June 16, 2007 The iPhone is cheap for small business. I think that the most impressive feature in the iPhone is going to be the ability to browse the web. I can already do this on my Samsung i607... but it's really a bad experience. The Samsung is a fairly new phone and the screen is the largest I've had yet (save my Treo 650) but it's still fairly small for browsing the web. I often want to zoom out to see the full web page but there's no way. I usually fat-finger the home button and have to navigate back to IE on the phone. I also have problems with 3G all the time. When I'm at home or at the Office, I get the 3G connection, but while in transit, its usually on E. I only go to a handful of websites: news.google.com to bbc news and google finance for stock prices. The good websites can detect that I'm not on a desktop and give me something simpler to look at. Often however, they detect that I'm on a mobile and give me 1/10 of the page and I have to load 10 pages to read the entire story. And those are the good websites. The bad ones, well I won't go there. The good for phone websites have gone out of the way to develop a second website that is usable on the phone.. but lets face it those are probably far and few in between. I manage a fairly busy website for my full time job and we just don't have the time to develop an alternate look and feel for the cell phone browsers. All my developers are working on a list of features that will take us until the end of next year to complete. We can't expect people to make mobile browsing useful anytime soon. It's just too expensive and the market is not large enough for travelers who browse for me to make building the mobile version a priority. Who would use the iPhone though? At the office, my job allows me to sit in one place. I use a handful of browsers to get my work done. Sometimes I have to use IE because the site has integrated a lot of activeX components but for others I use Firefox since I don't trust IE enough to not give me viruses. I've tried using Safari for Windows, but that browser just came out 4 days ago and people haven't suited websites to it yet. Let's consider some other professions now that don't let you sit in one place, but do have a WiFi Signal... Let's see Doctors, Engineers, Home builders, Auto parts, delivery people, travelers at airports... the list goes on and on. For those people, the iPhone is going to be cheap to buy for their office. Hopefully those people would be willing to pay for DSL or Cable which is so much faster than 3G. Small business needs solutions, but can't pay the large consulting companies to build mobile versions of the applications they need. They already exist on the web. Too bad that the iPhone doesn't run FireFox because most websites support that already.. but then again, I've gotten a lot of viruses using Firefox. If Apple succeeds at making the iPhone work successfully, then small business will be able to incorporate the World Wide Web into everyday transactions. Without something like that, they would have to buy laptops which may or may not be convenient. Smaller laptops are coming, but nothing as small as a iPhone. Now lets consider that the virus factor. Time will tell if Safari is susceptible to viruses or not. The iPhone will definitely be cheaper for people than buying a laptop and certainly more convenient, especially if you count the cost for not having to remove viruses from their windows laptops. So for someone who buys this for browsing the web, they get some extras for free. On their trip home, they can hear music of podcasts and ohh yeah, they can receive and make phone calls too. If Apple is able to make Safari a supported platform for websites and keep viruses out, the iPhone is going to be a no-brainer for small business for these reasons: better browsing, faster connections, no viruses, convenient to carry. June 15, 2007 The Tip of the Iceberg is often smaller than what's underneath. The average number of queries from Safari browsers has increased from April 1st to June 15 by approximately 8%. This is a huge number and does not even take into account Monday's Safari for windows release. Where does this increase come from? Are people replacing their windows machines with Macintosh machines? There was actually dip in the later half of April, but the turnaround seemed to correspond to the options scandal clearing up. What's really interesting is that Safari traffic looks to mirror Apple's stock price. This tells me that there is pent up demand for these Mac computers and that when there is good news, people go out and buy Mac's. 8% is really big. Now lets see what Safari for windows does in terms of viruses and if it's impervious because it doesn't use windows DLL's, then I can only imagine that the halo effect from the browser will drive even more fans towards the juicy 20-30% margins which should drive higher stock values and the cycle should repeat. June 14, 2007 Paris Hilton's viruses won't mess up your Safari today... Are iPhoto and iLife next? Safari for Windows is ported at the lowest levels, and not a port of the application written for windows in the same way that iTunes is. iTunes is pretty obviously written for Windows. Safari, on the other hand, comes packaged with MacOS libraries that have been ported to windows. I wonder if this is an indication that iPhoto and iLife for windows are around the corner. Technically, it certainly seems plausible. Also, didn't Steve Jobs essentially say at the D conference that Apple is now looking to being "The Software Company?" Some side thoughts: 1. Why would a company that has to pull developers off of Leopard to work on iPhone want to release an un-announced product just weeks before the launch of iPhone. Leopard will make Apple lots of money and Safari for Windows will not. 2. So what happens to the different viruses trying to exploit the windows libraries that Safari doesn't use? Are hackers now going to have access to the libraries to write their viruses with? Looking at the Program Files directory listing for Safari for Windows beta, you can see many of the MacOS libraries. CoreGraphics and CoreFoundation stand out. So indeed, this is a ported version of the libraries rather than a windows port. i think that this is a much similar binary to the binary you would find on iPhone. My earlier comment was that Safari release on Windows was meant to ferret out the problems one would find on the phone. Second note: I'm assuming that iPhone is intel. Besides, does it really matter which processor is used? Since the libs have been ported wouldn't the source for Safari still be the same? In fact, comparing this directory listing to the listing for iTunes, it's obvious that Safari was packaged in a way completely different from iTunes. You can see the listings at the end of this article. Looking at the CoreGraphics.dll file, the library calls have been obfuscated, but I'm sure someone will reverse engineer it. Ok, so now that we have Core Graphics and Core Foundation, I think it will be interesting to note that we can probably use the CoreGraphics library calls from windows now. Some enterprising soul should be able to exploit this library to port their MacOS apps to windows now. I'm betting that the next release of the Safari for Windows will attempt to package these in a better way. I still believe that this Beta was not intended to be a beta for Windows, rather it was meant to expose problems on iPhone Safari, prior to the launch. Ok, so more sleuthing.. Aside from the obfuscating, I only found this so far. Many of the libraries have version numbers that are in the hundreds. I think that Apple has been porting all these libraries to windows for quite some time. > /usr/bin/find -name *.dll | xargs strings | grep bwa What does bwa stand for? Build for Windows Apps ? Safari directory listing: > ls -l ITunes directory listing: > ls -l total 16320 - Nagendra June 12, 2007 Safari on Windows... Brilliant!
These are just great! I mean, iPhone is launching on the 29th and it's gotta be just right. That means, that it's version of Safari has to also work. Do we remember when Apple developers got called off Leopard to work on the iPhone? I be the first thing they worked on was the auto-update mechanism to ensure seamless upgrades to the phone. The second thing they probably worked on was the Windows version of Safari. I think the Windows Safari release is an ingenious way for Apple to fix iPhone Safari bugs / security breaches in time for its June 29th launch. Sep 25, 2006 - The Apple iPod has come a long way since the introduction of the first 5GB model in late 2001. In 2002, Apple doubled the capacity and added the signature solid-state scrollwheel. A year later, the capacity had increased to as much as 40GB. And 2004 saw the introduction of several new iPods, including the mighty Mini, the pricey Photo, and the black U2 version. In early 2005, we witnessed the splashy arrival of the flash-based Shuffle, the 30GB iPod Photo, and the updated Mini, which added a 6GB version to the series as well as improved battery life. Then came the 20GB photo-friendly iPod (the Photo part was dropped on this and the 60GB versions) and the colourised iPod U2 Special Edition, plus a fresh new price for the AU$199 1GB iPod Shuffle.Full Story New Ipod, New Nano, New Shuffle, new ITV, new iTunes, new ear buds, smaller packaging, no iPhone Wow! That was a mouthful and in so much as an hour, CEO Steve Jobs unveiled updates to everything that has made Apple Computer a household name in the last five years, except for the computers it sells. Eager to reach new venues, Apple have been selling specialized computers made to not look like computers with one piece of software at its center piece, iTunes. Itunes, is that software that ties it all together and brings you the content from the web. Note, you can't browse the itunes store on the web, you can only download Apple's special web browser called iTunes that can only access one website, www.itunes.com. Apple is about singularities, the single application that is only used by the single user. You see, that's Apple's stragegy: different computers for specific tasks. You see this with their iTunes software, a web browser that only access one website. You see it in their iTV, which is a computer that only does one thing, stream content from your computers into your living room. This is where Apple sets itself apart from the others computer manufacturers. Maybe that's why the iTV is Apple's Media PC and not the Mini because it does many different things. At a time when everyone is saying, look at all the different things you can do on this computer, Apple says, "Look how well you can do this one thing". And there's the Mantra Steve Jobbs keps repeating to us, "One more thing". He wants to sell you a new computer for all the different things that you want to do. Amazing! At at time when we had written off Apple Computer, they come out with a strategy to do one thing at a time. It makes you wonder what the iPhone is not going to do. What is the one thing that you do on the phone? For sure, it will look like no other phone out there. Lots of people have speculated about that, but on the inside, what is it really that a phone is supposed to do? Is it a communicator that lets you talk with the iTV with mom and pop at home? Is it a new place to put ipod's? If its just a phone, then how can be be made more powerful than any other phone? It makes sense that there are no iPhone's in an iPod event. The iTV, on the other hand, It's pretty much a single task computer, right? Well, there is a USB port on the back of the iTV, what's that about? What about the whole thing with playing games on an iPod and watching full length movies on the iPod? Will iPod's be able to stream video to the TV? Can I carry my movie collection and watch it on the big screen everywhere I go? Everywhere there is an iTV? Somehow, as cool as it sounded, it doesn't seem like yesterday's announcements were in the same spirit as the previous history. Play games, watch TV, listen to Music. What's next, iChat on an iPhone near you? It's getting confusing, and perhaps that's why its been taking so long to perfect the iPhone. Between, email voice calls, video calls, notes, music, games, media storage and calendering: which applications are really going to be in your pocket inside that iphone and how will it all tie into iTunes and how will it tie into iTV? Certainly, iTV puts a new twist on things. Why the iPod is losing its cool Apple has added ever more extras to its digital music-player in a bid to stem falling sales. But fears are rising that the device is now too common to be cutting edge. Microsoft, Nokia have work cut out to rival iPod BERLIN (Reuters) - Almost any iPod owner will tell the same story: they wouldn't swap the iconic device for any alternative. But the battle is wide open for the hearts -- and pockets -- of the vast majority who still have no MP3 player. Microsoft, Murdoch Crave Bite of Apple's IPod Pie: Mark Gilbert Sept. 7 (Bloomberg) -- In the digital battle for the ears of the world's music lovers, Apple Computer Inc. has vanquished its opponents during the initial skirmishes. Its enemies are now regrouping and preparing to declare war on several fronts. |
