Jackson Miller

It is hard to refrain from drawing parallels between the iPhone / Android competition today and the Windows / Apple competition of yesteryear (circa 1995-ish).

In the previous version of this battle, Apple had it’s clock cleaned by Microsoft – at least in terms of market share. The similarities are stark. Android promises a lower cost to consumers and a wider array of hardware choices, just like Microsoft provided with Windows on generic PCs.  Apple is maintaing the same playbook of having a unified hardware / operating system environment that allows them greater control over the user experience. “Better user experience” is too nuanced of an argument when the competition is touting the importance of hardware features that Apple does not offer. (more…)

The iPad has been out for just over four months. As others have shown, the more meaningful reviews of a new device can only come after having some time to really use it and understand it.  After a comment from Paul I realize that it is a good time to revisit the idea of the iPad as a personal dashboard.

Here is what Paul said: (more…)

I have been using my iPhone as my sole mobile phone for a full month now. I think that is long enough to know why the iPhone sucks. The problem is that in some ways is it the absolute best mobile device I have ever had.

Notice I called it a mobile device and not a phone. That brings us to #1…

1. The Phone Sucks
   When I have a reliable 3G signal the iPhone sounds great… until it drops the call. We have had to activate my dad’s phone 3 times because it just stops working. There is something up with the iPhone radio and Apple needs to figure it out quick.
2. The Keypad / Keyboard Sucks
   I can dial a phone number without looking on every phone I have ever owned, except the iPhone. Typing URLs and passwords, etc is a pain. Typing email is so annoying that I don’t respond to as many emails as I did when I was using my blackberry. Think about that, the iPhone is making me less responsive.
3. The Battery Sucks
   When I first got my iPhone the battery only lasted a couple of hours. I knew it would improve when I quit playing with it non-stop, but it hasn’t improved enough. If I am in the car, charging my phone while talking on it, the battery goes down instead of up. It takes more juice than a car charge can put out to use the iPhone as a phone. I love streaming Pandora in the car but that burns the battery faster than my Ford F150 burns gas. Speaking of burning, the iPhone gets crazy hot too.
4. Restarting Sucks
   I used to have to restart my Treo almost daily because it would quit working right; the iPhone is almost as bad. Every couple of days the iPhone will either lose it’s ability to connect to 3G or the GPS quits working or it just freezes while using a third party app. The only way to fix it is to turn the iPhone completely off and then turn it back on (which is a process that either involves patience, witchcraft, or both).
5. Being Special Sucks
   The iPhone gets a special class of service with AT&T. Unfortunately, it is “short bus” special and not “14 year old olympic gymnast” special. Before making a standard change to your AT&T plan you might hear the agent say “let me see if we can do that on the iPhone”. WTF?!?! I thought the iPhone was the most capable phone on the planet?!? Why do we have to see if the iPhone can handle it? Because AT&T hamstrings the iPhone. If I could legally tether my iPhone I would pay for that feature and use it rarely. But I can’t, so I find a way around it. Want unlimited text? “I will have to check and see if the iPhone can have unlimited text messages”. Oh, and where the hell are the turn by turn applications? I could at least buy TeleNav for my Blackberry. The iPhone is special, and that is retarded.

Anyone know when Android will hit the market? Maybe then Apple / AT&T will be forced to step up their game.

I had a 9am meeting this morning so I was not able to be one of the first in line for the iPhone. That didn’t stop me from at least checking out the festivities. Here are pictures from the Apple Store in the Green Hills Mall and the AT&T store in Green Hills:

After talking to the people I knew in line at the Apple Store and talking to some random people in the AT&T store I went off to my meeting. Because I needed to buy 3 iPhones I had to go pick up a couple of my kids so that I would have 3 people for the “1 iPhone per person” limit. Since my kids were in East Nashville I went to the AT&T store in Rivergate. Once I got there I learned that they were sold out. They played dumb receiving future shipments.

After leaving the Revergate store I called the Green Hills AT&T store. They still had inventory.

It turns out that the AT&T store in Green Hills made the executive decision to go ahead and sell tomorrow’s inventory today. That allowed me to buy the three phones I needed.

Note: there are plenty of iPhones at the Apple Store. However, I have a business AT&T account so I had to use an AT&T store.

AT&T was not able to activate my phones. This meant 3 things:

1. I did not get to “bond with my iPhone” in the store.
2. I would have to activate my iPhones at home using iTunes (which was producing horror stories on twitter).
3. I was going to walk out of the AT&T store with a dead blackberry and three unopened, shrink-wrapped iPhones.

The whole point of activating in the store was to prevent people from leaving with pristine iPhones that could be sold on the open market. Activation through iTunes was also supposed to be required, but it wasn’t. I activated my AT&T account by putting my iPhone SIM card in my Blackberry. Then I put the SIM back in my iPhone later and hooked it into iTunes. By hitting cancel on all the iTunes prompts I was able to un-brick my iPhones without going through the recommended procedure. I could have then jailbroken the phones, unlocked them, and sold them on eBay.

Seems like all of the headache this morning didn’t really result in much more security. Apple and AT&T could have sold more phones without requiring activation in the store (and I could have still sold unlocked iPhones even with their precautions).

Add in all of the troubles that people had getting their iPhones activated using the proper method, it seems like Apple and AT&T over-thought this problem. Oh well.

Now I am sitting down and playing with my new iPhone. It is pretty sweet. The App Store is the killer app.

Oracle has released what looks to be a really great app for the iPhone.

From the iTunes App Store:

Oracle Business Indicators is a business intelligence application that provides real-time, secure access to business performance information on the mobile device.

- Requires the licensing of Oracle Business intelligence Suite, … [and a bunch of other Oracle products] … so that users can view and interact with pre-defined and customized financial, human resources, supply chain and customer relationship management analytics and business intelligence alerts.

Now, the down side is that while the iPhone app is free, all those Oracle products add up to lots of money (likely over six figures worth of money). Also, in my experience with BI applications, they require a fair amount of customization to be really useful. I hope (but don’t know for sure) that the iPhone app pulls from reports (and thus customizations) that have already been developed on the customer’s server.

Still, Oracle has released a really great app at least from a marketing and sales standpoint. I am sure quite a few “decision makers” will be ooh-ing and ahh-ing over this one during presentations. Kudos to Oracle. They were first to the punch since I didn’t see any SAP, Lawson, or Business Objects applications listed on the app store. (Speaking of which, Crystal Reports for the iPhone would be cool. Especially with an SDK.)

I am certain Oracle will not be the only BI player on the iPhone for long. I know I am planning to develop BI tools for the iPhone. It is my hope that the iPhone SDK’s method for handling notifications will make it easy for me to send some really great notification from statzen (i.e. you are getting Stumbled or tons of traffic from some big blog, etc).

I am also sure that I am one of many people that will be developing custom private BI apps for the iPhone. I currently have a OS X Dashboard widget for viewing Key Indicators from my retail stores. That will be the first iPhone app I develop. Since that stuff is using Google Apps as a back-end it will also be interesting to see how well I can manage sending alerts based on Google Docs (i.e. watch a Google spreadsheet with a Google AppEngine app and send alerts when a condition is met).

Either way the shear popularity of the iPhone makes it a prime development opportunity for developers. I am expecting that mobile BI will really take off as a result of the iPhone 2.0 SDK.

I guarantee that we will see a location based match making application for the iPhone before the end of the Summer. Here is how I think it will work…

You will sign up and create a brief profile including a picture, age, and some parameters of what you are looking for (i.e. someone of the opposite sex within 4 years of your age). Then, when you are out and about you will be able to turn the application on and accept possible matches.

At that point you will be able to browse pictures / profiles of people who are within a mile of so and currently open to matches (would work well at a concert or something). If you see someone you would like to meet you will be able to select their profile for a possible match. At that time person/people you selected will get notifications that someone in the area is interested. They will then be able to browse the profiles in their area that meet their criteria and select the ones they are interested in.

If there is a mutual match then the application will facilitate the initial communication. Out of necessity it will also send a safety reminder about meeting strangers.

My generation will be creeped out by this application, but the younger generation will look at it as light-hearted fun. It has the potential to be very viral and will be a big hit at some high schools.

I would develop this application myself, but I think it is a little weird and I have other things to focus on. Someone will develop it though.

What location based applications do you think will be developed before the end of the summer?

Did you catch what the biggest change is to the iPhone 3G?

No, it is not the namesake 3G chip and it is not push email per se.

Apple has decided to replicate a portion of BlackBerry Server. This opens the iPhone up to outages similar to the ones Blackberry users experience when the BIS/BES servers go down.

The change I am talking about is the persistent connection to an Apple server to allow for push notifications. First, let me say that I think push notifications are bad ass. I have shown many iPhone users the brilliance of the Facebook app for Blackberry that implements a similar notification system. From the looks of the iPhone 3G demo it looks like Apple has recognized that notifications are a key feature and has found a way to improve on them.

I appreciate the way that Apple is using push notifications to handle part of the problem of “background tasks” (the other problem is persistence, which I assume they are addressing another way). However, I am not sure that Apple can really predict the popularity of these push notifications. I imagine that there will be push notifications delivered to my iPhone from Twitter, Whrrl, Facebook, IM, Google Docs, and more. It could be that the push notifications get so popular that Apple has a hard time keeping up with the demand.

It may be that it will never be an issue. It just scares me because this appears to be a single point of failure on what I think will be the iPhone 3G’s most used feature.

Prediction: Push notifications will be the single most used feature on the iPhone 3G. More than multi-touch, more than web browsing, more than MobileMe, more than even the phone.

Per Marc’s comment below this is actually an issue for all iPhones as of iPhone 2.0 and not just the iPhone 3G.

I have to admit I am excited about both iPhone 2.0 and iPhone 3G.

Those that are not quite as obsessive about mobile technology news may be wondering what the difference between iPhone 2.0 and iPhone 3G are. While they both sound like the new version of the iPhone that is not quite true. iPhone 2.0 is the software on the iPhone; this will be available to both existing and new iPhone handsets. iPhone 3g is the second version of the iPhone itself that includes a 3G (faster internet) chip.

iPhone 2.0
The next version of the iPhone software is exciting because it is the first version to really run 3rd party applications. Sure, there are other big announcements like MS Exchange support and VPN connectivity, but 3rd party apps are what will keep the iPhone separate from the wannabes. Phones like the Samsung Glyde and the HTC Touch Pro are getting pretty close to the iPhone’s appearance and ease of use. Sure, I would still prefer Apple hardware, but they are close enough that the market could fragment. The critical mass of the 3rd Party applications will be too much for fragmented devices to keep up with (especially with Windows Mobile, but this could change with Andriod).

iPhone 2.0 seems poised to change the way that we approach our mobile tools. Location Based Services are FINALLY going to explode. The Associated Press news application for the iPhone will use your GPS location to deliver relevant news. Google Maps will show the addresses of your friends from Address Book. Someone is going to create a twitter-like application but instead of following individuals you will follow a radius around where you are. It may take off or it may not, but there will be new killer-apps that are created because of the iPhone 2.0 SDK and the critical mass of users (including many early adopters).

iPhone 3G
While iPhone 2.0 is about 3rd Party Applications, iPhone 3G is about two things: near-broadband internet and GPS. This will be a true convergence device. We have seen GPS devices start to connect to the internet and we have see internet devices start to provide services typically associated with GPS (navigation), but the iPhone 3G is where the two will really combine. Other devices have combined GPS and 3G, but I really think iPhone 3G is the perfect storm (unless of course it turns out to be Android, or more likely both Android and the iPhone).

There are some other niceties added in on this next iteration of the iPhone like fixing the flawed headphone jack. However, the most amazing feat that Apple pulled off on the iPhone 3G is giving close to double the performance for close to half the price. I can’t think of another product that doubled functionality and halved cost in a single release. That would be mind boggling if it weren’t for the crafty accounting that is also taking place as the Apple <-> AT&T contracts shift away from revenue sharing to a more traditional model.

All-in-all I am impressed with what I heard from Apple today. I am still speculating that there will soon (6 months) be Android hardware that I prefer to the iPhone 3G (I like hardware keyboards like on the Blackberry and Treo). Still, I cannot resist the iPhone 3G, it is just too great a device for such a small (relatively) price. My Treo and Blackberry Curve each cost over twice what the iPhone 3G costs. TWICE.

BTW, what a brilliant move on Apple’s part to time a 50% price drop with an economic slowdown.

On a related note: Almost 2 years ago (before the iPhone was announced) I wrote “Why Apple Will Release a Cell Phone“. In that post I claimed that .mac would be an integral part of the iPhone. I guess I was a little early to the party on that one.

UPDATE May 19th, 2010: If you are look for Jackson Miller of Cupertino who went missing recently in San Francisco, please read this.

The wireless handset (i.e. cellphone) market is getting absolutely insane just in time for the “economic stimulus checks” to start arriving. I am not using “insane” as some sort of bad-meaning-good euphemism; I really think people are losing some mental stability.

For those living under a rock, the next generation of the iPhone is going to be released sometime in the next 30 days. There are thousand of people pontificating online over whether it will be announced tomorrow, June 24th, or any day in between. The second debate is when it will actually be released. Of course, no one REALLY knows what the specs are for the device. Luckily that doesn’t stop people from arguing about it.

My favorite part about the next iPhone release is that the vast majority of the people talking about it have no fucking clue what they are talking about. One of the better confusions comes from people who confuse 3G wireless networking (a devilishly ambiguous term at best) for Apple’s traditional use of 1G, 2G, 3G, etc to describe revisions (or generations) of the iPod product line. Some of these people seem to think that 2G and 3G will be released at the same time. My second favorite confusion comes from people who are debating 3G data speeds using benchmarks from EVDO devices like the Blackberry 8130 (which is a particularly bad test b/c of the Blackberry servers in the middle). AT&T’s 3G network is powered by HSDPA which is completely different from EVDO (though both are in fact “3G”).

It has gotten so bad that professional technology journalists don’t even know what they hell they are talking about. I just read an article that was talking about how Blackberry beat Apple to the 3G market with the Blackberry Bold. They then proceeded to talk about the video of a Bold demo that RIM brought to their office. It is amazing, a video showing a prototype qualifies as beating someone to market.

I don’t fault anyone for the confusion though. It is exacerbated by every single handset maker trying to release an exclusive iPhone look-alike on a US carrier. Sprint has one, so does Verizon, I assume TMobile has one too; hell, I think I even heard about AT&T getting one.

I am all for an increase focus on mobile technology. I am excited to see new handsets finally being released first in the US (which was not true for years and something I predicted would happen as a result of the iPhone). Still, all of this madness may cause more harm than good. What makes a good mobile device? Is it a big touch screen and a single button at the bottom? Or it is something that allows you to communicate via multiple channels easily and quickly? If you ask me it is obviously the latter.

While I am pretty much convinced that I will be a 3G iPhone the day it is announced, I am already starting to look ahead to Android devices. Remember, I switched to AT&T so that I could easily use multiple phones. Soon I will have a 3G iPhone and a Blackberry Curve. I would like a Nokia N95, but I think I will hold out for something Android. Maybe I can finally try out an HTC handset once it doesn’t mean suffering though Windows Mobile.

The iPhone is cool and the 3G iPhone is cooler, but jesus christ people, it is just a damn phone.

Oh, and the Blackberry Bold is almost as big a disappointment as the Palm Centrino. (Though that is tainted by my growing displeasure with BIS/BES).

My thoughts on the MacWorld 2008 keynote announcements:

• MacBook air is pretty sweet looking, but…
  • everyone is complaining about the battery not being (user?) replaceable.
    Fred Wilson made an excellent point on twitter: “can you at least pull the battery out when every other reboot option fails you?”
  • No internal 3G (more on this in a sec)
  • No ExpressCard slot for a 3G card (deal breaker for me at this time)
  • I would be scared of the first version of such a radical case redesign.
• No internal 3G cards in any Apple products?!?
  • I think every single major laptop maker except for Apple offers an internal 3G wireless card
  • Not even a mention of 3G in the iPhone, no further indication of the timeline
  • The MacBook Air would be much more kick-ass with internal 3G. I mean, even the Kindle has 3G because Amazon understands the impulse purchase potential. I guess iTunes has enough sales already.
• The updates to Apple TV are compelling
  • I have passed on the Apple TV b/c it was a little too close to the Mac Mini in price and not in functionality.
  • Movie rentals including previews and user reviews straight from the review are great!
  • The price drop is nice
  • Great for Apple customers that this is only a software update
• Time Capsule looks great
  • Does this mean that there will be no Time Machine over the air? That would suck
  • I wonder if Apple will let you replace the hard drive as the capacity and speed of drives grow
• iPhone SDK can’t come soon enough
• Google Maps “my location” feature could have been delivered last month when all the other phones got it. Boo for saving the announcement.
• Hopefully there will be a few other nice announcements this week delivered with less fanfare