I’ve avoided talking about the tussle between Verizon/Motorola and Apple for some time now. I’ve ignored the attacks, claiming that the former are just trying to slap and scratch their way into a market which has already chosen its king. I’ve remained cool, calm and collected. But now, Verizon and Motorola have don’t something so incredibly stupid, arrogant and ill thought out that I can’t ignore it any longer.
Just look at his ad. Instantaneously it does unthinkable. Without even trying to remain level headed and sane it appears all guns blazing and destroys what could have been half of its customers. This deliberately ad removes women as potential buyers of the Motorola Droid and at the same time calls the most popular phone in the US a “tiara wearing digitally clueless beauty pageant queen”.
Good work.
Verizon and Motorola have come to this conclusion: their phone is butt ugly, and there is no way in the world that it appeals to women, or anyone for that matter, more than the iPhone. This is all true of course, the Droid is incredibly ugly. There is absolutely no way you can tout its design as “industrial” or “rugged” without bursting out in uninhibited laughter. It’s ugly. So instead of highlighting the features of the Droid that women may like, such as the free turn-by-turn navigation, they decide that they don’t want women as customers at all.
They are then left with a miniscule marketing demographic, now that they have decided that they don’t want women or men with taste using their phone. Verizon and Motorola have shrunk their target market down to the lonely, unshaven, jeans and sneakers wearing, unloved, sweaty male college graduates who have never been touched and who work at Blockbuster on a Saturday night. And when they shrunk their market, they forgot that these buck teethed, greasy haired, barely post-pubescent men have no money to spend on a phone that talks like a robot every time you get a phone call.
Verizon and Motorola can’t face the fact that their product is not going to win. This isn’t the act of a company who is confident of success. And no, neither is this an act of a company who is being gutsy and sticking it to Apple and showing just how confident they are. Because smart companies don’t shrink their target demographic. This is the act of a company floundering to find a place for their product in a market which is beyond saturated with smart phones. So instead of customers choosing a place for the Droid, Verizon and Motorola are choosing one themselves. Because they are stupid.
Batch Apple
This has to be one of the biggest non-media event product upgrades in recent times from Apple. Brand new iMac, MacBooks, Apple Remotes, Time Capsules and the amazing new Magic Mouse. It’s a multitouch mouse, which means you can use gestures to navigate your Mac just as you would with gestures on the trackpads of the new MacBook Pros. I’m buying this mouse asap!
Bottom line, everything looks gorgeous!
iPhone Number Four
1:08 Oct 16th, 2009 | 2 notes
Yes, okay. It may just be because I’m and Apple fanatic and like the smell of new Apple products, or because I’m pedantic, or because I like my $900 phones to be free from manufacturing faults, but today I got another iPhone 3GS, my third one. The screen on my second one was off center and you could see down the side into the device. I tried to live with it after returning my first one after two weeks with a similar problem, but after I saw the perfectly manufactured glory of my neighbor’s new iPhone 3GS, I couldn’t handle it anymore.
Shut up. I have a iPhone problem.
Some may call me outrageously greedy for returning a working phone twice because of an off center screen, but when it cost me, a poor lowly student, $900, I want the damn thing to be absolutely perfect. Needless to say, I think this is the start of a new and beautiful relationship with my new, new, new iPhone 3GS.
If you’re wondering how I managed to count to four, I had a 3G before the 3GS and I returned two 3GS’, making this my fourth. I may have dropped a math class, but I can still count. Sort of.
Apple Event. September 9th. Yay!
It’s finally been announced, and it’s clear that it’s going to based around the iPod. Just like it always has been for events in September.
What’s interesting to me is the choice of tag line. Yes, these events always have a nostalgic line from a well known song (or songs in this case), but I think this year’s tag line was chosen for another reason.
With all the rumors about an Apple Tablet, I think Apple wanted to subtley quash any hopes that it would be introduced at this event. Using “It’s only rock and roll” as the tag line makes me think that this event will be just that; only about music.
No tablet… For now.
Guess we have eight days to wait to see if I’m wrong.
Snow Leopard! Yay!
My concerns about Apple not having any in stock were totally unncessary. There were tons in the store. In short, Snow Leopard is great! Well worth the AUD$40.
Amazingly, it shuts down in about 3 seconds!
iPhone 3.0!
12:06 Jun 19th, 2009 | 0 notes
YAY it’s here!!!!!
After clicking on ‘Check for Update’ button in iTunes and getting ‘iPhone Activation Servers are currently unavailable’ for around ten minutes I finally managed to download and install the iPhone 3.0 software!
You all know the new advertised features, so I’m not going to bother with those. After using it for a day, I’ve made a short list of the undocumented changes for your viewing pleasure. Have any more? Leave a comment!
- Closing application animation now fades out as it minimizes
- Phone and iPod icons changed, stripes added
- Lists scroll smoother
- Smaller ‘Now Playing’ text on the lock screen
- Artist and album information now available along with song title on the lock screen (brought up with a double click of the home button)
- Encrypted iPhone backups
- Song/podcast scrubber now has fine tuning abilities, hold scrubber and drag down to change scrub speed
Beverage vender
Have fun with iPhone 3.0!
MobileMe.
Let’s not quickly forget about MobileMe this WWDC! It got some pretty cool updates in my opinion. First, you can use Find my iPhone to do exactly what it says it does, find your iPhone. I would find this useful say, oh, I don’t know, if I left my iPhone at a friend’s house and they live half an hour away. I would quickly know where I left my phone without panicking and freaking out. Find my iPhone isn’t just cool for clumsy people who lose their phones, it useful if you get your phone stolen as well. Using me.com, you can send a customizable popup message and warning sounds to your iPhone to deliver a message to the thief of your precious phone. “Give my iPhone back B@#$%!!” and “This iPhone has been reported as stolen to the local authorities. Thank you for stealing Apple products!” are a few of my favorite custom messages.
Along with finding your iPhone, you can even tell it to remotely wipe itself. That means it will delete everything on itself should you chose.
iDisk also gets an upgrade. First, the icon changes from that horrid pink to a somewhat nicer blue. Additionally, an iDisk app is finally coming to the iPhone/iPod Touch with all the features of the online iDisk such as file sharing.
Just a few more reasons to love spending that $99 a year!
The iPhone 3G S-QW38DOSN-FX/2
OK so I’m overexagerating. But I don’t like this constant addition of letter to the end of Apple product names. They’re starting to remind me of a Panasonic television.
Despite looking exactly the same (my friend Sam and I joked the ‘S’ stood for ‘Exactly the Same’) there are enough new features in the iPhone 3G S to make me go out and buy one. (See? It’s getting longer and harder to type out it’s name now!). I can think of reasons why Apple wouldn’t change the design of the iPhone. It would increase the price to manufacture a new body, it’s more cost during tough economic and there is absolutely nothing wrong with the old design. On the other hand, with the release of a new product I would have liked to see some sort of change.
Video capture and editing, a compass (“OMFG A COMPASS!! A COMPASS!!! HOW EXCITING!) and Nike+ support are a few good reasons to upgrade. I am also loving Voice Control. For me however, it’s the super ultra speed increase that has my wallet in hand. As previously mentioned, I’m an efficiency fiend. That means speed as well. There was no way I was going to idly stand by while someone else loaded Rolando faster than me! No way!
I also can’t wait for the 3.0 software to come out! Cut & Paste, MMS, full system search, landscape keyboards, notes syncing, faster web browsing and tons more! All for free on my current iPhone!
Continuing the trend, all the features of the iPhone 3G S and the 3.0 software update are incremental changes and aren’t anything bold and groundbreaking.
Safari 4.
Once again, little changes from Apple. The full release of Safari 4 gets rid of the tabs at the very top of the screen which became loved by few, hated by many during the beta.
I was in the ‘loved by few’ camp. As a total efficiency fiend, the prospect of gaining at least half a centimeter of screen real-estate by moving the tabs to the title bar was positively breathtaking! Seriously! Now that moved the tabs back to their traditional position, below the address bar, I’m choosing to keep Safari 4 Beta packaged away neatly for a rainy day when I will be in need of it’s bold offerings.
Personally I find the whole rebranding of the MacBook line a bit weird. The old aluminum MacBook’s branding was fine, the MacBook Pro’s had a clear advantage and superiority to them over the MacBook and the white MacBook was left out in the cold where no body knew about it.
Oh wait…
So the white MacBook was rightly brought back into the mix, but I still don’t see why the now 13” MacBook ‘Pro’ couldn’t have also stayed just a MacBook. In this case, Apple are just confusing people more by saying “No, that computer you bought last month is still a MacBook but this one we are selling now is a MacBook Pro. See? Just look at the writing under your screen!”
Talk about confusing! All they needed to do was rebrand the white MacBook as “The MacBook Classic” or “The MacBook White” etc. and their problems would be solved.
The removal of the Express-Card expansion slot was a mistake in my opinion. Sure, and SD slot is nice, but there isn’t too much harm or expense in adding both. I mean, take a look at every other laptop out there, they have both. Why can’t the MacBook Pros?
Once again, Apple is just tweaking their product line up instead of bringing out something bold and ambitious.
