Dan Frommer has a nice breakdown of Tim Cook’s statement:
>And it’s pretty clear to me that if you forecast out in time that the tablet market — I still believe it will be larger than the PC market.
I don’t think it is hard to see this happening. The proliferation of iPad’s that I am seeing is staggering — people that I consider “non-tech” are buying them. Should be fun to watch.
I can say that this is the first “new” type of camera I have seen in quite a while. Focus after the fact, no auto-focus — small. Very interesting, I think I will order one.
There are flashlights and then there *are* flashlights. This is the latter. A dual LED output with the low beam clocking in at 15-lumens and the high beam hitting a blinding 200-lumens. If you have never seen a Surefire flashlight before, then you are really missing out.
This thing is rock solid and sturdy — I just bought mine a month ago to replace another incandescent Surefire I had purchased over 5 years ago. This flashlight is really, really amazing. If you are a camper, photo light painter, gadget hound, or other — this is the flashlight you want. ((I was not paid to say any of this.))
Seriously, I love this thing.
Lee Youkyung:
>The Galaxy Nexus smartphone, the first handset built using a new version of the Android system called “ice cream sandwich,” is designed to bypass potential legal attacks from Apple Inc., the mobile chief of Samsung Electronics Co. said.
Interesting choice of words here: “bypass”. Whereby “not infringe” would be the correct thing to do, bypassing patents is more like: “sneaking around patents”. *Sketchy*.
It’s amazing how good the 4S camera is, especially when you see the progress it has made since the original iPhone. Like I said: no need to carry that point and shoot any more. Go Micro 4/3 or dSLR full frame. ((You could get a crop frame dSLR, but if you are going to do that I personally think you are better off with micro 4/3.))
Ryan Lawler reporting on a statement by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer about how they are beating Google in productivity applications living in the cloud:
>“Everything is a little earlier days than all the rhetoric,” Ballmer said. “But we’re winning, winning, winning, winning.”
What a winner.
Good to know, the iPhone 4S now has [GLONASS](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GLONASS) in addition to ‘assisted GPS’.
**UPDATED** (on Oct 19, 2011): [The Next Web](http://thenextweb.com/apple/2011/10/19/apple-sneaks-in-glonass-location-support-on-iphone-4s) talks a bit more about why this matters. (Hint: accuracy.)
Horace Dediu on Siri:
>It’s not trying to be a typist. It’s not trying to be a companion. It’s not trying to be smarter than you and make you redundant. It’s only trying to help lubricate your life. This is what makes it so exciting.
He’s right too, with the data that Apple is collecting from all the users of Siri, the technology will only get better and do more. I for one am very excited about Siri’s future.
Future UK CEO Mark Wood as reported by The AOP:
>Future had sold more digital editions in the past four days through Apple’s Newsstand than in a normal month.
For power users the Newsstand seems stupid and annoying, I suspect though that for many non-power users it is more of a “finally” type system. It makes searching for, downloading, paying for periodicals very easy — makes sense that it is a hit for publishers.
Merlin Mann on Instapaper:
>Twenty-some years after a college career sucking down over 1,000 pages a week, I am finally returning to reading a lot more. Because, I am deciding to read a lot more. Instapaper means there’s no excuse for not reading a lot more. Period.
I have, throughout my life, been a terrible reader. I am slow and not motivated. Up an until I found Instapaper I didn’t read much — now I have trouble keeping Instapaper full. Without Instapaper, there’s a pretty good chance I would not have started this site because I likely wouldn’t follow technology the same way that I currently do.
So, as Merlin says, thank you Marco.
Shadoe Huard responding to [this post](https://brooksreview.net/2011/10/drang-imessage/) by me:
>If you think iMessage is only a handy bonus, you’re missing the larger picture.
He says that iMessage will be a “game changer” — it could be, but not in it’s current form. Currently it is just going to be a nice bonus for being an iOS users. What *would* make it a “game changer” is if one of the following happens:
1. It is integrated into Mac OS X.
2. It is opened up so that other platforms can use it (Android mainly).
No matter how popular iOS is, it won’t every be on 100% of devices, thus it becomes hard for iMessage to be a wild success in the same way that Text messaging is. If, and only if, iMessage becomes universal, that’s when it will really matter.
David Streitfeld reporting on comments from Russell Grandinetti (an Amazon exec):
>He pointed out, though, that the landscape was in some ways changing for the first time since Gutenberg invented the modern book nearly 600 years ago. “The only really necessary people in the publishing process now are the writer and reader,” he said. “Everyone who stands between those two has both risk and opportunity.”
That includes Amazon. This entire move by Amazon not only makes sense, but sounds like a win-win for both writers and readers.
Craig Grannell talking about the conundrums that face ‘magazine’ type apps in the App Store:
>But that’s the problem with ‘free’: anyone can review, because anyone can download an app, without making any investment whatsoever. Typically, when people have paid money for something, they are more considered. And in making an app something other than free, you filter out the idiots.
For what it’s worth the Tap! magazine app is actually quite good and has great content, but he brings up a great point: so long as reviewers can review something just by installing it, we will have these problems. So should reviewers be required to have first used the app for X period of time? Or wait until X days after they purchased it? What then of new apps that are yearning for reviews to spur downloads?
If I was a magazine publisher, I’d charge for the app itself.
Steven Sande on somethings he really wants Siri to do for him:
>Finally, what about being able to do something like ask Siri to get a bunch of articles about a particular subject and put them into your Instapaper account? You say “Get me ten articles about terraforming Mars” and Siri grabs ten of the most popular web pages about the subject for you.
That’d be really neat actually. I think these types of articles really show just how fast people are taking to Siri — notice that he never said he wanted Siri to “actually work” because it already does.
This morning was the first time Siri was consistently running at full speed for me. On my drive in, using my Bluetooth headset cruising at fast speeds and listening to the radio it did the following:
– Texted my brother-in-law “happy birthday”.
– Set a reminder to go off when I got to my office.
– Checked the weather where my office is.
– Checked Apple’s stock price.
It was all trivial stuff, but I was grinning from ear to ear. Siri just worked perfectly and completed all these tasks with my eyes staying glued to the road — amazing.
RIM via press release:
>Research In Motion (RIM) (NASDAQ: RIMM; TSX: RIM) announced today that a selection of premium apps worth a total value of more than US $100 will be offered free of charge to subscribers as an expression of appreciation for their patience during the recent service disruptions.
I can only imagine how excited all those stodgy BlackBerry users are at the idea they can get SIMS 3 and Bubble Bash 2 for free — *finally*.
Pretty impressive.
Apple through press release:
> Apple® today announced it has sold over four million of its new iPhone® 4S, just three days after its launch on October 14. In addition, more than 25 million customers are already using iOS 5, the world’s most advanced mobile operating system, in the first five days of its release, and more than 20 million customers have signed up for iCloud®, a breakthrough set of free cloud services that automatically and wirelessly store your content in iCloud and push it to all your devices.
Wow.
Dr. Drang:
>If iMessage offered significant extra features, I might see some value in it. Allowing a conversation to jump between an iPhone and an iPad, is a nice feature, but since I don’t have an iPad, it means nothing to me.
I have to disagree with him on iMessage, because I think it is actually a very interesting feature. Texting is much bigger among the younger crowd and guess what, it is expensive — so are iPhones. An iPod touch, or an old iPhone with iMessage becomes a great, inexpensive, option for the younger crowd. Sure it would need wifi, but that’s not overly hard anymore.
And why turn it off, it’s not like there is anything detrimental to keeping iMessage turned on.
Overall iMessage isn’t a feature that is going to change the world, but if you family and friends are all iPhone users (increasingly more likely), it’s a very nice tool to have.
Richard L. Brandt profiling Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos:
>He wanted a decentralized, even disorganized company where independent ideas would prevail over groupthink. He instituted, as a company-wide rule, the concept of the “two-pizza team”—that is, any team should be small enough that it could be fed with two pizzas.
Overall a pretty interesting look at the man behind Amazon.
Dave Caolo on how great location based reminders are:
>If you had asked me to describe what I want in a perfect reminder app, I’d list simple task creation, dependability, multi-device sync and so on. That’s exactly what Guy describes: I listed my desires in terms of what I’m already using. I never would have said, “Place a geofence around a given location and prompt me to act upon arriving at leaving that spot,” but it turns out that’s precisely what the perfect reminder app should do
This works really well with OmniFocus — I only wish they could also make OmniFocus work with Siri.