Paul Howland's Profile

Pointless. If someone wants an iPad with a keyboard they can easily buy one of the several iPad cases featuring a built-in bluetooth keyboard, or get a separate keyboard. Extra screen size alone would not merit this - far more likely is a nextgen iPad with "retina" display that simply ups the resolution of the existing size.

Spot on. The point is, Ping is nothing about social networking, it's all about an attempt to increase sales in the iTunes store by allowing friends to share tracks they've just bought. It's another form of advertising, an area Apple has woken up to with iAds. Once you realise that, the limitations make perfect sense.

As a new iPad owner I can say that Flipboard is absolutely amazing - a superb application. Beautifully done - a must have. I'm amazed it's free.

I agree few people are talking face-to-face on their computers using iChatAV - but that's a very Apple-centric view of the world. The fact is, millions of people are talking face-to-face on their computers using Skype. Why Skype and not iChatAV? SImply because it has market momentum and "just works" on any platform. Although iChatAV is compatible with AIM, so few people use AIM (at least in Europe) that this is irrelevant and so iChatAV only allows you to chat with the small percentage of Apple users that keep iChatAV running in the background. In other words, a small percentage of a small percentage of the computer users in the world. FaceTime is destined to suffer the same fate for the same reasons, *unless* all other vendors adopt the same open standards and so it becomes a guaranteed way of talking to anyone with a mobile phone. As soon as communication systems become unreliable (either technically or due to limited adoption) people will swap to something else.

Your argument is superficially attractive, but ultimately incorrect I believe. To apply a political analogy, Apple is following the communist approach, where Big Brother knows what's best for the application developer and user. The alternative is the capitalist Free Market approach, where the consumer decides what applications are worth keeping and which are not. Ultimately if the "vanilla" Flash-based applications are bad and the Objective-C/Cocoa applications are excellent, the market will reflect that and people will vote with their wallets. Absolutely no need for Apple to dictate. That said, if someone is able to write a good application using some intermediate standard, good luck to them! Indeed, by Apple restricting the developers to using only Apple tools, Apple is ultimately limiting competition in the developer tool space and preventing others from perhaps developing better development solutions. Whether Adobe or someone else is in a position to develop better tools is highly debatable, but my main point is that the market should decide, not Apple. Indeed the biggest obstacle to this at present is the organizational mess known as the App Store (more like an App yard sale) - it may have 100000 applications, but how on earth do you find the one you want, and identify the better applications? If Apple focused their efforts on providing a better interface to the app store then the rest would take care of itself - and they'd probably sell more applications to boot.

Not sure I agree with you there Khürt Williams, nor like your characterization of me as a geek. Having a built-in webcam is hardly a luxury item these days for a mobile computing device. In fact, I don't think I've seen a laptop or netbook without one in recent years. It's integral to mobile computing. I take your point that there will always be those who won't buy one until some obscure feature is added, but a webcam for video chat hardly falls into that category. Furthermore, I'm happy to go on record as predicting that iPad v2 will feature a webcam, include a mobile version of iChat that is marketed as the most significant innovation since the telephone and that Apple fans throughout the blogosphere will instantly forget how unimportant the webcam is and simultaneously be ready to rave about how innovative Apple was to include one. I love Apple products, but do find it very tiresome how so many fans are unable to think outside of the box Steve Jobs last gave them.

UrbanBard - yes, we'll see. But I doubt any of them will be fundamentally due to the shift to 64-bits. Having used a 64-bit UNIX over ten years ago, I can assure you there will be no revolutionary change. Just as we have seen little revolutionary change so far as Mac OS has already largely migrated to 64-bit. I'm curious, what is it that you think you can do with 64-bits that you can't already do with 32-bits - other than address more memory or use longer registers? One example of a revolutionary change would be interesting.