AllThingsD » Amazon MP3

Apple Enables Post-PC Era With iOS 5, but Are Users Ready?

Ina Fried — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 18:13:52 +0000

Although every iPhone and iPad ships with a sync cable, Steve Jobs took a huge step on Monday to make that cord purely optional.

The Apple CEO drew significant applause as he announced several features that will allow the iPhone and iPad to end their dependence on a Mac or PC. When iOS 5 arrives this fall, iPhone and iPad owners will be able to get started directly from the device, as well as sync content wirelessly.

Indeed, by the time Jobs stood up later in the keynote and noted that Apple was demoting the Mac from the “digital hub” to just one of many devices talking to a hub in the cloud, the point had already been made. Of course, iCloud is a key piece of the vision, enabling all manner of documents to be created in one place–be it PC, Mac or iPhone–and then backed up and synced to a host of other devices.

Wedge Partners analyst Brian Blair said that, for all the talk around the post-PC era, it wasn’t really possible until Apple’s moves on Tuesday to allow the iPhone and iPad to operate without having to connect to a computer.

“It reminds me of the first Mac I saw without a floppy drive,” Blair said. “Or the reaction people had to the MacBook Air given the absence of a CD drive. The cord-cutting details of today’s event are a glimpse into the future.”

Apple was early with both trends, of course. But the floppy is most certainly dead and even the DVD drive is no longer ubiquitous on computers.

As for seeing a cloud-based future, Jobs is certainly not alone. Google is offering two of its own takes on the post-PC era. Android is clearly a bet on a lighter-weight operating system to take on iOS head-on. Meanwhile, the company’s Chrome OS is a different kind of bet on a world where the cloud is at the center. With Chromebooks, Google is pitching a world in which everything lives in the cloud, with very little if anything stored locally.

Amazon has also offered a cloud-centric approach to media with both its Kindle (and Kindle apps) as well as its Amazon MP3 music store.

One company that, not surprisingly, isn’t looking to enter the post-PC era just yet is Microsoft. Though clearly challenged by iOS and Android, Microsoft is attacking back with Windows 8–a version of the operating system that it hopes will be able to allow the PC to reach new directions. For its part, Microsoft is hoping that people will want a powerful machine with local storage, especially if that comes in a package nearly as portable as the cloud-dependent competition.

What remains to be seen is if Redmond can deliver on its “no compromises” promise, particularly when it comes to battery life and the user experience.

The other question is just how much people are really looking to move beyond the PC. There is no question that users are adopting alternative devices like smartphones and tablets. So far, at least, those devices are largely in addition to, rather than instead of, a computer.

But Apple’s move, Blair said, does more than just position the company for a distant future.

“It will also allow Apple to further penetrate international markets where populations don’t have high PC penetration rates,” Blair said. “Over the next decade, many users will purely access the network via an iPhone, that’s it…and that will be enough.”

Complete coverage:

Orange You Glad the iPhone’s Coming to Vodafone?

John Paczkowski — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 18:00:33 +0000

[ See post to watch video ]

Google Android Phone: 3G, $179, Amazon MP3, App Store, 1GB, Copy and Paste

John Paczkowski — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 15:24:43 +0000

The first handset to be powered by Google’s Android OS debuted this morning at a T-Mobile launch event in New York. Manufactured by HTC, the G1 is largely as anticipated. Peter Chou, CEO of HTC describes it as “iconic,” but that’s being a bit generous, I think (“The G1 won’t win any beauty contests with its Apple rival,” writes Walt Mossberg. “It’s stubby and chunky, nearly 30 percent thicker and almost 20 percent heavier than the iPhone.”)

In design, the device seems to borrow quite a bit from T-Mobile’s Sidekick, and its touchscreen GUI owes a thing or two to Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone. Which makes perfect sense, since that’s the device it’s clearly intended to compete with. The G1 will run on both 3G and Wi-Fi and be tethered to the T-Mobile (DT) network. It will come preloaded with a version of Amazon’s MP3 store and Android Market, an application store similar to Apple’s App Store. And it will support and sync with the broad spectrum of Google (GOOG) apps–Google Talk, Google Calendar, etc. Its browser is something the dev team refers to as Chrome-Lite, a mobile version of Google’s new Webkit-based Chrome browser.

Oddly, the G1 has no built-in video player. Odder still, it has just 1GB of memory. T-Mobile has helpfully outfitted it with a 1GB/month bandwidth cap, though.

The G1 supports PDFs and Microsoft Office documents as well. Email will be handled through Gmail; there is no Exchange support, though presumably, engineers developing for Android Market will fill that void in short order.

Oh, the device offers copy-and-paste functionality. Hear that Apple?

It will arrive at market Oct. 22. Price: a highly-subsidized $179.

Grave New World

John Paczkowski — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 19:00:12 +0000

[ See post to watch video ]

1982 Called. It Wants Its Digital Music Distribution Model Back

John Paczkowski — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 15:29:37 +0000

Overall CD sales are plummeting after eight years of unflagging erosion. Digital music sales now account for 15 percent of recording industry’s revenues worldwide and 30 percent in the United States, according to recent data from the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry. And those numbers are climbing faster than ever. Consider: This past June, Apple (AAPL) said it has sold some five billion songs on its iTunes Store. Clearly, physical media are giving way to the Internet as a means of music distribution. What better time, then, to reinvent the music industry’s business model for physical media as SanDisk (SNDK) hopes to do with its new microSD memory card album format?

This morning the company announced slotMusic, a compact memory card-based music format that can be played on cellphones, PCs and some MP3 players. It relies on MP3s without digital rights management schemes and is backed by Universal Music Group, Sony BMG Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group and EMI Group, all of which apparently believe that more physical media is the best way to reinvent their business model in the era of digital distribution. Though as SanDisk VP Daniel Schreiber notes, they do have their reasons. “There’s a billion phones out there and a lot of them can play music and a lot of them have a microSD slot,” he explained. “We think there’s still a need for a tangible, physical product. People will appreciate walking out of the store playing music on their phones.”

Perhaps. But will they appreciate carrying that music around on a 0.6? x 0.4? medium that’s about the size of a fingernail? Seems easy to lose, doesn’t it (maybe Case Logic is planning a slotMusic binder)? And wouldn’t they rather carry around hundreds of songs, instead of the dozen or so stored on each slotMusic card? And what if the memory card in their phone is already in use, filled up with contacts, applications and other data? What then? And beyond this, haven’t iTunes and Amazon MP3 made consumers more accustomed to purchasing music à la carte? Why purchase a full album at $15, when all you really want are the only two good songs on it?