Mindworks Creation – Photography – Media Design – blog

That would be pretty much my initial reaction to the announcement of the Nikon D4 that came in last night.

I don’t have the camera, I did not used it but there are several hands-on videos all over the web. I also saw the report from the usual suspects who have received pre-production samples. Of course you can expect from them to be all excited about the camera and to try to convince us of how awesome it is.
Anyway, even if you take the buzz with a cautious grain of salt, the specs of the product are still here and I still have the feeling that we have a shift that remind me of the D3.

Let’s go back to the end of 2007. Canon is the king. You hear reports of photographers switching from Nikon to Canon to take advantage of the more advanced video capabilities. Than at the beginning of 2008 the Nikon D3 appears and it did not took long for several photographers to come back to Nikon to take advantage of the low light and overall picture quality of the new product. The D3 was the star of the beijing olympics, I would not be surprised if we see the same thing ahead of the London Olympics.

What will be the next step?

There is really nothing groundbreaking in the new product but Nikon apparently is catching up on the video quality and on the overall usability and convenience of the camera. It is certainly leveling the playing field.
At the same time, with the C300, it looks like Canon is more interested in addressing the needs of filmmakers in Hollywood than casual photographers. Are they really going after the right market? Not too sure. In the meantime we can reasonably expect to see the new technology from the D4 to appear in more affordable consumer cameras in a recent future.

In the last 12 years we saw the digital technology take over the traditional film, than over the last 5 years we saw a fusion of the tools available for photographer and film makers. The D4 looks like everything you can dream of if you shoot or film sports, nature and portraits.
But the D4 is also a very specialized tool, it looks to me as some sort of specialized computer with an advanced optic system. It’s a device built to capture and process light digitally. It is probably more sophisticated than a computer in a way but with a very specific user interface.

The question that remains unclear to me is how this technology is going to filter down to the consumer market. Are we going to see a downplayed version of the D4 or are we going to see portable computers getting a better optical component and invading the market of point and shoot cameras. By ‘portable computers’ here I mean devices like an iPhone. The iPhone 4S already has a pretty descent lens system but the software is where it really shines, the low quality of the optics is compensated by great software.

Now can you imagine a device with a ‘camera’ level optic (as opposed to ‘cellphone level’) and the software and the overall user interface and power of an iPhone, a camera on which you could install apps for specific creative features. Wouldn’t that be a killer product, wouldn’t you prefer that over a point and shoot? Are we heading toward generic portable computers upgraded to be cameras or toward ultra specialized devices like the D4 downgraded to be affordable by consumers?

I also must notice that if the D4 is better on many aspects it is still a camer

If you have not heard about it yet, you will probably soon.

To summarize what people have been able to find out so far.

Carrier IQ is a private company who provide some services to the cellphones carriers. For years, the carriers have installed this software on your cellphone supposedly to be able to analyze the quality of the network and improve their services.

After analyzing what the software does exactly it has been recently revealed that it logs pretty much everything you do, your location, the numbers you dial (the carriers already know that anyway), the text messages you send or receive, the websites you visit.
This happens at the lowest level of your phone OS so it can even log your encrypted web connections before they get encrypted, so it keeps track of your passwords for example before they get encrypted.
To make things worse, those data are stored on your phone and sent to the servers at Carrier IQ and made available to the cellphone carriers. You are not aware that this process is happening, you cannot opt out of it, you are not asked for your approval for it to happen and you cannot even shutdown the software or prevent it from starting when you turn on your cellphone.

The cellphones manufacturers are all pretty much explaining that they have nothing to do with that, they give the devices they produce to the carriers who install whatever they want on it and sell them to the unsuspecting customer (that would be you!)

The carriers have pretty much admitted using Carrier IQ but explain that this is a necessary process to improve the quality of their network. Sure, ATT need to know when I log into a website with my username and password and need to keep track of those unencrypted information, it is vital to the optimization of their network. Or you can be the judge of that.

As for Carrier IQ they have been pretty quiet so far but today they received a letter from Senator Franken and it looks like they will have a lot of embarrassing questions to answer.

The story is still developing and could turn into an outright scandal, maybe even a lawsuit as it is not clear if all this is really legal.
We will see how it turns out.

Now, next time I hear somebody explain to me that we have too much government, too much rules, that those rules are bad for the business, they are hurting the economy, they are preventing companies from creating jobs, I think I will use that example. This Carrier IQ story is what happens when you let big companies do whatever they want without putting any regulation on them. It is simply not acceptable.
Sure Carrier IQ is a private company that will soon be in trouble and may simply collapse as a consequence but I still believe the world will be a better place without them. Sure some people will lose their jobs but the problem is that those jobs should not have been created to start with. Not everything is acceptable just to be able to make some profit.

Big companies have proven over and over again that they cannot be trusted, that they are unable to keep a reasonable behavior, that if you let them loose and free to do whatever they want it will end up with that kind of situation. That was the case for the Finance industry, it got us into years of recession and ended up hurting millions of people while making a few executives even more rich. Now we have a pretty good evidence that it’s the same all over again with the cellphone carriers.

So, who’s next? How much more evidences do we need?

Note: I wrote that post on Wednesday morning and did not finished it, than the bad news came Wednesday evening that Steve Jobs had died. So posting this comment was not really a priority.
Last week the press was full of articles and comments from analysts explaining how Apple had lost its advantage and how the other manufacturers will soon catch up and take over the cell phone market. Based on all those comments the iPhone 4S was meant to be a failure even before going on sale.
But… friday the phone actually went on sale and during the first 24 hours, Apple sold more than 1 million of them. Not bad for a product that is doomed. You can probably count on your hands the number of phones that sold that well… in their entire life.
That proves that once again the so called analysts and technology gurus still don’t get it. I start to wonder if they will ever get it actually and honestly they should start to be careful. One can predict doom every time Apple do something, but when it become systematic and you are systematically wrong than you have to face the risk of becoming irrelevant!

Below is the post as I originally wrote it.

There was no iPhone 5 announced yesterday, so this morning the world is disappointed, Apple stock is down more than the day after Steve Jobs resigned as CEO, Samsung and the koreans have hope again at conquering the world. At least the good thing for them is that they won’t have to copy a new device again, the iPhone 4S looks just like the iPhone 4. So is this really a problem?


Let’s analyze what happened. Apple had to release a new product to replace the old but still popular iPhone 4, this product was supposed to:
- have a new faster processor comparable to the one in the iPad 2
- have a better camera
- run on iOS 5 and have a new voice recognition feature
- run on the faster 3.5G network (when your carrier actually support that)
- have a single model that works for all carriers and on all kind of networks

The new iPhone 4S delivers all that but still people wanted more and maybe in a unrealistic way.

The major other expectations were:
- make it thinner. Unfortunately we know this is not possible because of the camera. A descent quality camera requires a descent lens and some sort of focusing and this prevents the phone from being thinner, that’s physics, not much anybody can do about it nowadays.
- get rid of the glass back. I can understand that because it certainly makes the phone a little more fragile, but it also helps a lot the reception. Antennas don’t like to be hidden behind an aluminum back. That’s why there are those ugly black plastic areas on the back of the iPad 2 for example. An Apple don’t like plastic much.
- make the screen bigger. This is certainly possible but that would mean a bigger phone. Apple has picked a form factor from the beginning and is sticking to it and there are some good reasons to do so. Among various advantages, you can use a 3.5 inches phone one handed, this would not be possible with a 4 inch phone. Unfortunately people often get the impression that bigger is better, so a phone with a bigger screen must be better. That’s not necessarily the case but people don’t realize it.
- LTE. Or 4G, this is the next evolution of the wireless networks. Eventually it will get there but there are currently 2 major problems with it. First it’s not widely available. Second every 4G chip requires much more power to operate and therefore would mean a reduced battery life. Apple puts a lot of emphasis on battery life, they don’t want to sell a phone who is out of battery after 3 or 4 hours. So until there are more advanced components there will probably not be a 4G iPhone.

So now the real question is: what is missing in this iPhone 4S?

As far as I can tell nobody came up with much except that there should be iPhone 5 written on it. All the points I listed above are expectations for sure but they are not reasonable expectations.

On paper this phone looks like a great product, it comes with a very significant software update, the new Siri voice recognition intelligent assistant looks awesome, so where exactly is the problem.

I think part of the problem again lay in the secrecy that Apple maintain on everything, it helps develop all sort of rumors and unrealistic expectations. On one side it gives Apple a constant buzz in the press, on the other end when the most crazy rumors prove to be just that (crazy rumors) it leads to some disappointment.

But does it really matter?

No, I very much doubt that outside of a very small population this matters in any way.
The iPhone 4S is a product for a mass market (albeit a sophisticated product) and masses don’t care if there is 5 or 4S written on it.

Now there are some real questions that I have not seen mentioned anywhere. I don’t really have the answer but sometime just asking the question already opens perspectives.

- Why cannot we get Siri outside of the iPhone 4S. The power available on the iPhone $ may be too limited but it is certainly not the case for the iPad 2?
Would that be a way for Apple to make this phone more attractive? Looks like it.
- What happened to the integration of payment systems in the phone. There were speculations a few months ago about the integration of Near Field Communication features. That would let people replace a credit card payment by waving their phones at a new kind of terminals.
There is no sign of that either. Maybe the world is not ready for it. To get this to work you need a phone that is compatible with it and you also need terminals in every stores capable of reading the information coming from the phone. That means replacing all those devices on which you swipe your card at the supermarket. All of them, every where and that’s a lot of devices!

Check out the last brilliant thought from J.P Morgan analyst Mark Moskowitz, I quote from a note sent to clients concerning the new Amazon Kindle Fire:

“We are not impressed with Kindle Fire. In our view, [it] is a stepping stone, at best, into the tablet market. We think that for any vendor to wrestle momentum from Apple, a fully-loaded offering is a must, and here, Kindle Fire falls short for now.”

So, thank you Mr Moskowitz to let us know that we can still safely buy Apple stock and Apple’s lunch won’t be eaten by Amazon once their new tablet is released. I really appreciate that insight. Now maybe what you missed here is that Amazon is not entering the tablet market, Amazon will offer a device that will allow its customers to consume the content they have for sale. Books, magazines, TV shows and movies. They don’t care about the tablet itself. Amazon is a retailer not a computer manufacturer. They want to leverage their advantage as a retailer, they cannot care less about the hardware.
That’s a significantly different purpose and obviously it has been entirely misunderstood.

What amuses me in the aftermath of Amazon announcement is how every other manufacturer of 7 inch tablets is lowering the price. Yesterday the RIM playbook went from $499 to $299 and the same thing is happening today to HTC Flyer tablet.
Still there is very little hope for them to have a significant market share anytime soon because… they lack any significant content. Why would you buy a HTC tablet and have no movies or books to read on it. When you buy your Amazon tablet everything is here available for you.

When journalists were reviewing the various tablets that have been introduced this year their conclusion was always the same – there are no reasons to buy this tablet instead of an iPad. Now Amazon join the party and the same question still apply – if you want a $500 device there are no reasons to buy anything else than an iPad, if you want a $300 device there are no reasons to buy anything else than the Amazon Fire.
And there is room in the market for a $500 device AND for a $300 device.