I watched Steve Jobs’ iPhone 4.0 presentation.\u00c2\u00a0 He’s at risk of becoming a caricature of himself.\u00c2\u00a0 Every feature is described with superlatives, as if a plumber lifted the back of the commode, delineated the inner-workings and pronounced them not only revolutionary, but emotionally satisfying, decreeing that users would truly love the operation of the toilet.\u00c2\u00a0 Except for a few jokes when he put up fake ads to demonstrate iAd, Jobs was so serious as to establish a divide between himself and his audience.\u00c2\u00a0 And this is death in the Internet age, if you’re not willing to come down off your pedestal and ingratiate yourself with the hoi polloi, you’re at risk of ridicule.<\/p>\n
But that does not mean the content of Steve’s presentation was worthless.\u00c2\u00a0 Watch how they integrate multitasking into the iPhone.\u00c2\u00a0 It truly transcends any previous implementation.\u00c2\u00a0 Makes so much sense, is so simple, that only Apple could come up with it.\u00c2\u00a0 Which begs the question why the iPad is such a better e-reading device than the Kindle.\u00c2\u00a0 We can argue backlit or not, but usability is far superior on the iPad, controls are intuitive and progress is put forth in pages, unlike the mystifying percentages on the Kindle.\u00c2\u00a0 Just like the iPod killed the Rio and other MP3 players, the iPad has triumphed over all e-readers overnight.\u00c2\u00a0 Maybe the lesson is that Amazon should not have ventured out of its area of expertise, not gone into hardware, which requires software to run, but isn’t he who’s first supposed to triumph in tech?\u00c2\u00a0 Guess not.\u00c2\u00a0 And now that’s what’s happening in mobile.<\/p>\n
Palm is on its last legs.\u00c2\u00a0 It may never be sold, or be auctioned off for peanuts, like BeOS or the other game-changers of yore that never managed to get into the fast lane and died.\u00c2\u00a0 Windows Mobile is losing momentum.\u00c2\u00a0 RIM does e-mail incredibly well in an era where users demand much more than that.\u00c2\u00a0 And the iPhone, although not first in the market, is triumphing.<\/p>\n
In the keynote, Jobs flashed a graphic showing mobile browser usage.\u00c2\u00a0 iPhone had 64%, Android 19%, BlackBerry 9% and others 8%.\u00c2\u00a0 This is staggering.\u00c2\u00a0 Or, should I ask, do you know anyone who surfs the Web regularly on their BlackBerry?\u00c2\u00a0 I own one.\u00c2\u00a0 Navigation is difficult.\u00c2\u00a0 I go to the usual sites, unless I’m looking up statistics or other raw facts.\u00c2\u00a0 Browsing is unintuitive and difficult.\u00c2\u00a0 But on an iPhone, although you might be hindered by AT&T’s network, it’s similar to the desktop and easy.\u00c2\u00a0 And he who owns online browsing wins?<\/p>\n
Sure looks this way.<\/p>\n
In today’s "New York Times", Gene Munster of Piper Jaffray, the most accurate Apple follower lays out astonishing facts: <\/p>\n
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