The Philippine Online Chronicles

The past three months of tech was a flurry of activity.  There was "Why iPad" in April, and it was a blitz!  Apple rampaged through the competition with product after product announcement like iPhone OS 4 (renamed weeks later as iOS 4) and new MacBook pros.  It was followed by that iPhone 4 debacle--- the phone got stolen or left in a bar.  Then there was Facebook’s F8 conference, Google’s I/O, D8 then Apple’s WorldWide Developer Conference that led up to iPhone 4’s launch and all the angst on phone signals to go with it.

Oh, and at E3, Microsoft launched Kinect, the project formally known as Natal and a bunch of other games like Star Wars the Old Republic MMORPG with its Hope Cinematic trailer got attention.

This is July and it is time to catch our breath and make sense of it all.

Ars Technica takes a look at Android 2.2, a.k.a. Froyo, which debuted at Google’s I/O conference a few weeks ago on a Nexus One. Ars Technica concluded aptly of Google’s efforts at moving Android development at a rapid pace.   The improvements to Android have been many.

Over at TechCrunch is a different story however.  They talk about Apple and iPhone.  TechCruch’s MG Siegler wrote, “It’s as if Apple has hired Don Draper.”  Siegler recounted the story of his friend--- a non-tech guy asking him about iPhone 4. Siegler then pointed said friend to his longish review. His friend goes back to him and asked, “I just want to know if it’s any good.”  The friend goes that all he wanted to do was connect better with his girlfriend.  “Why iPhone,” Siegler naturally asked.  His friend replied, “The Commercial.”

What commercial?  This one:

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Siegler says with this commercial, Apple is creating a “sentimental bond.”  He concludes that Apple is selling more iPhones to people like his friend because of that bond.

Normal people love, Geeks hate

Going back to Ars Technica’s review of Froyo, Ryan Paul wrote that the performance update alone is a boon for “Android enthusiasts,” and if you hark back to Pogue’s review of iPad, and now Siegler’s thoughts on iPhone this situation perfectly describes the dichotomy that exists in the tech world.   It is either, “normal people will love it, and geeks will hate it.”

It explains why most PCs are uninspiring. Technology has been about the fastest this, the biggest that.  What we’ve seen in the past 20 years is that most people’s daily computing requirement is just a fraction of the power being offered by computing hardware today.

It doesn’t take much muscle to browse the web, to read, compose and send email.  It doesn’t take much muscle to draft a report, do minor spreadsheet, listen to music, or even watch video.

For the most part, the power offered in the device that you carry everyday is enough to do most of things and reasonably well.  Those devices like the Samsung Galaxy S, or the Samsung Wave, powered by Bada OS or Android devices and iOS devices are not blazing fast.  In fact, under the hood they just run at 1 Ghz, tops and their memory, 512MB at the most.

Package an Atom processor with a big screen or two, and you have an Internet device most people would have no trouble using on a daily basis.  It is only the inefficiencies of Windows for example that make these devices look cumbersome.

Drive a 13-inch Macbook Pro and to a user like myself, it only feels slightly faster than the Core Duo iMac, which I own.  Either device works great for most tasks.  The trouble really is when you starting doing more serious work.

Photoshop requires more compute muscle.  Video editing does too.  Building and testing out software is a taxing experience.  Don’t even speak about virtualization unless you got the memory to spend.

And what about games?  Most people just grab an Xbox or a PS3.  Have you seen the new consoles?  Wouldn’t it be great if Civilization V for iPad came out and it was almost the same Civilization V that goes out with computers?  That game would be perfect for multi-touch.

Forget that that phone is driven by A4, or SnapDragon.  Forget it if this thing runs on i7 or Athlon.  The sad reality is that most people just want know if it’s good.

For geeks, the great retina display versus Super AMOLED is a big deal.  Normal people will look at either and say, they like one over the other.

The PC era ends

What we’re seeing here is the end of the PC era.  Who cares what drives Xbox, so long as you know that that spec will play your game on 1080p.  Who cares if PS3 has BluRay, everything else is downloaded these days, it seems archaic to watch stuff off discs.  PS3 is for the awesome graphics.

In the same way for Android, who cares if it runs on Linux?  Great factoid, but really the question is, how well does the phone work?  Is it intuitive enough?

For the same reason the question by most geeks on iPhone (without realizing it) wasn’t really if FaceTime was awesome but how’s the reception on that thing?

The analog era ends

What we’re seeing here is also an end of the analogue era.  As Android matures, and as iOS perfects itself, we’re seeing books, newspapers--- everything move digital.  We will be consuming media on tablets and phones.

Analog is over.

People are saying, what about the historical record?

Datacenters are fragile.  These devices are fragile.  We don’t even have to go to how many times a hard drive would fail and we lose the entirety of family photos, of hospital records.  Without electricity, the sum knowledge of the entire human race is going out in a sizzle.

The beauty of books is that they are physical things that are known to stand the test of time--- at least a reasonable amount of time.  Paper has been around for centuries because it worked.

A completely digital era carries with it the seeds of our own destruction and it becomes increasingly important that renewable energy be the mainstay of how the human race is powered.  It becomes doubly imperative that as the entirety of human existence is tied to the Internet, to the cloud, to these fragile devices, ensuring that power doesn’t sizzle out, ensuring that we are connected to the network is an ever-growing part of that.

The future is a digital tomorrow

What’s next is that the bell tolls and it tolls for PC and it tolls for analog.

As Clay Skirky more elegantly put it, “what matters here isn’t technical capital, it’s social capital.  These tools don’t get socially interesting until they get technically boring.  It isn’t when the shiny new tools show up that their uses start permeating society.  It’s when everybody is able to take them for granted.” Clay Skirky was referring to mobile phones and to twitter and Facebook, when he spoke those words but it seems apt too thinking about technology and what’s next.

It’s a truism.

Going back to Android, and open source and all that--- it was a sexy new frontier.  In a world where we are all cyborgs, the technological feats of android is greeted by, “meh” and a shrug.  It is why iPhone advertising isn’t about how fast it goes, but how it makes people connect with what’s real, and in real-time.

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Video, Courtesy Apple

Android logo, Courtesy Google