HUA HIN, Thailand - The passing of Apple's visionary co-founder, Steve Jobs,
was the only tech news that could eclipse the earlier announcement of the
long-awaited upgrade of the iPhone. Both instances made for a sad and a
disappointing week for Apple fans.
Before news that Jobs' long battle with cancer broke on October 5 in the United
States, the tech community had been awash with articles on Apple's iPhone
update and the company proved yet again that it can drum up excessive and often
unmerited levels of attention for its product upgrades.
The new iPhone 4S disappointed many who were expecting a fully new product, or
iPhone 5, after their 15-month wait. Company shares dropped US$19.25 to $356.14
after the iPhone
announcement before rebounding to $372.50 in after-hours trading.
The shiny new handset does offer a few enhancements over its predecessor such
as faster dual-core processor, the ability to run on both GSM and CDMA
networks, an 8 megapixel camera, HD 1080p video camera, iCloud and a new iOS5
operating system.
It also offers a virtual personal assistant software called Siri. The
artificial intelligence-based voice recognition app responds to verbal requests
given to the phone for information such as restaurants, directions and the
weather, by parsing the data and sending it to the appropriate web service.
The software is neither new, innovative nor exclusive to Apple; it was created
at an artificial intelligence research lab in Silicon Valley five years ago.
Google's Nexus One also has voice recognition capabilities enabling the user to
complete web forms by speaking to the phone.
Apple chief executive officer Tim Cook took the stage to fill the gaping void
left by Apple's highly venerated father of creation who left the tech world at
the age of 56. The presentation lacked the showy pizzazz often associated with
Apple's ostentatious product launches, although Cook did a good job of
reassuring fans and investors that the winning formula is here to stay.
The product itself did not live up to the hype it has generated online over the
past few weeks or the initial expectations of adoring aficionados who were
clamoring to get their hands on a new innovation laden iPhone 5 with a bigger
screen and sleeker curves.
The iPhone 4S will go on sale on October 14 in the US, Australia, Canada,
France, Germany, Japan and the United Kingdom. It will be available on lock-in
two-year contracts through AT&T Inc, Verizon Wireless or Sprint Nextel Corp
in the US and be priced at US$199 for a 16 gigabyte version, $299 for 32 Gb and
$399 for 64 Gb.
It is predicted that 25 million units will be sold during the December quarter.
That is unlikely to be enough to catch the advancing market leaders, Google's
Android army. Industry analyst iSupply predict that global iPhone shipments are
likely to be 83.6 million units in 2011, rising to 112.5 million in 2012 and up
to 169 million in 2015. The sales figure for the 4S may be boosted if people
wish to commemorate the legacy of Steve Jobs by purchasing the last iPhone
launched during his lifetime.
Samsung, following multiple lawsuits from Apple, this week launched its higher
specification Galaxy SII handset to coincide with the release of the iPhone 4S.
The company has increased the screen size to 4.3 inches, compared with the 3.5
inch iPhone 4S display, and the unit offers faster network speed capacity. The
legal spats between the two tech giants have now turned into digital guerilla
warfare.
E-mail
The world's most popular e-mail system was overhauled this week as Microsoft
launched a raft of upgrades for Hotmail. The largest problem that Hotmail's 360
million users face is the way the webmail platform deals with "graymail",
messages that are somewhere in between spam and genuine messages.
A new system of categorizing or flagging messages will help users organize
their inbox and hopefully prevent messages disappearing into junk folders after
failing to get through Hotmail's overzealous filters.
"Seventy-five percent of e-mail identified as spam by our customers actually
turns out to be unwanted graymail that they receive as a result of having
signed up on a legitimate website," stated a company executive. An unsubscribe
feature has been added to quickly and easily stop those annoying newsletters
and unwanted update messages arriving in the inbox.
Windows Live vice president Chris Jones has been highlighting the company's
efforts to combat the negative public image Hotmail has accrued over the years.
Despite the bad press and highly stringent e-mail filters, Hotmail still leads
the pack in terms of users, with Yahoo mail following at around 310 million and
the ever trendy Gmail on the chase with around 180 million users.
Microsoft has also re-engineered an Android client so that users can access
their Hotmail accounts with greater convenience and functionality from any
Android powered handset.
Martin J Young is an Asia Times Online correspondent based in Thailand.
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