Nexus One Launches

Steve, this is your loyal Apple customer base. Um, don't panic or anything, but, you might want to take a look at the new Google Phone. It's, um... well, like... wow. You, you might want to check it out. I'm just saying.

Wow.

Apple iSlate vs. Amazon Kindle: eBook Steel Cage Match!?

The Apple rumor mill is now projecting that all the activity around an overgrown iPhone-like device will not be an Apple "netbook", or tablet computer, but rather an eBook reader, set to compete with the Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble's Nook. Supposedly called the iSlate (yeesh...), the Apple reader will have a separate part of the App store dedicated to eBooks for the device.

This makes a lot of sense, in the wake of certain publishers who have released their book publications as iPhone apps, rather than as PDFs, Kindle Books (.azw format), or .mobi (MobiPocket format). The advantage of this for Apple is that it leverages their current iPhone/iTunes Store momentum and infrastructure, while maintaining ease-of-use for customers. It does, however, mean more VHS/Betamax format wars for consumers.

Right now, it looks like Mobipocket and other formats, used by open-book readers like Sony, the Nook, Philips', and others, are fighting an uphill battle, at least in the U.S. The Big 3 in the electronic publishing industry are PDF, MobiPocket, Kindle Books. But even though an iPhone app is not really a file format, is is a method of delivery, which is ultimately what the file formats allow. Amazon and the iTunes Store offer convenience of delivery, sync, and portability, while PDFs offer print options and ubiquity due to a 15-year head start. Since Amazon purchased Stanza, buying books from the Fictionwise book store has become more disjointed and harder to do. IPhone app-books, in contrast, are becoming easier and easier to download. Another advantage for iTS users is that they can purchase their audiobooks from the same place, to the same devices. Amazon's Kindle does "read" certain books to you, but reviews of the auto-reader are mixed.

No doubt Android (Google's smartphone OS) will be incorporating app-books into it's store soon, if it has not already. That, together with Google's recent eBook moves and it's ginormous search-engine audience, could be the beginning of a slow death of Amazon's initial raison d'etre. I foresee an Apple vs. Google fight to the death in most consumer information markets, including eBooks.

Good thing Amazon has leveraged it's cloud computing and fulfillment infrastructure into separate businesses. Wonder what Microsoft is up to?

Google Nav kicks payware apps in the nads

Google just announced a FREE beta version of a turn-by-turn mobile GPS navigation app, with voice and text input. Right now, it's just for Android OS 2.0; iPhoners will have to wait. (Incidentally, this is another reason that, contrary to my earlier post, Android phones will gain momentum, ugly though they may be.)

Attention Garmin, Tom-Tom, and AT&T Nav: "My name is Google Montoya. Prepare to die."

Android lives on

OK, I was wrong when I declared Google's mobile phone operating system Android to be DOA.

Like everything Google does, Android has improved. Google's "release it now, and improve it later" strategy has been effective for everything from it's venerable search engine to Gmail, Calendar, Picassa, Google Docs, Google Books, and all it's various Labs programs.

Now the hardware makers are stepping up. I am a hardcore Apple iPhonatic. But I love Google's apps, despite the occasional worrying cloud outage, I think Google rocks, and I trust them with my data, at least as much as I trust any ginormous corporation.

The one trump card that Apple currently holds for me is iTunes, and the associated iTunes store, which not only syncs my phone to my computer, but also connects to my TV. I could probably find ways around the TV, what with all of Netflix' hardware parnters, and other devices that stream data from my media computer to my tele, but buying and syncing music (especially podcasts) is a big deal for me.

Now, if Google opens a store to compete with iTunes, either partnering with or competing against Amazon, well, then, look out. I might just have to jump ship.

What would be a great store name for Google? How about "The G-Spot"?

(Sorry.)

No Sketchup for you!!!

Now, this is funny.

Google's Sketchup training videos, hosted on YouTube, went dark.  Note the "no longer available" message in the video screen.

Did I mention that Google owns YouTube?

Knock, knock- who's there? Not Microsoft

When you weren't looking, Google went and did something very sneaky, and veeeeerrrry cool.

If you've got an iPhone, or an Android-based phone, you can now edit your Google Spreadsheets. Not a lot, but some. And, as we all know, Google is like a locomotive: once they get rolling on a feature set, they just keep coming, and with a helluva lot of mass behind them.

I wonder what Steve Ballmer was doing while Google burned up the mobile phone world? Bill Gates wouldn't know, because he's banned Apple products in his house. (Seriously.)

Apple one-ups everybody

I just popped for the new iLife '09, specifically to get one feature:  Faces, a new technology in iPhoto.

For many months, I've been using Google's Picassa, both the online photo storage cloud, and the desktop photo editor/organizer.  There is also a Picassa Uploader plug-in for iPhoto, which is pretty cool.  Both Picassa and Flickr are great photo management solutions, but sorta Web 2.0  They are still a pain in the ass (PITA) when compared with working on your client computer.  What is great about them, though, is that they allow anywhere-access via the Web.  But frankly, even basic photo editing and organization with these services (or Facebook, or Shutterfly, or MySpace, or fill-in-the-blank) is cumbersome.

Well.  

Apple released the new iPhoto '09 with this kick-butt feature called Faces:  you tag a face in a photo, and it remembers that face, and creates a "Polaroid" of that person.  You can build up your Polaroid collection, and then tell iPhoto to churn through your entire photo collection (16 GB, in my case), and tag every single photo with every face that it finds from your Polaroids. Holy crap!   You can then create Smart Albums using the tagged faces, and upload said albums to any Web-based service, including Apple's own Mobile Me.

Mobile Me used to suck.  Lately, it sucks much less.  I did some test uploading of albums to my Mobile Me account (for which I pay $99/year, and get 20 GB of combined storage), and the result was quick, painless, effective.  My albums appeared on MM, were easy to manage from the Web, even easier to manage from iPhoto, and looked a helluva lot prettier than Picassa, and somewhat prettier than Flickr.

Given Yahoo's financial history (Yahoo owns Flickr), I am a little worried that Flickr could go bust at any moment, as have other Yahoo services.  Google's Picassa gets better all the time, but it is still very clunky.

iPhoto's integration with Mobile Me offers a user experience closer to what iTunes users get with their iTunes/iTunes Store integrated experience, and it is probably the main reason that there are 160 million iPods out there, and only 3 million Zunes.  This close marriage of hardware (computers, iPods, iPhones) with client applications, and cloud storage service is what Apple needs to push in order to stay ahead of Google and Facebook. 

"Um, don't you mean Google and Microsoft?"  No, I mean Facebook.  More on that next time.

Google keeps bringing the heat

Google just announced Tasks for mobile devices, including the iPhone.

ToodleDo's otherwise excellent iPhone app and Web service, which replaced my ToDo app, which replaced my OmniFocus app, may have just been replaced.

Yes, I do get tired of spending time and energy to divine the "ultimate" app for my purposes. But some of that is just the cost of doing business, and my feeling is that the effort will pay off in the end with slightly increased productivity, and greatly increased peace of mind. Part of the appeal of these apps to me is the "external brain pack" factor, which allows me to quickly offload my vagrant thoughts onto a more permanent medium. That medium used to be a lined sticky note stuck inside my daily calendar/journal thingy. It was a good, flexible, and simple system, which has been surprisingly hard to beat. But it was also not traceable, and it was hard to track both new, unprocessed thoughts, and sorted "to dos" all in the same space. It became unwieldy after a while. Capturing new to dos electronically, with online sync, is a little more sterile, but a lot more scalable and reassuring.

The new service is still buggy, as you can see in the below photo, so I'd give it a month or two. But after that, look out.

Offline Web mail? Oxymoron?

Gmail is going offline.

OK, not totally. But their new, "offline" service allows you to use Gmail in your Web browser even when you are offline. It behaves just the way it normally would, according to a Google press release (cleverly disguised as a Google Labs blog post), by saving a snapshot of your last Gmail session in your computer's memory ("cache"). You can then do everything you are normally used to doing in Gmail, but your outgoing messages will be stored in the Outbox until you are re-connected to the Internet.

The new service uses Google "Gears", which is a browser plug-in that taps several Google application programming interfaces (APIs), in order to make your Web-based apps function like native desktop applications. So, you must install Gears to make offline Gmail go.

This raises a question for another post: how in the world is Google making any money from all this? Stay tuned...