Rodrigo A. Sepúlveda Schulz

a little typo yesterday when Apple launched its new MacBooks...

Kinda hard to explain what "con" means in French : along the lines of dumb, stupid, badass...

Apple's 2nd move into home entertainment

Really nice keynote by Steve Jobs today again. Watched on a bigs screen with one windows on engadget, and another on macrumorslive.com. Text + pictures: it felt almost as being in the conference room. The edited video footage is not up yet.

1) the MacBook Air is a hottie. Really nice. Should win lots of fans, and although a bit pricey at 1799$, its really cheap for Europeans buying it in the US :) Nothing much more to say than Apple still setting the standards in design, usability (thin, light, small), and ergonomics with the extended touchpad bringing to laptops lots of the iPhone new features. The wireless remote disc is smart !

2) TimeCapsule is a great solution for backups, for those who always forget to backup. Elegant. I understand the idea though of wanting to sell more hardware, but when you already have a home server, it would have been nice to be able to backup to one of your home machines instead of buying another piece of hardware. Nevertheless a dedicated backup server is not a bad idea.

3) blah blah on software updates. Oups, jailbreaking now is certainly illegal as it brings you for free what update 1.1.3 will bring for $20 on an iPod Touch...

4) I think the most interesting move for the industry is the update to the AppleTV device and iTunes movie service. most people have called the device a flop, with the number of units sold failing to reach any mass market (200K units was the last number I read, pretty big, but much smaller than the set top boxes at ISPs). Nevertheless :
    - I find the UI on the Apple TV fantastic, including when watching youtube stuff. It really gives you another experience from your couch
    - ALL major studios have signed up. This used to be a major hurdle for VOD wanabees (I used to work at Glowria, I know...). Apple is announcing 1,000 titles. Clearly not enough, then need to rump up with the over 60,000+ titles on DVD at Netflix, nevertheless, this is a GREAT alternative to the "there's nothing on TV tonight". And Apple still makes $229 upfront on this device (*30% for net margin maybe ?) compared to VOD services that make up nothing upfront.  It's just a matter of time until it goes up
    - the box is somehow a closed environment, so for the moment the movies are rather safe from copy (although a HDMI device to record on the other side, and the job is done ;)
    - the encoding quality is expected to be really high, which is great, as most services have settled on 350Kb/s, 750Kb/s, or 1,5Mb/s. At some point, you'll have to pay more to satisfy your need to get the best out of that latest HD flat screen you bought for the family...
    - and finally, the price points are really low ! cheaper than buying the DVDs. $2.99, $3.99 or $4.99 are very affordable prices, as they are still below movie cinema tickets, and you can watch with more people. I would say the only challenge here is to reach volume quickly, so that the studios / Apple recoup the encodign costs + marketing costs, and create a market for themselves quickly enough to encode the back catalogue, and finally promote the industry (VOD in France is about 30m euros in 2007, so very SMALL !)

Updated thoughts after watching the demo trailer :
    - AppleTV now brings pictures from Flickr, .mac (who cares) : in addition to Youtube, these are 2 category killers that you want to have to spend time on your TV. woot !
    - Apple's vision is of convergence, although they don't mention it : you can watch content on your mobile phone iPhone, your portable media device (a range of iPods), your TV set (AppleTV). All these devices I guess play H.264, creating some competitive advantage in terms of quality vs. competition. They are clearing all the rights through the iTunes approach, smart.
    - I'm not sure I like the new UI and navigation system for the movies. I've seen better elsewhere, this might require some more work.

 

    - the only thing I still don't like about the Apple TV is the remote control. Too small for a 10" experience.

A final word on marketing. I'm always AMAZED by the quality of the marketing material on Apple's site : all products are described with glamorous pictures, great videos, text descriptions, in many languages, and all of that goes online while Jobs is demo-ing. Very very impressive both for exection and secrecy, although some of it leaked yesterday through wikipedia.

What digital camera should I ask Santa Claus ?

I've had small cameras on me for ever, including my Nokia phones (N70, N73, N90, N80, N93, N95...) and small compact ones from Sony (currently a T9).

I'm currently looking to upgrade to something more professional. My 2 interests :
- portraits (I really close ups)
- architecture (just moments of life walking by...).

Looking at the pictures of my friends on Flickr, I find that the folks who take the best pictures use the following cameras:
- Leica M8 : Guido van Nispen, Joi Ito
- Canon EOS 5D : David Sifry
- Canon PowerShot S80 : Feuillu

Other folks rave about the latest Canon 40D, the official photographer at le Web3 had a Canon EOS 350D, SashaQS had a Canon EOS 400D. And no one is using Nikon anymore ?

Please let me know your thoughts on which camera I should get, and obviously what lens to start with. I'm pretty confortable with carrying 2 lenses instead of one-size fits all.

Final note : I love the fact that Guido takes pictures with no Flash in the middle of the night, and the results are stunning...

(ps: cameras used info is given by EXIF data on Flickr...)

(pps: Digital Photography review has probably the most extensive coverage, nevertheless I'd rather hear from you all...)

iPod touch can now be a phone ;)

Using the Jajah service. What is not clear to me is whether the ipod has a microphone or not ?

(via mashable)

WTF ? I'm not buying a house...

extract from

(via http://iphone.orange.fr/)

Hack the iPod Touch

Nice stuff on this blog to make the most out of your iPod touch.

Just upgraded to Leopard (OS X 10.5 on my Mac)

Just upgraded to Leopard... I bought the upgrade online for less than 9 euros, as I got a new Mac very recently. Got it by courrier today (monday). Not bad considering it came out on the market on Friday at 6pm.

I just put the DVD in, clicked twice, then it took about 2 hours to install, and reboot.
I came back at my desk to stare at an ugly galazy (I really don't like this design. Feels cheap and Microsoft-ish...). 2 seconds of panic (but I had done a full backup before), and about 45 sec later, it started booting into the new UI.

First impressions : all my stuff is here, good.

The menu bar is translucent. Yawn..

Then I noticed my hard disk + my vents spinning at full speed : something wrong ? Nope. Spotlight is indexing my stuff, 2 more hours...

The new UI is weird. Maybe I have weird settings, but I don't like them. Look at these folders : ugly !

Everyone was saying that the new dock was great, blah blah.. Mine is on the side. Hence nothing fancy about it.

And prudent as I am, software update is my immediate test on a new machine. What ? there already are 2 packages to upgrade :) ?

In the systems prefs, I notice of course the new Spaces icon. But I'm more interested in the "back to my Mac" option.

And indeed the networks pane is better designed now.

And I read somewhere that it was not a good idea to press the Time Machine button unless I had time to let it to all the checkups and stuff it does...

So, so far so good. Up on a new OS. Can't wait to try out the new iChat...

The best part of this whole process ? I booted off my external hard disk (my backup) on another Mac, and was able to keep on working during the upgrade. That's what I call customer focus...

iPhone in France on November 29th...

(from http://iphone.orange.fr/)

I got my iPod touch earlier this week, and already love the UI, although I'm not sure I really want a phone service on the device...
Let me explain:
- I fully understand the iPod Touch is marketing-wise, positionned as an iPod (photo, video, music device) with extra features such as wifi and a browser, and not as a PDA (email, contacts, phone, etc.)
- nevertheless, the device (I have a 16GB one), is beautiful, slick, slim. Great addition to my iPod G5 (slimmer).
- I absolutely love the on-screen keyboard. very efficient in landscape mode.
- I can totally foresee everyone to have such as device to communicate with the world in their pocket, and replace blackberries, mp3, etc. That would however require extra communication skills.
- wifi is good.

why I don't like about the touch :
- no Bluetooth. That would enable it (as the Nokia N8x0 series), to sync up with a 3G phone and connect to the net...
- no apps (one should be able to add so many more apps. Great that an SDK was announced yesterday).
- no cover / box / sleeve / something to protect it in the box
- ugly white ear buds. They could sell them with great Shure earphones... (but I have them already)
- no radio feature (I love FM radio on the N8x0).

as you can see, I don't really miss the phone feature, but indeed, I would love to get
- mail
- etc.

Anyways, I think I might go for an iPhone v2 (slimmer, nicer), not the v1.

Played with a Nokia N810 prototype today

Yep, I took pictures of the N810, originally uploaded by rsepulveda.

coming to market in 4 weeks :)

Nice device, see my review from yesterday. In addition, I'd say that the prorotype I had in hand felt heavy (more metal ?), smaller.

The buttons felt a bit akward, and I sometimes tried to use the stylus instead of using the keyboard.

The new UI for OS 2008 is better : nice drag and drop features, clearer graphics, although some disparity between clip art and web2.0-ish designs.

If you have not used the N770 or N800 before, than you won't notice these.

I didn't have time to test all apps, but I do confirm that Flash 9 plays nicely on the device.

More to come... :-p

Nokia unveils N810 linux tablet with keyboard & GPS

I first saw it on engadget, moments before Nokia put our the official press release. The successor to the N800 now has a built-in GPS, and a QWERTY keyboard (although a thumb on-screen keyboard like on the iPod touch would have been great).
From the press release: "The Nokia N810 is powered by maemo Linux based OS2008 (great ! a new version, need to reflash my N800 :), updatable also on the Nokia N800, the previous internet tablet generation hardware. The Nokia N810 features a highly customizable user interface and contains various novelties such as a Mozilla based browser with Ajax and Adobe flash 9 (this is great ! Apple's iPhone and iPod touch do not support it), Bluetooth headset support as well as enhanced video and audio features"

Video-wise, it runs a large variety of formats (3GP, AVI, H.263, H.264, MP4, ASF, WMV, MPEG-1/4, Real video); I guess FLV comes as a plug in to the browser ?

Nice inititative, with partnerships with Boingo Wireless, The Cloud, etc. for wifi (internet) connectivity. No FON ? maybe work in progress ?

Also, although I really like the integrated webcam on the N800, it does not work with Skype, and only Gtalk. Will it be enabled in the 810 ?

Nice device huh ? :)

ps: I am amused at all those sites out there who just keep on repeating the features of the press release with little extra analysis on the devices...