Apps Getting Too Hot for iTunes

Looks like Apple is taking boobs off the App Store for good.  Personally, I think erotic cell phone apps takes pathetic to a whole new level, unless you downloaded them for a laugh. Apple was right to remove them for financial reasons. Having such tacky apps diminishes the perceived quality of the iPhone.

Lets look at this logically; where would you use an erotic app? You wouldn’t use one on public transport, at a restaurant, in a shop, or anywhere in public. You wouldn’t use one a work either. So where does that leave? Your home? Gee, it’s not like you have anything better than a phone in you house with which to… you know.

So I ask: what is the usage scenario of these apps? I’m sorry if I’m being too practical, but these questions must be asked. When and where would you use an erotic cell phone app?

Google’s iPhone web search has been improved recently. It now displays a bigger search box and search button. It’s vastly better from the previous version which I found impossible to use. However, the search box still makes no sense when you consider there is another search box already built into Safari on the iPhone.

See it there? The one with ‘Google’ in it? Now see the one below it? See why Google did this? Maybe? Yeah me neither.

It’s confirmed. Apple has sent out invitations to it’s latest press event, scheduled for the 27th of January. The event is suspected to reveal the prolific Apple tablet, information about iPhone 4.0 and now iLife 2010 according to FOX news.

It’s a shame it’s happening the day I go back to school. I’m sure there’s a message I should be listening to on this, but who cares.

- iPhone App of the Week

Serenade

It’s become all the rage to post what music you’re currently listening to. Whether to Facebook or Twitter, Serenade can fulfill your social need to express your individuality. This app is slim, sleek and simple to use. Just open the app with a song playing and it will gather the song info and a link to its iTunes Store page. With one tap you’ve posted it to Twitter or Facebook either with or without your personal message attached.

It even has some other nifty features built it including a karaoke mode, the ability to copy the song information and the iTunes like to the clipboard and a sort of instant playlist feature. Best of all, it’s free!

Price: Free

Link to iTunes Store page

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.

I was dumfounded when I heard Rupert Murdoch’s interview on Sky News a few weeks ago. There I saw the founder of the modern journalism industry proclaiming that he is going to undo a decades worth of progress into the online market by reverting back to the tired, old methods of the past. What really struck me was this: Murdoch doesn’t know who he’s up against.

The iGeneration, my generation. The generation born from the early 1990s up until now. The generation who has been the first to grow up from childhood with the computer. We’re the first generation to have known instant communication, the MP3 player, digital entertainment, cable television and the cell phone since birth. And yes, we’re the first generation to grow up with the internet. Growing up in such a world, connected like never before, earned us the nickname “Digital Natives”.

Growing up in the internet age also taught us a frightening lesson: media is free. We explore our world and find two realities in front of us. We find the first reality, in which people go into physical stores to purchase movies, music, news and games. In this reality, physical versions of these items are received in exchange for currency. We see that the older generations like this reality and remain content to exist solely within it. The iGeneration are confused by this. For as we turn our heads we see another reality, an invisible one. In this second reality, those same items exist, but we can’t see them. We delight to discover that all of the items are much cheaper than they are in the first reality. Sometimes, if we’re sneaky, we can get them for free! But for everything that means breaking the law to do so. Everything but news.

You see, here is where Murdoch’s plan to raise the dollar sign in front of peoples’ faces hits a snag. It hits a snag with my generation, the iGeneration. As I’ve explained, we’ve grown up watching free news on the TV, listening to free news on the radio and reading free news on the internet. The only time where we’ve encountered payed news is when we wanted to get berated by loud, intolerant people, or when as young children we looked at our parents, wondering why they would bother struggling to unfold a giant piece of paper with tiny writing on it when there were easier alternatives. I’ve personally bought a newspaper only once in my life and regretted it very soon after as I realized I had to carry it around with me, and even more so when I realized I could get the same news for free on my iPhone. In fact, the only person I’ve know to carry around a newspaper is one who drinks way too much coffee for a 17 year old and who so obviously belongs with the university crowd that it could be said he is already subconsciously practicing his future habits.

Murdoch is forgetting that despite my generation being the wealthiest in history, we are also the most stingy when it comes to news. We have cell phones to buy, skinny jeans to try on. There are social expectations to conform to, politicians to swear at without discerning our own political views. We don’t have the time or money to spend on some of the smut you describe as “Quality Journalism”. We’re the status update generation, garnering all our news and information from one line of text. We’re the 8 second news grab generation, the targeted advertising generation, the news on tiny screens generation, not the news on paper generation. We’re the generation with the world in our pockets, the history of anyone and everything at our fingertips. All the while, it is free. Information flows into our elastic minds more freely than water into our mouths.

Rupert Murdoch faces the most commercially hardened generation in history as his upcoming audience, and he expects them to pay. Rupert Murdoch wants the iGeneration to pay for online news. Good luck.

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.

I think this puts in proportion just how many apps I have downloaded for my iPhone.

MMMess in the US

The iPhone in the US has finally entered the end of the 20th century with the arrival of MMS. Naturally, Americans are giddy with excitement about the prospect of spending 30 cents to send a photo of their cat to their mothers using who are still using a Nokia 6610.

Here in the rest of the world, we have another view of MMS. It’s called a waste of money.

MMS just isn’t used anymore. There are many cheaper ways to send photos to people. Dozens of phones now use email, which is upfront free. Instead of spending 30 cents to send one photo to one person, I could just upload it Facebook and allow hundreds to see it. Heck, I could even use Twitter. MMS isn’t an exciting new technology because it isn’t new.

And to tell the truth, people discovered that MMS was a failure of a service the moment it came out. Even in the days of emailless phones, the days without Facebook and Twitter (I shudder at the thought), no one was that desperate to send a photo around.

To the people of the United States, enjoy your MMS while you can because it’s a passing fad soon to be forgotten.

The iPhone.

It carries your email. It carries your contacts. It carries your music. It carries your photos. It carries your social networks. It carries everything that makes you, you.

Now let it carry you.

Let your iPhone carries your entire genetic information. Let it carry the very information of your existence.

Because we all need a new way to make identity theft more scary.