My Thoughts! - by Prakash G.R.

With the invitation itself, it was well known that its going to be a special iPod event. The photos of iPod Nano leaked in the media, well before the event. Full screen iPod & a Wi-Fi enabled iPod were much expected. So what were the real surprises in yesterday’s event?

• The original iPod or simply “iPod” now gets a name - “iPod Classic”

• Who cares?

iPod’s max battery life is now 30 Hrs of music or 7 hrs of video

• Cool

iPod’s storage goes up to 160 GB

• Wooops!

Starbucks- Apple deal

• On one side a (once) computer maker with passion in music & on the other side a coffee maker who creates music that wins Grammy awards. Interesting deal !

Safari on iPhone & iTunes Wi-Fi store

• A perfect match for Wi-Fi enabled iPod. What else to say?

4GB iPhone is dropped and 8GB is now priced at $399 only

• For those early adopters, who are complaining: (i) Nokia’s timely wit (ii) I paid ~ $500 for an 20 GB B&W screen iPod which had 6 hrs of battery life. Should I complain now? No. Remember one thing with the electronic gadgets. As soon as they leave the designers table and enter the manufacturing line, they are outdated. The next generation cool device is already in the Designer’s table. You can keep on waiting to get cheaper, better products. That will never end.

Bluetooth in iPod Touch???

• Although steve didn’t say anything about that, Apple website is displaying an image (at this time of writing) with a Bluetooth icon. See it the top-right corner of iPod in landscape position?

In essence, Apple armed itself perfectly for the holiday season. This year, even more number of socks are going to have iPod. Bad news for Zune. A price cut just before this event is not going to help it. Good news for everyone else.

PS: I’m eying on the iPod Touch. Might get one soon

written by Prakash G.R.

Disclaimer: Even on my MacBook I use Firefox rather than Safari because of the wonderful plugins that I need.

I’m using Safari on Windows since the day its announced (and switched back to Firefox today). There are some nice things about Safari (like Find) but I don’t like the product as a whole. Here are top 5 reasons why Safari is not going to succeed:

5) Safari installs unwanted apps: The installer of Safari tries to install other unwanted software. (No. I definitely don’t want Bonjour)

4) Safari doesn’t import your settings from IE/Firefox: When I install Firefox, I remember Firefox giving me options to import my settings from IE. So that I don’t have to loose any bookmarks. Safari doesn’t do that. So I’ve to recreate all the bookmarks

3) Safari is NOT a fast browser: I don’t know about the benchmark results. But the applications I use like Gmail, Google Reader takes more time to load than Firefox/IE. Googling around I found the real reason. More over, its neither a sleek browser. Even for the modest number of websites, the memory usage shoots up.

2) Safari is not a native Windows application: At least it doesn’t looks/behaves like one. For example, its Edit > Preferences not Tools > Options, you can resize only from bottom right corner, …

1) Safari’s font rendering is pathetic: Perhaps besides the other reasons like Security/websites compatibility, if there is a single big reason a user is going to dump Safari on Windows, it could the font rendering. There are reasons why Apple selected this rendering. Honestly I don’t give a shit about that. To me it should be easily readable in my screen and its not so.

I was wondering why the hell did Apple enters a game which it can’t win? The reason is simple. Steve decided to close iPhone to third party applications and the only way to write apps is Web 2.0 and Safari is the only browser in iPhone. No Firefox/IE/Opera. So why should a developer write web apps for a browser that has a single digit market share? The only way to increase the market share is to let Safari go out of Mac and explore the windows arena. Is it going to work? Who knows? It might!!! Look at what people said when iPod was released.

Related Links:
Safari for Windows announced
Gmail extension for Firefox
Top 10 Firefox extensions I use

written by Prakash G.R.