Uncarved

I found a curious Business Insider post via Daring Fireball, which contained the following chart, visualizing the growth rate of various “smart phone” platforms, across carriers:

I’m noticing a significant difference in the angle of elevation that the Android adoption curve is showing, amongst the different carriers. Specifically, I’m looking at how it’s showing the flattest rate of growth on AT&T, the only carrier on that list that’s also offering the iPhone.

General Thoughts Android, Blackberry, chart, iPhone, mobile

I recently discovered a neat little “trick” on my iPad (and iPhone): I’ve stumbled upon a way to listen to music streaming from Internet radio stations while I do “other things,” like check my email, take photos, or write text messages.

While iPhone OS 4.0 — due out this summer — will finally deliver the long-requested ability to allow users to listen to their Pandora or Last.fm radio streams in the “background” by virtue of its new “multi-tasking” capabilities, the solution I’ve stumbled upon works (in slight variations) today with any device running iPhone OS 3.x.

Although this little trick won’t work with Pandora, since you must be using a Pandora client to stream their music, you can use it with any radio station which exposes its MP3 or AAC music stream via a multimedia playlist file URL (which will typically end in .pls); basically any radio station you’ll find on Live 365, Soma FM, and more.

I’m a fan of Soma FM’s Secret Agent radio station, so we’ll use that for our example; feel free to try this out for any station you like.

The process is super easy, but slightly different between the handheld iPhone OS devices (eg, iPhone and iPod Touch) and iPads (for which it’s actually a bit spiffier), so I’ll take you through the steps for doing it on each one.

iPhone / iPod Touch

Launch Mobile Safari, and head to the following URL:

http://somafm.com/secretagent48.pls

You’ll see the following:

Safari fetches the PLS file URL

Once the playlist file is loaded, Safari will find the URL of the music stream, and start playing the music, and you’ll see this:

Safari has started playing the audio stream

Now — click the Home button and, say, check in on your email. Note that the music continues to play.

Isn’t that fantastic?

Just one caveat, though: you won’t be able to browse other websites in Safari until you click the “Done” button (top left), which — as you might expect — causes the music to stop playing.

One workaround is to use an alternative browser, like iCab, Opera Mini, or any of a number of other web browsers (some paid, some free) available in the App Store.

iPad

Things get a little cooler on the iPad. The steps to get you listening to the music stream are the same, but we can do a few more things once the music starts playing on the iPad.

Once the music starts to play, you’ll see this:

Safari playing the audio stream

Note one key difference to note, however: unlike the iPhone’s Mobile Safari app, the iPad’s Mobile Safari continues to show you the browser chrome up top.

For starters, this means that you may continue browsing other websites in Safari on the iPad by simply tapping the tabs icon at the top:

Change tabs or create new ones.

What’s more you can actually create a bookmark for the radio station, so you can quickly listen any time:

Create bookmarks for your favorite stations

But — and this is where I started to get a little verklempt — it gets just slightly more fantastic: you can bookmark it to your Home Screen.

Now I can fire up Secret Agent FM from my Home Screen, just like Pandora or Last.fm.

Looks like the folks at Soma FM went the extra mile to specify a Home Screen icon for their website. Your mileage will vary with the availability of your favorite station’s dedicated icon for your Home Screen, however, depending on the site publisher.

Meanwhile, go forth and enjoy streaming some music while you’re sending those texts or reading the Times.

Check it out, Tutorials iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch, multi-tasking, music, tips

Michael Arrington of TechCrunch published a post Friday, titled The Truth: What’s Really Going On With Apple, Google, AT&T And The FCC. It is—in my opinion—a fairly insightful piece, particularly regarding his analysis of Apple’s seemingly misleading wording behind their reasons for “not approving” the Google Voice app for inclusion in the App Store.

I do believe that Apple perceives a risk behind allowing this particular piece of software “hijack,” as it were, the iPhone user experience, particularly as the Google Voice service will likely become wildly popular amongst the demographic of folks who are attracted to products like iPhones. I must also note that Apple themselves pulled quite a similar customer “hijacking” trick on AT&T with the iPhone.

So if anyone knows the smell of this type of usurpation, it’s Apple. They’re also right to fear it.

I ultimately get exactly why Apple attempted to block it: to paraphrase the late father of a past girlfriend of mine, if you’re not pulling at least one foul per game, you’re just not playing hard enough.

It’s all a game of strategy, folks, and the stakes in the competition for slices of the burgeoning mobile Internet device market are pretty damned high.

Arrington does make one claim, however, that I just can’t get behind. He writes:

[Apple is] jealously guarding control of their users and trying to block Google and other third party developers at every turn from getting their superior applications in front those users.

The first half is spot-on, but the second half is very wrong—they are not fearful of developers offering better software than their apps. Apple doesn’t care, for example, about superior stock tracking, weather, or memo programs.

They do care about Safari, Phone, Contacts, Calendar, Mail, Messages, and iPod, App Store, and iTunes applications: they are the signature apps of the core iPhone user experience.

If Google Voice takes over the dialer, a significant problem is introduced: people may likely start demanding that the phone experience is designed around the Google Voice service. In such a case, Apple will have lost control of the UX of this core component of the product, as they would then have to choose between two paths:

1. chase after the Google Voice UX requirements, OR
2. consciously choosing to ignore it, causing customers that want it evaluate switching to an Android phone.

Apple are specifically looking to control the core user experience of the device, but that’s what Apple does, and what’s more: that’s what we (largely) want them to do! Their passion for that sort of thing is directly attributable for the design excellence of their products.

In any case, the ref is on the field, and we’ll get a call on the game play. The only certainty here is that—whatever call the FCC ultimately makes—the outcome will be interesting.

My call: offensive holding.

Business Sense, Conversation Apple, Google, Google Voice, iPhone, iPhone app

John Gruber of Daring Fireball writes another great piece, this time about the Pre, in which he struck upon a compelling insight with respect to the new device’s hardware keyboard.

From his post:

[I]t is my theory that a hardware keyboard is a significant selling point for only one group of customers: those who already own a phone with a hardware keyboard…

[...] Most normal people have yet to buy their first smartphone…. Normal people aren’t planning to do much typing on their new smartphones, and they’re probably right. Any smartphone QWERTY keyboard, software or hardware, is going to be better than what most people are used to, which is pecking things out on a phone with a 0-9 numeric keypad.

I type far better on my iPhone than I expected I’d be able to, and that seems to be true for everyone I know who owns one. The only people who struggle with the iPhone keyboard are those who are already accustomed to a hardware smartphone keyboard.

[...]

For as good as the Pre is, and I’m convinced it is excellent, it just doesn’t have much to offer that would sway someone considering an iPhone. But for someone considering a BlackBerry, the Pre might look very sweet: a big bright screen, a beautiful modern user interface design, a kick-ass mobile web browser, and, yes, a hardware keyboard. The Pre is the BlackBerry Bold done right.

My experience has been the same. The people I know that have hated the iPhone’s on-screen keyboard are people that had already become accustomed to using a hardware keyboard.

That particular insight aside, it’s great to hear — from someone whose software design reflections I’ve long respected — that Palm did such a solid job with the overall design of the WebOS.

Linking Out Blackberry Bold, iPhone, Palm Pre, WebOS

John Gruber recently published a characteristically insightful piece about the Verizon iPhone rumors in the press earlier this week. Speaking to rumors of what Business Week has called the “iPhone Lite,” Gruber revisits Apple’s introduction of the iPod Mini, which was the event that turned the iPod from a single product into a product family.

He writes:

The formula behind the iPod Mini was simple: Apple made a smaller, cheaper device with more or less the same technical specs as the original iPod from October 2001.

[...]

So here’s how I see Apple applying its iPod strategy to the iPhone. At some point the iPhone will expand to two form factors:

1. A high-end iPhone with the same basic size and price as previous iPhones, but with significant new features…

2. A new, lower-priced, smaller, and more adorable iPhone, with more or less the same technical specs as the original iPhone. Given that those specs include the 320 × 480 display, I wouldn’t expect something tiny…. Shrink the iPhone’s forehead and chin and make it thinner … is what I’m thinking. Existing iPhone apps would run just fine on the new device, as it’d have similar, if not identical, CPU performance and RAM to previous full-sized iPhones. [emphasis added]

Reading the piece got me thinking back on the concerns I had about Palm’s fragmentation of both their prospective developer communities, as well as consumers, should the rumors of their introducing “Pre Lite” to the market.

Note the points where emphasis has been added. There are two reasons for Apple to aim for roughly the same specs as the first generation iPhone when it introduces additional models:

1. a device with such specs will be significantly cheaper to produce more than two years later, and
2. it helps ensure maximal compatibility of existing apps with the prospective newer members of the product family.

Apple has been very clear that minimal hardware variance is an explicit concern in their iPhone product design strategy (and, even their platform strategy for all devices running iPhone OS, or what I've been calling Touch OS X). Naturally, since the devices in the product family must continue to evolve, it’s impossible to entirely avoid hardware variance, but the more that the devices in the iPhone product family can have in common, the easier a job developers will have creating and testing the apps they make and sell.

By contrast, the Android platform is beginning to get its first dose of non-trivial woes around hardware variation issues, but more on this later.

There are plainly over a billion reasons that Apple would want to maximize the extent to which apps remain compatible across their entire product family of iPhones, and screen size and shape is one of the critical details to keep consistent in the mobile world, where developers (at least the competent ones) take great pains to make every last pixel count.

And for platforms like iPhone OS (and even Pre’s webOS) that are designed so meticulously around the user’s direct physical interaction with the screen, screen size is not a detail to be varied willy nilly.

Read more…

Business Sense Google Android, iPhone, Palm Pre, product planning