Reilly2040's Blog

Well, everyone else is talking about it, so I thought I’d copy and paste (seems appropriate ) a forum post I made elsewhere and tweak it a bit.

In short, confirmed new features include, 3.2Megapixel camera, cut/copy/paste, compass, some “find my phone” Mobile Me thingy, MMS, video recording and a bunch of other stuff I can’t remember.

So, reactions?  Well, I don’t think it was an exciting new release by any stretch of the imagination, but I think its an important one, in that a lot of this functionality fills in critical (and in some cases embarrassing) gaps in the iPhone.  They’ve been coasting without things like MMS and video capture for ages when these are standard features in every other phone and have been for years.

From a smartphone point of view, no copy & paste has always been bad as well, but the iPhone still lacks multi-tasking, which to me is going to be a brick wall they’ll hit soon if they truely want to capture the Smartphone market.  I’ve owned my Blackberry for about 6 months now, and I’m always switching between apps.  For example, I’ll be looking at some tweets when I get a text, so I’ll switch to my messages, reply to the text, then flick back to my twitter client. 

Similarly with copy and paste. Multi-tasking makes copy and paste a lot more relevant as I’ll be reading something, find it interesting, copy the URL/text, switch to email or twitter, paste it in, send and then switch back to the original app I was looking at.

For me though, despite this new upgrade, I’m still not interested. As I say, I’m used to having multi-tasking now, and the big killer is still the touchscreen keyboard for me. I use my iPod Touch for twitter and the odd email, and I’m definitely a lot faster and more comfortable typing on my Bold’s physical keyboard. If you’re not a big typer though, then its less of an issue.   There’s no doubt in my mind that the iPhone’s a great device.  But it still doesn’t quite tick all the boxes for me personally in terms of being a communication device.

Meanwhile, on Twitter, there’s a huge fallout over O2′s suggestion that existing iPhone customers will have to wait till their contract is up before they upgrade (or pay an early upgrade fee).   Of course, this is completely standard practice for every mobile network I’ve ever been with, and I always except it as read whenever I sign on the dotted line (and thus I tend to make sure I’m going to like whatever phone I’m getting).  

However the iPhone customers seem to think they’re a special case.  Does this highlight the gadget versus phone mentality that the iPhone fosters?  Or does it indicate that a large portion of iPhone customers (or at least, those complaining) were Pay-as-you-go customers unused to what mobile contract terms actually meant when it came to upgrading?

Here’s a fairly good blog post I read on the matter: Why #O2Fail is really ‘iPhone customer Fail’

Last night, I was browsing through the App Store, and I noticed something really interesting. Namely Star Trek Countdown 1-4.

Star Trek Countdown is the official movie prequel series, released by IDW, and what a company called (I think) IVerse Media have done, is port them into an iPhone/iPod Touch friendly format.

This is interesting for a couple of reasons. Number one, these comics were really hard to get here. I think I saw issue 2 once, and that was it. Making them available in this way means everyone can get a copy. Secondly however, its interesting because they were only 59p each. That’s a heck of a good price compared to the £3+ you pay in the comic shop (who didn’t get them in anyway).

Of course, you’re not getting the issues as they were intended, and things like splash pages lose their impact in this format, but for a cheap, mass-market alternative to the proper comics, I think its great. I’ve also picked up Farscape #1 from the same company.

This got me thinking about digital comics on the whole. Now Marvel have made moves into this area, with their Digital Comics Unlimited service (that I blogged about here) and also their collections of older comics available on DVD (I know they did something like 40 years of Amazing Spider-Man available on a DVD at a bargain price and I’m sure a few others as well).   DC however seem pretty unsure about the idea of making their comics available digitally.

While I would never say digital comics will or should replace proper comics (or at least trades – I feel the same about eBooks and books) I really like the “mass-market” idea digital comics could bring.   Its been something widely commented on for a while, that sales of comics have been badly affected since they moved off of news stands in the States and became the almost sole domain of the specialist comic shops.    It occurs to me that making more comics available via a digitial medium (and given the undeniable success of the iPhone, the app store is a good starting point) could surely only be a good thing.   It wouldn’t even have to be the newest releases.  They could lag a few months behind, meaning if you wanted to be up to date, you could still go to the comic shop.   Heck, even the pricing could be raised a bit.  59p is outstanding value, but given how much the paper copies go for, you could double that easily and it’d still be good value.

With both DC and Marvel courting the mainstream press for attention (Marvel more successfully), why not bolster that with electronic versions of comics.  Imagine DC talking to the press about Blackest Night, and being able to back it up by saying that you can buy Rebirth and Sinestro Corps War for cheap on the App Store, or off their web site or something.  

Digital piracy is a problem for comics like every other medium.  However, while music has iTunes, Amazon etc providing legal sources, TV and movies also have iTunes, and services like Hulu and the iPlayer, comics seem to be stumbling a lot more with embracing the medium, and all that does is make piracy the only option to people who want their comics digitally.   I’m not condoning it, just saying that’s the case.  

Think about the changes coming with the iPhone v3.0 software.  Companies could make an comic book reader app that would allow you to purchase more comics and download them from within the app, or set up a regular subscription to certain titles.   That’d be very cool.   And with other manufacturers providing their own App Stores (Blackberry’s App World, Android Marketplace etc), companies could provide readers for a variety of handsets that would download the comics in some standard format and display them, with the reader handling the hardware-specific stuff.

Just a brief thought/rant on digital comics.   I would definitely like to see more in this field, especially from DC (I’d love to have some GL comics stored on my iPod Touch for reading on the train be it any of the 4 volumes so far).   I can definitely see me buying more for my iPod Touch, especially if more Farscape issues turn up.

Hmmm, ranty blog post time.

So Apple have finally got around to sorting out the features (copy-and-paste/MMS) that other phones have had for years.   Looking forward to adverts and fanboys proclaiming this as the 3rd coming of the iPhone and acting like they invented these features.

Yes I’m bitter.  Why?  Because the iPod Touch users are getting charged for this update, while the iPhone users aren’t.  Granted, most of the update doesn’t interest me in the slightest, but there’s a couple of provisos:

1. Calendaring updates.   I’d quite like the ability to sync my iPod Touch’s calendar with my Google calendar.   As I’ve said here before, part of the reason I went with a Blackberry was because I didn’t like the iPhone’s reliance on Outlook to do anything in Windows.
2. Updated App Store APIs.   Wonder how long it’ll take before I can’t really buy much from the app store without having the 3.x software?
3. Security fixes.  Nothing confirmed on this one, but something I thought was really dodgy about the 2.x update was the way it included security fixes.   Now, as far as I know, once 2.x hit iTunes, there weren’t any 1.x updates anymore.    So does this mean that if I want the latest Safari etc security patches I’ll need to pay Apple $10?   Or do I risk having an out-of-date OS and browser on my network?

As it stands, I can see me skipping this update and probably having iTunes moan at me forever more.   There’s just not enough in it to justify the money for me at the moment.

If I had an iPhone though I’d be grabbing it in a heartbeat as Copy-and-Paste really is incredibly handy (as I’ve appreciated ever since getting my BB), and MMS is a necessity for me (not having it was a huge mark against the iPhone for me, and it still boggles my mind how it wasn’t there from day 1).  Top marks to Apple for finally getting these implemented, but you still have to wonder why they weren’t in the iPhone 3G.

Not that that seems to have stopped it selling mind, so what do I know?