Great news, HBO will be offering a web-only service in 2015! No longer will you need to bundle it with cable or satellite TV service. Good news for cord-cutters, and hopefully the start of a larger trend. Read more at Gizmodo.
Why Apple Pay will be a hit
Yet another day, yet another company (Dairy Queen, this time) realizes their computer security was breached, exposing customers’ names and credit card information. The brilliance of Apple Pay? None of that data would have been transmitted from the phone to the business in the first place. There would be no data to actually steal. Say bye-bye to traditional credit card terminals. Read about Dairy Queen’s data breach here.
iOS8 – first impressions
Yep, I couldn’t wait. I upgraded by iPhone to iOS8 earlier today. I thought I’d share some initial impressions. First off, this is a really big update…if your iPhone is pushing its limits like mine is, remember that instead of clearing all the space it’s asking for, you can plug it in to your computer and update through iTunes instead, requiring vastly less free space on your device. When installing, it’s best to NOT enable iCloud Drive just yet…you’ll need to do so for all of your Apple devices simultaneously, and that just won’t be possible on your Mac until Yosemite is released in late October. Resist the urge and move on!
I’m not going to get into all the details of what changed…I expect you’ve probably already read about that in the past week. I’ll just focus on what stood out to me. You’ll find the UI familiar; most of the changes are under the skin. The mail app has nice swipe features for marking a message as read/unread (swipe right) or flagging (swipe left a little bit) or deleting (swipe left more). I like the ‘hey Siri’ feature…yeah it’s creepy that she’s always listening but is handy, especially in the car…though this only works if it’s plugged in to power. I wonder how the AppleWatch will implement this…always on, or twist wrist to activate, something like that? Anyway. Cool feature. Family sharing in App Store is something I’m really looking forward to once I upgrade my wife and daughter’s devices to iOS8. The Health app looks cool….but so far, Withings has not updated their app to share health data with that, so it’s kinda useless for me. No word from Withings if/when they’ll be doing this, but I expect so…or else they’ll be losing users!
One aspect of the photos app scares me a bit…I have a ton of pictures on my iPhone, but there’s no longer a ‘camera roll’ to view them all. Now there’s a ‘recently added’ album, but to see the older ones, I need to go to ‘photos’ and scan through them by year. Which I guess is OK…just different. Considering how infrequently I’d access those older pictures…no big deal. It’ll be nice once that’s better integrated with the photo collections on my Mac…which I don’t think will truly be awesome until the new Photos app for OS-X is released sometime early in 2015.
Lifehacker has a cool list of lesser-known iOS8 features here. Such as, battery usage statistics, and a grayscale mode.
So that’s it for now…but I expect I’ll have more to say once I get my new iPhone6 on Friday!
Apple Watch
Well, no surprise that Apple unveiled the Apple Watch today…but I was a bit surprised at how watch-like it looks. I really expected (hoped?) Apple would branch out and reinvent the wrist-worn device, but they’ve gone a fairly conservative route with styling and focused on software and usability instead. Which, in hindsight, I shouldn’t be surprised about. The watch isn’t shipping until early 2015, and we’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg in terms of what it can do. I think it’ll get a lukewarm reception overall, though when compared to the other recent entries in the marketplace (like the Moto360), it’s one of the better devices on the market. It does seem to offer some slick software features though..for example, if a friend texts you with an ‘either-or’ question, the software will recognize that and offer those two options as replies ready to send with a tap. I look forward to learning more about the Apple Watch over the coming months. In the meantime, check out the review at TechCrunch or the product page at Apple’s website for more info.
Big day for Apple fans
You’ve heard the hype. Apple is likely unveiling a new iPhone today. Bigger screen, NFC communications for paying in stores. Etc. More significantly though, today is the day Apple is expected to revolutionize, reinvent, and dominate the struggling smart watch/activity tracker market. We shall see. My prediction goes back to early geek days. Remember those calculator watches? Big and bulky. Apple needs to hide a bulky battery. I recall some wearers rotating their calculator watches 180 degrees, so the watch was on the inside if their wrist to protect it. I predict Apple will do something similar. The bulk of the watch will be on the inside of your wrist, out of view, out of the way, yet also in a great spot for biometric sensors to do their job. The screen will still be on the outside of your wrist though, and flexible…it’ll look more like a band than watch. So that’s my best guess. We’ll find out at 10:00 CA time if I’m right!