MacWorld report: iZap, Apple MacBook Air, iPhone and AppleTV

The picture shows an electric car called the Zap, which someone appears to have decided that it needed a few upgrades to become the iZap. Jet motor, rotor blades and iPod interfaces....

I tracked the MacWorld keynote via the Macrumors site on my iPhone this morning. It worked very well, with updates being pushed every few minutes. Over-all there was some good stuff released, but I think expectations were higher.

Later in the afternoon I dropped in on MacWorld for an hour or so, which was plenty of time to check out the interesting stuff.

The MacBook Air is another hit product, destined to become a geek status symbol. It looks good, feels good to use, and has the option of a solid state disk. I had some hands-on time, and I want one.... They are expensive, but the format is very well designed, and I expect it will come down in price and get new options over the coming years. To make the case strong enough despite being thin, there are more curves in the case (curved metal is much stronger than flat sheet) and it has no large holes in it. So there is no removable battery pack, and each key has its own small hole in the casing. It actually looks more mechanically robust than my MacBook pro.

I hoped to find some interesting third party iPhone applications but didn't see anything worth mentioning. I played with a demo iPhone with 1.1.3, it had a bunch of safari based games bookmarked on the second page of icons. Once I got home I upgraded my iPhone, its running fine and the new features work well. They were well leaked a few weeks ago, so there is nothing new to report. The iPod touch picked up the missing set of applications as I expected, but Apple want $20 for the privilege. This is the first example of optional applications, and charging for applications, and I expect the mechanism will get well tested by the Touch then it will be introduced for the iPhone and third party applications.

I have had an AppleTV for six months or so, and the upgraded software looks much better. I don't think I will be renting or buying many movies, but the user interface is better, and the ability to browse both audio and video based podcasts could be interesting. I mostly use my AppleTV for YouTube, playing music and sharing photo albums. One new feature is the ability to pull up photo albums over the Internet from the .mac galleries generated by iPhoto. I've been using .mac for years, and the latest (Leopard) version of iPhoto galleries is very slick and well integrated.

Apple also introduced Time Capsule, which is a network backup server combining a 500GB or 1TB of disk with an Airport. The hardware was not on show as far as I could tell, and it looks similar to the AppleTV package, but with more Ethernet ports and no video port. Personally, I don't want two separate products in this space, I want an AppleTV that operates as a Time Capsule and Airport. I want to backup my laptop and be able to play the music and video directly from the backup copy.

I'm disappointed that there was no new iPhone hardware or Leopard upgrade, and no business oriented iPhone software. I guess that's going to be featured in the next show....

Thoughts on iPhone 1.1.3, Macworld, 3G and business users

Reports indicate the the 1.1.3 update is likely to ship before MacWorld in January, it includes an update to Google Maps that adds the same location feature as recently shipped on other non-GPS platforms (basically locating to the nearest cell-tower). It also provides mechanisms to select and arrange the applications installed on the iPhone. This is a key new feature, since the iPhone has been updated by Apple as a monolithic all-or-nothing set of applications so far. It greatly reduces the need to hack into the iPhone to customize it.

The updates themselves are fairly small, and to me it makes sense to get them installed before MacWorld. We will then see announcements at MacWorld of a set of optional applications that users can pick and choose to install on their iPhones. This could include the ability to add the Mail application and other "missing" iPhone apps to the iPod Touch. It could include brand new applications (I'm going to nominate iChat as a candidate yet again...). The public announcement of the SDK is due at MacWorld, with shipping in February, which will open up anyone to build officially sanctioned applications. However key vendors will have been testing the SDK over the last few months so I expect a bunch of third party applications to be announced or ready to ship at MacWorld.

The other leaks and rumors indicate that there is likely to be a second generation iPhone with 3G support shipping in the spring, and announced at MacWorld. This would also support launching the iPhone in Asian markets like Japan, where there is no GSM support.

I also expect that Apple will start to make moves towards business use of the iPhone, with some tools and upgrades provided by Apple, and others by key third parties.

I currently carry a Verizon Blackberry 8703e for work use, and my iPhone for personal use and iPod functionality. In order to use the iPhone as my work phone I need a few key features.

• Firewall support - the BB is inside the corporate firewall, the iPhone can't access it. We use Juniper Network Connect which is a Java based VPN solution on MacOS/XP.
• WiFi support - we use LEAP to login to WiFi at work, need support for LEAP on iPhone, it works fine on my MacOS X laptop, should be a simple feature to add.
• Exchange support - I can't use the IMAP workaround due to firewall issues, properly integrated Exchange email and calendar support is what everyone is asking for.
• Ideally RIM will port the Blackberry application suite to the iPhone, like they did for the Treo...

The two other biggest missing features are Flash and Java support. I know there are lots of issues with CPU/memory/battery life. Perhaps the next generation iPhone will be based on a more advanced ARM CPU (e.g. the ARM Cortex based Qualcomm Scorpion) with more performance and more memory so it can run Flash and Java apps alongside the existing apps?

We'll find out in a few weeks...

Happy new year.

iPhone and Treo at MacWorld

I went to MacWorld to check out the Apple iPhone. I think that it is even more impressive in person than I was expecting. Its smaller and much thinner than I imagined from looking at pictures, and watching the live on-stage demos made it clear just how much of a step forward in usability this is for a mobile device.
I took the picture above using my Treo650 of someone else taking a picture with a Treo650, so the size can easily be compared. I was embarrased to get the Treo out anywhere near the iPhone, it just felt wrong. The overall width and length of the device is similar, but the Treo is about twice as thick. I tried to take a picture edge-ways to show how thin the iPhone is, but the Treo camera is a crappy low resolution one and the iPhone is so thin it effectively disappeared in the photo.