Rumor: Apple may not release cloud-based iOS 5 until this fall - Page 4

That's so interesting. I think that the original iPad display is great. I read all (scientific) papers on the iPad now, I haven't printed one off for ages. I mark papers up too. I've given classes from my iPad (since last year) but would greatly appreciate the mirroring capability of the new one, reason enough for buying. Please keep thinking up reasons for me to buy an iPad 2, I'm sure that I could find a perfectly legitimate use for my existing one, although to be fair, it is in much wider circulation at home now.

By the way, being able to charge the iPad while driving a VGA screen would be nice too, I know that it can be done on the HDMI output adapter. \

Huh? The drama queen leaving with the Prom Queen!

"Apple is selling a culture, an experience, an all enfolding universe of hardware performance, beauty, apps, music, video, and third party equipment." melgross, circa March 2011

Don't you dare tread on a Poet's territory. A well grounded and knowledgable mindset has no business wrapping up an argument laying out a metrical minefield to entrap a well versed opponent... But so be it! What were mere technological artifacts in a ground shifting debate morphed, on a dripping elegiac upheaval, into happenstance's obituary.

Long live melgross the Poet; he can talk small..., he can talk big..., ...and now I know, for I bear witness, ...he can talk way beyond!

Sync is going to be become a killer feature for "mainstream" users over the next few years.

The truth about the "post-PC era" is that it isn't about simply swapping your PC for an iPad, it's about separating your virtual digital life from the hardware.

Once your digital life has been virtualized it can be accessed from a plethora of different devices, each of which are the best fit for the task they are performing - your smart phone, tablet (or probably multiple tablets), PC, laptop, smart TV, smart car and probably a bunch of others that are yet to be envisioned.

In a few short years mainstream users are going to stop thinking about on which device they saved a photo or a document - if it belongs to them the expectation will be that it is available on all devices which they own.

So (in a round-about fashion ) my point is that you're 100% correct. iPad tethering isn't just an inconvenience or something it would be nice for Apple to get rid off... it's absolutely critical to the success of the device and the platform as a whole because the iPad isn't the "post-PC era" device, it's just a window into it.

I think the lack of an explosion of interest bodes very ill for the platform. Why would a developer invest in the platform when iOS and Android are so much larger? I liked the WP7 interface too, but that's not enough, and there were things I found clunky about it too. I don't think slow and steady will win this race for MS.

Apple and Google are steadily evolving their Mobile OSs, but they made an initial splash that MS failed to. When Apple blew the mobile market wide open in 2008 with the App Store and cheaper iPhone, there was room for a competitor to come in and offer the alternative. Google got there first and I think they'll take some shifting now.

MS could do it, but I'm just highly doubtful and haven't seen any signs that they have the nous and forward-thinking to do it.

Exactly.

Apple was smart to remove a user-accessible file-system from iOS. But I think it's time that we had a new and elegant solution which allows apps to share and exchange data.

As you say, the best way would be some auto-magical solution where the user doesn't know or care where the file is actually stored.

C.

Where MicroSoft is involved, maybe no nous is good nous.

But really, one wishes them well.

Excuse me guys, but MS jumped into the so called tablet space in 2001. They've also been heavily been promoting real tablets with Vista and Win 7. So let's not state things incorrectly. They aren't late to the ball, they just been tripping and falling all over the floor, and have gone back to rub their ankles and feet.

MS has major problems when it comes to tablets. Their insistence that they run real Windows programs is the biggie. All other tablet OS companies either don't come from a desktop heritage, or understand that it won't work in the small screen touch space. Not MS, they insist that it's the only way to go.

The question is how does it go? So far it hasn't gone anywhere (ooh, a pun). The problem for MS is that they know quite well that they have a major problem if a new form factor comes out and becomes a major factor in computing, without running legacy programs. One problem MS had while developing Longhorn, we all remember the fiasco with that, right?; was that they tried to insert major new technologies (well, Cairo wasn't new, but it hadn't been used either) while maintaining full backwards compatibility. It failed. Apple had tried that with Copeland in the '90's, and it failed as well, though there were other reasons, in addition.

So if MS were to develop a tablet that didn't run Windows programs, there would be little incentive for their customers to stay with the platform. A survey was done a couple of years ago that basically asked that question when Windows was seen to be having problems. The question to CIO's in major companies was whether they would stay with Windows if MS modernized the platform at the expense of backwards compatibility. The result was that about 50% said they would leave the platform. About half said they would move to the Mac, and the rest to a Linux distro such as Red Hat.

We can see the problem MS has. As far as they're concerned, the name Windows is exceedingly important to them, which is why they call everything by that name, even though most of their products aren't actually Windows products at all.

But in the tablet space, they need actual Windows if they're not going to become a footnote in the future. But there's a disconnect between need and doability (my word). It just isn't easy to do. There is a major conflict between a touch interface and a keyboard/mouse interface. Apple got this, Google had no OS to hold them back, and so they got it. MS hasn't got it yet, and there's a very big question as to whether they can get it.

So while a recent poll has shown that there is a demand for a real Windows tablet, the question is whether MS can deliver on that. I'm not even questioning MS's competence in the area. No doubt they have that competence. But it may not matter. Let's say that they produce a wonderful touch UI for Windows running in the background. How are developers going to react to that? Their programs won't work, either at all, or for the most part. What then?

This is MS's biggest nightmare. If the programs won't work without major reworking, then why bother? Can they come out with an interface that will somehow make the complex Windows UI work on a small, low Rez screen? They haven't been able to do so yet. What can they do to make it so? They seem to be changing the UI entirely, if what they've shown as a possible UI for Windows 8 is real. But it's more like their phone than anything else. How will that work, assuming it's real?

I'm not so optimistic for MS right now, and neither is anyone else. They've certainly got their work cut out for themselves, and their developers who may not play along.

Line starts on the right.

It may not matter. You know the old expression; Timing is everything? It may be too late. In fact, before the Nokia deal, I though that it WAs too late. It may still be, as there's no evidence that Nokia will be able to sell nearly as many WP7 phones a year as they were selling Symbian phones. And if not, they will likely move to Android after all, at least as a supplement, and who knows, maybe even keep Symbian and MeeGo around.

It may not matter in this case. It's not true cloud integration anyway. That will take some time. Apple has the mass of sales behind it, and that alone maso allow it to succeed. Other cloud based companies, except Google, don't have products they control at the OS level in the numbers that would matter. MS, for example, doesn't. All of the other cloud companies except IBM are pure software plays, such as Salesforce.

1) It's hard to say if it's too late. Even now Nokia is much better off financially than Apple was prior to its rise from the ashes. I don't foresee Nokia doing why Apple accomplished, but they don't need to in order to be viable.

2) Like dumbphones, Symbian can be the majority while still making Nokia a competitor in smartphones and helping solidify WP7 as a smartphone OS.

3) I like WP7. It's what I'd choose (on HTC HW) if I could use an iPhone. If what I hear about Android from smartphone vendors is true we may start to see some vendors switch more heavily to WP7 once their ecosystem grows.

4) Late to a party isn't always a bad thing, and Apple has proven that twice revetly with te iPhone and iPad.

We may have a different definition of what viable means to Nokia. Remember that they sold upwards of 130 million smartphones last year. That's about a 38% increase over the year before. For most companies, that would be a pretty good year. RIM's sales increases were not that much higher.

But Nokia is number one, and the reason why they're so upset is because they want to remain number one. If they move from Symbian to WP7, can they accomplish that? I don't see how. Nokia isn't interested in becoming a very shrunken company. A comparison to Apple in the mid late '90's isn't a good one. Apple wasn't number one.

If Nokia somehow managed to sell 50 million WP7 phones in the first full year they're depending on them entirely, in 2013, most likely, that would be a major problem for them. If sales don't take off in 2012, when they're supposed to be coming out with a couple of models, or more, that's a problem for them even earlier.

Why would anyone think that WP7 will do so amazingly well in the EU, when it's doing so amazingly poorly in its home market? This is something I've yet to understand. It seems to be more of a hope on Nokia's part than a sure thing. Lots of companies make predictions. Lots of them are wrong.

The current release date is much better as it gives Apple time to ramp up production (nothing worse than shortages at the busiest shopping season) and it allows for plenty of exposure.

Sorry for another post on this, but I was thinking about It again, and so I just wrote it up.

You keep talking about Nokia being viable, but Nokia doesn't want to be viable, they want to remain number one. That's a very big difference.

Nokia just said that they were phasing Symbian out. That means gone. S40 for dumb and feature phones, and WP7 for smartphones. That's their new mantra.

It's bad to be late when you have nothing new to offer. Look at the reviews of WP7. good, but not great. And MS is showing people a side they aren't happy about. Finally, the first update is coming out with c/paste. And not for everyone yet. When? Who knows! There's a lot of anger about the update problems. It appears that contrary to what MS said originally, updates can be held up indefinitely. We're seeing its strongest supporters complaining about it and stating that if it isn't fixed, it will hurt the platform. Comparing it to the iPhone from 2007 is useless, as the phone industry was a very different place then.

So with poor US sales, problems with the update process, few apps, etc. We can see the MS truly needs the Nokia deal to work. Nokia does as well. More so than MS does. If Nokia can't increase sales of its smartphones with this, rather than have a major shrinkage, they are in trouble, and they know it. It's why Elop, in that now infamous long memo, said that their platform was burning, and that they were jumping into the sea with WP7. in other words, we're dying with what we have now, but we're jumping into something that may not save us.

They know this may not work. And if they do, then others, who are not close to the numbers, should assume the same thing.