Apple Launches New iPhone 5, iOS 6 Features and Apps

 Yes, Apple has unveiled its latest range of gadgets to an eager media scrum at Yerba Buena in San Francisco, but with the same old presentation and incremental approach, the magic seems to have gone. 

At the Apple's Core

You could have written the script for Tim Cook's presentation today, just by changing a few words from recent Apple events. "Here's some pretty new stores, with glass staircases and eager customers. Here are some huge numbers and now our new products with every element carefully refined." Everything looks shiny in the world of Apple, but it is the becoming the same story, regardless of location and product. 

Expecting Apple to innovate its socks off with some new mega experience every 12 months is asking quite a lot, but for a company that sets its standards so high, that's the pressure it faces. Sure, Apple has improved every bit of the iPhone 5, but its now just another smartphone, scrapping over the same feature sets and specifications. 

So, there are now 380 Apple stores in 13 countries. Apple's notebooks now account for 27% of US sales and it sold 17 million iPads in the quarter to June, bringing the total to 84 million with its market share up from last year, despite the efforts of many rival products. That makes for a grand total of 400 million iOS devices sold. 

On To The Good Stuff

Phil Schiller took over to introduce the new iPhone 5. Made of glass and aluminium it resembles all the recently leaked images, it is 18% thinner and 20% lighter than the 4S. The key features are the new 4-inch display with a 16:9 aspect ratio, running at 1136 x 640 with a retina display of 336 ppi.

That extra space adds an extra row of icons, while all of Apple's apps have been updated to take advantage of the extra space. Some key developers have also been allowed to update their apps ahead of the bundle (expect your App Store update number to start pinwheeling on 19 September when iOS 6 becomes available).

It is not just the size that's improved, the touch sensors are built into the screen, with one less layer, allowing for improved color saturation, up to 44% claim Apple. There's also improved wireless chip with improved WiFi and LTE finally making it into the iPhone. 

Heart of the Machine

At the heart is the Apple A6 processor, which offers double the processing and graphics performance on the A5 chip. Again, Apple brought out a games partner, this time EA to show off its wares, Real Racing 3, powered by the new chip. But how big are these, admittedly impressive, games with their increased storage requirements?

They've also improved the camera, adding a dynamic low light mode, To cope with all this extra horsepower, the battery is an unspecified improvement on the iPhone 4S model. To take nice photos, there's a new Panorama mode, as if we don't have enough apps for that already? The front camera is now also HD, allowing for high quality FaceTime, which can be sent over a cellular link (CSP dependent). 

More fiddly updates include the use of three microphones, noise cancelling features and wideband audio from the speaker. There is also the new "Lightning" connector lead, to go along with the Mac's Thunderbolt. So much of this must be exciting for the engineer, but as a customer and user it's just so much fluff. 

Into the End Game

As expected the iPhone 5, for all the power and beauty is just an upgrade and an end to a means. iOS 6 is what us Apple owners will actually use every day and get a better experience from. As expected, there is the new Maps app with over 100 million points of interest and turn-by-turn directions. 

 

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Source : cmswire[dot]com

Apple’s Not-So-Secret Weapon: How iCloud Keeps Them One Step Ahead Ahead Of Windows

Steve Jobs may no longer be with us, but his approach to building the digital experience is alive and well, and not merely at Apple Inc.

illustration by matt dartford

For decades, Steve Jobs extolled the virtues of "building the whole widget"--in other words, designing and manufacturing a computer or a digital media player or smartphone as an organic whole, from the molecular materials of the hardware to the abstract bits and bytes of the software. The resulting products may not always have been as inexpensive or utilitarian as the standardized machines that ruled the PC marketplace, but they did always possess the svelte and winsome quality that Apple's loyal customers love with a passion.

Earlier this summer, Microsoft tried to make like Apple. The company had never itself built computers, out of deference to its many hardware partners, but on June 18, it revealed the results of a three-year secret project: a sleek and distinctive Windows tablet PC called the Surface. No mere iPad knockoff, the Surface is Microsoft's effort to build a "whole widget" of its own. It could well be the most beautiful and best engineered Windows device ever made. And it has bells and whistles that won't be easy for Apple to quickly mimic.

Google too has concluded that it can't really compete against the iPhone long term without its own end-to-end laptops, handsets, and tablets--hence its $13 billion acquisition of Motorola's cell-phone design and manufacturing business. The Motorola patent portfolio is valuable, to be sure, but Google wants to find a remedy to the fragmented world its Android architecture has fostered. The immense diversity of Android devices and generations of not-quite-compatible operating systems are beginning to look like liabilities, especially to app developers who don't want to have to support multiple versions of their own products.

So with Google and Microsoft as emerging widgeteers, might Apple finally be losing one of its historic advantages? Hardly.

At the annual World Wide Developers Conference held June 11 in San Francisco--the first big event since the death of Jobs--Apple demonstrated how its software prowess and skill at building interlocking digital platforms is the real game changer. How? By enlarging the definition of the whole widget. Increasingly, the Mac, iPhone, and iPad do not exist alone. Instead, Apple now offers a multidimensional, integrated ecosystem of devices held together by the centripetal force of iCloud. Apple's ideal customer, who likely owns at least one of each kind of product, can now share a single user identity, and core personal content and data can be viewed, consumed, used, or manipulated in familiar ways regardless of platform, with any changes or additions from one gadget instantly available on any of his other Apple gear.

In other words, Apple can now boast of providing a complete, coherent, and consistent digital experience at home, at work, in your car, and on the go--without any conscious effort on the part of the user. It's as if just at the moment when the visiting team finally steps up to the plate, they discover that the home team has moved the fences out, raised the pitcher's mound, and increased the distance between the bases. This is a different ball game.

Apple didn't announce some silver-bullet innovation at the WWDC to make all this possible, but instead described literally hundreds of new features and data services borne of software, many of which integrate how all its hardware products create, display, and share digital information. New versions of its Mac OS X and iOS for portable devices, along with much-improved data storage and remote processing services accessible via iCloud, will all come together in the next few months to markedly improve the quality of the entire Apple digital experience. Indeed, in many ways, improvements for the Mac will result in new capabilities for customers' existing iPhones and iPads with no new hardware required.

That is what you get when you enlarge the widget, and it doesn't even reflect the inevitable hardware improvements Apple is so famous for delivering like clockwork.

Microsoft and Google clearly understand this strategy. But Apple's ecosystem is the product of carefully nurturing smaller whole-widget ecosystems in such a way that they could be stitched together. Until recently, Microsoft has always tried to contort Windows to fit just about any class of hardware--using a one-size-fits-all strategy that has never played out well in non-PC devices. Google has tried to turn its browser software into a modest computer operating system, even as it took a completely different approach to Android smartphone software, and now is trying to make coherent architectures that are intrinsically different. Software can paper over just about any incompatibility, but a patchwork is not an ecosystem.

Apple's Tim Cook knows he has to be very careful not to over-standardize these individually dazzling devices. That's why it is unlikely that Mac OS X and iOS will ever subsume each other. The masterstroke is in using iCloud to knit them together, which hides the complexity of managing and not duplicating all those trillions of bits that each of us consume or manipulate every day. For today's digital consumer, syncing data, managing your access to it, and keeping it all straight and secure is the key to a powerful digital experience that we are only now beginning to grasp. Cook, an operations wonk who is a master of taming complexity, might even be better at figuring this out than Jobs was. And since Apple usually improves any screen it focuses on, a new and improved AppleTV platform could become an intriguing fourth species in the ecosystem.

Source : fastcompany[dot]com