I was talking to a friend on the phone last night and the topic of where end user computing is going came up.\u00a0 He said something that I found interesting.\u00a0 He\u2019s using his PC less and less.\u00a0 In fact, he only uses it now because it does two things that his iPad cannot: virtualisation (for labs) and handling of RAW files (from a DSLR camera) for processing in Adobe Lightroom.\u00a0 All the web stuff, email, and so on, are handled nicely on his iPad.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Hmm, I\u2019m finding the same thing.\u00a0 I use my iPhone more and more, instead of using a laptop\/netbook.\u00a0 When I\u2019m lazing on the couch, the phone works well for Facebook or Twitter.\u00a0 When I\u2019m travelling, I use it for music, and watching videos and podcasts.\u00a0 When waiting, I can surf the net or use carious apps for getting the news or weather.\u00a0 The PC is becoming less of a factor in my life.\u00a0 In fact, if I had an iPad (which I won\u2019t pay for) I think I would only use a PC for work.<\/p>\n
But then my friend mentioned something that I\u2019ve also wondered about.\u00a0 iDevices don\u2019t have a concept of storage like in a PC.\u00a0 There is no C: drive so to speak.\u00a0 Storage of user data like music, videos, and so on, is handled by the apps in question.\u00a0 Many people seem to consider Dropbox to be a mandatory add-on to iDevices.\u00a0 It appears to me that Apple has taken the view that everything is centred on the app.\u00a0 I\u2019d argue that everything is centred on information.<\/p>\n
Maybe this is the stumbling block right now for the iPad being a true end user, business appliance for the masses.\u00a0 Sure, some apps can live in the cloud, with data warehouses in the back end, out of sight from the end user.\u00a0 Maybe Office can live in the cloud with online SharePoint and an app-managed local replica.\u00a0 But there are times when that isn\u2019t enough.\u00a0 Maybe we need a complete rethink of how we use data.\u00a0 But then I come back to one scenario that I\u2019m familiar with \u2026 a day of wildlife photography could generate 12 GB of RAW photos to upload, and then I\u2019ll process some of those into 100+ MB PSD files.\u00a0 That\u2019s a lot of data going up to the cloud.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ll be sure to patent the solution when I think of it \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n
Meanwhile … out on the farm …<\/p>\n
Rumblings about Windows Phone 7 continue.\u00a0 We’re still<\/em> waiting to see the copy-paste patch that was promised back at the underwhelming launch.\u00a0 And Paul Thurrot (and commentators on his blog) have been reporting that WP7 handsets are eating up data allowances for no apparent reason.\u00a0 I listen to a Thurrot podcast this morning and he reckons that WP7 handsets are sometimes using 3G instead of an available and joined wifi connection, e.g. you start a download on wifi, “hibernate” the phone, wifi is powered down, and the phone continues the download over 3G.\u00a0 Ouch!\u00a0 And there are also grumbles that Zune is still quite region limited so even podcast distribution is restricted.\u00a0 Not good … but that’s always been a big issue for Zune.\u00a0 It killed the Zune device from day zero.\u00a0 For example, in Ireland, we could not even access the Zune website without using a USA-based proxy.<\/p>\n A beta for Apple iOS 4.3 has emerged for developers to test.\u00a0 It’s going to add mifi functionality.\u00a0 That’s where you use your phone are a wireless access point, put it somewhere with a strong signal, and wirelessly access it’s Net access from your laptop\/tablet.\u00a0 Nice!\u00a0 I’m told Android already has this.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I was talking to a friend on the phone last night and the topic of where end user computing is going came up.\u00a0 He said something that I found interesting.\u00a0 He\u2019s using his PC less and less.\u00a0 In fact, he only uses it now because it does two things that his iPad cannot: virtualisation (for … Continue reading “Thinking About iDevices”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11023","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-commentary"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11023","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11023"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11023\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11023"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11023"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11023"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}