So I plugged my iPhone in to my PC and the insufferable iTunes application opened up. I thought that I might be able to drag some music from my collection right onto the phone icon in iTunes and hey presto – new music. It was never going to happen.

It seems that the iPhone is so amazingly clever that you can’t do that. No, Apple insist that I wipe everything off the phone and fully synchronise with this PC. How long is that gonna take? I only had a few minutes.

I initially loaded the music onto the iPhone from my media centre PC (which seems logical right?) but today I was in the office using my office PC. I have 4 PCs that I might use for this task too. Just load some files on right? Nup.

You see because I have six  different PCs that I might use for this task (too many for Apple to deal with by a factor of five – oh but they will actually let you “authorise” five of them). I would have to have all six (actually five, the sixth one Apple won’t allow me to have) loaded up with exactly the same songs. That means converting my entire CD collection from wma format to Apple’s proprietary control system on six (five) different PCs. Yeah right…

But that is the only way Apple will allow me to add to my iPhone music. So now I have this useless thing that won’t allow me to add music without wiping everything off first and waiting an hour for the privilege of starting again. FFS Apple must hate me! Why do they insist on treating me with such disdain and contempt?

I say that because there is simply no valid technical reason that Apple should not allow you to drop mp3 and wma files straight onto the iPhone to play (even through iTunes). So there are only two choices left. Either:

1. Apple can’t develop decent software
2. Apple insist on complicating things to the point that consumers will lose all will power, give up and buy everything through iTunes.

I’m inclined to think that it’s number 2, and that’s exactly the reason that I bought an iRiver instead of an iPod for my car in the first place.

I avoid buying music from iTunes like the plague. Why would I when I can download DRM free mp3 files from Bigpond for less without having to navigate using that cesspool of a program called iTunes?

So buyer beware: Whilst iPhone was once the best thing since sliced bread, don’t expect that it is a phone and an mp3 player. It is not an mp3 player, just a portal to the Apple iTunes revenue farm. Put your credit card away and don’t give it to them.

The app store kept me interested for a little while, but I can seriously say that I don’t rely on any of them. In fact apart from the facebook app, I wouldn’t use any of the 150 apps that I have downloaded on a weekly basis. I’ve even been fully rehabilitated from the games.

I am seriously regretting the purchase of this iPhone. I had a play with the HTC Android phone and the HTC Sense with WinMo on it at my customers office yesterday. The HTC sense is a very nice piece of kit that runs fast and smooth. It’s about friggin time that a Windows Mobile device offered a decent experience, and the HTC sense delivers. Bring on WinMo7 too.

The Windows Mobile move to integrate social media with email and contact management is just awesome. Even the HTC sense makes the Apple iPhone app concept look like kindergarten.

Sorry Apple, I’m over it. I want to load my music on my phone! As soon as I can I’m outta here! I would take a HTC sense of this any day. Making the switch back to PC.

According to the wired report on the now famous “Town Hall” meeting (seems a bit religious doesn’t it – for freak’ sake they make computers), Steve says about Adobe,

They are lazy, Jobs says. They have all this potential to do interesting things but they just refuse to do it. They don’t do anything with the approaches that Apple is taking, like Carbon. Apple does not support Flash because it is so buggy, he says. Whenever a Mac crashes more often than not it’s because of Flash. No one will be using Flash, he says. The world is moving to HTML5. – Wired Article

Apparently he’s never seen the smoking pile of garbage that is iTunes. In terms of designing to usability standards it is on a par with if not worse than Adobe’s lazy products like Acrobat Reader. It is slower than a snail, unbelievably irritating, and incredibly hard to use. Did they design this program to convey the complete disdain that they hold you in as a customer.

What about Quicktime? What a piece of rubbish! It does not conform to any Windows usability standards… and you have to wonder, was it designed with that in mind? – To make windows seem bad? I flat out refuse to install it, and thankfully more and more the format is irrelevant anyway. Kudos to flash!!! I can think of once or twice in the last 12 months that I’ve visited a site that needed their buggy piece of rubbish video player.

All I’m saying here is that while Steve’s flamboyant rant had the Apple underlings in rapture, it was a ruse.

Apple make money from iTunes and the App Store. If they gave it away for free by letting flash roam around on the iPhone and iPad unguarded there would be no profit and no business.

It has nothing to do with how rubbish Adobe products are, and Macs crash more frequently than windows because they are Macs… don’t go blaming flash (which is actually one of the more reliable Adobe products, probably thanks to its Macromedia roots).

So cut the bullshit Steve! Stop throwing stones because that Apple store you got is one freakin’ huge glass house!

But something that he said in a comment on one of his articles yesterday got me thinking…

Just about the only thing I don’t like about the iPad is the lack of real inking, but this isn’t something that appeals to the masses. – Sumocat, Gottabemobile.com comments

Last night I was out at a business lounge in the Melbourne Airport Hilton with a couple of Motion Computing VPs and Sumocat’s comment came to mind… As I looked across the room I noticed business people all over the place having informal meetings and taking notes on pen and paper.

Perhaps Sumocat’s comment was referring to the fact that people don’t use pen and paper so much while vegetating on the couch (or toilet) – which is of course the intended use case for an Apple ipad. And he’d be right about that… Touch will do just fine.

However, I thought how many people work in an office, attend meetings all day long and take notes? Tablet PCs in their current form are unbelievably ideal for this use case, and I’d have to say that there are masses.

At home, at work, in the car (as a passenger or stopped of course!), at church, at the shops, at the post office… there are so many places that you scribble notes on paper. Surely everyone does that?

Touch in any form will simply not cut it to replace the ballpoint pen, but a proper windows Tablet PC with an active digitizer can! If we could only get them into a consumer format and priced like an Apple iPad.

I think now that Apple will never adopt the pen. I doubt that Google will either when they release a couple Tablet PCs shortly. C’mon Microsoft, it’s time to act on Courier – put your cards on the table(t)!

I filmed this video before the release of Windows 7 showing it alongside another F5 with Windows Vista on it.

I wanted to show off the improvements for tablet PC users in windows 7 as well as the Motion F5 hardware… I think that I’ve certainly succeeded in both! This video itself will account for 100,000 views in a couple of days.

The thing that strikes me is that there are so many people who still don’t even know about Windows Tablet PCs, even though they have been around for 10 years in their current form (20 years really on Windows).

Sure 200,000 views is nothing compared to the dizziness that surrounds an Apple product launch, but I’m still proud of what we have achieved so far here down under… All part of a days work for me to get the message out about real, useful tablet PCs that will make your job quicker and easier – not just Apple richer. Swipe!

When commentators said that the lack of Tablet PC sales means that people don’t like the pen, maybe Apple listened. But most of those folks that pass comment on Tablet PCs haven’t seriously used one either…

It’s not true that people don’t like the pen. They might not like the idea of it, but for the most part they’ve never tried it, so they don’t really know that they don’t like it. It’s an experience that they have never been able to have, so they really don’t know how useful it is. The disappointing thing is that thanks to Apple, they may never know.

Windows Tablets are still far from perfect, but due to the lack of a digitiser they are still far more useful than the iPad appears to be.

To give you an example, I spent the weekend in a conference. I took notes through the entire full day session on a Motion Computing C5 tablet on one battery. That included scribbled notes, mind maps, sketches, drawings and audio. Windows indexed all of my handwritten content in the background so that I can search through it… which I often do.

Another example, when a customer calls on the phone, I have my Tablet PC open with Microsoft OneNote and our enquiry form template. I fill in the details we discuss without distracting the person on the other end from the conversation with the noise of frantic key tapping. It’s much faster to note take this way than on the keyboard anyway.

When I go to a meeting with a customer, I always take notes and fill in the answers to my questions so that my sales process does not rely on tatty notebooks, sticky notes and lost paper.

I often take screen shots of things like web pages, pictures, documents and videos, then scribble on them and email them off using the Microsoft Snipping Tool.

I never print letters of faxes that I have to sign. I just sign on the screen and email them straight back using Bluebeam or Word.

Digital note taking, sketching and drawing is all impractical on a device like the iPhone or iPad. There are no tools to do it with… Sure, you could use the brushes application shown at the iPad launch to draw with your finger… But that’s a bit like drawing with a blunt stick. Practically useless when compared to using a Tablet PC with a Wacom active digitiser – Which is both proximity and pressure sensitive, while your touch screen is neither.

No, there are only 2 things that have held Windows based Tablet PCs back from going where Apple is about to go (and I’m not talking about UMPCs here).

1. Price – iPad is cheap in comparison
2. Availability – iPad will be available to get your hands on in most places.

Windows Tablets did not take a huge hit today, because Apple decided to play it safe. Did Apple fall into the old corporate trap of too many focus groups, too many committees, too many meetings, too many voices of fear in the back of their heads? They played it safe and just supersized an existing product… I don’t think that’s going to fly.

This is not the mobile phone scenario where windows mobile is being seriously spanked by the iPhone. Phones are pretty much a closed system, whereas Windows Tablets leverage the 92% of computers in the world that run Windows, not to mention the fact that they can connect to and access practically any server be that Windows, *nix or Mac.

That said, if Microsoft et al don’t act – and be seen to act – it may be only a matter of time until history is rewritten by Apple.

Remember the first iPhone? With no 3G, no video, no app store? Apple won’t stand still with a seriously deficient product like this until it becomes a seriously useful product like the iPhone 3Gs.

But I had hoped for something game changing. I had hoped that Apple would bring something new to the slate form factor with some radical new input method like mind control or eye tracking… Something that was just out there!

Coming down off of the high of finally meeting the unicorn (Apple Tablet has been a myth for 5 years now), I am starting to feel a little disappointed.

One of the biggest benefits of having a tablet is input. Taking notes, drawing, handwriting recognition. Apple iPad has none of that. It even appears to have kept the same virtual keyboard as the iPhone – which is good enough for a 3 inch screen, but hardly ideal for a 10” one.

On the iPhone, input is frustrated by constant switching form letters to numbers to symbols and it appears that Apple haven’t really even addressed this with their legendary innovation… Nothing.

In the end, it appears that we’ll have to wait for MS and partners to come back with a decently priced super mobile digitizer tablet that handles handwriting recognition, sketching and note taking. At the end of the day they already have all that right now, but just not at the right price!

So it turns out that the Apple iPad is a consumption device for consumers. Disappointing.

I want to be the very first author to announce a new project for Apple’s tablet.

He adds,

Steve Jobs will probably never speak to me again for announcing before his launch. That’s okay, he never speaks to me anyway.

It’s not really news, but it’s still interesting… As is the Vook Video / Book reading platform that is referred to in the post.

Read it here: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2010/01/jumping-the-gun.html

My verdict: Super impressed!

The eInk screen is very comfortable to read, although I didn’t get a chance to use it in the sun (as it rained in QLD pretty much the whole time).

What I like about the Kindle 2:

• Super thin
• Very light – easy to hold for long periods of time
• Easy to read
• Long battery life…

What I don’t like about the Kindle 2:

• Still very limited selection of titles in Australia. It’s getting better, but still not good enough
• Scrolling control / jog dial – could take a lesson from the old HP TC1100 jog dial
• Lack of touch input
• Device is locked in Apple style…

Pros outweigh the cons as far as I’m concerned. The Kindle 2 will do much to attract people to e-reading.

What I’m really excited about is the prospect of using a Tablet PC or UMPC that fills this form factor. No, I don’t want it to run some dumbed down mobile phone OS like Google Chrome or Windows Mobile either… I want full Windows on it. I want it to replace my desktop like my Motion J3400 does… Can’t wait for that – It’s only a matter of time.

Into Personal Computing History…

In its current form, the PC mouse is now 42 years old, but it is really only 25 years since it went mainstream with the Apple Macintosh – 1984… Here’s what a respected PC journalist had to say about that:

"The nature of the personal computer is simply not fully understood by companies like Apple (or anyone else for that matter). Apple makes the arrogant assumption of thinking that it knows what you want and need. It, unfortunately, leaves the “why” out of the equation – as in “why would I want this?” The Macintosh uses an experimental pointing device called a ‘mouse’. There is no evidence that people want to use these things. I dont want one of these new fangled devices."

John C. Dvorak – Commenting on the mouse that came with the Apple Macintosh, San Francisco Examiner, 19 February 1984

That pretty much sums up the way the tech journos  write about Tablets and UMPCs today…

Like the switch from keyboard to the mouse, most people will initially resist the change… I still know people who hate the mouse so much that they continue to operate completely without one.

That said, even I was still using PCs without a mouse well into the 90’s (we had PCs at home, not Macs). Nowadays, it would be practically impossible to work without a mouse (barring touch and pen input of course!).

I believe that the adoption of Touch and tablet technology is similar. Digital pen technology has been around in a commercial form for 20 years now, but it really hit the mainstream in 2001 (2006 for UMPC). So it’s been 9 years and things are getting exciting for a couple of reasons:

1. Better hardware – outdoor / indoor screens, capacitive touch, low power processors, mobile broadband access.
2. Better software – Windows 7, multi-touch, Android, better handwriting recognition and ink enabled apps like Microsoft Office.

So the Tablet will continue to gain ground as  an accepted mainstream form of computing.

However, it won’t play out exactly the same. That’s because tablets are most useful in mobile scenarios, whereas the mouse could be used practically on a desktop. Practical Tablet PC use also has much higher software and processing requirements – like handwriting recognition and virtual keyboard input.

That means that unlike the mouse which is now attached to practically every PC, tablets will probably never gain that sort of presence. Additionally, they will take longer to gain mainstream acceptance.

Apple will have a good crack at it this year… like they did with the mouse, with the release of some sort of Tablet. But like the much like the mouse, they probably won’t be able to change the market overnight.

Also, if Apple do adopt touch input on a PC – as the mouse has taught us – it does not mean that Apple will ultimately own the market.

If you’re doing your own video production, you should subscribe to Cam the Cameraman’s YouTube channel here:

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