 3 months, all these rumors have done is to move dates from the originally expected mid 2009 time-frame into late 2010, which to me places Apple into a reactionary rather than visionary category, and by which time larger home media market shifts will dilute any innovation, novelty or wow factor.

Wipe-Out: Google Wave

I very much connected with that the web has come a long way since email, which now is 40 years old. The concept with Google Wave was to introduce a new metaphor for communication, incorporating all the collaboration successes and phenomenons of the last couple of decades. The merging of email with forums, wikis, micro blogging, real-time content generation just made so much sense.

Image via Wikipedia

The reality hits home hard, there are few use cases, waves are difficult to manage, and the marriage of asynchronous versus synchronous communication methods in the same tool, and within the same UI, just simply does not work. Is it because the UI is not usable, or is it because there is a lack of use cases? My own hypothesis is that at the center of usability there has to be usefulness, and this is where wave falls short.

Related articles by Zemanta

• First impressions of the JooJoo tablet (seattlepi.com)
• Fusion Garage JooJoo Tablet Hands-On [Joojoo] (gizmodo.com)
• Hands On With the JooJoo, Formerly Known as CrunchPad (wired.com)
• Joo Joo tablet maker says Michael Arrington had ‘flair for the dramatic’ (telegraph.co.uk)

Why the Slingplayer for iPhone App was rejected by the App Store

According to reports this morning, the much anticipated “Slingplayer for iPhone” app has been rejected from the app store, apparently at the request of ATT, who are concerned about “bandwidth issues”.

However, I think this is a mis-direction, as I would point out that there is already currently a Windows Mobile version of Slingplayer that is fully functioning over ATT’s 3G as well as over Edge networks.

Rather I think ATT is using it’s iPhone monopoly to position it’s own video service that will be launched later this year.

I think the critical difference here is that ATT’s monopoly as service provider for the iPhone is strongly trending into consumer unfriendly lack of options, applications, innovation and flexibility.

We may see a WiFi only version of the Slingplayer (like Skype), but how does that compare to the fully enabled version for Windows Mobile?

According to PC Reports:

Meanwhile, another possible reason for SlingPlayer‘s ban from the App Store could be AT&T’s speculated plans for its own mobile video services. The wireless carrier silently changed its terms of service at the end of March, basically prohibiting services like Sling is offering from its network.

But if AT&T won’t get to keep its exclusivity with the iPhone, maybe this kind of won’t happen anymore. That would allow users a bit more freedom with which apps they can get on their phone and how they actually use their (already capped)

mobile Internet.

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• SlingPlayer Mobile for BlackBerry Exits Beta, iPhone Version Looms (appscout.com)
• T-Mobile Germany banning Skype for iPhone (macworld.com)
• SlingPlayer for iPhone submitted to app store (tuaw.com)

Polymash Prediction: Monetization features of OS 3.0 will change the iPhone app landscape completely

I was following today’s iPhone OS3 announcement live event, and one thing in particular struck me:

Most of the advancements are focused on the app developer community, and while I agree that these will enable this community to produce far better and innovative apps, one feature in particular I think will change the application landscape for the iPhone completely: the ability to have optional paid content and subscription models within an app.

iPhone 3.0 in-application payments

In general I am in favor of multiple business models for developers to monetize their apps, however I do see this eventually resulting in a completely changed application landscape compared to what we know today, where freemium vs. free will reign, and where I believe a majority of applications will have limited functionality and some sort of premium concept.

Now Apple promised that free applications will indeed remain free, “no new taxes, read my lips”… But I think the temptation for re-designing existing apps to build in monetization will prove too tempting for the app dev community, and will result in fewer free apps in general, and fewer choices for consumers eventually.

Additionally, the concept of getting prompted via a fairly intrusive pop-up boxes to purchase content, or sign up for a subscription, rankles me a bit. My iPhone experience is based on being used to pay for an app once, and then enjoy seamless service, and the user experience of reading something only to be then prompted for premium content mid-stream does not sit well with me. Signing a once a year subscription may be OK too, if I value the service, but I don’t know if I’ll like to “pay as you go” for content.

Let’s hope that the bevy of OS3 features announced will make it all worth it in the end, and that the resulting increase in innovative apps will be just so cool, we will all be happy to pay for them, one subscription at a time.

What do you think?

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• The iPhone OS 3.0 Announcement Scorecard (mobilecrunch.com)

Can Twitter Survive What Is About to Happen to it? I think that is the wrong question…

The explosive rise of Twitter in the last couple of months is giving rise to a couple of phenomena, and to some these trends are harbingers of doom: More than a few people are asking if Twitter can survive what is happening to it, in it’s current form. And the answer is surely that it can, at least from an infrastructure perspective.

I would pose the question differently: How can Twitter continue to deliver value as a meaningmaking and sensemaking tool for its users?

A couple of examples that illustrate what is happening:

Tweepme, a ponzi-like scheme that would have you pay for followers, in return to following everyone else, is causing a lot of controversy with its concept: Ultimately with this concept everyone would follow everyone else, and this becomes meaningless very quickly. Cheryl Harrison writes in her blog that Twitter is not a numbers game:

Is there value in having a large, worthless network on Twitter?  While I might not agree with it 100%, I can see the value of connecting with everyone on LinkedIn – in the most direct benefit, this lets you contact other people to whom they are connected for free, without having to pay for InMails and whatnot. But on Twitter – you just crank up the noise and turn down the substance.

At the SXSW conference in Austin Texas, the traditional paradigm of having a Twitter based backchannel to find interesting topics and keep up with what was happening was made meaningless by the sheer volume of tweeps coming through the service. Stacey Higginbotham writes in her piece Forget the Fail Whale: Twitter Jumps the Shark

Twitter is still up and running, but the idea of generating a real time picture of what folks are doing, and extracting relevant information from that picture, is kind of like trying to pick out your grandma at the Washington Mall on the satellite image taken during President Barack Obama’s inauguration. It’s easy to see that a lot of folks were there, and hard to find that one thing you’re looking for.

The trend is apparent: Twitter, as we know it, is about to change. And, to use another shark metaphor, it needs to “keep swimming”  to stay alive; it needs to keep evolving in order to provide meaning to its users.

So the question raises itself: How can Twitter continue to provide “meaning” for its users?

What the cool kids did this weekend…

For those not obsessed with recent tech or online developments, the South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas, is the place where the Digerati, Social Media Mavens, Tech Geeks, Bloggers and increasingly Corporations assemble each year to immerse and attune themselves with emerging trends, innovation, creativity and fun.

There are few better places to get in touch with trends in online developments. Web2.0? We’re talking Web3.0 here (officially announced at SXSW on Friday)…

Now I was not there, but not being able to attend an event like this is actually becoming ever less painful through conference live blogging and Twitter back-channels. Still a poor substitute for face to face networking at tweet-ups, concerts and various bashes, but staying at home at least you will have had a stable internet connection…

To note a few trends:

Kafka-esque iTunes Tweetie 1.3 flip flop at the app store leaves some questions…

The byzantine mechanism by which new iPhone apps are approved for listing in the iTunes App store has always been a subject of somewhat derisive musings among Apple’s many fans.

Yesterday however, the story reached Kafka-esque proportion when Apple rejected an upgrade to Tweetie, arguably the most popular iPhone Twitter app. The reason given was profanity, which they had noticed in a screen shot that displayed a dynamically generated has tag list. (see image)

The truly amusing thing is that Loren Brichter, the developer of the app,  did not provide the offending screen shots to Apple, but that the Ooompa Loompa’s at the app store factory generated these screen shots themselves, only to be surprised and dismayed to find that 1.) profanity exists on the internet and 2.) can be displayed on mobile devices and browsers

In apparent realization that perhaps iPhone’s safari browser would need to be removed on similar grounds, Tweetie 1.3 was reinstated in a sudden burst of sanity.

Or could it have been the outcry and ridicule of  the Twitter community that ensued?

For your amusement I enclose some of the developers tweets:

clipped from twitter.com To clarify: no, I would never submit a screenshot with profanity. Apple sent that to *me* as an example of the objectionable content.about 19 hours ago from web Hot damn I love Twitter. You are all awesome. #fanningthefireabout 20 hours ago from web clipped from twitter.com You all ready to be pissed? Tweetie 1.3 rejected. Because there’s an offensive word in the TRENDS – http://twitpic.com/1zbcsabout 22 hours ago from web

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• Twitter iPhone App “Tweetie” Has Been Updated! Ping.fm, RT’s, New Theme and More! (thenextweb.com)
• Tweetie 1.3 rejected from App Store because of swearing on Twitter (downloadsquad.com)
• Apple stupidly rejects Tweetie 1.3 for foul language in Twitter trends (engadget.com)
• Tweetie 1.3 approved — what are we supposed to do with this wagon full of torches and pitchforks? (engadget.com)