Just a quick note – I saw this article/video today. Check out the creativity of using iPads to make an incredible Halloween costume. It reinforces, once again, that there are endless creative ideas which people have every day regarding new ways to use iPads and other technology. Some are silly and fun. Some are insightful. And some are huge productivity gainers for an enterprise.

This one may be silly. But it’s users like this who are always pushing the envelope and coming up with new ideas to use the technology which is provided. This does not have huge relevancy for business, but the key is that your employees are having new ideas every day – learn to harness it.

Also crucial is the need for IT and business to get together and collaborate. Break down the walls of organizational structure and share ideas which will support your organizational mission. Be creative. Get a competitive edge.

Users have their heads in the clouds.

When Nokia announced they were signing up with Microsoft in February 2011, the mobile world gasped. Could it be that the world’s number one handset manufacturer was signing on with Microsoft and dumping Symbian and the fresh air that was Moblin + Maemo > MeeGo? It happened. Wow!

The engineering teams inside Nokia no doubt went through some serious soul-searching trying to find a way to make the Microsoft OS “fit” into their development culture let alone their emerging devices and ecosystem, which was not a simple undertaking. They announced product today and ecosystem updates – good stuff!

The question is: will it be good enough? The world has moved on and a few months is a long time in this fast-paced market. Can Nokia regain lost market share with previous users? What about new users? Will they come? Why will this be so difficult? Apple has great devices with more to come, a killer feature set in iOS 5, an amazing marketing machine and the leading mobile media ecosystem. Android is making big strides and has locked-in the number two position with a strong ecosystem and many hardware suppliers. The proverbial user-expectation “bar” is set high.

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Tim Cook may not have had a “One more thing…” at the unveiling of the iPhone 4S, but it looks like Steve Jobs did.

Though he resigned as CEO in August and is no longer with us (Rest In Peace), he had two big projects on the go.

Did the late Steve Jobs have some final tricks up his sleeve?

With the release of “Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography,” by Walter Isaacson, on Monday, October 24th (I got my iBooks copy on the day), you can find out what Steve’s final show-stopper is. In the weeks following his death, reports have been popping up that he was still working on a few new things, perhaps even right up to the day of his passing on October 5. One of these is said to be the next iPhone, which shall be a complete redesign of the current iPhone. If you believe the report by CNet’s Brooke Crothers, Jobs was not very involved in the 4S itself because he was focused on the 5.

Now this may not be much of a surprise, as most people were expecting this redesigned iPhone to be unveiled instead of (or at least alongside) the 4S this October. There was a great deal of speculation that the 4S was to be a cheaper cloud phone. Of course, the rumor mill leading up until the announcement of the iPhone 5 will continue to churn so questions such as, “Bigger screen? Teardrop design? Ultra-thin?” will be around and increase with intensity up until June 2012.

However, there is now more! In the biography, a BIGGER and BOLDER project is mentioned. Something that has been stirring in the background for the past two years, but which no one has been able to really confirm – until now. In Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs, the Apple co-founder was quoted talking about TV! In itself again, not much of a surprise, as it made sense for Apple’s next product to be in the TV industry, yet I was still in awe as I read the Washington Post, which happened to be a MASSIVE SPOILER ALERT to the contents of Isaacson’s book.

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“For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings;”

~Richard II, Act III, Scene ii, by William Shakespeare

Will Apple's 2011 OS X Lion go the way of the ill-designed 1962 Univac computer?

The demise of leaders makes for great literature. And timeless quotes.

I started my last blog entry with a quote from Blade Runner. It triggered a memory and a train of thought. (This train takes the scenic route, so you’ll have to bear with me.) The first stop on this journey is at something called the Blade Runner Curse.

The 1982 film included a number of prominent brands which form part of the film’s assumed futuristic backdrop ( made in 1982, it was set in 2019). The product placements included Atari, Cuisinart, Pan Am, Bell and Coca Cola. In real life, over the next few years, the first three went bankrupt; Bell was broken up and Coke went through the failed introduction of “New Coke,” though this last was only a brief setback.

Pan Am, though, is newly fashionable, due to the new American series of the same name. In case you haven’t seen it, think Mad Men meets the peculiar 1950′s and 1960′s glamour of civil air travel – a winning combination. A couple of recent articles introducing this series in the UK in turn referenced an older movie, the 1965 comedy, “Boeing Boeing.”

Never seen it? You’re missing out. The plot is simple: Tony Curtis is a playboy living in Paris (obviously). He conducts a series of affairs with a number of airline stewardesses, all mutually oblivious to one another. He can do this by meticulously managing his shenanigans according to the airline timetables, so that as one paramour leaves, another one arrives. But suddenly, all the airlines upgrade to faster jets. The schedules change. Farce ensues. Add to that his predatory best friend, Jerry Lewis (who presumably arrives in France with an honor guard), and the typecast sarcastic housekeeper, Thelma Ritter, a fixture of this kind of 1960s movie.

How is this relevant?

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“The light that burns twice as bright burns for half as long – and you have burned so very, very brightly, Roy.”

~From “Blade Runner”, 1982. The film’s director, Ridley Scott, would go on to make the famous “1984” commercial, used to launch the Apple Macintosh in January 1984.

I was asked to write something about Steve Jobs.

Now, I never knew Steve Jobs. And not knowing him, I didn’t think of him as “Steve.” Still don’t. And he never “burned so very, very brightly,” on my radar screen in 1984. I’m guessing I wouldn’t have liked him, personally. Too abrupt. Too sure of himself. Too American. Too much (apart from the last part) like me.

Had no interest in an Apple II in 1984...

Not fundamentally like me, though, really, the only great product-manager CEO. I’d never, ever, call myself great; Steve Jobs, I think, was great. A CEO who ran his company through running the product plan, in the belief that everything else—if it could be reliably tethered to the product plan, if he could control the hardware, the software, the content chain, if all of that was tied irrevocably to his vision—could and would be a success.

Unlike my colleague Dan Zeck, I never had an Apple II. The Apple II barely entered my consciousness. The great innovator in UK home computing was Sir Clive Sinclair, with the ZX-81 and the ZX Spectrum.

When I finally bought a decent home computer to replace the Sinclair, it was a Commodore Amiga. I loved that computer – everything about it. But I won’t be holding a candlelit vigil outside the house of Commodore’s CEO, when he passes away (if he hasn’t already). By that stage of the mid-80s, Personal Computer World (the UK equivalent of Byte Magazine), was a kind of Burgess Shale of half-formed, half-thought-out, could-be computers – and the Apple II was as obsolete as the trilobite.

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This six-part blog series retraces the evolution of the mobile Internet in an attempt to understand its complicated history. Part 1 touches on the history of the PC Internet. Part 2 covers AT&T Pocketnet, the First Mobile Internet Phone. Part 3 is about NTTDOCOMO’s i-mode. Part 4 discusses the growth of the mobile Internet in the early 2000s . And Part 5 brought us the phenomenon of Apple and its influence on the industry.

THE STATE OF THE MOBILE INTERNET TODAY

Determining the state of the mobile Internet as it exists today is a difficult task. The challenge is – which day? In a dynamically changing industry, technological advances are a common occurrence every day. The answer to the question is different depending on the day. This is the challenge with developing for the mobile Internet. With change being constant, where should developers focus their time and attention? Which technologies are worth the investment – the ones that will have a future?

In this six-part blog series, we reviewed the early stages of the mobile Internet and noted the introduction of the iPhone as the inflection point, based on wireless carrier data traffic. A look at the Evolution of Mobile Web-Related Markup Languages, found on Wikipedia, describes in visual format the challenge that developers have faced. The chart, found below, describes the many languages that were created to solve the mobile Web problem, sometimes branching off from a predecessor with improvements.  Some of these languages are still in use today; others have been dropped by the vendors that once promoted them.

The chart on Wikipedia has been updated through 2007, coincidentally the year the iPhone was introduced. Unfortunately, it’s out of date and missing the latest HTML5 movement. So let’s take a stab at completing this chart for Wikipedia. Will it look like the following, where the world finds its harmony and lives happily ever after?

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Heard on the net recently: AT&T might label the iPhone 4S as a 4G phone? Really? The purists cringe.

I find this amusing in a technology vs. marketing sort of way. AT&T is competing hard with Verizon on 4G coverage. Verizon is winning in terms of deployments and AT&T’s Mobility Leadership admitted it. AT&T claims to have faster speeds in 4G tests vs. Verizon; this is very regionalized and subject to many network conditions – channel bandwidth, encoding schemes and antenna usage.

The question is what does 4G actually mean and when did 3G end and 4G begin? It’s all a little gray… and was made worse when the ITU reversed a decision in December 2010 and stated that HSPA+ was a 4G technology even though it preceded LTE by years.

The iPhone 4S does have an HSPA+ enabled radio on the AT&T network. HSPA+ was defined in the 3GPP Rev 7 spec in the 2006-2007 timeframe. LTE was defined in the 3GPP Rev 8 spec in the 2008-2009 time frame. Many believed that the Rev 8 spec was where the 3G and 4G boundary was. That is, until the ITU changed its mind.

Some in the technical community suspect that the iPhone 4S lacks a few current technical enhancements to make it real 4G (e.g. 64QAM encoding in both the uplink and downlink). We will soon find out as the phones are shipping now and no doubt detailed test results will appear on the net.

The bottom line: this is way too complex for consumers to understand.

As for coverage maps, see for yourself:

AT&T HSPA + map
Verizon LTE map

This is one reason why AT&T is pursuing T-Mobile – to expand their HSPA+ network.

Today’s carrier networks are evolving and the features required for the highest throughput are not available everywhere creating a situation where marketing hype will thrive – let the carrier 4G battles continue.

A 4G label on the iPhone 4S is a stretch in that it’s not real 4G based on what networking purists believe. However, given the ITU’s reversed decision in Dec 2010, it is sort of true…and clearly gray.

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Geek Speak:

AT&T 5MHz/channel HSPA+ and Verizon’s 10MHz/channel LTE can be roughly equivalent throughput-wise IF (the proverbial big “IF”) favorable radio conditions exist and IF AT&T uses certain networking techniques (e.g. channel doubling, 64QAM and 2×2 MIMO). One wonders what 64QAM and 2x MIMO are. 64QAM = 64-bit quadrature amplitude modulation – basically how analog and digital signals are converted to symbols for transmission. MIMO is Multiple input, multiple output. Contrasted with MISO – multiple input single output, not the soup! and SIMO – single input multiple output. 2×2 MIMO is 2 transmitting antennas and 2 receiving antennas effectively doubling the throughput on a point-to-point link. You may recall Apple talking about using two antennas in the iPhone 4S. Is this MIMO on the device side? We will soon find out.