The Technology Life

iPhone Apps on the iPad

Monday, 8 March 2010

Brian X. Chen at Wired, on the default iPhone apps that aren’t present on the iPad:

But if you recall, the iPhone ships with some apps that appear to be left out from the iPad: Stocks, Calculator, Clock, Weather and Voice Memos. What gives?

Apple didn’t respond to a request for comment, but I’m willing to guess Apple will just stick those apps in the App Store for a free download, and they’ll be the same apps as they were on the iPhone. After all, it’s unlikely there’s much to do with those particular apps to make them visually special for the iPad.

Actually, it’s sort of the opposite problem. It’s not that Apple couldn’t just create bigger versions of these apps and have them run on the iPad. It wasn’t a technical problem, it was a design problem. There were, internally to Apple (of course), versions of these apps (or at least some of them) with upscaled iPad-sized graphics, but otherwise the same UI and layout as the iPhone versions. Ends up that just blowing up iPhone apps to fill the iPad screen looks and feels weird, even if you use higher-resolution graphics so that nothing looks pixelated. So they were scrapped by you-know-who. Perhaps they’ll appear on the iPad in some re-imagined form this summer with OS 4.0, but when the iPad ships next month, there won’t be versions of these apps. At least that’s the story I’ve heard from a few well-informed little birdies.

(There is, alas, no secret “widget” mode for iPad in OS 3.2, either.)

Some (maybe even most?) iPhone games will work well as-is, on the iPad. Not just technically, but in terms of being fun and feeling right. But non-game iPhone apps that are just upscaled on the iPad are going to feel weird. And the run the app in a little iPhone-sized rectangle in the middle of an otherwise black screen mode is even weirder, I think. A 3.5-inch screen is just totally different than a 10-inch screen.

On the whole, it’s actually rather un-Apple-like that they’re even allowing iPhone apps to run unmodified on the iPad. It’s a huge compatibility win, of course: an instant market of thousands and thousands of titles. Given the runaway success of the App Store and the fundamental technical similarities between the iPhone and iPad, it’s the sort of decision that most companies wouldn’t even think twice about. But it’s undeniably a sub-optimal user experience. iPhone apps on the iPad are a “good enough” thing, not an “exactly right” thing. Most companies — the ones that wouldn’t even see it as a tough decision whether to allow iPhone apps to run on the iPad — settle for “good enough” all the time. Apple, on the other hand, usually goes for “exactly right”.

I’ll go so far as to predict that by the time Monday April 5 rolls around, it’ll already be an established meme that non-iPad-optimized iPhone apps are to the iPad what Classic apps were to Mac OS X — something you’ll make do with “for now” but can’t wait to abandon for the real thing.

I’m not saying it’s a mistake that Apple is allowing the iPad to run iPhone apps. I’m just saying that the iPad is not a big iPhone.

Previous:

Attention Is the Real Resource

I so can not wait...

Today in insane, hilarious push polls: Apple iPhone addiction among college students. Conducted by Stanford University researchers, this poll actually asked whether respondents feel that their iPods are jealous of their iPhones. However, it missed a golden opportunity to ask if the students felt that their iPhones are jealous of their 30-racks of Natty Light (my estimate: 13.2% say yes).

The researchers surveyed 200 iPhone-owning students, 70% of whom have owned their iPhones less than one year, on their oft-inappropriate relationships with the gadget. Some of the most important (read: funniest) findings:

• 75% admit to falling asleep with their iPhones. 0% would admit what happened when the lights went off.
• 30% of the respondents checked the box reading "I consider my iPhone to be a 'doorway to the world,'" which allows the researchers to say "30% of respondents consider their iPhone to be a 'doorway to the world,'" even though nobody actually says that.
• Under the question "Losing my iPhone would be...", 41% checked "a tragedy." Write-in responses included "Betty White."
• 8% admitted that they at some point have thought "My iPod is jealous of my iPhone." 100% of those respondents giggled while telling their friends about that response.

The survey is framed like a serious inquisition into the possibility of iPhone addiction having disastrous social effects, but those involved are reluctant to actually brand iPhone addiction a medical problem on par with alcoholism or drug addiction. In fact, Tanya Luhrmann, who oversaw the survey, said, "I don't think it is really unhealthy. I think they really like their iPhone."

There's also the little problem of whether the choice of smartphone really matters--modern smartphones, be it a Motorola Droid, Palm Pre, Google Nexus One, or BlackBerry Curve, pretty much all do the same stuff, and their owners have essentially the same relationship with them as iPhone owners have with their smartphone of choice. But until we have a survey that details how many Droid owners "pat" their phones, we'll have to just defer to these results.

[Via LiveScience]

Related Stories: Can the iPhone Be an Enterprise Tool? Apple iPhone, Beloved by Bears The Gross Inconvenience of the New iPod Shuffle

Topics: Technology, Magazine, surveys, iphone, Apple, addiction, Science and Technology, Technology, Apple iPhone, Consumer Electronics, Electronics

As an Iphone user, I know this to be totally true. After using blackberry's for over a decade, the user experience has caused me to use my smart phone in a fundamentally different way. It's tough to explain the why...

A very interesting next few months will be filled with hands on use of the iPad as well as more information (rumored) regarding Google's HTC built tablet. Wow! Technology (R)evolution is heating up in my humble opinion.

“This will be the most important thing I’ve ever done” – Steve Jobs

, referring to the soon-to-be-launched Apple Tablet.

We haven’t heard this first hand, but we’ve heard it multiple times second and third hand from completely independent sources. Senior Apple

execs and friends of Jobs are telling people that he’s about as excited about the upcoming Apple Tablet as he’s ever been. Coming from the man who has created so much, that’s saying something.

If Steve Jobs thinks the iPhone was just a warm up act to this device, I can’t wait to see what it can do. As if our expectations weren’t already set high enough. We’ll all know a lot more this Wednesday.

Huzzahs and alarums! Apple’s January 27 event has just been announced to tech journos all over the world with a new invite reading “Come see our latest creation” hitting inboxes left and right. The event will happen on January 27 at 10am PST.

More as we get it. You can read all about our iSlate obsession here.

via Giz (Where’s our invite!)

PC World’s Jeff Bertolucci recently posed the rhetorical question, “Could a tablet replace your notebook?” He referenced not only Apple’s anticipated tablet computer but also new PC tablets like the one from Microsoft and HP that was pitched at CES, the chatter about which inclined him to wonder if a tablet/slate would work as a suitable notebook replacement.

Bertolucci thinks that for folks who use their laptops and/or netbooks primarily for light-duty web work like email and casual surfing, the answer may be the affirmative, and of course many have pretty much switched to using their iPhones or iPod touches for that type of duty. A tablet would presumably provide a larger display size as well as greater feature depth, so for that cohort, and in that usage context, such a machine could be quite satisfactory, and a step up from the handhelds in terms of performance.

However, for those of us who do serious production work on our laptops, not so much. I’m resolved to keep an open mind, but I’m exceedingly doubtful that a tablet will be a really well-suited tool for workaday production use.

Of course there are many as yet imponderables, especially in the context of an Apple tablet, such as whether the machine will support the standard Mac OS and application software or will run with a variant of the iPhone OS, limiting one to iPhone apps, and if there will be some provision for supporting a work-worthy external keyboard and mouse, rather than limiting users to touchscreen input.

On the OS support front, recent scuttlebutt is not encouraging. Earlier, Gizmodo reported new intelligence from someone they say has been a reliable source in the past that the new tablet will be basically an “iPhone on steroids,” and will be running an ARM CPU on the iPhone kernel rather than Intel Core power with the Mac OS, so Mac OS applications will not be supported. If that is accurate information, then it would pretty much rule out the Apple tablet as a serious work platform as far as I’m concerned, and along with prognostications of a $1,000 price tag, I would say good luck with that, Apple.

If the iTablet/iSlate or whatever really is going to be an “iPhone on steroids,” that would also make prospects for external keyboard and pointing device support murky, to say the least.

I simply can’t conceive doing production work on a machine without a physical (QWERTY) keyboard. I’m only a “semi-touch” typist, but I’m pretty fast, using most of my fingers in an idiosyncratic typing technique I’ve developed over the years — part visual and party spatial reference — and I find the lack of tactile feedback with touchscreen virtual keyboarding unacceptable for typing more than a paragraph or two. Not a problem, perhaps, for tweeting and texting, but not the thing for long-form typing projects.

Both handwriting and voice dictation support could have potential. I use MacSpeech Dictate a lot for entering text both as straight dictation and for transcribing material drafted by hand. Efficient and accurate handwriting recognition could potentially condense those operations into one, but only if scribbling on the tablet proved ergonomically comfortable. My flirtations with using handwriting recognition in OS X have not been encouraging, and personally, I would miss the tactile satisfaction of putting pen to good old low-tech paper, which seems to help me organize my thoughts more effectively.

Without Mac OS support, Dictate is out (along with much else), although MacSpeech or some other developer might eventually fill that void with an iPhone OS compatible dictation app. I’m not going to hold my breath waiting for that. I anticipate that I’ll be using laptops as my do-all tools for years to come yet.

How about you? Can you envision a tablet, especially one running the iPhone OS, displacing your laptop?

Related GigaOM Pro Research: Is The Age of the Web Tablet Finally Upon Us? and Rumored Apple Tablet: Opportunities Too Big to Ignore

Google is working on a tablet computer with HTC, the company that built the hardware for the Nexus One “Google Phone“, according to a report.

The report claims that HTC has “been working closely with Google (

) for the past 18 months” on “several working models of a touch tablet”.

Are Google and HTC about to challenge both the iPhone and the Apple tablet, rumored to be called iSlate?

Australian news site SmartHouse, which first published the story, pits the Google/HTC offering as a direct rival to Apple’s tablet ambitions. But the device might equally prove a threat to Microsoft: getting Google Chrome OS into consumer’s hands is key to the operating system’s success.

Skeptics might argue that Google will never promote a tablet computer of its own: that would endanger its relationships with other hardware makers. And yet the Nexus One proves that Google very much will tread on toes if the move makes strategic sense.

What do you think: could a Google Tablet rival the iSlate? Or will this rumored device never see the light of day?

[image for illustration only, courtesy Gizmodo]

Apple is courting owners of US television networks, including CBS and Walt Disney, in the hope of launching a subscription television service over the internet next year, people familiar with the discussions said.

The service is expected to be offered over Apple’s iTunes digital entertainment store, which sells movies and TV shows, but does not offer them for a recurring monthly fee.

The debut of the service is among other entertainment and news services that the maker of the iPod and iPhone could offer on the “tablet” computer it is widely expected to launch imminently.

Magazine publishers Time Inc and Condé Nast have created prototype digital editions of their magazines for a new generation of handheld tablet devices from companies including Hewlett-Packard, Samsung and potentially Apple.

Apple has contacted other broadcast and cable networks, including Time Warner’s Turner Broadcasting System and Viacom, which have so far been unconvinced by Apple’s proposal. The computer maker has also courted the book publishing industry, sector executives say.

“The driver behind it [the tablet] will be content,” said Kathryn Huberty, a Morgan Stanley analyst.

Apple is preparing an announcement next month that many anticipate will be the official unveiling of its tablet, but the company has so far declined to confirm the existence of the device. Wall Street analysts expect mass production of an Apple tablet to begin as early as February.

Executives close to the discussions fear Apple’s possible TV service could undermine the lucrative economics of the pay television industry, where basic networks such as MTV collect a fee per subscriber from distributors such as cable operators as well as selling advertising.

The business model, honed over three decades, has made cable networks one of the most resilient sectors of the media industry during the recession and was the chief reason why Comcast sought to take control of NBC Universal from General Electric this year.

Creating a new subscription service with Apple could upset distributors, these people said.

Apple was said to be offering broadcast networks $2 to $4 per subscriber and basic cable networks $1 to $2 a month, according to a Wall Street Journal report.

TV on demand about to get more affordable?

I am so getting one of these...