Wednesday, September 12, 2012

Apple, I'm so not surprised at your iPhone/iPod announcement

Today's announcements were hardly a surprise, despite a company long concerned about secrecy.

As I wrote in an earlier entry, I'm not too concerned with what this announcement brought.  I'm not switching phones after only one year, since any new phone is not going to cook, clean, do the dishes, and pay the bills for me.  Only the most fanatical would pay an early termination fee at this time, yes?

Does anyone remember that there were electronics-related announcements last week?  Probably not.

I'm glad to see the iPod nano get some love.  It hardly looks the right shape or size to be a watch this time.  They went through tall and skinny at the start, and moved to wide and dumpy, then to square, and back to tall and skinny with video playback.  It seems a good choice for a lot of people, especially runners who don't want to be bothered by a phone while they're running.  There was a time when we all left the phone at home and just enjoyed the time away from it.

The iPod touch got a needed upgrade, but is it enough?  It used to be that the iPod touch was more powerful than the iPhone, but that's no longer the case.  It has the longer display without the newer processor, likely making it a poorer performer than with the last generation although it's been behind the times for a while.  Hopefully, it's the A5x processor that the third generation iPad has, instead of the A5 processor that powers the iPhone 4S.  I've found my 4S to be slow graphically in some situations.  Pushing more pixels with the new display, the processor certainly wouldn't be faster.

Everyone I'm sure is ready for a revamped version of iTunes.  They announced version 11 but are they just cosmetic changes or will it be fluid and more versatile?  When I moved from a 1.33 GHz PowerBook to a dual core 2.13 GHz MacBook, I didn't really see much improvement with iTunes and it was still an assemblage of messes.  I know the problem of communicating across the wire and coordinating files, but Apple always assumed that the iTunes user was wrong and they knew better.  They never asked, and never explained anything.

What I'm waiting to see is how the critics on both sides react.  I don't want to see how the fanatics will react because it's a given that they'll be ridiculous.  Will companies with devices based on Android feel the need to change further?

I'm interested to see how LTE-enabled phones work.  I just saw a message that the U.S. bound Sprint and Verizon versions of iPhone can work with LTE networks overseas but the AT&T version will not.  Considering the mess of network deployment and that it's all still a mass of confusion, will anyone win in 2012?

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