The Cloud (come back to earth and reality)

Everyone's talking about The Cloud, the hype around it is incredible. It is the new frontier, the new killer-app. If you are not "in The Cloud", you are nowhere.

The Cloud concept is quite old. The general idea is that your computer, laptop, tablet delegates some of its functionality on external servers housed somewhere by someone that is giving you a service. Hotmail and Gmail could be considered a cloud email services. You don't have an email server at home, you don't have (or at least don't need) an email client in your PC. Your emails aren't even stored in your PC, all is hosted and handled by Microsoft's  or Google's servers and you only need a web explorer to access it.

So why all the hype about it?

We all have seen this image at work. Someday (it always happens sooner or later) internet connection is lost. For several hours you can't get email and you can't surf the web!!! Your life turns miserable. Without email it is obvious that your boss can't expect you to work or do anything useful!! Some people even run through the office crying about apocalypse... the IT Director is crouching in a corner with his right hand on his ear (Rainman-style) mumbling something about its not his fault... hell is loose.

I may be exaggerating but the truth is that without email it seems people can work any longer (and the IT guys get a couple of shouts).  Now just imagine that ALL your systems were "cloud" based. No access to the company's accounting. No access to Word/Excel/Powerpoint cloud-based apps. This time it would really mean that there is nothing to do.

The concept behind cloud computing is nice, the idea is great but there is still a long way to go to get to the place where it will be an acceptable solution for our needs. I use Dropbox and now I also use iCloud as cloud-storage services. I find the iPhone's new automatic backup service quite useful. I've been reading about the new services of cloud-synchronization that iOS5 is giving to game developers (I guess that to any iOS & Mac developer but it seems that game developers will be the first ones to take advantage of it) and I find it a good use of the cloud. But still it all seems more a file hosting service than a real cloud-computing service.

The first thing I've seen that made me think "wow, this is a good way to use cloud computing" is Silk, the new Amazon Browser for Kindle Fire. What Amazon does is handle all navigation in their servers, the dozens of connections that a web client makes to different web servers when trying to "paint" a page on screen (you get the web frame and text content from one place, ads from a different or several different ones, cookie counters from another, google analytics, Facebook "I like" and followers icons... etc, etc.). So Amazon pre-processes all of that and simplifies the connection with the client so that all complexity resides in the Amazon servers and little processing is left for the client. I havent tried yet it (Kindle Fire not available yet) but the idea sounds great.

I'm sure there are many other good solutions for the Cloud out there... but the same way Virtualization was a great idea but it took Vmware & others years to have a solution that IT departments would adopt for their systems, Cloud computing still needs some time to mature. I don't doubt it is the future, but not the present (yet).

Why will iPhone 4S be a success?

I tend to be critical and try to look at things from different viewpoints. It's always good to think "out of the box" and not get influenced by what you are reading in the news, in websites or listening on TV. That is the reason why while there are many people feeling let down by yesterday's Apple presentation, I think they have made a good move.

The last thing I saw yesterday before having dinner and being "disconnected" from the world was that Apple's stock was down 3,3% in NASDAQ. Articles had started to appear here and there talking about the disappointment of fans. However, my image of the day was this one (we'll get back to it later):

(with 2 year contracts)

Lets make a quick revision of the main features of the new iPhone:

Feature 1: A5 Processor
The iPhone 4S features a A5 dual-core 1GHz processor designed by Apple. The same processor you can find in the iPad 2. According to Apple it will be twice as fast as the current iPhone 4 and seven times faster when gaming. However, this won't affect battery as it, in theory, will be able to provide 8hours of talk time over 3G.

Feature 2: Antennas + Connectivity
After all the problems the antenna gave in the iPhone 4, the famous "Antennagate", Apple has revised the antenna setup in the iPhone 4S. It now switches between two antennas, to transmit and receive, and this gives better call quality and faster data, reaching 5.8 and 14.4 mbps upload and download. It's not LTE but sounds pretty good.
The iPhone is now also a "world phone", unifying CDMA and GSM in a single device, allowing you to travel anywhere with the same handset.

Feature 3: Camera (8mp + HD)
The camera system has been revised, introducing a state-of-the-art 8 megapixel camera for phones, higher sharpness, better color accuracy, better illumination and faster, much faster to setup and take pictures.
This same camera is also capable of 1080p HD video recording with video image stabilization and temporal noise reduction. Quite a nice camera.

Feature 4: iOS5
Of course, iPhone 4S will run iOS5, the new operating system by Apple. It's not something new and it's not groundbreaking, but will add some nice features like a RSS reader in Safari, being PC Free, iMessage (similar to BB Messenger), improvements to Mail, etc...

Feature 5: Siri
But the most innovative feature the iPhone 4S adds is Siri. Siri is your voice assistant. It is designed to give information and follow commands. You can check the weather, ask for a contact address, get directions... all buy just asking Siri. It has a female voice (that can't be changed) and will launch in English, French and German, with more languages to follow. We will have to see how well it responds and how it evolves, but it sounds as a good addition.

Seen as a whole it is a good upgrade for the iPhone, but its not the iPhone 5 many people were expecting, and that is why we had all the disappointment floating around yesterday.

Killer-feature: Pricing
But lets get back to the pricing. The features we have been talking about may not be impressive, it may put the iPhone on-par or slightly ahead of several other high-end devices in the market, but the most important move Apple made yesterday was setting up very competitive prices.

You don't need a low-end and a high-end device when you have iPhone 3GS, 4 and 4S in stock, what you need is to set the prices straight. the iPhone 4 is still one of the best handsets in the market and the iPhone 3GS also beats most smartphones. With the pricing Apple is setting there is no reason for many people to get onto the iPhone train as the main barrier before, the price, has disappeared.

Why get a low-end nokia or LG or whatever when you can have an iPhone 3GS for free? It is a powerful phone with a nice hardware and gives you access to the whole AppStore. You may not be able to record videos in HD, but you would definitely have a better handset than 90% of those available in your carrier.

Amazon presented the Kindle Fire ten days ago. It isn't the best piece of hardware of the market but the pricing is competitive and the experience it delivers is better than any other tablet (leaving aside iPad). They are getting 50.000 pre-orders per day and it seems they have crushed all android-tablet competitors.

Apple seems to be attacking now a segment of the market it hadn't bother with before: mid and low end. They are the leaders in high-end smartphones even though, as a whole, Android seems to be passing them, but now they are putting their phones in the hands of kids, teenagers and more price-concerned users. In a single item you have a gaming platform with thousands of games (some free, many cheap), an iPod and a mobile phone.... what else do you need?