This will probably come back to bite me….

I love my iPhone, it’s indispensible. I run with it (tracking my distance and speed), i’ve used it when i’ve been lost in the mountains, i’ve checked train times, used maps, watched TV episodes when I’m on the treadmill in the gym, search recipes in the supermarket, found recommended cocktails when wandering around the West End, and listen to audio books on the Tube. I’ve even used it to have multi-way, international Skype conferences while I’m stuck in a service station on the M1. It’s properly integrated with out MS Exchange, so i have pretty seamless communications.

For me, its the personal and portable nature of the iPhone which has become indispensable – and i think augmented reality apps (when mature) will entrench the addiction even further.

So what of the iPad? Its seems to me predominately a device for using at home – although yes it would make a great accompanyment to a long haul flight if the 10 hour battery life for video playback is a genuine.

So what would I use the iPad? Which of the dozens of location and office productivity tools that i have on my iPhone will be useful on a tablet that spends most of its time in the living room?

I’m sure that the enduringly innovative app developer community will prove me wrong, and before you know it there will be a plethora of compelling and addictive iPad apps – but it seems to me that the most likely use of the iPad in my home will be the web and possibly TV series. I already purchase TV through the iPhone and connect to my giant plasma screen using an AV out cable so that’s not nessarily a new feature. The iPad doesn’t have HDMI either. Or USB. And its 4:3, so not great for most of today’s video content.

And so to the Web – the Web that requires so many plugins and updates that allow you to view the broad spectrum of file formats. Like Flash – the iPad does not offer in-browser Flash. Kind of dumb in my humble opinion.

Apple in its rather closed, limited environment, would rather that you were a viewer or consumer of the Web rather than a contributor to it, they would rather you purchase your leisure time through iTunes than finding you pleasure spread throughout the four corners on obscure site. I cannot believe that the iPad will offer me a sufficiently flexible and rewarding experience as my £500 laptop, with which i can download all manner of content and plugins. My cheapo Dell Vostro is light enough, with a long enough battery life, to support most of the living room browsing I need. A Windows tablet would probably do the trick if i really wanted a tablet. Or maybe the new Chrome OS ultra-mobile PCs.

So for me, the iPad is just a little bit too much. Just like the Touch, and the Apple TV. A profitable niche perhaps, but unless you are a Mac lover (I’m not), the tablet in my living room will need to be a lot more open than an iPad.

There are some more objections here: http://technologizer.com/2010/01/27/my-first-25-questions-about-apples-ipad/ and this wonderful sanitary towel courtesy of failblog.

@stewartbaines

In the mainstream media, there is still far too much rubbish, lies and misinformation about technology. Too many pundits who fail to question what they are being told.

There was a classic example on Radio 4′s Today Programme  - a discussion on why 3G service in the UK is so disappointing and patchy. While Peter Cochrane, one time CTO of BT, did make the occassional relevant point, such as why O2 has a poor network***, he also blamed poor 3G network coverage on clustering. Apparently kids sit around coffee shops, simultaneously watching the same video on their individual mobiles. This, apparently, is the reason for our collectively poor service experience. I’ll leave you to make your own conclusions about that. Check out the interview here at 7:13 on Friday 15 Jan: http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/listen_again/default.stm

But it got me thinking about all the recieved wisdom about technology, all the rubbish masquerading as fact.

One of those is country league tables for broadband speeds. It may be interesting to know where the UK is – 26th apparently – but does this mean that we are really way down the list of broadband competitiveness, or indeed if broadband competitiveness has any baring on the digital economy? Does the relative position of where we a country is in the league table mean that somehow that its internet users are less evolved, that with 5mbps they do not operate on the same level of conciousness of citizens graced by 50mbps? Or does it mean that those with higher speed, more reliable connections simply are recipients of even more mass media channelled downwards through these fat pipes.

I love my fast broadband, I genuinely like the experience of BT Vision’s IPTV, and I regularly use BBC iPlayer and download games to my PS3, I use Spotify and spend huge sums on TV and music on iTunes. But will i be disappointed if in two or three years this isn’t a 50mbps or 1gbps connection?

My current 16mbps pipe is a conduit to mass media. Of course, that’s not so say that my internet experience is limited to this – quite the contrary, much of my working life is spent researching online, and I buy online in preference to visiting stores – but this does not need require a constant race for increased broadband access speeds. The impact of high speeds means that much of my Internet experience is now a sit-back rather than sit-forward experience. I watch, listen and play much more now than read and browse. Any rich media I want, it’s on demand. And i can’t help thinking its a little addictive, and that i’m spending less time discovering and learning. So tell me now – what does broadband competiveness means to the digital economy? It means more supine people, able to consume media in more ways, more often. Hardly enlightened! So why do writers, consultants and politicians continue to bang on about the need for broadband competitiveness without thinking about what it means?

Footnote:

***O2′s lower GSM spectrum band – 900Mhz – means it had quite large cell sizes originally. The high spectrum of 3G – 2100Mhz – needs smaller cells sizes, and therefore more of them. O2 is still in the process of trying to acquire additional cell sites rather than using just the GSM sites it already has, a process known as infill. This may have been fine if it wasnt for the boom in mobile apps and content created by the iPhone, which has taken O2 by surprise. The shear volume of data traffic generated by apps and content has highlighted another weak point – backhaul. Even when there is sufficient wireless capacity, many cell sites do not have sufficient capacity to bring the traffic back to the core network. That’s why as an iPhone user you are offered free access to BT Openzones – its cheaper for O2 in the short term to pay BT to backhual its apps and content over WiFi. More backhaul is being provisioning but at the moment, it can’t keep pace with demand.

My buddy at the ITU spotted this fantastic visualisation of global mobile phone penetration. Wonderful how a bit of number crunching combined with some charts can instantly grab you. The work is done by Richard Heeks on the ICTs for Development blog.

What was instantly striking was how far Estonia has climbed the mobile penetration charts – it’s the world’s no. 2 on 188 mobiles per 100 inhabitants, sandwiched between UAE and Bahrain. Not much further behind is Lithuania on 155.

Estonia’s economy has been rocketing along – 10 years ago it had a GDP per capita around 1/3 of the EU15 average, now its more like 2/3. But even this economic growth doesn’t explain quite why the small baltic state can have such an affintity with all things mobile. Could it be the proximity to Finland and Sweden? Or maybe it was the massive investment the government made in ICTs during the 1990′s to drag Estonia out of the ashes of the Soviet state. The web site of Estonia’s Tiger Leap is here and there’s a fascinating profile of Estonia’s online and ICT development here. Did you know Estonia has 200 licensed telecom operators????

What’s interesting about this visualistion of penetration is that you can see how penetration has developed. Back in 1998, not surprisingly, Finland topped the charts at 55 mobiles per 100 inhabitants, and the average in sub-Saharan African was a fraction of 1% (actually closer to 0.1%). Now it’s around 35% (my calculation). On their own, communications don’t lift people out of poverty but they are a massive contributing factor. I could go on forever about some cool initiatives to bring mobile to the unnconnected – such as shared access to voice, mobile banking for those without bank accounts, telemedicine cabins, green base stations extending connectivity into regions without stable power supplies (and don’t say how do they charge their mobiles then)….but it might be easier to scoot along to the GSMA’s Development Fund blog or check out the UN Millennium Project which was led by Jeffrey Sachs or check out the work that Grameenphone does in Bangladesh.

The role of mobile in the developing world is a bit of a pet topic – I’ll explore the impact of mobile broadband in a future post.

Recent figures from In-Stat suggest that hot-spot usage surged in 2009. In-Stat predicts that usage will increase 47% in the year to 1.2 billion – presumably it means sessions, although that isn’t clear in the release. The analyst says that the turnaround for the market has been driven by mobile operators who are looking to offload browsing traffic from their 3G networks onto Wi-Fi. In some Wi-Fi hotspots smartphones already account for the majority of sessions. In the UK, mobile broadband networks such as 3G and HSPA overtook Wi-Fi as the most popular way of accessing Internet on the move back in September 2008 – according to Point Topic.

So why are we looking to Wi-Fi again for browsing on the smartphone? Part of the reason is simple usability, because it is much easier to access Wi-Fi network on the new generation of smartphones. But there is also a network reason: new mobile internet browsers – such as Safari and Opera – are also much more multimedia rich, which puts strain on available network capacity. Although HSPA is becoming increasingly widespread, coverage is still very patchy in rural areas and browsing the Internet or downloading email over GPRS is truly a painful experience. You could, therefore, consider the surge in Wi-Fi use as an indictment on the  quality of 3G networks, because operators have been forced to offload traffic. Essentially, however, the underlying network technology should be irrelevant to the user. Operators just need to make sure that they provide the necessary bandwidth by whatever means if they don’t want their users to churn.