I’ve been using iPhones and iPod Touches for a while now, and I’ve loved being able to sit on the sofa, check emails, surf a bit of web and do other small bits and pieces of web related jiggery pokery without having to crack open my Mac Book Pro, which seems gargantuan by comparison now. It’s been a perfect go between and I’ve not once had cause for complaint over this set up…. until last night night when I was sat there thinking to myself “you know, this is great, but I wish the screen was a bit bigger.”
With the iPad just around the corner, a device which up until now has only registered as a “meh” in my mind, this is hardly a coincidence. Dam you Apple! Dam you!
The rumors that Apple will be announcing a new Tablet device this months have reached such a fever pitch that if it turns out to be bull hunky, there’s going to be a riot.
That said, since I’m something of an Apple fan, and because I’m also a blogger, Apple Legal have informed me that I’m contractually obligated to write a post listing my own worthless speculations on what the device might be like. My sphincter is too delicate for jail, so here goes:
I don’t think it will be called the iSlate. That’s a shit name.
I do think it will have a built in camera. I’m also “hoping” the camera will be completely invisible. That’s not as daft as it sounds if this Apple owned patent patent is to be believed. Either way, I just don’t see the logic in Apple creating a device like this without a camera as some people have speculated. They’ve put so much time and effort into things like iPhoto, iMovie, Final Cut et al, and the video editing they have on the iPhone is ground breaking. I can also imagine a new breed of imaging based software for people like architects, interior designers, film makers that can make good use of the built in GPS, accelerometer and compass combined with a camera.
Synching is going to be a big deal. It’s going to be a game changer and it’s going to be completely new. Think “Cloud Computing” but smaller. It’s also going to be something no other competitor even thinks about when they launch their inevitable “iSlate” killers.
It could fail. There, I said it. Apple could make a device that isn’t all that great. The word on the street is that Apple have struggled to make sense of this device since before the iPhone came along. This guy I know, he knows a guy that knows a guy who says Steve Jobs doesn’t really like the “iSlate”. I mention this because people seem to think that Apple can’t afford a failure. That if they released a device that didn’t receive instant unanimous praise and acceptance then it would somehow kill the company. Apple have had failures before: The G4 Cube and iPod Hi-Fi were both unmitigated failures while the jury is still out on the Apple TV, Macbook Air and Mac Mini. This device could go the way of the Newton just as easily as any other. But it won’t really matter, Apple will simply stop selling it and move on. Unlike a certain someone else.
It will have “Cut & Paste”.
There will be a developer SDK from day 1.
It will not look like a big iPhone.
So there! Those are my predictions apropos the “iSlate”.
Just one more thing… I also hope the Apple TV gets a mention at the upcoming event. Apple TV has the potential to be awesome if you think of it as a home server. The fact that Steve Jobs hasn’t killed it yet means he must have plans for it. All it needs is a little bit of of the same TLC they’ve given the iPod and iPhone.
Yesterday I went on a rant about how marketeers don’t use cognitive science in their decision making process. While I suspect that there are a few ‘savvy’ marketeers who will attempt to, for the most part it they don’t.
The video above is interesting because it’s an actual cognitive experiment by Duke University that is aimed squarely at understanding what role cognition plays in relation to consumers and brands.
However, the conclusion that the experimenters arrive at, that marketing resources may be put to better use generating super short, almost unnoticeable brand experiences, is erroneous in my opinion. For starters, the Apple logo does not inherently make people ‘more creative’. Apple has spent years marketing it’s products through various different channels in order to create a link between the Apple brand and ‘creativity’ in consumers minds. Without that previous ground work from Apple, there would be no pattern to recognize in the results. Score 1 for old fashioned marketing.
And who knows, maybe the Apple logo has no effect on creativity, but the IBM logo has a diminishing effect. There’s also no statistical data mentioned. The results could be real but insignificant for all we know.
There’s also a lot of cognitive science which both supports and criticizes every other marketing medium such as television advertising or presence marketing. If we were to ask someone like the Cochrane Foundation to do some meta analysis on all the available studies, my gut feeling is that they would reach no conclusion at all. We may well put television advertising through defensive mental filters, but that doesn’t mean it has no beneficial effective.
But ultimately, it comes down to the real world implications. No self respecting marketing weasel (I quite like the term now, weasels have a lot of good qualities) would tell Nike or Ford to abandon television advertising because they’d be laughed out of the room. Nor does anyone want the job of orchestrating something as subtle and demanding as what this video suggests. And going back to my first point, without that T.V. exposure or press coverage, what message do you expect to carry in those subliminal messages?
Let me be clear however, I’m not saying this isn’t an important field of research because it clearly is, and who knows, in the future it may yield some genuinely useful and applicable techniques for people to apply. But for now, it’s interesting yet useless, and more importantly, it’s marketing people marketing their marketing insight to other marketeers, so take it with a pinch of salt.
Apple has created this video detailing how the visually impaired can use an iPhone. They’ve been the gold standard in this area for a long time, but their work on the iPhone, a one button, icon powered interface, demonstrates just how serious they are about it.
In a somewhat lacklustre interview yesterday with David Pouge over at the New York Times, Steve Jobs had this to say about the Amazon Kindle…
“I’m sure there will always be dedicated devices, and they may have a few advantages in doing just one thing,” he said. “But I think the general-purpose devices will win the day. Because I think people just probably aren’t willing to pay for a dedicated device.”
He said that Apple doesn’t see e-books as a big market at this point, and pointed out that Amazon.com, for example, doesn’t ever say how many Kindles it sells. “Usually, if they sell a lot of something, you want to tell everybody.”
I disagree. I would love a Kindle, and pretty much everyone I’ve told about it would love one too. The biggest barriers to getting one right now are, a) no-one knows about it and b) they’re pretty damn expensive.
Whereas as Apple like to keep their products hovering around the same price-point by adding new features and hardware with every new release, I’m hoping the Kindle stays simple, true to it’s purpose and comes down in price every few months. I also don’t think Amazon would fare very well if it entered into a fist fight with other hardware manufacturers like Sony, who clearly don’t want to repeat their iPod mistakes by letting someone else corner a new portable electronics market.
Unlike Steve, I predict a big future for the humble e-reader. I also predict a disastrous string of e-readers come music players come internet devices. I’m looking at you Sony.
