It’s that time of year again; students have from now until September 7th to pick up a Mac under educational pricing and get a free 8GB iPod Touch as part of the deal.
As Apple famously does not offer big sales on their product line this is about it in terms of deals on current hardware and is probably the best time to buy if you are in the market for a new Mac anyway. Even if you don’t want the Touch they can fetch around $150 on Ebay and help further defer the cost of your new iMac or Macbook.
I have to say that I was really expecting Apple to include the iPad as a potential upgrade on this deal. It seemed like a perfect fit to offer the option of a $200 discount on the iPad for those that don’t want an iPod Touch and I think potentially could have really spiked their numbers with a demographic that they have to desperately want to own.
While the iPad is performing well in the current vacuum with relatively no competition to speak of that time is going to draw to a close in the next 6 months and they are foolish to squander any opportunity to draw buyers into their ecosystem now. $75-$200 in app and accessory purchases into their iPad experience buyers would be considerably less inclined to jump ship for a few added niceties like Flash and the Chrome browser.
What do you think, did Apple blow a chance to really cement their lead or are those that aren’t getting an iPad firmly enough entrenched that discounted pricing wouldn’t sway them?
The videos really do the talking here, but Steve Jobs has thrown down the gauntlet against Flash and indicated that it essentially makes for a broken experience on a mobile device. The first video below is of Flash 10.1 running on a Nexus One and the second is HTML 5 running on an iPad.
Which looks like a broken experience to you?
*post image courtesy of androidphonegeek
I recently wrote a piece over on Android and Me about iVdopia, a mobile advertising platform which brought pre-app and in-app video advertising to the iPhone last year, and became available to Android developers recently. The reader response to the idea of actual commercials on their mobile devices was overwhelmingly negative, mirroring my own feelings on the matter, and I think developers and advertisers would be wise to look at other options.
On average mobile users are incredibly impatient (myself included) and they absolutely will not stand for a commercial or even an extra screen to jump through before accessing your app or website.
Advertisers need to realize that they can’t continue to apply the same tactics that worked for TV or even the “immobile internet.” Being bombarded by advertising is intolerable to the tech savvy market and mobile has been the last refuge, not requiring us to actively work to stop ads from invading our screens. With advanced mobile devices proliferating at an incredible rate in the last year and mobile ad click through rates allegedly soaring with them it looks like that panacea is about to end. Continue reading »
To anyone that follows the blog regularly I’m sure you are calling shenanigans on my referring to this as “Week 3″ of my learning to program process as it has been a few weeks since I last posted on it. Ironically it is my interest in Android that slowed my progress on this project as I took a job as a contributor to Android and Me and it has taken me a little while to adjust to the added workload. Anyway, I’m back at it this week and I will definitely try harder to stay on track this time as I would love to be able to contribute something to the Android Market this year. Continue reading »
This morning I received a lengthy rebuttal to one of my earlier iPad posts and as I ended up voicing my opinion on many of the major iPad debates while responding to it I decided that I would instead turn my response into a post. So thanks to reader Louis Wheeler for his well considered comments and here are my answers. Continue reading »
I’m a happy Android user at present, so today’s big unveil of Windows Phone 7 Series (WP7S?) is exciting to me mainly if it serves to push forward the rest of the mobile market (and from the sound of things it should do just that). But what peaks my interest more about this release is that a division within Microsoft managed to completely recode and reimagine from the ground up a significant OS within the Windows ecosystem without any significant information leaks prior to its announcement.
TechCrunch is reporting this week that the Amazon promotion that popped up in January offering a “free” Kindle to their most dedicated readers was just a trial run for a much more ambitious undertaking. If you recall the offer that was extended was to buy a Kindle and if you weren’t thrilled with it you could receive a refund while retaining the Kindle. Purportedly Amazon is hoping to extend this same offer to all Amazon Prime subscribers. Amazon Prime is a $79 a year subscription which offers free 2-day shipping on all orders. While I’m sure it would be a PR win for Amazon, I just don’t see this as that critical for Amazon’s success in the e-reader world and I certainly don’t see it as tipping the scales one way or the other in their upcoming war with Apple and the rest of the tablet manufacturing world. Continue reading »
I was reading an article on CrunchGear earlier this week about Sony’s rumored plans to re-launch the PSP Go which has not exactly been flying off the shelves since its release last October.
I owned one of the original PSPs for a little over a year and just didn’t end up using it enough to justify keeping it. Despite that experience I always perk up whenever I hear rumors of a revision to the device and hope that Sony has figured out a way to make it relevant. Each time I’m disappointed in the minor tweaking that they do and even the PSP Go which was more of a re-imagining of the device than the previous iterations still fails to deliver. So I offer up my opinion on where Sony needs to go with the PSP in order to breath life into it.
I’m sure by now that you are all aware that multitouch has come to a U.S. Android device at long last. This was fast becoming an issue akin to the iPhone not having copy and paste or MMS for the first couple years of its existence. Every interview you saw with a member of the Android team would feature at least a brief grill session on why multitouch (or “specific multitouch implementations” as Erick Tseng put it to Engadget) were missing on U.S. Android devices. Now that we have multitouch the why probably seems less important, but I think the answer has been made crystal clear. Continue reading »
The New York Times reported yesterday that Google is getting closer to the release of an online store targeted at the business market. The store will offer software from Google’s partners with an eye to increasing the sales of Google Apps.
I might be reading too much into this, but I can’t help but think this is a harbinger of the more business minded Android device that Andy Rubin indicated would be coming soon. Continue reading »