Why Nikon and Canon should be worried

There has been some recent speculation on iLounge that Apple may be about to enter the 'point and shoot' camera market. According to the authorised biography of Steve Jobs the three fields that he most wanted Apple to tackle were Television, Textbooks and Photography. We can speak of certainty with regard to textbooks as Apple has already released iBooks Author. According to tech chatter then an Apple 'iTV' is almost certainly imminent too. But does an entry into the world of photography, particularly the point and shoot variety, make any sense? At first appearance the obvious answer seems to be no. There's no doubt that the smartphone market has encroached into sales of point and shoot digicams. For example, the iPhone is by far the most popular camera that posts to flickr. This is for three main reasons; firstly, smartphones are omnipresent whereas most digicams are only carried for particular occasions. Secondly, our smartphones are connected enabling us to share our photos on our social networks almost instantaneously and finally cameras on smartphones are good enough to replace most digicams, though not DSLR's. So why would Apple enter a class of device that most agree that it has played a decisive role in making obsolete? To answer this question we need to know why Apple and Jobs were interested in photography. Firsly we know that Apple have always placed importance on decent optics in all of its camera iSight offerings. Secondly we know that Apple has produced professional photography (and movie) software in Aperture (and Final Cut Pro) in addition to its consumer iLife products (iPhoto, iMovie). This in itself is quite strange seeing a neither professional product is likely to have made much money for a company which traditionally abandons peripheral product lines. Unless of course these products are part of a longer term strategy. We also know that Jobs was very active player in Hollywood circles given his roles at Pixar and Disney. Jobs was also a very keen photographer – and we know he was never healf-hearted about anything. Indeed he was the official photographer at Larry Ellison's latest wedding. Finally, and perhaps most crucially, we know that Jobs had met with and was impressed by the people at Lytro with their 'light field' camera. Taking all this evidence together it doesn't seems plausible to me that Apple would enter the traditional digital camera market with a point and shoot camera. Where Apple ventures it tends to be much more disruptive. If Apple does release a standalone camera I’d imagine it will be something like a Lytro, but probably with still and video features, that was always on and always connected and had hooks into the Apple entire ecosystem. I'd imagine it would be a companion camera that displayed real-time output on your iPhone/iPad and could be controlled from such a device. Lytro has been around for about a year now and looks very impressive but also very, very niche. The Lytro solves a problem to a question we haven't yet asked ourselves. Time will tell but it wouldn't surprise me if Apple wanted to turn the photography world on its head by producing a new type of camera. If that's the case then Nikon and Canon had best start worrying now.

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.