Four Xbox Ones for the Price of One

Microsoft have been making a lot of noise over the Xbox One this week, rolling out the specs and bigging up the promises.  They've told us pretty much everything we need to know about the new console apart from one critical piece of information - the price.  There is a rumour floating around, started by a German sales outlet that suggests that the new box could retail at around $800 but to be fair, it's a guess, not based on fact.  My guess is that Microsoft are letting the market - that's you, by the way - suggest the launch price before going public.   This is a bit like the ploy I suspect Google are using to gauge public interest in Google Glass - start the rumours floating, see who bites, set a price.  The German retailer is probably off the mark - well they have been for years, it's Euros now - but it's a starting point.

One way of working out the starting price is to compare the competition, see what they're charging for comparable devices and assume that the new gear will be somewhere near that.  The difficulties start in deciding what is comparable, given the media slant the new Xbox is taking and then working out whether Microsoft are likely to undercut the competition to get market share or set a premium to show their product, in their opinion, is better and therefore commands a higher price.

But here's an additional factor to consider.  Microsoft claim that anyone who buys a Xbox One will get four Xboxes in the trade.  To be fair, three of them are virtual and floating around in the Cloud, but what it means is that when you boot up your machine it will have four times as much processing power available than it has under the hood.  You might think that it would be easier and more transparent of Microsoft to just beef up the spec of the console itself, already touted as ten times  more powerful than the Xbox 360.

However that would increase the manufacturing costs by a significant factor and would make the console much less attractive.  Bang goes the market share.  But unless you don't sleep, work, eat or, well live away from your console, you won't be sat at it twenty four hours of the day.  In fact I'm fairly certain Microsoft knows how long the average gamer sits in front of his or her console and although you're a long way from being average I'm sure they know the upper and lower boundaries, the Standard Deviation and every other statistical tool in the book.  So they have built a raft of virtual machines that effectively quadruple the processing power of your Xbox One when it needs it. 

I doubt we will need this benefit when we are streaming films or porting data between Microsoft Office applications, but when we're walking through a mist laden swamp, rifles held aloft as we watch clouds of mosquitos home in on us just before we take incoming fire, well, we might be glad of the enhanced rendering that the extra processing power provides.   When we don't need that power those three Xboxes will be available for someone else, somewhere else so Microsoft don't need to install three sets for every box they sell. 

I think we may see a lot more of this approach - it's not strictly a new idea as graphics rendering software has used the power of networks during the quiet hours for some years - your organisation might have used it themselves if they have a graphics department - but farming the work out to the Cloud for parallel processing in real time, that's an interesting idea and one that may have taken the competitors by surprise.  The only real question is whether the games developers can take advantage of the development.

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Sky's the Limit

I stopped using Outllook at home some years ago.  It was a combination of reasons, partly because we were moving to separate email accounts and Outlook seemed a little picky over multiple accounts, especially if you wanted to log in individually, but mainly it was the transfer to personal laptops.

You see, we ended up after a very short period of time with a shared desktop computer and individual laptops.  If either of us opened Outlook on any of these three machines our emails would slip onto that machine, making it the go-to for that particular email.

So, as we obtained new email accounts with more personal email addresses, we transitioned to webmail.  It was timely as our phones started to become email compatible and, as time moved on further, we started using tablets, so webmail became the de facto standard in our house.

This isn't a blog about email, by the way, it's a preamble to explain how I ceased to use certain parts of Microsoft's tools day-to-day at home - my work solutions have always been Microsoft Exchange including Outlook, no matter where I've worked.

But I do use Office a lot in other ways - all of my books have been written in Word and I've got probably the most comprehensive Excel solution to managing my personal home accounts possible, built up organically over many years, all worksheets linked together, interactive and using a central lookup table for managing repeating costs that may change mid-year.  I've used a thumb drive to store those accounts on for years, periodically backing up to my hard drive, although the backups have always been a bit random.  You look up and three months has shot by.  To make it more imperative, I've felt that either the thumb drive or my USB port has started to become a tad flaky lately.

Then, at the Microsoft stand at the recent Gadget Show Live event at the National Exhibition Centre near Birmingham I learned about SkyDrive, a piece of Cloud computing that had passed me by.  I assumed it was just me who hadn't spotted it, but since canvassing a lot of people at work, it appears to be a reasonably well kept, if open, secret.

It's Cloud space, 7 gigabyte free to anyone who signs up.  So much, so what?  We can have 5 Gb of Apple's iCloud, and similar amounts of Google and Amazon space up there in the Cloud.  But it does differentiate itself a bit over the other offerings out there.  It's probably better to explain how I've started using it than just listing the functions.

I've got the home accounts, going back to 2004 and all interlinked.  If my thumb-drive failed I'd be reliant on the most recent backup on my hard drive.  Some months that could be a lot of reverse engineering needed to restore  my records. If the law of sod kicked in and my laptop spontaneously ignited with the thumb-drive in the USB port, then I'd be screwed right Royally.  So I've uploaded these files to SkyDrive for safe keeping.

First off, I had to join, which involved creating a new Microsoft email account, complete with password.  These two pieces of information give me exclusive access to my personal slice of the SkyDrive, which Microsoft will back up and maintain on my behalf for free.

Then I had to upload the files to SkyDrive.  When you join up, Microsoft create a SkyDrive folder on your hard drive and that's where you work with your SkyDrive documents.  I copied the files across to the SkyDrive folder and then checked the Cloud area assigned to me.  It took a few minutes and as far as I can tell it just happens automatically - I've been playing with SkyDrive for a few days now and it just seems to happen, I haven't found a sync button or any way to push my files up there, but just being connected to the internet seems to be all that I need to do.

Anyway, once my files appeared in the Cloud I realised I could view them up there.  More importantly, I can use Microsoft Office tools, specifically Office 2013, up there even though I have Office 2007 down here on Terra Cotta.  In fact, should I pop around to a friend's house and decide to modify a document in my SkyDrive account, even if they don't have Office on their computer, I can still carry out the modification.  I just log onto my SkyDrive account and use the Office tools up there.  When I connect my own computer to the internet next, SkyDrive will update my hard drive version.

So I took a look at my home accounts and initially all was not well - many of the links no longer worked, however I went back to my SkyDrive folder and rebuilt the links.  I think they were a victim of copy and paste.  And here's the top SkyDrive tip of this session - be patient.  I rebuilt and tested the links on my hard drive, then popped up into the Cloud to check on progress and found a small number of links didn't work.  Well, to be specific, February was a mess.  I made changes on the hard drive and reverted up to the Cloud and it didn't seem to work.  Eventually I was distracted by something and when I resumed my checks I found the file worked fine.  Remember that bit about the synchronisation being out of your control?  My advice is to make your edits, then go and make a cup of tea or coffee, or do something useful like spell checking your latest blog entry, because the changes do happen, but in their own time.

Next I uploaded a number of in-progress novels I have on my hard drive.  I'm keeping to using SkyDrive for backing up those documents that would cause me pain if I lost them.  Anyway, being straightforward Word documents they have slipped up there effortlessly.  And here's a  trick point for you self publishers out there - download the SkyDrive App to your android tablet and you can view your novels on your tablet direct from SkyDrive in PDF format - bang up to date and looking like an eBook will help you proof read your manuscript before uploading to Amazon and Smashwords.  Converting to PDF and uploading on my Kindle is part of my pre-publishing routine already, only this makes it easier.

Up there in the SkyDrive space there are a number of other tools you can access for free.  One is Outlook.  You can use this to manage your new Microsoft account.  It also gives you access to your own Calendar up there in the cloud.  Here's a cool part.  I added my Microsoft email account to my Nexus and when I add appointments to the SkyDrive Calendar, they drop into my Nexus Calendar.

So now, after a hiatus of several years, I'm starting to use Outlook at home again.  Not as my main email client - you can't beat using the tablet email function for always-on emailing, but being able to use the SkyDrive to book family orientated appointments that drop into relevant calendars across several devices is really useful - it's the smartest way I know of to achieve that across Android and Apple devices to date.

SkyDrive has a lot to commend itself to you.  I recommend you check it out.

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                                                          Visit my Book Website here

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Auto Ripping Yarns

Amazon are pushing to get a larger slice of the cloud business by offering a new service, unfortunately only available in the US at the moment, where a large number of music CDs can be added to your Amazon cloud for free.  From there you can listen to the music on your smartphone, tablet computer, laptop - you name it, if it has internet access and can play sound, you got it.  The new service is called Auto Rip.

Is there a catch?  Well, yes and no.  The service is free, so there's no cost, and it covers the 50,000 most popular CDs sold by Amazon in its fourteen years of trading. So it's possible that there are some CDs you'd like in your cloud that they haven't listed yet.  There's one other requirement - you need to have bought the CD from Amazon sometime during that fourteen years.

They've sold a lot of CDs in that period and clearly they are good at record keeping - I know if I look at my Amazon account I can check my purchases in recent months, but hadn't realised that they kept all these records indefinitely.

I assume that Amazon have cleared this initiative with the owners of the music, the artists and record companies, because I can see a flaw in the concept that benefits those of us who have used Amazon to buy presents for others - and let's face it, who hasn't?  So those CDs I bought my wife, my daughter, my brothers and sisters and those I bought the olds over the years, I guess that if Amazon roll this out to the UK then I can add those to my cloud.  Because I don't see how Amazon can tell who I've bought for.  Mind you, I'm not sure I want Dirty Dancing Soundtracks or The Spice Girls in my cloud either, so perhaps they have thought this through.

In fact the real weakness is that a lot of us don't treat ourselves that much, we tend to treat others.  A lot of my CD collection has been built up by me dropping shameless hints before my birthday and Christmas with the odd CD arriving on Fathers' Day.  So the majority of my CDs, regardless of where they were bought, weren't bought by me.  So, apart from those people who buy all their own music, and buy it from Amazon, it could be a bit of a limited offer.

However, I'm not one to look a gift horse in the mouth and if and when Amazon roll this out in the UK I'll take a look at my list of Amazon bought CDs.  I may even add the Spice Girls just to start the cloud off.

The next step, not announced by Amazon, maybe not even considered by them, could be to extend the idea to books.  When they started trading fourteen years ago their business was books, the music, games, washing machines and computers came later.  Now I'm struggling to recall which CDs I've bought from Amazon over the years - CD Wow and Play probably saw more of my cash than Amazon did - but I have bought books from them.  Now, with the increasing digitisation of books taking place it would be interesting to see if I would be allowed to download the digital eBook version of books I've bought from Amazon in their short history.

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I can be followed on Twitter too - @RayASullivan
or on Facebook - use raysullivan.novels@yahoo.com to find me

Why not take a look at my books and read up on my Biog here

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Worried/Interested in the secretive world of DLFs?  Take a look at this website dedicated to DLFs here, if you dare!

Apple to Buy Tom Tom

You would think with all their resources Apple would be able to build a mapping app for their iOS.  But after  being slated within hours of the initial release in September up to the recent scathing remarks from the Australian police a few days ago they are still struggling to sort it out.  Sacking senior managers didn't work, either.

It turns out that the mapping module they've been using belongs to Tom Tom, the European mapping software and hardware company.  Tom Tom have a good reputation, over here in the UK at least, although they do get blamed for sending articulated wagons down farm tracks every now and then.  I have a personal theory that the next innovation in GPS mapping needs to be a common sense detector, one that shuts the device down when it detects that the driver is incapable of thinking for him or herself.

Anyway, it seems that Tom Tom would like some cash - about 100 million Euros, give or take - and Apple have a fortune lodged outside of the US that would be taxed to within a cent of its life if brought back into the mother country, so buying out a European company is a great way of using that surplus.

Oh, and Apple need a functioning mapping app that works.  It sounds like they've decided that their own attempts at using the Tom Tom mapping data is not going to happen.  I find it surprising and have assumed that Apple were about to do a 'ta-da' gesture with a re-released and correctly functioning version of their mapping app, but there you go.

They've been wooing Tom Tom and have been flashing the cash, according to industry rumours.  It appears that a purchase announcement is imminent, so if you're a Tom Tom shareholder then it looks like Christmas has come early.

There's another dimension to this story, though.  We know the market leader in mapping apps for mobile devices is Google, who have also spent a lot of time melding their app to a self drive module, creating a car that drives itself.  Cars that drive themselves could be the next big thing - if done intelligently you could imagine a world where all the cars in a city take their passengers efficiently to their destinations, exchanging travel data to a central cloud.  That way traffic jams can be avoided, fuel can be saved and frustration can be reduced.  Apple will have seen what Google is doing and will want to elbow in that market.  Getting a major slice of the automobile industry has got to be a fantastic growth sector.  A marriage between Apple and Tom Tom, arguably the predominant GPS navigation device in the market, will be a major step towards catching up on Google.

And of course Tom Tom wouldn't be able to achieve all of the research and development without Apple's cash.  Or its Cloud knowledge.

I don't know if all this speculation is likely to be close, but it is reasonable.  If it is, then Apple is embarking on an incredible journey, and having Tom Tom aboard is a shrewd companion.  At least they will know when they've reached their destination.

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I can be followed on Twitter too - @RayASullivan
or on Facebook - use raysullivan.novels@yahoo.com to find me

Why not take a look at my books and read up on my Biog here

Want to see what B L O'Feld is up to?  Take a look at his website here

Worried/Interested in the secretive world of DLFs?  Take a look at this website dedicated to DLFs here, if you dare!

The End of Stuff

Hot on the heels of my article on Western consumerism (Tech Manufacturing Coming Home) I'm going to propose that actually part of the consumerist habits are likely to retreat in the very near future.  I'm talking about the next 12 to 24 months here, not some out of focus point in the distant future.

Now many of us are avid collectors of stuff - not just gizmos like laptops and tablet computers, but also the media associated with them.  DVDs and Blu-Rays are a major part of many a collectors home right now with bookcases and shelves bulging with years worth of collected special editions, boxed sets as well as the normal versions.  A few years ago we all had bookshelves bulging with CDs - well actually a lot of us still do but those collections are building up much slower now.  While CD sales haven't died completely, many of us are buying our music on-line and downloading it to iPods and other MP3 players without purchasing a physical copy at all.

You could argue that the iPod, iPad, Android phones and tablets, and all the other devices we have in our homes to store our on-line bought music are the modern manifestations of the CD library.  But then we have to factor in the iCloud and Google's Play cloud where we can store up to 25,000 music tracks that we own the rights to listen to - either music we've bought from the likes of Apple or venerable tracks sat on plastic CDs on our bookshelves.  If we feel the need to store more than 25,000 (20,000 with Google) then that's also OK, but be prepared to pay for the storage.

So really, the CD collection is almost certainly a thing of the recent past.  We shouldn't be too surprised, it isn't that long ago that we had bookshelves of 12" vinyl records - OK I admit it, I've still got some in the attic and a turntable in my home office, but I don't play them anymore.  And the VHS tapes were recycled years ago (I'm not going to mention the Betamax tapes I used to have).  Fair enough, there's no shortage of records and VHS tapes on eBay, proving that there is still some demand.

And let's face it, the argument for owning DVD and Blu-Ray discs is only for completists.  What you can't Tivo, Sky+, record on your HD recorder you can order from LoveFilm either as a DVD on loan or streamed through to your tablet computer to watch, well, wherever you can get WiFi.

I haven't even started to rant about books, either.  Unsurprisingly I'm a great believer that eBooks are about to overtake print.  This holiday season we're going to see an avalanche of tablets ranging from £70 no-name Android devices to £500 iPads with everything in-between.  Some of these will disappoint, others will cause arguments on Christmas day over the costs, but pretty soon half of the adult residents in the UK and the US plus our friends in Australia, New Zealand and Canada will have devices that can, among other things, be used to read eBooks.

To me this means two things.  First, we're on the edge of not needing as much physical stuff as we historically have.  The toys will remain, the tablets and netbooks, but the physical media will shrink.  But the second thing is that the future probably isn't iCloud or Google's variant.  I think we will see the emergence of personal cloud space that could link to our Apple iCloud etc.  So we could take advantage of the iCloud directly or via our own cloud.  Critically I think there could be a family cloud, where common media could be stored - photos, diary, contact lists plus, assuming the ongoing arguments over intellectual property rights can be ironed out, our common music and film copies.  Then each family member could have their own overlapping cloud space - like the ultimate Venn diagram.  And critically each personal cloud would overlap to some degree with your iCloud, your Amazon cloud, your Google cloud.  It would be a unique space that all of us will have, that we'll be able to access day or night from anywhere with WiFi.

Perhaps I ought to pop onto eBay, take a look at those completists buying records, VHS tapes, DVDs and Blu-Rays.  They might want to buy my bookshelves.

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I can be followed on Twitter too - @RayASullivan
or on Facebook - use raysullivan.novels@yahoo.com to find me

Why not take a look at my books and read up on my Biog here

Want to see what B L O'Feld is up to?  Take a look at his website here

Worried/Interested in the secretive world of DLFs?  Take a look at this website dedicated to DLFs here, if you dare!

Black Friday Sees Tablets Take the Lead

According to some analysts, the Black Friday sales saw tablets overtake laptop sales for the first time in the US.  Of course, we'll have to wait for the sales figures to be returned and ratified but the projections are indicating a 3:2 ratio.

I can't say I'm surprised and if you've been reading my blog for the last year you would know why - I've been saying that this is going to be the year of the tablet, forecasting a surge before the holidays since last January.

And of course, it's not only the Apple iPad that is pushing the concept forward now - over 100 million units strong - but also the iPad mini, the Amazon Fire and the Google Nexus.  The consumer is spoilt for choice across all price points as we lunge towards the Christmas period.

But it's not just the sexy attractiveness of the tablets that has pushed them ahead of the laptops, nor the convenience of using a hand-held device anywhere to do, well, pretty much anything apart from word processing, crunching numbers in a spreadsheet and printing off the results.  So, OK, tablets still have a few challenges to overcome but they're pretty cool and great fun to use.  They're also great for reading books and magazines as well as watching movies so their utility is pretty much unbeatable.

The real kicker in the laptop/tablet race that I hadn't realised was taking place is that we all pretty much have laptops, netbooks and even some dust gathering desktops at home already.  Outside of the serious gamer applications, the laptops are now keeping pace with technology better than ever.  Sure, Microsoft are still trying to develop operating systems that suck every last megabyte of RAM, ROM and hard drive capacity but most of us are finding that whatever legacy version we are using is adequate, or have moved over to Linux.  Even the old chestnut of needing to upgrade on a regular basis because of hard drive capacity being overtaken by software and file storage is becoming a thing of the past as the low cost flash drives and cloud based storage becomes mainstream.

So the real reason that tablets overtook laptops is that everyone has a laptop or two - some new, many getting on a bit (maybe two years' old?), grandparents have them, for goodness sake and even their grandchildren have their cast-offs (grief).  But not everyone has a tablet, not yet. OK, some folks will be on their second iPad - some will be on their fourth, for no other reason that there have been four iterations, but despite Apple's best endeavours there are plenty of people who don't have a tablet yet.

I knew that tablets would take off, the Kindle Fire last year sounded the challenge loud and clear.  I've been quite upfront with my contention that this will be both the best year for dedicated eReaders and their peak as well, but I didn't guess that laptop sales would be a casualty.  But I guess when we look back, it was inevitable.

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I can be followed on Twitter too - @RayASullivan
or on Facebook - use raysullivan.novels@yahoo.com to find me

Why not take a look at my books and read up on my Biog here

Want to see what B L O'Feld is up to?  Take a look at his website here

Worried/Interested in the secretive world of DLFs?  Take a look at this website dedicated to DLFs here, if you dare!

Save the Date, Get an Apple

Apple products are expensive.  There I've said it and will probably find myself thrown in the dock for mentioning it.  But it's true.  Unfortunately they are in a fantastic bargaining position that their competitors can only dream of.

The Apple belief is that a computer needs to be more than the sum of its parts - which is why they control the hardware design and the software production - sure, they let outsiders produce Apps for the tablet devices but they vet the products and charge to let them on their network.  There's no renegade programming going on that they don't sanction.

What you get with Apple is a whole environment - starting with a device, be it a Macbook Air, an iPad, iPad mini, iPod and, when they start digitising desserts, the iPud probably.  Then they add the software which is generally considered a good thing, but we'll gloss over iOS 6 for now as it will probably be superseded before I push the 'Publish' button on this blog entry anyway.

On top of the hardware and software there is an overlayer of support in the iCloud.  Up there, wherever that is, you store your iTunes, naturally, plus your iBooks, your personal photos, your calendar entries and anything else they can suck up out of your iDevices.  I'm not being negative, it's amazing how they do this because they then allow all of your data to be shared by all of your Apple devices.  Hence the bigger than the sum of its parts claim above.

But, despite all of these things, they are bloody expensive.

Well, if you are harbouring a desire to own an Apple-like device, perhaps to use for yourself or to share with a loved one as a present then Friday 23rd November 2011 could be a date to circle on your calendar.  I know it's short notice, but I'm a Brit and still trying to get my head around the Black Friday thing.  Because Apple don't limit the traditional post Thanksgiving shopping spree to just the US, they extend it even to the far flung shores we call the UK.

At the time of writing there isn't any specific details about the discounts being offered for one day from this notoriously expensive company with virtually no track record of  offering bargains, but traditionally they offer between 10% and 15%, which is £40 - £50 on better spec iPads.

Save the date and, if you are in the market for an Apple product right now, save yourself some cash.

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I can be followed on Twitter too - @RayASullivan
or on Facebook - use raysullivan.novels@yahoo.com to find me

Why not take a look at my books and read up on my Biog here

Want to see what B L O'Feld is up to?  Take a look at his website here

Worried/Interested in the secretive world of DLFs?  Take a look at this website dedicated to DLFs here, if you dare!

Which Mini Tablet to Buy?

If you are thinking of buying a mini tablet for a loved one this coming Christmas, or perhaps want to leave a conveniently bookmarked blog posting lying around in the hope that you will receive one as a present, then there's never been a better choice.  Of all the emerging technologies, this is one reaching that pleasant level of maturity that means you're not running the early adopter risks, nor are you buying at the end of the line.

There are a number of mini tablets out there, from a broad range of technology firms, but this article is going to concentrate on just four models.  These are, in no particular order; Amazon Kindle Fire, Apple iPad mini, Google Nexus 7 and Nook HD.  Three of these run on the Google Android Operating System (OS), although the Amazon product and the Nook are heavily cloaked under a software skin.  The iPad mini uses the Apple IOS that is used on the larger iPad devices as well as on iPhones and iPod Touch devices.

Is one OS better than the the other?  It's fair to say that this can polarise opinions and many users of these two OS are so heavily persuaded that they'll never consider the other.  If you are one of those and IOS is your preferred OS then, if you're buying a mini tablet for yourself your choice is pretty well sorted.  The Apple IOS is a holistic environment pulling the iCloud and other Apple devices in your home together seamlessly.  Android is moving towards a more coordinated environment but is still developing in that respect.  But as a pure OS it is fine.

Verdict on OS selection: If you already have a strong preference for IOS or Android, then stick with it.  Otherwise make your decision on other factors.

All four tablets carry 1 GB of internal memory. The RAM varies between the models and is generally a cost driver.  The Amazon Fire comes with 16GB and 32GB variants; the iPad mini in 16, 32 and 64GB; the Nexus 7 is available in 16 and 32GB versions; Nook HD in 8 or 16GB.  More RAM means more storage of photos, books, music.  The Nook is expandable with external storage using a micro SD card up to 64GB and the Amazon Fire comes with apparently unlimited access to the Amazon Cloud for storing media in.  Make your decision based on the likelihood of storing films, photos and music but don't get hung up on book storage - to fill any of these devices up with eBooks would require constant reading until the end of the next Century.

Verdict on RAM: My recommendation is to go for the most storage you can afford as it is generally impracticable to upgrade with this technology at the moment,  perhaps something that we as consumers should be complaining about.  As RAM size affects price you need to consider all the other aspects first.

Screens:  All four devices have multi-touch screens so you can zoom in on an image by spreading with your fingers, so the factors to consider here are size and resolution.  The Fire, Nexus and the Nook all have 7 inch screens, the iPad mini 7.9.  So the iPad provides a little bit more real estate to work with, which may be a deal breaker for some.  In terms of resolution the iPad mini comes off worst with a resolution of 1024 x 768.  The Fire and the Nexus have 1280 x 800 and the Nook has 1440 x 900.  Not only is the Nook screen better on paper, it gets rave reviews for clarity.

Verdict on screens:  If screen quality is paramount, then the Nook has to be a major contender.  If other factors drive you away from the Nook then either of the two remaining Android devices have to be in the running.  The iPad mini comes off worst in this category, but to put it into context the screen is the same resolution as the very popular iPad 2. So if you've seen one of them in action and don't have an issue with the resolution then perhaps any of these devices are fine.

Cameras:  The iPad mini has front and rear cameras, the Nexus and Fire front facing cameras only and the Nook has none at all.  Anyone who has watched tourists trying to use the full size iPad to take photos will probably agree that it looks a tad unwieldy, however the smaller form factor probably works with this machine.  With the Fire and Nexus the front facing camera is there just for Skype calls and updating social media, as it is with the  iPad mini front facing camera.

Verdict on cameras:  Nook doesn't have any, so if cameras are important, the Nook isn't for you.  If you only want to Skype then either of the other two Android machines or the iPad mini would be fine, however if you want to use your tablet to photograph your world around you then it has to be the iPad mini.

eReader compatabilty:  With Amazon pitching the Kindle and Barnes & Noble pitching the Nook it may be that potential purchasers of these devices got to this point after deciding to buy something to read eBooks on.  Of course Apple has its own bookstore too, so that puts the iPad mini in the frame too.  Google also have a bookstore, but at present it doesn't appear to have the range of books available through B&N, Amazon or Apple.  What isn't necessarily obvious is that many eBook sellers (including Amazon and Barnes & Noble)  provide free apps for Apple and Android devices so you aren't necessarily limited to the books from the company that sells your tablet.  Certainly you can load the Kindle app onto the iPad, but you can't, however, load Apple iBooks onto Android devices.

Verdict on eReaders:  All four devices will allow you to read eBooks from various eBook sellers.  The iPad is slightly more flexible, but you should be able to obtain any eBook on any machine by some means.

Apps.  Here it does get a little complicated.  Apple pretty much invented the App market and have at least a year on its competitors.  It's almost certainly the fact that any App you want, if it exists, it will be available for the iPad mini.  Google, who developed and own the Android OS, are playing aggressive catch up and the Nexus has access to the whole Android App market.  Both the Fire and the Nook have limited access to Apps due in part to marketing decisions and in part, I suspect, to their software skins.

Verdict on Apps.  The iPad mini has the largest App range of all of these devices, however I'm fairly certain that most of the important/desirable Apps are also available on Android.  However you may not be able to use the Fire or Nook to gain access to some of them.  If Apps are important along with Android, look at the Nexus 7.

Price: Here we go, please remember that prices will change over time and the degree of competition  we are seeing will almost certainly make the manufacturers review their prices over the next 7 weeks.

Amazon Fire: £159 for the 16GB version, £199 for the 32GB version.  There is also a lower spec version of the Fire for £129.  To read more, follow this link.



Apple iPad Mini: £269 for the 16GB version, £349 for the 32GB version and £429 for the 64GB version.  Extra if you want 3G connectivity. To read more, follow this link.


Google Nexus 7: £159 for the 16GB version, £199 for the 32GB version.  To read more, follow this link



Nook:  Believed to be £159 for the 16GB version, but we'll have to wait a few more days for the actual price.  It is going to be widely available, see my other Nook related articles for the list of sellers.



Verdict on prices and overall round-up:  Well, it looks like £159 is the price point for 16GB Android 7" tablets, so it's down to the other variables if 7" and Android is what you are looking for.  The Nexus has the greatest flexibility in this price range, however the Fire is getting great reviews too.  The Nook has its work cut out, but take the opportunity to look it up.  £199 seems to be the next price point, for 32GB devices.  Probably, for longevity and usefulness, 32GB is a good option for many users.  The Apple product is looking very expensive at the moment, but that price may drop after the initial rush is over.  It is charging £110 more for the 16GB version over it's Android competitors, however you do get more than just the hardware with Apple.  It's just whether it's worth spending that much extra for the IOS.

Added thoughts:  While tablet computing is clearly the next big thing, Cloud based storage is likely to be a major game changer.  Consequently the move towards larger internal memory capacity may be a red herring in the long run.  Apple and Google are both offering Cloud based storage for your music - Apple for £22 a year for up to 25,000 tracks and Google for free for up to 20,000 tracks.

Summary:  As discussed at the front of this blog entry, if you're set on Apple and want a mini tablet, then the iPad mini is the only device you need to consider.  My advice would be to buy the largest capacity device you can afford, but freely acknowledge that the whole family are overpriced.  Out of the Android machines I would suggest that the Nexus 7 32GB device is probably inching ahead of the Kindle Fire, which is slightly further ahead again of the Nook HD.  Watch out for aggressive discounting amongst the Android devices as they are all competing for a crowded market space.  If Google keep their prices static then, in a perfect world Amazon would knock £10-£20 of the Fire and Barnes & Noble would discount the Nook HD even heavier to achieve market share.  The iPad mini may or may not drop in price nearer the 25th December, however it is really possible that it will drop after.

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I can be followed on Twitter too - @RayASullivan
or on Facebook - use raysullivan.novels@yahoo.com to find me

Why not take a look at my books and read up on my Biog here

Want to see what B L O'Feld is up to?  Take a look at his website here

Worried/Interested in the secretive world of DLFs?  Take a look at this website dedicated to DLFs here, if you dare!

Apple Apologises - Eventually

It can't have missed your notice that Apple and Samsung have been falling out with each other recently.  I blogged a week or so ago about the various court cases they have had (and I understand one or a thousand others may have mentioned it too).

the upshot is that the Korean courts think both companies are pretty much as bad as each other for copying ideas, the US courts (including 12 American jurors) thought that the American company Apple was great and wronged by the non-American company Samsung, awarding costs of $1 billion.  The UK courts agreed that Apple was cooler than Samsung, but that was all.  They ruled that Apple had been bad-mouthing their competitor and insisted that Apple place the following statement on their UK website and post it in a number of UK newspapers.

On 9th July 2012 the High Court of Justice of England and Wales ruled that Samsung Electronic (UK) Limited's Galaxy Tablet Computer, namely the Galaxy Tab 10.1, Tab 8.9 and Tab 7.7 do not infringe Apple's registered design No. 0000181607-0001. A copy of the full judgment of the High court is available on the following link www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/Patents/2012/1882.html. That Judgment has effect throughout the European Union and was upheld by the Court of Appeal on 18 October 2012. A copy of the Court of Appeal's judgment is available on the following link www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWCA/Civ/2012/1339.html. There is no injunction in respect of the registered design in force anywhere in Europe.

Apple appealed the decision but was over-ruled.  However they posted a modified version of the ruling that went like this:

Samsung / Apple UK judgment

On 9th July 2012 the High Court of Justice of England and Wales ruled that Samsung Electronic (UK) Limited's Galaxy Tablet Computer, namely the Galaxy Tab 10.1, Tab 8.9 and Tab 7.7 do not infringe Apple's registered design No. 0000181607-0001. A copy of the full judgment of the High court is available on the following linkwww.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/Patents/2012/1882.html.

In the ruling, the judge made several important points comparing the designs of the Apple and Samsung products:

"The extreme simplicity of the Apple design is striking. Overall it has undecorated flat surfaces with a plate of glass on the front all the way out to a very thin rim and a blank back. There is a crisp edge around the rim and a combination of curves, both at the corners and the sides. The design looks like an object the informed user would want to pick up and hold. It is an understated, smooth and simple product. It is a cool design."

"The informed user's overall impression of each of the Samsung Galaxy Tablets is the following. From the front they belong to the family which includes the Apple design; but the Samsung products are very thin, almost insubstantial members of that family with unusual details on the back. They do not have the same understated and extreme simplicity which is possessed by the Apple design. They are not as cool."

That Judgment has effect throughout the European Union and was upheld by the Court of Appeal on 18 October 2012. A copy of the Court of Appeal’s judgment is available on the following link www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWCA/Civ/2012/1339.html. There is no injunction in respect of the registered design in force anywhere in Europe.

However, in a case tried in Germany regarding the same patent, the court found that Samsung engaged in unfair competition by copying the iPad design. A U.S. jury also found Samsung guilty of infringing on Apple's design and utility patents, awarding over one billion U.S. dollars in damages to Apple Inc. So while the U.K. court did not find Samsung guilty of infringement, other courts have recognized that in the course of creating its Galaxy tablet, Samsung willfully copied Apple's far more popular iPad.

The UK courts, understandably, had a dicky fit over this statement, which effectively appears to attempt to divert the reader away from the judgement.  It probably implies that the UK courts were wrong, seeing as other courts appear to have differed in opinion.  Given that Apple started the whole issue by bringing Samsung to a UK court they felt that Apple hadn't been listening to them, so the courts hauled the Apple lawyers back in and gave them a fair old dressing down.  Consequently the original statement, as directed by the UK courts, has now replaced the modified statement.

Is this just a semantic spat?  Will it convert people who may have been swayed by the court case and any statements made before or during to consider Samsung devices?  I doubt it; in fact, most of us just watch these arguments going on out of curiosity and then buy whatever we were going to buy anyway.  I live in a household where Apple and Android devices (admittedly not Samsung badged, but possibly manufactured) live harmoniously side-by-side and I'm sure I'm not the only one.  The only real opinion the user will have is that the net effect of all the court actions and punitive fines is going to be passed on to us eventually, and we'll still buy the device we fancy.  Even if it is an uncool Samsung device.

But the real problem for Apple is that Samsung are probably going to go back to the US courts and make the not unreasonable challenge to their $1 billion charge.  They will probably argue that as Apple had recourse to one more layer of judiciary in the UK, the UK Supreme Court, but clearly chose to place the retraction on their website and in several newspapers instead, it demonstrates that they did not believe they had an absolutely correct argument regarding infringements.  That action alone should compel the US courts to reconsider their previous judgement.  Hopefully both companies will be told to go away, stop wasting court time and the consumer might find that the next generation of Apple and Samsung devices are a little bit more affordable than they might have been.

Here's hoping.

--------------------------------------------------------------

I can be followed on Twitter too - @RayASullivan
or on Facebook - use raysullivan.novels@yahoo.com to find me

Why not take a look at my books and read up on my Biog here

Want to see what B L O'Feld is up to?  Take a look at his website here

Worried/Interested in the secretive world of DLFs?  Take a look at this website dedicated to DLFs here, if you dare!

iTunes Under Threat From Google

It's been a heck of a few weeks in the tablet world, what with the launch of the iPad mini, Google upping the spec of the Nexus 7 to 32 Gb while dropping the price while announcing the launch of the Nexus 4 and 10, while in the UK we've seen Barnes & Noble announce that their Nook HD tablets are coming in November too.  Their e-ink devices are here already and on display at an Asda near you.

But it's not all about hardware, right?  Apple wouldn't be anywhere now if it hadn't been for an inspired piece of vision by Steve Jobs and his team with the launch of the iTunes product which complemented the classy looking MP3 players Apple were touting a few years back.  Without iTunes, the iPod would have been just another MP3 player, without the iPod, iTunes would have been a solution looking for a problem.  The other, major, piece of vision at Apple was to license the dock side of their connector to anyone who wanted to make an Apple compatible device, meaning that the market could fill up with cheap to expensive, sassy to ugly, docks without allowing anyone other than Apple to make a device capable of docking with them.

Anyway, history will show that Apple did it right, playing the perfect long game that has one major limitation - it is built around Apple.  Sure, I can load iTunes onto my PC and use it to play MP3s as my default player, but I'm fairly certain that will be a stretch on my Android devices.  Picky of me, maybe, but there are a squillion or so Android devices in use worldwide and about to swell with Google's launch of the Nexus 4, 7 & 10 et al.

About a year ago Google launched Google Music in the US and it has been fairly well received despite Google's insistence on messing with the name on a few occasions. Well, they are launching it over here in the UK soon, on November 13th.  In addition to the usual music buying opportunities they are adding a very useful cloud based experience that could be the model for the future.  You can upload songs in your Google library for free and then they are stored in the cloud and are available for any of your Android devices you are linked to. Not just a few songs, mind, but 20,000 of them.  Here's where it gets better.

If you try to upload songs that Google recognise, and given that they've just signed up with Warner this week to complete their tie in with the majority of music distributors that may be a given, then they'll just add those tracks to your cloud.  In software terms they simply associate the file with your Google cloud space with the metadata of your songs, so they don't have to squander terabytes of storage on multiple copies of the same file, they just have to allocate a minimal amount of data to show that you are entitled to stream a copy from their master archive.  Neat, eh?  And of course, the metadata should be all correct - no more mistyped titles annoying the hell out of everyone.

And if you have an iTunes account on your computer when you connect to Google Music, then the content of that account is also game for allocating to your Google cloud space.  So Apple have done the spade work and Android reaps the benefits.

Rock and roll on November 13th!

--------------------------------------------------------------

I can be followed on Twitter too - @RayASullivan
or on Facebook - use raysullivan.novels@yahoo.com to find me

Why not take a look at my books and read up on my Biog here

Want to see what B L O'Feld is up to?  Take a look at his website here

Worried/Interested in the secretive world of DLFs?  Take a look at this website dedicated to DLFs here, if you dare!

Access All Areas

I was recently in Alicanti, a surprisingly pleasant coastal city in mainland Spain.  Alicanti is a modern city based on a medieval port, vibrant and cultured.  It's also a heck of a lot warmer than the towns and cities I frequent in the UK.  Walking around the town I became aware that the local telecoms provider was providing free WiFi around the whole area.  Connecting wasn't problem free, but at least the intention was there and that counts for a lot.

Back home in the UK I'm not aware of any town or city that has managed to create a free WiFi area.  Locally there are pockets of access - The Cloud is used in McDonalds and in Wetherspoons that I know of.  I have occasion to frequent both establishments now and then - one for coffee, the other for beer and curry (Wetherspoons' Thursday Curry night is a very popular draw that tests my liver every few weeks or so).  But outside of these places the access to WiFi is limited - the odd cafe here, patchy reception in some bookshop there, dedicated WiFi pushing a department store down your throat somewhere else.  But nothing comprehensive or consistent.  No ability to access the WiFi out in the street while sat on a bench taking in the architecture or deciding which stores to offer your patronage to.

Now I'm sure there are significant technological challenges with making WiFi free more generally, but as Alicanti has shown, it can be done.  I can see a model being developed where promotional advertising linked to the town or city could be used to offset the costs involved, but honestly the real drive has to be the economy.  Or the lack of an economy, to be blunt.

British towns and cities are really struggling to pull in tourists and shoppers right now.  There's a lot of belt tightening going on and no shortage of locations to not spend your cash in.  Although free WiFi is unlikely to convert any given town or city into the hottest location for shopping, my guess is that whichever ones strike first will reap the most benefit.  There's no shortage of smart phones and tablets, recession or no recession, and 3G is patchy in many locations, as well as being slow.  Being connected, having access in all areas, is fast becoming an aspiration for all users of these devices.  As Cloud based storage becomes more commonplace there will be an increased demand for access to those clouds wherever we are, whenever we want to.

So contact your local Chamber of Commerce, lobby your local Council, send your MP an email - if he or she doesn't do email, then you're probably wasting your time anyway - and let's see if we can get the UK towns and cities connected.  Let me know how you get on, too, because I'm off to Alicanti.  They've got free WiFi.

And it's warmer there!

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Why not take a look at my books and read up on my Biog here

Want to see what B L O'Feld is up to?  Take a look at his website here

Worried/Interested in the secretive world of DLFs?  Take a look at this website dedicated to DLFs here, if you dare!

The Virtual Library

I recently mentioned on  my blog that on holiday I loaned my wife my Kindle to use as a reading device (in lieu of her trusty iPad) while I used my new Google Nexus 7 for reading on.  I carried both devices plus a netbook in the ancillary pouch of my camera backpack as my carry on baggage - the compact size of both devices plus the PC meant I could carry all the tech gear on the flight.

Just before the holiday I downloaded a pile of books for my wife - our reading habits sometimes overlap, but  often we prefer to read different genres, just like any normal married couple, I guess.  It was this activity that made me think about the Amazon method of working, although it seems that Apple and probably all other digital content sellers share the method in some way.

If you've read my blog previously you'll probably recognise that I have a love/hate relationship with Amazon. One one hand I'm incredibly grateful Amazon made self publishing a reality.  Even if I hadn't had a trio of novels that I'd written when I got my Kindle, the whole eBook reading thing they opened up to me was a truly revealing road trip I'm enjoying enormously.  So much for the love part.

The hate part is probably too strong a word.  I realised very quickly that Amazon don't actually give a stuff about the books they upload - they insist on some low level formatting standards and do provide assistance in the creation of the books, but hang around Amazon long enough and you soon realise that they exist only to make money.  More than that, they don't care if your books sell or not - I guess most authors who upload to Amazon will pay to download a copy to their Kindle if only to confirm it works but more likely as a mini ego trip.  Been there, done that.  Smashwords, on the other hand, let you download your eBooks for free so you can check how it looks in the real world.  In fact, they encourage it.

Why would Amazon not care if they are all about making money?  Well, in reality, the storage of your book is trivial in cost terms and for every thousand eBooks that never sell a copy there's always going to be the odd Fifty Shades to compensate.  Plus, as Kindle ownership broadens, there's the impact on friends and family downloading books of their nearest and dearest out of loyalty.  By the way, unless the author sets a relatively high price for his or her book ($2.99 or higher) then Amazon hang on to 65% of your payment.  Compare that to the likes of Sony, Apple, B&N etc who typically pass 60% of the purchase price back to the author, regardless of the price.  If you really want the author to benefit from your purchase (and don't forget that in the self publication world, it is the author who will have done virtually all of the work or would have paid someone themselves) then consider buying from Smashwords, who pass 85% to the author.

But this is all an aside, really.  Because one thing that Amazon do really well (and yes, I do know other eBook sellers do this too) is that they allow you to have multiple devices linked to your account.  For that you need one email address and one credit card.  Actually, they'll take any number of credit cards to be fair, it's money after all.  But one unique email address. I personally have two Kindles lodged to my account (because we sent one back), an android phone, my Nexus and two laptops.  I can select which books to download to each device so the list I see is different on each device. I bet if you polled a number of couples with Amazon accounts you'll find that they have their own personal accounts lodged with Amazon, and that seems a very natural thing to do.  Until you look around your own home.

Most of us still have legacy bookshelves.  We'll have them for years, long after we've bought our last print book, probably until we remodel the rooms they're stacked up in.  And I guess that's what Amazon want.

What hit me on the holiday is that in the apartment we stayed in, an apartment owned by friends, is that they had left bookshelves of books for visitors to read.  Hard to do with Amazon's business model.  But here's an alternative method.  It probably isn't of use to anyone who has been sucked into Amazon's Kindle model, unless anyone out there knows how to use multiple accounts on Amazon.  But it may be worth thinking about by those people about to dip their toes in the Amazon eBook pool.

Instead of linking to your existing Amazon account, which is the most logical, sensible thing to most of us, but instead create a new account, using an email account that is shared by your family and using a credit or debit card that isn't currently used by Amazon. Obviously there needs to be a personal evaluation of the integrity of the people you share this information with (so the kids are out) and it almost certainly breaches Amazon's policies (which I don't care about) and probably the credit/debit card provider's policies (which I care about if I get caught/burned).  An alternative is to buy Amazon gift vouchers and lodge them with this family account - no abuse of the shared credit card there.  What you end up with is a family bookshelf, one you can share in the same way you can share print books with your family.  Like a bookshelf, really.

It may seem to be a little convoluted way to buy and read books, but probably is the way forward until we all have cloud spaces all the family can access where we can upload eBooks to, which is the place I suspect we'll be at sooner than we realise.

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Why not take a look at my books and read up on my Biog here

Want to see what B L O'Feld is up to?  Take a look at his website here

Worried/Interested in the secretive world of DLFs?  Take a look at this website dedicated to DLFs here, if you dare!