Prodigy, my iPhone 4, is beginning to feel old after last week's Worldwide Developers Conference.
As expected, Apple showed off iOS 6 at this year's WWDC, months ahead of its Fall release (presumably at the same time as the new iPhone's announcement). Prodigy and I followed the liveblogs and tweets, giddy at the new features Apple is preparing to cram into the iPhone and the iPad.
Turn-by-turn navigation for the Maps app, which now runs on a custom database Apple made itself. There's even a Flyover Mode for easier driving. Yay!
Facebook integration. That's nice!
Facetime over cellular—that feature finally has a purpose!
Oh, and Siri's coming over to the iPad—yay for me and Plato, my recently bought iPad 2!
Or so we thought.
The turn-by-turn navigation on iOS 6? iPhone 4S only. Prodigy will get the fancy new vector-based Maps app, but neither turn-by-turn nor Flyover Mode.
The Facetime over cellular feature is restricted to the iPhone 4S and the latest-generation iPad. We don't know why, because Nokia had this working on much less powerful phones when I was in high school, but the fact is that I still can't make Facetime calls home over my cell network with Prodigy.
And Siri is coming to the iPad—the third-generation iPad, that is. The original iPad and the iPad 2 still won't have her (and not even Voice Control!).
Of course, this is all a portent of the already obvious: that a new iPhone is coming out in the Fall, and it's going to support all of these features, maybe even along with some other unannounced hardware-related ones. The unspoken rule of Apple is that only the two latest iPhone models (in iOS 6's case, the iPhone 4S and the new iPhone to be announced in September) get to carry the full feature set.
In other words, this is all part of the Grand Apple Plan, and has been from the very beginning. Prodigy and I were expecting it, but it still feels weird to be getting old.
It's so weird watching this knowing that Steve Jobs is dead, especially because he was alive when it happened.
Tim Cook's gay, if you didn't know, and his twang becomes quite obvious the more he speaks. Isn't it wonderful how that does not bother us at all?
Oh, I'm sorry. Grid lines? Autofocus and autoexposure? Cropping? Are those new features of your Camera app? I thought you were just showing off Camera+. (Even the volume-up button as a physical shutter button was their idea, until you told them to get rid of it and took their app off the Store until they did.)
I'm finding it really hard to believe in some of their figures, such as "26% sharper." How do you measure that?
Pretty photos, yes, but they were all taken in favorable light conditions.
Such shrewd marketers, these Apple people. Phil Schiller called Voice Control a "letdown" just before he unveiled Siri; when it was announced together with the 3GS a couple of years ago, they used such terms as "great," "the simplest thing," and "easy to use."
Schiller prefaced the Siri demo with a "this is just a beta" disclaimer. How unlike Apple is it to be less than 200% confident about a feature. Is this a sign of the post-Jobs era?
I'm disappointed at the supposedly reputable tech journalists in the audience who applaud the Siri demo. Guys, please—it was a free app.
Notice how Scott's talking to Siri slowly and deliberately? Yeah, that's probably not how you would talk to your phone if you were jogging or running late for work.
So basically, if it weren't for Siri this phone would tank. I'm not even confident it's going to do so well in sales.
I have to admit, Siri does look nice, and I would love to have it on my phone. Let's be honest here, Apple. The iPhone 4 totally has the capacity to run that thing. It's only exclusive to the 4S because they wouldn't make any money otherwise.
Siri is loads useful, but it's not worth a purchase. I'll wait 'til next year, when more major upgrades are sure to come.
The iPhone 4S is probably the last iPhone whose development Steve Jobs was able to oversee extensively. The iPhone 5 is probably stewing in a laboratory somewhere, but it's not fully formed yet. How will Apple's first post-Jobs phone look? Will it meet our expectations? I'm scared.
I denied Steve Jobs's death when I first heard of it.
"Steve Jobs is dead?" Mama texted me while I was on a jeep to Katipunan to meet Katz for breakfast. "No, just retired," I replied.
"Our television must be lying, then," read her reply.
Incredulous, I opened Twitter on my iPhone 4. The tweets weren't loading, so I opened up Mobile Safari and began googling.
The news outfits had broken their stories on Jobs only half an hour earlier.
* * *
Truth be told, I don't think I've fully absorbed Steve Jobs's death yet. We all knew his health was deteriorating. We knew it when he had to take three medical leaves as CEO. We knew his health was the reason he had to step down from Apple—his love for his company wouldn't allow him to resign for any less. We knew his battle with disease had become permanent, that cancer had become his lifelong foe.
Still, I never imagined I would have to hear the news of his death this early. I'd imagined myself finding out about it a solid two or three decades later, plopped on a couch at home next to my child in front of whatever iDevice would be the fashion of the time. Jobs would have been cozily retired by the time he died, fully satisfied with what he would have had accomplished.
I guess to me, Jobs's death felt like a film screening stopped before the closing credits ended. I think the thought process in my head was something like, "No, it can't be. Steve still has so much to show us."
Not that we haven't seen anything from the man that revolutionized desktop computing, our mobile experience and the way we listen to music. I will fight anyone who says that Steve hasn't made a mark; you couldn't ignore his impact if you had three layers of blindfolds on. Still I think we felt that he had more, much much more left to show us, that the show was far from its end. Steve just needed to take a break.
It didn't help that the day before his death, Tim Cook and the rest of the team he entrusted his life's work to announced the iPhone 4S. Although Steve couldn't go on stage to show the world the device, we know he was hands-on in creating it. For all we know, the early prototypes of the iPhone 5 are sitting in an Apple laboratory somewhere, not quite fully formed yet, but with the fingerprints of Steve Jobs all over them. Steve's vision was so far-reaching, we can't tell for sure where he stopped looking.
I suspect we won't know for sure for a long time to come.
* * *
I could say Steve means the most to me as the man who made me feel personally connected to the chunks of metal that are my gadgets. But really, when I think of Steve I think of a tremendous presenter who knew how to get a message across and engage and spark enthusiasm in his audience.
The tips I picked up just watching Steve's keynotes help me in school, when I have a report or some other kind of visual presentation to do. More than that, however, I learned from Steve to do what you want, do it with genuine enthusiasm and believe in it. The enthusiasm and belief of whoever you're trying to convince will follow naturally.
Jobs did what he wanted to do, and he didn't feel threatened by "the system." He thought different; he spent his limited time on Earth to make a difference. He set out to put a ding in the Universe, and thanks to him, it now looks like a half-eaten apple.
I aspire to live the Jobs way every day of my life.
Apple announcements are probably like Election Day for technology journalists in the United States. They're much hyped, well-anticipated and preceded by lots of controversies and rumors.
For Filipino gadget geeks, every time Apple comes out with something it's like Christmas morning. Apple usually makes announcements in the morning, Eastern time, which means 1am Philippine time, when everyone is too asleep to be bothered with a gadget announcement. The moment we wake up, though, we rush to our laptops and check all the liveblogs we bookmarked in advance, excited to see what Steve Claus left for us under the tree.
Steve retired earlier this year and sadly passed away on Wednesday. Apple was apparently informed of its co-founder's imminent demise, as its headquarters "went dark"over the weekend preceding Jobs's death, Robert Scoble quotes "a guy I know at Facebook" as saying. Tim Cook, who succeeded Jobs as CEO, and his team had iOS apps and a "new developer platform" to announce, but we got none of that on Tuesday.
But Jobs wouldn't have wanted anything to come to a halt because of him, so Tim Cook went up the stage and announced the iPhone 4S on Tuesday. Steve Jobs deserves a separate post; here I'll talk about the 4S.
The 4S retains the form factor of the previous generation, except that GSM users might wonder why there's an extra notch on the upper left side of the phone, above the Mute key. Apple changed the antenna structure so that the phone can support both GSM and CDMA networks, removing the need for separate models for different networks. The 4S packs a new dual-core processor and an eight-megapixel camera, up three million pixels from the iPhone 4. This confirms the theory that Apple makes major upgrades to its iPhone every other year, and releases relatively minor upgrades in in between.
However, Apple always manages to include something stellar in the minor upgrades to entice customers to buy what would be an otherwise unchanged phone. Remember when they came out with the 3GS? It sported the same form factor as the 3G that preceded it, except with a few speed improvements, multitasking and Voice Control. The speed improvements weren't so noticeable; multitasking on the 3GS made the phone lag. But Voice Control was a dream. You spoke stuff like "play Here Comes The Sun" or "What time is it?"into the phone, and instantly the song would play or the time would be told to you. All told, it wasn't enough reason to replace a one-year-old phone, but for many Apple users who were on the fence about an upgrade, it was probably all the convincing they needed.
Similarly, the A5 chip isn't really a big leap from the A4 chip on the iPhone 4 (in fact, I don't imagine I'll ever need anything faster than the iPhone 4 for my daily needs). I barely flinched at the 8MP camera—I can take photos just fine with my iPhone 4 and all of the five megapixels it has to offer.
But Apple took the voice control technology one step further with Siri, which they demonstrated the hell out of during the iPhone 4S announcement. Siri is like a tiny personal assistant fairy that lives inside your phone. Tell it to "set a meeting for 4pm on Tuesday at the Conference Room" and an appointment is automatically added to your Calendar. Saying, "I'm craving for a burger in Quezon City" will give you a list of hamburger places in your city, ranked according to Yelp ratings. Tell it to "text Kathleen I'm on my way," and it instantly sends an SMS.
People are buzzing about Siri all over the Internet, but those who don't really follow technology won't know that Siri was actually a free (FREE!) iOS app DARPA helped develop. It went live on the Apple App Store on February 5, 2010, and Apple bought the company on April 29 that year. Siri hasn't received an update since the purchase, but it stayed on the Store, available for download.
And then, the iPhone 4S keynote happened. Before it started, Siri was still free for downloading by anyone; by the time it was over, Siri had been taken down. Those who downloaded the app before it was pulled offline will still be able to use it until October 15. From then on, everyone who doesn't have an iPhone 4S won't be able to use the technology.
Basically, Apple bought a company (for an undisclosed, but my guess is pretty hefty amount) to make its users get a brand new, $199 phone to enjoy a feature that previously cost nothing.
Is Siri enough reason to fork over as much as $399 for the 64GB iPhone 4S and throw away your perfectly fine iPhone 4? Granted, Siri is much more integrated into iOS now that it's a feature instead of a third-party app. Many pedestrian users have probably been won over again and again by the use cases Apple demonstrated in the keynote. But I don't think anyone who isn't a power-user businessman-type can justify a 4S purchase if he already has an iPhone 4. The Voice Control feature that's available now for iPhone 4 and 3GS users works perfectly well for most basic commands, such as playing songs, dialing numbers and asking for the time. If I want to book a reservation in a restaurant, I can just ask Voice Control to call the place, and I can speak to a human to reserve a table. I don't need to buy myself a new phone.
Then again, Apple probably knows there are quite a few people out there who have both a lot of money and an infinite love for everything Infinite Loop. Those people will probably populate the lines outside Apple Stores once the iPhone 4S goes on shelves. The rest of us know the real story: the iPhone 4S is just an iPhone 4 with one fewer available app.
If there's one thing to be excited about in iOS 5, it's the overhaul of the notification system, which Apple users have been waiting for ever since we received our first text. Twitter integration is nice; the upgrades to the Camera app, I have right now because I bought Camera+. Reminders? Okay. Newsstand? Sure. But man, that new implementation for notifications—it's like cut and paste all over again.
If there's one thing to hate about iOS 5, it's that it's a long way away from devices. Apple says it'll be available in the fall (September, for my fellow tropics-dwellers).
