I am quite sure that a lot of people have written a similar blog post on this topic. I think that this question was primarily raised by the “Apple Haters Community”, because “it is an over-sized iPod touch” as they say. Well… Times seem to change a lot, and tablets gain interest. Not only that, it seems that they seem to start eating into the pc market. What I really want to describe in this article, is how an iPad is better at doing something, that the other devices can do. I have read a lot about how good things are, but I’ve not seen many comparisons. I hope this works out and gets people a basic idea, why do they want to buy one, and whether they need one.

So, I will start with the day-to-day tasks, and how would you use the iPad when you’re at your desk as an example.

I have found a good use for the iPad, when I’m using my computer at the same time. I tend to put video/audio podcasts on it, so I can still focus on whatever I’m doing on the MAC, using two screens, but I can still enjoy the video podcasts, which don’t always require your full attention, but you would sometimes need to have a look when they show you some tips and how to get those done.

What started to annoy me though, is the fact that I need to make a decision, as to where do I deal with my twitter/facebook stuff. Because when I get an @ reply on twitter, it gives me a notification on the Mac, iPhone, and the iPad, and I seem to always reach the iPad these days. So I’m thinking whether I should get rid of the twitter client on the Mac when I’ve got the iPad in front of me? Of course I won’t when it’s a video podcast, but otherwise, why not?

Email – that’s what I seem to have stopped reading on my desktop all together, mainly because I’ve got the iPhone and the iPad which seem to do that a lot better. So now when I’m at the desk, I only read the email on the iPad (if it isn’t occupied by the mrs of course, – then I use the desktop client), and when I’m out and about I would of course prefer the iPhone. My every mailbox is using an exchange sync, or imap, so whenever I read the email in one place, it is being marked as read in the other.

Holidays with an iPad.

Just recently I was on holidays abroad, and we decided to go just with the iPad, and leave my MacBook Pro at home. It was brilliant to show photos to relatives, browse the web, twitter facebook etc. That’s how much I do on holidays. I’ve also played some Tower Defense (awesome game). We’ve watched video on it, using a case that also acts like a stand – works beautifully. Put it on the be in front of you, works great for two people, same as if you had the laptop, but the screen is a bit smaller. Plays hd mkvs almost flawlessly with AVPLAYERHD

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Another recent discovery. Plex for mac together with the Plex for the iPad hooked up to a TV with a VGA (in my case) or HDMI cable – brilliant. I don’t have to bring my computer to watch those tv shows and movies any more. It also does a lot of other video services as well. If I had an apple tv – you can do AirPlay mirroring and watch 720p fine over Wi-Fi. I have tested it with a friends apple tv.

So all of these things alone are worth it.you can pretty much use it as a replacement for most things that the pc/mac can do. Not everything. But most things. And some things it does do better!

The idea for this post came from the recent tech news and announcements from Samsung that I’ve been looking at.

So may I be right or wrong, but Samsung seems to be trying to go Apple, in terms of design at least? I keep reading these posts on the internet where Samsung has made a tablet that looks like an iPad, which is comparable in sizes and specs. Then it’s a laptop which is trying to compete with the Macbook Air, and kind of looks too similar as well.

So what’s the game Samsung? I’ve noticed that your Galaxy phone looks like an iPhone 3G/3GS. And geeks, – correct me if I’m wrong, but it’s a copied design, with a bigger screen on the Galaxy S. Yes it’s slimmer, yes it’s bigger in screen size. But if you look at them from a distance they look too similar to me.

There’s the new Galaxy 10.1 / 8.9 on engadget.

http://www.engadget.com/photos/samsung-galaxy-tab-8-9-and-10-1-hands-on/#3989415

I never liked Samsung’s designs, and all over sudden I like them. There’s a simple answer to the “Why?” question that comes after this statement, – They look like Apple-like. Isn’t it strange that quite rapidly after the iPad 2 announcement we’ve got a re-designed Galaxy Tab that kind of looks the same again? Is it a good thing – I don’t know. I think it just makes a bit mash from products, and people still call them iPads, though most of them aren’t just look the same. It is also similar with the phones. “Have you got one of those iPhones? – No… Couldn’t afford one, went for a Samsung”.

This post may put me into a position of an Samsung/Android hater but I can assure you that I’m not. I’m happy that they are finally doing some progress design wise, but… They should probably come up with their own ideas, not steal it from another company.

I have just watched “The Social Network” movie. I kind of reminds me of something. It reminds me of me, when I was really passionate about music. I didn’t become as successful in that area as Mark Zuckerberg with Facebook; but damn, I did some good stuff (I think).

Now it seems that, as soon as you lose the passion, it doesn’t matter any more. Things are not that important then. And something has to drive you. Otherwise it’s a waste of time. When you want to get home and just rush to put your thoughts into reality, be it a song, or an app you developed, or anything, – you do it damn well. You feel the adrenaline. And when it is just another messed up day, – it doesn’t matter. Because you don’t care.

I have found that it is essential to be driven by passion. I am writing this today because something has inspired me. I am willing to trash my tech blog, that isn’t that popular any way. I will put something really weird like this on it, just because I want to.

We’ve just seen the new announcements from Apple, the keynote was streamed live (good changes) and we’ve got some exciting news, and some that may actually worry people.

So the new iLife 11 suite is out, it’s got a weird logo as you can see. It’s got major changes to iPhoto, iMovie, Garageband. No changes were mentioned during the Keynote for the iWeb or iDVD.

The changes are not too dramatic with the iPhoto, Apple seems to have concentrated on the new slideshows and prints a lot. Now you can do more books for print, and actually store them really nicely locally on the machine as well. You also get a full screen view, which seems nice, not a big deal, but can make people concentrated more when dealing with photos. I wish there was more effort put into the editing really…

iMovie seems to be big. You can now see the waveforms of the audio right in the editing are, plus in the clips pane. You can make automation for the volume, you can fade it really easily, and you can boost the sound quite nicely. It seems like a big deal to me because it has always been a problem there, I think. Now the big part of the demo during the keynote was spent on creating trailers of your home movies. It’s not like I’ve done that many home movies, but… Who needs trailers for home movies? I mean… Maybe it’s just me though. The technology they use to find clips using tagging seems to be extremely helpful and powerful. Seems something like Faces for iMovie really. It also detects all sorts of differences in the video, like how many people are there etc. Seems amazing.

Garageband has a minor update and includes a couple of features that seem to be handy, but in my opinion they need to work on the whole interface as it is horrible. I am obviously more used to the Pro apps like Logic or Cubase, so maybe I’m misjudging. So now you’ve got Flex and Groove Matching. Flex can help editing the timing of the recordings, quite a good way to fix simple mistakes actually, I’ve used it in Logic for back vocals. Groove Matching seems quite interesting. You set one track that seems to have been played right to the rhythm, and all the others get automatically scanned and matched to the ‘master’. You can obviously select the ones that are affected and disable the change. Quite handy, and looks good, will have to check how good of a job it actually does though… There is also a new feature for lessons. It now can analyse the way you learn and tell you where you make mistakes. You can record and listen how you’ve played after and get marked down on various things. A couple new lessons are included.

Now the big thing that was previewed was the next MACOSX version 10.7 Lion. That seems great, but they have not showed off much, because of lack of time as Steve said. The main thing is that we will get some features that are great on iOS on the MACOSX desktop version. We will be getting the App Store for the Mac as well, which I think can cause quite a bit of noise in the press and podcasts space now. The apps that will be published on to the App Store on the Mac, will work the same way as the iPhone does, you get the updates for them, you install them exactly the same way as you would on the iPhone. There’s no difference. Now there’s no difference to the publishing process neither… Huh? You might ask? Well Apple gets 30% of your stuff that you put there. They will host the app and everything, but 30%? Really? I’m not sold that developers will be too happy. Too many unanswered questions about this so far. The App Store for the Mac will launch in 30 days.

First thing is the launchpad. Which is basically and iPhone home screen, contents of which is you application folder. You can organise things the same way you can on the iPhone. Folders, home screens etc. So basically a stack that is better made. Looks great, but isn’t anything special. It adds some simplicity, but that’s about it. I prefer Launchbar.

So we’ve got a couple of changes to the expose and dashboard (now called Mission Control), which gives you a view of all things open with previews for everything that is going on and launched on the machine.

We’ve also now got a cheap Macbook Air that has been improved. It’s now got integrated Flash storage like the iPad, it is available in 11.6 and 13.3 screen sizes. Is extremely thin as it used to be. Has 30 day standby time, 7hrs of wifi browsing on the 13.3″ model and 5hrs on the 11.6″. It has not obtained the optical drive, and there’s no way you can use a hard drive with the thing. It’s got 2 USB ports, SD card reader, a mini display port, a headphone jack, a microphone, and a facetime camera. Now is the facetime camera the horrible VGA? Hopefully not. It’s got a full size magic trackpad as on the other macbooks. The display resolution on the 13.3″ is a whopping 1440 by 900, which is more pixels that a 13″ mac has ever seen before, and 11.6″ gets 1366 by 768 which is stunning also. The flash storage on the 11.6″ is limited to 64GB or 128GB, and 13″ gets 128GB and 256GB. WiFi 802.11n and Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR are included. 13.3″ model has choices of 1.86GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor with 6MB on-chip shared L2 cache; or optional 2.13GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor with 6MB shared L2 cache. 11.6″ 1.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor with 3MB on-chip shared L2 cache; or optional 1.6GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor with 3MB shared L2 cache. Both have NVIDIA GeForce 320M graphics processor with 256MB of DDR3 SDRAM shared with main memory.

So the machines are underpowered due to the size, but seem compelling. The prices start at $999 for the 11.6″ and $1,299.00 for the 13.3″.

So that’s all the exciting news that we’ve got.

/me says thank you all!

There are rumours now circulating for years that the iPhone Nano is on it’s way as a cheaper consumer option. Now the big question here is: why do we need it? Most Android phones these days come out with bigger touch screen sizes than the iPhone has, and soon it will become one of the smaller size phones on the market.

Now this whole discussion just pointed me back at the iPad and the way people look at it. We all know that the iPhone was here first along with the iPod Touch. So when the iPad first came out, and still, a lot of us geeky people started calling this the “Big iPod Touch”.

Ok, now the problem with that is that it is actually the other way around my friends. For those that didn’t watch Steve Jobs’ interview at All Things Digital in June earlier this year, he has mentioned the fact that they have actually created the iPad first, but decided to release the iPhone first as it was more important (quite frankly I think it was the right choice, because the world needed a better phone). So what does that tell you?

The iPad has more screen real estate, and is capable of doing a lot more just because of that. And now, when you look at the iPad apps compared to the iPhone apps – they are less powerful and feature packed on the iPhone. So how can we call it the big iPod Touch? When the iPod touch is actually the small iPad WiFi?

It’s not one of those smarter topics that you might find out there, but really, no-one has mentioned this thing before. And it just completely pisses me off, that people just like to rant at things. And more to that, when it comes to Apple, they like to do it so loud, that everybody in the world knows. It’s like when my mother, who doesn’t know anything about tech, asked me if I have any problems with my iPhone antenna.

So my point being, is that after reading this article, which doesn’t give you much explanation, (but quite frankly, no more is needed) you still say that the iPad is the big iPod Touch – you’re most likely just the Apple hater, which is fine. I hate Microsoft too.

Thank You all!

Aleksandr

So the story is that I had a customer who has called in with an intermittent wireless connection issue. He has one of TalkTalks Huawei HG520b routers which is situated on the ground floor of his house. According to my systems in work his router was connected at a maximum sync speed of 20.1Mb.

He has got a 27″ iMac on his 1st floor upstairs at a distance of around 15-20 meters away from the router. The iMac had trouble connecting to the wifi and was only getting 1 out of 5 signal bars. We have moved the router upstairs, connected an Ethernet cable, and changed the wireless channel so he could connect wirelessly and get 5 bars on the same distance.

Now when running a speed test, he could only achieve around 6Mbps. To which my answer was WTF?

Now here’s the most interesting thing and why I have decided to blog about this. I told the customer I had an iMac before, it was a previous generation though, and I had a couple of issues with wifi on it, a the whole back on the new machines is aluminium apart from the apple logo, which is in black plastic, where the actual wifi chip is located, it can cause huge interference.

The customer then said, what if I turn the machine the other way round, so it’s back would face the direction to the router. It may sound ridiculous. But we’ve done that. Guess what was the speed result? 14.5 Mb! He turned it back and it was 6 again. So realistically, that huge aluminium back can cause huge problems. Now the main thing that worried me is that it would mean that the local are speeds were limited to 6Mb! While the router is a standard 54g. Clearly the Internet connection is faster than the guys local area network can handle.

I have advised the customer to have a word with apple regarding that issue, because it really seems like a problematic unit. Hope some of you guys found that interesting, thanks for now!

Cheers,

Aleksandr.

It is still the same good old app, but now you can receive messages and calls while in the background, I have tried both, and can only say that so far I am very happy with it.

Now coming to issues, which no app developer apart from a couple in the app store can avoid (and that’s understandable). People can’t hear you any good!, that’s using the iPhone 4. The person I was talking to had to turn up the volume on the speakers all the way up and could barely hear me! And I could hear myself back echoing very bad. Though as soon as I’ve put my headset on the problem went, and the person could hear me well, and there was no echoing.

You can do whatever you want with the phone while you’re on a Skype call now. Unless you are using a jailbroken iPhone with Backgrounder. Most people have these issues with 3GS, and not many reports come from iPhone4 users.

There is apparently no more proxy support, I have personally never used it and don’t feel the need.

Battery life is horrible according to most people on @twitter, I did not have a chance to try it out in a full day, but during the call that lasted around 5 minutes, it killed around 3% on the iPhone4, totally worrying.

Skype have also announced that there will be no charge for 3G calls anymore!, that is obviously very good for all of us, and gets Skype more users, so they think at least.

And for the conclusion – No video calls through the front facing camera.

Skype now has a new 2.0 version out for the iPhone. And the main feature is the long waited calls over the 3G. Which everyone expected to be there in the first place, just because it just made so much sense. I believe that Skype developers wanted to get a better quality level out of this feature, that is why they took so long with it.

I have tested the app on the UK’s O2 network using an 8GB iPhone 3G in various conditions. First I made a call just from my house, leaving the Wi-Fi connection off. The network was on EDGE. I was using the phone without the headset, and the quality was pretty good, the latency was acceptable, but not as good as on a proper connection. Though I expected a lot less from EDGE than I received to be honest. I’ve tried calling two different people, and they said the quality from my side was pretty good, no toilet room sound, and it was pretty clear, just some latency got in the way, but it was ok to speak.

Today I have decided to test it after I finished work, and was on my way to the bus stop in Preston town centre. I had 3G connectivity there and I have decided to give it another go and called my friend. That’s where the whole dancing around the chair has started.

I made these screenshots later in the day, totally forgot to make them during the call.

Now the main issue was that the connection was dropping. Well I thought it was. And then what appeared just weird, is that if you lock your iPhone, after about a minute the call goes on hold. I have received a text message and the call went on hold and then automatically went back to normal. I was using the iPhone headset, and during the time the call was on hold, I had very loud noises into the left ear, which were just horrible, they can be harmful!

Overall, I think the quality is acceptable, but there’s a lot of improvements to be introduced. Obviously from the App side first. Everybody will always blame the network for all the trouble, but I’m nearly sure that there’s a lot to improve within the app itself. It also is impossibly slow during the call on my iPhone 3G. I know it may be outdated hardware, but hey, there’s quite a lot of people who use it and it still is on the market (if there’s any left though, as it seems they are already going before WWDC).

So if we get an iPad and would be able to get every single book, learning books etc. on it, not just the hot titles from the publishers of Fiction and Thrillers. I mean real stuff that people would definitely buy. I am studying towards MCSE and the training company is sending me these ridiculousluy sized books that have no chance to travel to work with me. I know they give you PDFs etc but… Isn’t the e-pub format the one that allows you to do all those nice things to the font like resizing it or even changing it. It is just a completely different experience of reading books! How many times does it happen that you just hate a font in the book – it is too big or too small etc?

Simply saying, why all the books written cannot be released to be available on the tablets? Not necessarily just iTunes, though that would be the greatest way of doing it.

I would like to express my opinion on human interface devices and how important they seem to be for people in the world today. Meaning that actually we can do the same things on different devices. And most of the times we don’t actually need that many devices, but we have a choice to assign different types of tasks to each and every one that we have.

It comes out that mobile technology is the future of the computer world, as it makes a lot of sense. People want to be able to work where ever they are when they have thoughts or impression to do something. Meaning that if I want to write an article like that one somewhere on the go, I can use my MacBook and MasEdit, or I can use my iPhone and the WordPress app.

The biggest disadvantage so far is that most mobile devices are underpowered, and that is one area that is progressing, but not as quick as we would like it to. Batteries don’t last very long, and are not as reliable.

The big point of this short article is that we are actually paying for different devices or even input devices (the good example would be different midi controllers for audio DAW’s) when we can do the same things without them. Though with them we get more productive.

Are people lazy? Yes and no. We always try to make out life for the better, and that’s why we accessorise our lives with different types of devices, some of which do exactly the same things just in a different way of input from the human.