RIM Sort Your Life Out!
RIM recently announced its quarterly earnings and basically they weren’t good. This caused the companies shares to drop by over 20%! Not good. But I think RIM could keep itself in the picture with a few changes.
1.) Start anew on the OS.
Do a Microsoft, go back to the drawing board and write the OS from the ground up or at least use the Playbook’s OS. At the moment the current OS (OS 6.0) is old and OS 7 is pretty much out of date before it has been released. Many elements look outdated and ugly, MS has managed to turn its ugly duckling into a beautiful swan and whilst not up to date with the big boys, its doing its best to catch up.
2.) Get rid of the stupid monthly charge
Spend £100+ on a phone and then £5 p/m for the ability to do things, c’mon, yeah your push service is good, but my iOS devices get e-mails quicker than my blackberry and to use 3rd party apps, let me just move to another OS that allows that for free.
3.) BBM moves around
Now this is the tricky one, I’ve just said stop the monthly charge but this is where you can still make money, offer BBM on other OS’s for a monthly fee (for server maintenance naturally) or offer a crippled version making consumers want to move BBM is a big selling point, but with Apple bringing out iMessages to a user base in the hundreds of millions, you gotta get in first and remind people BBM was here first.
4.) Don’t stay in the past
Portrait QWERTY phones OMG! It’s cramped horrible and off putting, torch design was good, but if you must put in a physical keyboard make it landscape with a touchscreen.
5.) Get those Dev’s!
Did you hear Android has over 200,000 apps, iOS? 350,000 and the App World? 26,000. WHAT! Devs can make or break a system. Get the devs in with better tools and easy porting and consumers will soon jump on with all the cool apps. The playbooks Dalvik VM is good but make porting of Android apps so simple and more Dev’s will get on board and even improve their apps for the OS.
5.) Move Quickly
Everyone knows Apple’s part way into their next device just as they announce one, do the same! The playbook looked amazing when you announced it but now its just out and the specs seem average, get the edge be ready to jump ahead. Apple did it right with the iPad 2 and I’m sure you can aswell.
Hopefully that advice helps and you’ll be on the road to recovery in no time!
My 5 Top Albums of 2010
As 2010 draws to a close, I could list so many things in tops lists but I have decided to only do albums, why? Music is, as with most people, a big part of my life and I rarely download just one song, I download the whole album. Here are the 5 that I’ve loved the most.
These ratings are based partly on the artist, how long I listened wholly to that album, % of songs that I really like and % of year sent listening to that song, Note: This is based relatively.
5. Pendulum – Immersion:
Not my favourite Pendulum album but still an enjoyable one, kinda like the love child of their previous albums, taking many of the tunes from “In Silico” with a few similar to “Hold Your Colour” especially with the Layout of the Album, e.g. “Genesis” and “Salt In The Wounds” is very much like “Prelude” and “Slam” in “Hold Your Colour” still very enjoyable and a great album in it’s own right.
4. Katy Perry – Teenage Dream
Absolutely love this album, speaks very much to me and would be higher if it wasn’t for the other albums and “California Gurls” plus the remixes, “California Gurls” was great, until the album came out, then became my most loathed songs and whilst the remixes are alright, I prefer the originals. This will still be a heavily listened album in 2011 and possibly future years.
3. Deadmau5 – 4×4 = 12
The latest released album of the year out of this top 5 but amazing all the same, I love songs with vocals, but I don’t mind that all the songs are vocal less, much like “Immersion” but the tunes are 10x better than Pendulum’s IMO and make for great background noise as well as foreground tunes. For me and I’m sure many Deadmau5 is new to me this year, but the old stuff will be found and all of it listened to into 2011 and beyond.
2. Marina and the Diamonds – The Family Jewels
Absolutely LOVE Marina and this album proves her talent, every track is different from itself and is perfect, it’s so hard to describe how good, it just is, a great portion of my year was taken up by Marina and I don’t want it back, here’s to hoping she brings out more in 2011.
1. Lady GaGa – The Fame Monster
Whilst being “The Fame” + more the more is still a true piece of art, taking you further through GaGa’s ideas on the fame and how it turns bad once you’ve reached fame, all the monsters pointed out in the tracks can be put to real life. GaGa is my life and is a true artist in everything she does. I wait with anticipation of “Born This Way” and know this is gonna be in the top 2 of 2011.
Ellie Goulding’s “Lights” should get an honourable mention, whilst I couldn’t get on with all of it what I did was awesome.
Gingerbread Announced Today?
Well we’re in December and Granny’s been cooking up some Gingerbread Men, hopefully Google will sweeten the holidays with the lingering scent of wait as Nexus devices get the warm Christmas feeling and other devices plead to Mummy and Daddy to get some.
nVIDIA CEO Calls Galaxy Tab a Large Phone
IMO he’s right, it has a phone built in FFS!
Android 2.3 “Gingerbread”
Froyo released for summer – usually a summer desert. Gingerbread has connotations of Christmas so possibly a holiday release for Vanilla Gingerbread?
Going Mirco-Blogging
Like Twitter with less of the social. Less massive posts, still the same if not more pointless ones…
Why Education Should Embrace The Tablet Now.
2010 saw the rebirth of the tablet device. Whilst tablets are not a new device, they have never been good enough to really make it mainstream, but with the announcement of the iPad in January. The tablet is making a big comeback.
Almost every manufacture is jumping on board to build a tablet device to claw some market share away from the iPad, with big competitors coming soon, with the Samsung Galaxy Tab and RIM’s Playbook.
But why is the tablet making such a big comeback now? It’s all down to the OS, before tablets used Windows as their main OS, some were modified Macbooks, and Windows is not designed for tablets, you could even argue it wasn’t made for netbooks but it definitely wasn’t made for tablets, even though some are coming out on Windows 7. But the ones that will really make it are those using an OS made for them.
And now is the time for education to grasp tablets at the beginning of their golden age and revolutionise and digitise education.
From my own personal experience, the tablet is the perfect educational tool. It’s portability means work can be done anywhere with out problems concerning size or weight, note taking can be better organised and work submitted easily.
But it doesn’t have to be just writing and work, textbooks can be changed, we are already seeing newspaper and magazine apps using digital content rather than just text and text books could do the same, video demonstrations of topics directly in the book and content can be changed and updated at any time.
All that is needed is a tablet, roughly 10″ with a capacitive touchscreen, with an appropriate stylus and the Android OS, which is free to use, on a custom rom which locks out app installs unless it is to a certain user (Admin).
Whilst on paper it sounds simple, in reality it would be a tough task for the OS and expensive to build the custom rom and tablets, we could really see a change in homework hand-in rates, attendance and learning, through the various mediums of delivery on the device in text books benefiting those that learn best visually or aurally.
What do you guys think, a winner or am I thinking too early.
Leave a comment 
The Mac App Store – Will it succeed?
Today Apple announced how the Virtual cycle of the Apple OS’ has gone from Mac -> iPhone -> iPad and now ‘Back To Mac’ the events name.
One of the big additions to Mac OS X is the Mac App Store. But will it succeed?
I think it will, but it depends on quite a few factors.
The iOS App Store has had a lot of controversy in the past, with apps getting past the restrictions when they shouldn’t have like ‘Shake The Baby’ and others that have been stopped for very silly reasons. But all in all these problems haven’t really stopped developers from getting on board and releasing 100′s of thousands of apps and billions of downloads creating a high revenue for Apple and developers as well.
Apple has always stated that developers are what makes a platform successful and this is no different. But with Apple having over 600,000 Mac developers and 30,000 developers joining every month. It seems that Apple has got a good driving force for this Mac app store but there are other possibilities why the store could fail or succeed.
The store needs to be a opt in service, on iOS devices the app store is the only official way of apps being installed on the device. Whilst there is also Cydia, an unofficial app installer, this can only be done through ‘jailbreaking’ devices something that apple doesn’t like. However with the Mac apps have been installed on the system through downloading and copying to a folder or through copying from a CD/DVD. Developers may still want to offer their apps from their own distribution areas as and use the App Store as an as well rather than a must. Many developers may not be happy with the 70/30 split when they have been making 100% on sales in the past. They may see selling on the app store as a way of reaching end users that would not normally see their app and so gain an extra sale even if it is for less.
Another area which will determine the success or failure of the Mac App Store is end user adoption, whilst developers look for another way to reach users of their apps, users want to find apps for their task at hand and so the app store will be an easy way for them to find what they need. The store also acts as as a safety rope, for users, there are many reports in which fewer apps on the iOS store that will transmit users data without notifying the user in comparison which does suggest that Apple’s restrictive store does benefit users and give more peace of mind when downloading apps.
Sophos recently ran an online poll asking whether Facebook should have a similar system for it’s apps after story after story of users data being transmitted without consent of the user. With over 95% of those asked agreeing that this system should be put in place. Suggesting that users do feel safer using the store.
Whilst the stores success rides on many factors, now might be the perfect time for Apple to release it, or it could be too early, or more likely too late.
Your thoughts on the store or anything else announced at the ‘Back to Mac’ event, leave it in the comments
Why I agree with Steve Jobs and 7″ just isn’t big enough.
On Monday 18/10/10 Apple announced their record quarterly earning of $20.3 billion, to mark this exceptional quarter Apple’s very own CEO joined in with the investors conference call. This is a rare event as Steve never drops in on the investor calls, the last time he did was to speak about his return to good health, which I think the world and investors are very happy about now.
During the conference call, Steve stated that a 7″ tablet that competitors are showing are just too small and that “sandpaper needs to be included to sand down users fingers to use the keyboard” (N.B this is not a direct quotation) and that the iPad’s 9″ screen is the optimal size for usability and portability.
I agree. Now I own an iPad I can see where Steve is coming from, whilst I still make mistakes whilst typing on the iPad, the keys are not a problem, it is putting my fingers in the wrong place and some error in the touchscreen picking up on which key I did press. But I don’t feel like the keys are too small and it is making me mess up.
Ask anyone with a touchscreen mobile phone and they will all agree that the keyboard is a problem with the keys being too small and can cause typing errors, and I think that 9″ is still too small.
Saying all this I think that a 10″ screen for a netbook is too small when you use a desktop OS like Windows and the keys can be too small.
All in all I think that a 7″ tablet is too small for users and typing let alone app developers, whilst screen size may not be as big a thing for phones, but the bigger the nicer for typing, for a tablet it is more important with the types of workflow users have, especially the Playbook which RIM will definitely try and cling on to their enterprise users where document editing is going to be vital and so an easy to use keyboard is even more important.
Leave your thoughts…
James
