Opinion: Apple iPad 3 launch: time for Cook to shine

Apple iPad 3 launch: time for Cook to shine | News | TechRadar Updated 43 minutes ago

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Tweet Cook - time to shine

Not that long ago I was sat at the London iPhone 4S announcement writing a live blog as several of the company's big wigs went through the phone that wasn't the iPhone 5 but that did become a truly monumental success for the company.

It was Tim Cook's first major consumer announcement and yet the whole thing felt muted. Cook himself was typically confident and forthright, and yet he was happy to let his team do the majority of the talking.

A few days later and we found out the sad news of Steve Jobs, and the conference was thrown into stark relief.

The questions about the lack of impact without Jobs on stage fell away. Now we knew that Jobs wouldn't only not be at the announcements of the iPad 3 and the iPhone 5, but that wouldn't be around to see the launch of his beloved devices.

iPad 3 launch

Less than six months on and we are only days away from the launch event for what is almost certainly the iPad 3 and all eyes will be on Cook as he kick starts the new post-Jobs era for Apple.

Perhaps that's overstating it a little. Apple has been beavering away on the iPad 3 for a long time, and yet this is one of the two key launches on Apple fans' calendars, with the belated iPhone 5 announcement likely to be later this year.

And it is up to Cook and his team to show that Apple is just as confident that it can flourish in the post-Jobs era as Jobs was confident that Apple would flourish in the post-PC era.

One more thing...

That doesn't mean that Cook needs to take to the stage in a black turtleneck, grandstanding, charming the crowd and closing with "one more thing".

It doesn't even mean that Cook needs to take the bulk of the time on stage; it would be entirely understandable that Apple does not want to fill the vacuum of Jobs with another single figure. Instead it will try to share the load across its luminaries: Ive, Cook, Schiller, Forstall et al.

But what it will need to do is prove that the iPhone 4S announcement was not the new Apple; that the figure-heavy presentation and sombre mood was for the perfectly acceptable reason of Jobs' illness.

Make no mistake, the iPad 3 launch is a massive deal for Apple.

Few would doubt that Apple will continue to go from strength to strength assuming it continues with the perfectionism that marked Jobs' time at Apple.

But this conference is the time for Apple to show that it can still wow the world, leave the fanboys giddy with glee and convert the cynics with the familiar spellbinding mix of showmanship and gorgeous gadgets.

Tags: Tim Cook, Apple, iPad 3, iPhone 5, iPhone 4STweetreddit!StumbleuponComment on this article  Your comments (2) Click to add a new commentplogplower

Wednesday at 12:40 UTC

2. Glenns,

Enough already you stupid Apple hater/idiot. It's just so like the Apple haters to bash on something you haven't seen or touch. Are you really that dumb to already pass judgement on the iPad 3 that almost no one have seen? Why do these poor Democrat trailer trash folks who clearly cannot afford Apple products be this way? I don't bash Ferrari just because I can't afford one yet.

Just keep your mouth shut and go pick up one of those free Android phones. Stop showing the world how stupid you are.

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glenns

Wednesday at 09:55 UTC

1. "Make no mistake, the iPad 3 launch is a massive deal for Apple."

and probably very boring for anyone outside their distortion field. Higher res screen and some other minor improvements. very blah...

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Opinion: Ubuntu needs to open up

Ubuntu needs to open up | News | TechRadar Updated 5 hours ago

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Tweet Page 1: Ubuntu needs to open up

Ubuntu has big ambitions, but how will we know if it achieves them?

One of the great things about Linux, and free software in general, is that it doesn't suffer the hyperbole that you find in other parts of the computer industry.

At least not in the user-community-developer sphere that we live in.

Our inbox rarely filters notifications of an imminent security disaster, for example, or messages marked as important because there's a new virus that's going to spread from our phones to our netbooks through our fridges.

If one of these emails does make it through, we enjoy replying by asking what impact this might have on Linux users. The response is nearly always: "What's Linux?"

The software, distributions and hardware emerging from the world of open community development often prefer to float on their own merits rather than those of a PR company. One exception might be the discussion on whether 2012 will be the year of Linux on the desktop, but that was a joke, and one long past its best.

But there's another exception, and that's the perennial Ubuntu.

Ubuntu is breaking away from the tradition of a free software company by ramping up both expectation and anticipation for its own products in ways usually associated with its proprietary competitors.

In some aspects, this is brilliant. The slick and professional HTML5 demo site that accompanied the release of 11.10, for instance, was a wonderful taster of what the Ubuntu desktop feels like. It fulfilled a genuine purpose by helping the uninitiated realise that Linux isn't just the command line or a wasted weekend trying to get audio to work.

It can actually be a slick desktop that looks as good as the latest release of OS X, and far better than that version of Windows where you can't even change the desktop background image. No other Linux distribution puts that amount of effort into trying to win new users, and Ubuntu deserves plenty of new ones as a result of that initiative.

Talkin' loud

Ubuntu has every right to shout about its success. It's still the most popular Linux distribution, and takes great pains to create a user experience that's different from other distributions.

But the team behind Ubuntu is also getting more proactive and shouty about its own largess and self-perpetuating prophesies - and it starts at the top. Mark Shuttleworth, Ubuntu's benevolent dictator for life, wrote on his blog that he wants to see "Ubuntu on phones, tablets, TVs and smart screens everywhere" by the time 14.04 is released (in just over two years).

This statement comes only months after he told the Ubuntu Developer's Conference in Budapest that he wanted to see 200 million users within four years. A good plan, and some nice big numbers, but we have difficulty believing Ubuntu will come close.

Without any question, if either of those goals were realised, we'd be ecstatic. We want Ubuntu to win. But we don't want its advantages and achievements to be lost in a cloud of moon-gazing rhetoric.

Numbers game

If, in 2015, Ubuntu has 200 million users, let's all have a party and we'll say sorry. Ubuntu would be an unprecedented success. But when the Ubuntu team can't even give you an accurate measure of how many people are using the distribution today, or how they're estimating their numbers, how can we trust predictions for the future?

Mark also mentioned, for example, that there are currently around 20 million Ubuntu users, up from their estimate of 12 million in 2010. That's a very healthy result, but why the secrecy in how these numbers are formed?

Why not open up how these figures were calculated and let us see the 10 times growth predicted for Ubuntu over the next few years ourselves. That way we can all celebrate.

This is something the Fedora project does, for example. The Fedora wiki statistics page lists as much data as it can, including unique IP access to the downloads in a week-by-week table, complete with percentage comparisons against the previous release and updates through the package repository.

This page also includes the important disclaimer about how the exact number of users can't be derived from these statistics alone.

But you can't argue against the openness in the statistics or the growth in Fedora's popularity from one release to the next. The numbers are in front of you, and we think the Ubuntu team should be prepared to do the same, especially when they're making such bold predictions for the future of their distribution.

Openness and transparency is what makes open source software development as brilliant as it is, and it's something our competitors can't touch. They should be our weapons of choice when it comes to marketing, not hyperbole.

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First published in PC Plus Issue 316

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Tags: Ubuntu, Fedora, Linux, open source, operating systemsTweetreddit!Stumbleupon  Your comments (1) Click to add a new commentoracle

Monday at 11:17 UTC

1. No your wrong Ubuntu and almost all the other distros suffer from a kind of inverse hyperbole that being “that Linux is so much better” than the dreaded MS alternative! Which is in itself an untruth.

What Ubuntu actually needs to do is stop worrying about how many people use it, lose the stupid name and get with the program that does away with command line instructions! And it can be done Android and iOS being two successful & notable examples!

THEN and only THEN will Ubuntu and dozens of other Linux “distro’s” make a genuine break into the mainstream.

At the moment most Linux is for those who either hate MS so much that they cannot allow its usability into their lives OR need or want to save money so badly that they will waste any amount of time "playing with the OS and trying to sort out corrupt syntax advice from the real thing " rather than doing any actual work! (Those and wannabe systems administrators of course!)

In an effort to embrace the world of open OS I chose Ubuntu initially but after realising “noobs” had to rely upon support forums, full of people who actually cannot help because in their hast to answer and show off their “knowledge” they type so quickly they get the all important syntax wrong! And woe betide any “noob” who dares to point that out!

So I gave up on Ubuntu and paid for a copy of SUSE only to find even then I was spending more time getting it to work than doing any work! An inability to get something as basic as a sound card working was the final straw for me and I went back to a product that “Does exactly what it says on the tin” Windows and Office!

The point of this post? Simply to say it really does not matter how many users Ubuntu has now, because for all the reasons I point out above I am prepared to bet there are far more EX Ubuntu and Linux users in the word than current ones!

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Opinion: How to make Linux the preferred desktop choice

How to make Linux the preferred desktop choice

The fight for the desktop might be entering its final phase, but not in the way any of us could have imagined 10 years ago.

In an interview at www.derstandard.at, for example, KDE's Aaron Siego said that the desktop is losing importance in the same way as newspapers, and after a conversation with Miguel de Icaza, Tim Anderson posted on his blog that the former Gnome founder felt that many of the benefits in open source development had played against the success of Linux on the desktop.

According to Miguel, this was because of fragmentation (my word) in the number of times we break the APIs for developers, and the cycle of upgrades that cause incompatibility between distributions, and even different versions of the same distribution.

Even suggesting that there's too much choice is controversial, as I've found out in the past, and Miguel has brewed a small storm with his statements. But there are two elements in his argument that change the angle, and I think set a new challenge for both Linux and Windows for the next 10 years.

The first is connected to the idea that the desktop is beginning to matter less - a point also made by Rob Pike at Google and many others since the release of the iPad. But it's important to differentiate between what might be seen as a fad for tablet computing and the obvious target for any desktop growth, and the increased pervasiveness of all technology in our lives.

It's not just smartphones that replace PCs - you could just as easily accuse internet enabled televisions, games consoles and satellite receivers of stealing desktop market share. But what these devices have really done is take an application off the desktop and move it into a more convenient form factor - regardless of whether that's a TV for YouTube or a fridge for recipes.

The result is that we no longer have as much need to sit down formally at a desk and use the computer. That doesn't mean they're becoming redundant - they're just becoming more specialised, and that leads to another of Miguel's issues.

Not enough good apps

"When you count how many great desktop apps there are on Linux, you can probably name 10. [If] you work really hard, you can probably name 20," he's quoted as saying. There's a lack of killer applications for Linux.

I think he's right. If applications are becoming less PC-centric, we need better reasons for using a desktop. Linux faces an uncommon challenge when you need a solid excuse to use one particular system over another, especially when it requires more effort to configure and set up.

The challenge is that I don't think we'll see that killer application. Any application worth the effort will be ported to both Windows and OS X, as has happened with many of the most popular open source projects.

Major releases of software like Audacity, Inkscape, Scribus, LibreOffice and Ardour are almost certainly downloaded more hungrily for systems other than Linux, at least initially (and we won't go into why you can't just download a package and install it on any Linux system).

That's a good thing. Free software is about more than just an operating system, and the more that can be done to unshackle users from proprietary alternatives or pressure their developers to be more open, the happier we'll all be.

All about the desktop

For that reason, the killer application has to be the desktop. The desktop is the best expression of the freedom found within the kernel, as well as community user interface design. It's what makes Linux different from the alternatives, and it has to be the reason why you want to choose it over Windows or OS X.

And while freedom is obviously a big motivation, both in cost and in the availability of the source code, when you move away from software idealism, there needs to be something else.

The problem is that this 'something else' is missing. There is no single desktop you can point to and say 'look at Linux'. Which is a pity, because there's great potential in the Gnome and KDE desktops that will likely be the inspiration behind many new features in their competitors.

Look at the drag-down task switching in Plasma Active, for example, or the touch scrolling for desktop windows, and I bet you'll see replicas of these functions in future versions of either OS X or Windows.

The trick has to be getting people to the Linux desktop first, and making it their preferred environment for desktop tasks like office work and browsing. We shouldn't get distracted by tablets and iOS, and should instead use the genius of open source software to create a singularly awesome desktop that everyone wants to use.

Opinion: Why you should buy a 3D PC monitor - and it's not for 3D

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Why you should buy a 3D PC monitor

What started out as a small whine - a barely audible fizzing whisper in the background - has now become an unmistakable rushing noise. Soon it will be a deafening roar.

I speak of the air rapidly escaping from the 3D bubble, and by that I'm referring to stereoscopic 3D, not 3D graphics rendering.

Of course, you wouldn't know it from the relentless onslaught of 3D-enabled products. Whether it's tablets with 3D cameras or smartphones with lenticular screens, the sheer momentum of 3D freight train will keep pushing new gadgets and devices down the product-release track for a while yet. But never mind bursting bubbles and runaway rail vehicles, the point is that the 3D revolution is over before it's really begun.

By all accounts, sales of 3D-capable HDTVs are already on the wane. Meanwhile, even the marketing might of Hollywood can't convince punters that 3D movies are the next big thing.

On the whole, 3D movies have tanked. Even when they do score, reports suggest movie-goers prefer the 2D version of 3D movies at a rate of two to one.

Still, there's at least one unanticipated benefit for the PC platform in the form of improved LCD monitor image quality. All the 3D hype and hoopla might just have been worth it after all.

Lack of progress

The problem with PC monitors, you see, is a lack of technical progress and choice. Yes, really. The huge array of panels at your local PC store, all plastered with stickers proclaiming unimaginable feats of image rendering, is an illusion. Take a closer look and you'll soon discover that the LCD monitor market has largely concentrated around a very narrow set of specifications and technologies.

Put simply, almost every remotely affordable monitor has a TN panel with a native resolution of 1,920 x 1,080 pixels. TN panels are the cheapest, but also offer the poorest results by every image quality metric save pixel response. Meanwhile, that 1080p native resolution may be plenty for £100 worth of 22-inch screen, but it's a lot less satisfactory extended to 24-inch and beyond.

As it happens, the latest 3D-capable monitors don't address any of that. They too are almost exclusively 1080p TN screens in various sizes, but what they do deliver is 120Hz refresh rates - double that of a standard PC monitor. It makes an enormous difference.

Find that hard to believe? I'm right with you. Bigging up high-Hz refresh rates is one of the more odious marketing strategies used to flog HDTVs, and the benefits of 200Hz over 100Hz are pretty marginal.

Moreover, if you do the maths based on the pixel response of a modern PC monitor, increasing the refresh rate beyond the standard 60Hz seems futile. After all, if the full white-to-black response rate of most LCDs is roughly in the 15ms region, anything above 60Hz ought to be fairly redundant. The LCD panel simply won't be able to respond quickly enough.

Then there's the debate over how many frames per second the human eye can truly perceive. Modern cinema remains at just 24 frames per second. It's true that projectors with triple-shutter blades are commonly used, resulting in 72 images per second, but the number of different images displayed per second remains 24, which is enough for fluid motion.

A lovely thing

It's all fascinating stuff, but what I can tell you with absolute certainty is that a 120Hz monitor is a lovely, lovely thing. Suddenly, everything you touch or tweak with the mouse pointer moves more smoothly. Your whole PC feels more responsive. It's an absolutely unmistakable effect, and once you've experienced it for the first time you won't want to go back.

Let me be clear about this - I'm not talking about dancing around the virtual battlefield of a popular online game and appreciating the benefits in terms of improved hair-trigger responses. I'm talking about juggling windows on the desktop and scrolling web and document pages - routine stuff we all do every day.

That's all very well, you might be thinking, but slightly smoother computing is no big deal. To which my response would be: try it before you knock it.

I personally didn't expect the increase in desktop refresh from 60Hz to 120Hz to be perceptible, much less beneficial. In fact, if it wasn't necessary to run the desktop at 120Hz (rather than merely running certain applications at increased Hz) in order to test some of the latest 3D gubbins on the PC, I likely would not have noticed the difference.

But it is, and I duly did. Now I need a new monitor.

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