Hasta La Gadget!

It’s the iPhone’s five-year anniversary, and I’m proud to say I was there from the start. In fact, I was number eight in the line outside the New York Cube Apple Store, camping out for nearly five days to be one of the first to get my hands on the new smartphone. Spending that time wasn’t just about recording history from the front line, but also taking part in an historical event. The iPhone has long been treated as a watershed moment in smartphones, and it’s fair to say that in its shadow just about all of the devices that came before it fell well short in more than a few ways. I knew, after handling a whole lot of smartphones prior to the iPhone, that this one device would change the entire mobile industry for the better.

As far as I know, that excitable queue was the first of its kind, and possibly the largest “iCamp” for any single device. It certainly changed the way gadget anticipation was perceived in the industry. Apple always gets credit for the quality of its hardware and design, and the ease of use of its software, but the company’s strategy with the iPhone has arguably been the most significant diversion from the industry status-quo.

One device in the line-up; one device per year. “One size fits all” in some ways, but – with the advent of the App Store – a near-infinite number of ways to personalize your iPhone. Developers, carriers and consumers flocked to it, more so when the iPhone spawned the iPad and spread its dominance to the tablet market.

The iPhone hasn’t had it easy, though, and Apple has fought hard to maintain its ease of use amid advancing features, to streamline its industrial design, and to variously lead and react to the evolutions of the mobile marketplace. Along the way more than 315 million iOS devices sold of which nearly 220m iPhones of five generations have been sold worldwide.

Through the years, we’ve continued to track and report on the iPhone as well as iOS, as they’ve matured into a platform that has forced competitors like Microsoft, RIM and Nokia into reinventing their businesses. For RIM, it’s obvious that they’re in trouble, while five years on Microsoft is still trying to get Windows for phones into the mainstream. Think for a moment about Palm: gone. Nokia, once the dominant force: given up on Symbian and thrown in, with no small degree of desperation, with Microsoft.

In the end, though, it doesn’t so much matter whether you’re a fan of the iPhone or of another platform. Strong competition and innovation in the mobile space – new features, refining those we have to make them more flexible and more usable, and delivering advanced technology in a way that makes it approachable and unintimidating – is something that benefits everybody with a mobile device. The smartphone segment five years ago was naive and lacked direction; iPhone shook that complacency to its core, and we’re still seeing the repercussions today.

Now iOS 6 is nearly upon us, and the rumors around the iPhone 5 are coming thick and fast. It’s bound to be contentious and, if I were a betting man, I’d put money on it being a sales success too. Each year Apple manages to do something which has the industry smacking its head, wondering why it didn’t collectively spot that possibility. For 2012, the talk is of bringing mobile payments to the mainstream, and a deepening of Siri’s potential as the voice-control system steps up to take equal place next to the touchscreen paradigm Apple revolutionized.

Knowing what I know now, would I have camped out for nearly a week just to be among the first to get my hands on the iPhone? Hell yes, and I wouldn’t even think twice about it. Happy anniversary iPhone; here’s to the next five years. http://slashgear.com/apple/

Happy anniversary iPhone; here’s to the next five years! is written by Vincent Nguyen & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Microsoft has so alienated Windows RT tablet manufacturers with its own-brand Surface that OEMs are abandoning the platform, insiders claim, with HP leading the way in ditching its roadmap. The PC company had intended to launch a number of Qualcomm-powered Windows RT models, it’s said, but according to SemiAccurate‘s sources HP dropped its plans after Microsoft’s handling of Surface and OS licensing.

Rumors that Microsoft’s Surface agenda was fueled by a general sense of disappointment over what it saw OEMs developing broke earlier this week, with analyst’s sources claiming that apathy had been the company’s motivation to go it alone. “If Microsoft had seen compelling enough plans from [PC makers],” Moor Insights & Strategy’s Patrick Moor said, after talks with Windows RT OEMs, ”they wouldn’t have needed to do this.”

However, this new batch of rumors suggests that rather than just prepare Surface as a “Plan B” of sorts, Microsoft actively took what it knew of each OEM’s Windows RT tablet – and what flaws in each it had identified – and used that knowledge to prepare its own range. Meanwhile, Microsoft also supposedly liberated its own designers and engineers from having to abide by the same restrictions that third-party OEMs were required to operate under.

Surface also stands a chance of being priced more competitively than rival Windows RT tablets, because Microsoft supposedly will not be paying the roughly $90-per-unit licensing fee. In short, a decision that was seemingly intended to motivate OEMs into being more imaginative with their Windows hardware could well have backfired spectacularly.

HP is not the last to jump ship, it’s said. Although no other specific names are mentioned, the sources apparently claim that “just about every OEM out there is scrapping one or more [Windows RT] designs, with most renewing Android efforts with every resource at their disposal.”

Update: HP confirms the decision; more here.

HP reportedly first to ditch Windows RT tablet plans over Microsoft’s Surface is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Google’s Nexus 7 didn’t come as a great surprise when it launched at IO 2012 yesterday, but the $199 price tag still raised some eyebrows in astonishment. At under half the price of a new iPad, it’s competitive – though very different – to Apple’s slate, but it also undercuts a fair number of other Android tablets too. You can’t even accuse Google of milking international buyers to make up the difference, as prices outside of the US are, surprisingly, very reasonable too. The Nexus 7 will sell from £159 in the UK, for instance, versus expectations of around £250. So, how has Google (and hardware partner ASUS) managed to make the Nexus 7 so cheap?

It doesn’t hurt to have relatively mundane hardware. Tegra 3 is no longer a brand new chipset, with the early-adopter tax likely rubbed off, and in fact Google is using the even cheaper KAI version announced earlier this year. That means the 1GB of memory can be the cheaper DDR3L sort commonly used in PCs; meanwhile the 8GB or 16GB of internal storage is unlikely to add greatly to the bill-of-materials. The display is, at 1280 x 800 resolution, better than the 1024 x 600 panel we’ve seen on other cheap slates like RIM’s heavily-discounted BlackBerry PlayBook, but then nor is it an expensive Super AMOLED as on, say, some of Samsung’s Galaxy Tab models.

The rest of the tech is tablet-by-numbers, with only NFC a mild stand-out (and an inexpensive one at that). The camera – front only, as the Nexus 7 does without the rear shooter – is a mere 1.2-megapixels, fine for Google+ Hangouts but not something you’d want to capture precious memories with. Finally, the case is simple molded plastic and rubber, not metal as on the iPad.

“Google’s intentions with Nexus 7 are very different from every other Android OEM”

Meanwhile, unlike every other Android OEM, Google’s intentions with the Nexus 7 are very different from the usual “make some money” approach. The race to the bottom of the Android tablet market has been tempered, a little, by each manufacturer’s hope to secure at least some margins on each unit they sell. After all, they make their money on hardware.

Google, though, is seeing Nexus 7 as a means to an end, not the end-product itself. As Android chief Andy Rubin said at Google IO yesterday, the missing piece in tablets running the platform to-date has been the software ecosystem: there were simply not enough compelling apps to make slates look competitive against the iPad.

Nexus 7 Android 4.1 Jelly Bean hands-on:

The Nexus 7, then, is a device to spur interest, adoption and hard work from Android developers. In that way it’s a slightly different proposition from the Nexus phones we’ve seen so far: they were intended as guiding points to the mobile handset industry, resetting specification goalposts that had begun to atrophy amid OEM apathy. The tablet, then, can be cheap because it doesn’t need to be anything more, and Google can opt for relatively mainstream hardware.

That in doing so it also mounts a challenge to Android upstart Amazon – which has been using a similar gateway-hardware strategy with the Kindle Fire, selling a cheap tablet and relying on ebook and media sales to deliver a longer-term revenue stream – is a pleasant bonus, especially since the retailer worked so hard to strip out Google’s own store options in the Fire and replace them with its own.

Google is doing everything it can to get users to start spending money in the Play Store. Free app downloads are well and good, but Apple continues to crow about the amount iOS users spend on paid apps and in-app purchases, and Google would like a share of that market too. Receiving $25 of free Play credit promised for all Nexus 7 buyers is, unsurprisingly, contingent on having “a valid form of payment” in your Google Wallet account. Google is also taking a page out of Amazon’s book with the Kindle, shipping the Nexus 7 automatically paired to users’ accounts – presumably with the same payment information as used to buy the tablet itself – so that it can be used to buy apps out of the box.

It remains to be seen whether Nexus 7 owners can be trained to spend money on software by a little free credit, but if interest in the tablet by the developers at Google IO is anything to go by, a $199 price point might be enough to persuade them to branch out into tablet app development. There’s more on the Nexus 7 in our review.

How is the Nexus 7 so cheap? is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Google has demonstrated a Google+ Hangout beamed from Project Glass, with company co-founder Sergey Brin interrupting Vic Gundotra’s keynote presentation to share live footage from skydivers overhead IO. “This is one of the things we’ve been experimenting with Glass, the ability to really share” Brin said, “we’ve shown photos but this is something we haven’t tried” as the two Glass-sporting skydivers leapt from a blimp flying above San Francisco.

“They’ve got to get to the right place so that they can hit the roof” Brin pointed out, as the amassed developers waited to see the skydivers jump from the blimp. The parachutes opened and the divers landed directly onto the roof of the Moscone Center.

“It’s a pretty big roof, actually” Brin said, “which is good for their landing.” The divers we met by a number of stunt bikers, who then proceeded to jump ramps between the roof levels – all wearing Project Glass – and then pass information to another person who promptly abseiled down the side of the Center.

The streamed video came directly through Google+’s Hangouts feature, which allows multiple parties to collaborate on a video call. Technical details – such as which mobile network was being used – wasn’t shared, but this is definitely one of the best stunts we’ve ever seen from a keynote.

Google Project Glass goes skydiving at IO in best demo stunt yet is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Android 4.1 Jelly Bean has introduced a Siri-battling voice feature, a super-speed recognition tool that produces results in a streamlined infographic-style UI. The new GOogle voice search system can recognize naturally spoken queries, pulling up Wikipedia entries, Google Image Search results and other data. Best of all, it looks considerably faster than rival systems.

In contrast to Siri and Samsung’s S-Voice on the Galaxy S III, the Jelly Bean voice search delivered its results almost instantaneously. Those results are presented in a clean new UI, picking out the key results and particularly well suited to navigating in those times you’re walking around and can’t poke at tiny on-screen graphics.

The voice search can even handle somewhat unusual requests. “Show me pictures of pygmy marmosets” it was asked during the demonstration, swiftly bringing up a gallery of shots that could then be tapped into and swiped through.

Jelly Bean Google Voice Search will be accompanied by the new Google now system, a contextual search implementation.

Jelly Bean Google Voice Search challenges Siri is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.