Got rocks in their head

News today that the Nokia Lumia is barely selling shouldn't really come as a surprise. Supposedly for every 1 Lumia sold there are 100 Samsung Galaxy S2's sold. No matter what your thoughts on Windows Phone 7 (I'm fairly neutral on the platform) the fact that Nokia seem to think that people will pay as much, and indeed perhaps even more, for an unknown proposition that an iPhone 4S or Galaxy S2 tells you that the people in Espoo nead a reality check. And soon.

MS Office for the iPad 2

More thoughts on the topic:

If MS had confidence in their Windows 8 tablet strategy surely they'd hold out the port of MS Office for their own kit. Wouldn't it be the definitive tablet killer app? Maybe, maybe not.

It would be the first time that MS were producing a major product for a platform they didn't control (yes I know that office for mac has been available for years - but it hardly counts). Scary new territory.

Wot no e-mail?

On this day when the Entente Cordiale (sp?) definitely took a hit on the chin let me do my bit for Anglo - French relations by praising a French leader. No not sulky Sarky - who more than likely won't survive his bid for re-election in 2012 - but Thierry Breton, CEO of Atos, who has decided to phase out internal e-mail over the next 18 months. Inspired leadership.

MS Office for the iPad

A few posts back I speculated as to whether Miscrosoft would bring Office to the iPad. According to recent tech news Microsoft is indeed in the process of porting its Office suite onto the iPad. If true this is an interesting development. You would have thought that such a move was counter productive given that it could hold off and port Office directly onto the Windows 8 platform for both PC and tablets.

I wonder if they'll get round to doing an Android port?

You can't be sirious!

When Siri was launched at the iPhone 4S product launch it was dismissed by both Andy Rubin of Google and Craig Mundie of Microsoft. The initial dismissal was along the lines of "people don't like talking to phones" which seams a bizarre statement when you think about it.

Now Microsoft seems to have rethought its objections and is now running a series of TV commercials about the voice integration that currently is in place in the Xbox 360.

I'm not going to get into the semantics of Voice Control versus quasi artificial intelligence but Micrsoft's lame TV commercials really don't do anything to help their case.

Size Matters 2

In a tech interview the late Steve Jobs indicated that Apple had done a whole lot of research on optimal screen sizes before launching the iPhone and iPad devices. As per my previous post I don't think that there is much debate that 3.5" - 4" appears to be the optimal size for a mobile screen.

The debate for tablets, however, seems unresolved with devices between 5" and 10" being launched at various times over the last two years. To anyone following the tablet market it comes as no surpirse to realise that Archos, Dell, Blackberry and others have had no luck with the smaller form factors between 5" - 7". Indeed Amazon's much lauded 7" Kindle Fire has recently come in for some poor reviews to do with poor browsing experience among other complaints. So does this mean that anything short of Apple's 9.7" is inadequate? Well I don't think so and it wouldn't surprise me to see a 7.8" iPad3 - Apple has allegedly order a large number of these screens - released next year complimenting the existing form factor.

Why? Well rumours are that the 7.8" screen was a very close second to the 9.7" screen that Apple launched the iPad with. Also if you think back to the days when a lot of pressure was brought to bear upon Apple to enter the netbook market Apple actually responded with an 11" Macbook Air despite Job's earlier statements that anyting under their existing Macbook range of 13" screens was sub optimal. Anyone like me who previouly owned a late, great 12" iBook or PowerBook would realise the flaw in that statement.

Size Matters

There was a time when manufacturers were pulling their hair out trying to make mobile phones smaller. Handsets like the Ericsson GH 337, Nokia 8210 were noteble for being the smallest handsets on the market when they were released.

With a new smartphone form factor established by the iPhone and followed by a horde of iClones that trend appears to be somewhat in reverse. Indeed many Android handsets are now being launched with screen sizes between 4" and 5", trumping the iPhone's screen which has remained unchanged at 3.5" since launch.

Recent reports that Apple has secured the supply of a large number of 4" screens has led to speculation that the iPhone 5, when it arrives next year will be bigger than it's predecessors. Will that be the case? Well I believe the answer is yes and no and here's my rationale.

Take a ruler to you current iPhone and measure the 3.5" screen diagonally. Now stretch that screen size by an extra half inch and its easy to see that a 4" screen could easily be fitted into the current form factor of the iPhone without compromising much. Effectively we'd lose some of the banner at the top (which houses the speaker) and/or the bottom (which houses the home button). Whatever happens I'm pretty sure that the mechanical home button - a component of questionable durability - will not find a place on the iPhone 5. Indeed there has even been speculation that the button will disappear totally. I'll leave Jony Ives and his team to do the rest.