Here is how it works. You need an Apple TV attached to your TV. Purchase the fbTV app for your iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad for $0.99. Using the app, you can browse your Facebook photos and the Facebook photos of all your friends and start musical slideshows on your TV.

You choose the music from the built in music collection on your iPod. The photos appear on the TV and the music comes directly from the TV, all via Air Play.

The app also makes a great little photo viewer for your Facebook photos, even if you don’t have an Apple TV device. It’s a universal app, so you can buy it once and it works on all your iOS devices.

Android was accepted by incumbents precisely because the carriers and handset manufacturers were afraid of Apple’s momentum. Motorola, Samsung, and LG needed to figure out how they were going to respond to the iPhone. Google offered their Android OS for free and offered ad-split revenue to carriers and the deal was done. But it was a deal with the devil because the Android handset manufacturers as a group are not making much money. Apple took their profits.

What Google needs right now is for Apple (or someone else) to innovate in TV. Then, maybe, the incumbents will be receptive to Google’s advances. Apple is working on such innovation with their rumored new iTV box, which will provide an application platform that will likely run existing iOS apps. Nevertheless, as Tim Cook has said, Apple believes all these efforts might be marginal until the technology is integrated into the TV set itself, something he claims Apple does not want to do (until the day they do it).

Traditional disruption, described in the Innovator’s Dilemma, is about a cheaper technology sneaking up on incumbent players who are focused on serving their best customers – customers who find the performance of the cheaper new technology to be unacceptable. As time progresses, the new technology matures to the point where it performs acceptably for the mass market, and the market moves to the disrupter.

TV is ripe to be disrupted. It’s expensive for consumers. But you have to remember that you can’t make TV better. According to Nielsen, Americans already watch more than 35 hours per week of it. Watching HD TV over FIOS with a Tivo on a 52 inch Samsung LCD TV is near nirvana. You can only make TV cheaper.

It’s not likely that Apple will disrupt TV by making it cheaper. As the premium provider, they nearly always focus on making things better, not cheaper. Apple did not disrupt cell phones in the traditional sense by making them cheaper. What they did is introduce such a compelling innovation from a user experience standpoint that the least price sensitive, most profitable part of the market moved to the new technology. And then Google’s Android offered a low-cost good-enough alternative to feature phones that offered similar benefits. That’s par for the course in the technology world. What is unique about the iPhone story is just how fast the market is transitioning to smart phones and how rapidly all the profits moved to the early leader in that technology.

Long story short, Google is not going to have much luck with Google TV unless they can offer TV for less for consumers. I think Boxee has the better approach there. That’s traditional disruption. Boxee is a mediocre experience at best today compared to FIOS attached to a Tivo with an HDTV, but it’s free.

Cablevision’s best customers are not asking for low-def TV with fewer channels, constantly shifting line-ups and mediocre picture quality. And even if Cablevision sees the Boxee threat, they don’t want to give up their rich subscription revenue business to answer it. But each year Boxee will get better. And if Joe sixpack walks into a Best Buy and is told that the Boxee integrated Vizio TV in the corner does not require a cable subscription and will save him $1200/year, he will likely take the offer even if that TV offers a slightly worse experience. And that will be the end of the TV franchise as we know it.

One of the benefits of blogging is that I get to suggest untenable solutions to other people’s problems. Ok, Here goes.

So the issue with the iPhone 4 antenna is that touching with human skin changes it properties. Maybe it changes it frequency response, or maybe you are bridging the two antennas. Not sure.

The crude solution is to add a bumper. Bumper is non-conductive. Problem solved, but not elegantly. So the question is, how else can we protect the antenna from connecting electrically with human skin while still keeping the iPhone beautiful.

Covering with a thin film of some sort of plastic is not an acceptable solution because the plastic woud easily scratch. I don’t think covering with glass would work well either. Too brittle and likely does not expand and contract at the same rate as metal.

You could anodize the metal. Anodizing a metal creates a thin oxide that is not conductive. Alas, you can’t easily anodize steel, because that oxide is called rust and it’s not particularly durable.

Aluminum anodizes well. You can even dye the resulting oxide. My guess is that the outer colorful skins of iPod Nanos are dyed aluminum oxide. But for some reason you don’t see a lot of aluminum antennas out there. Maybe the material does not make a great antenna.

It’s clearly possible to bond stainless steel to aluminum. That is the design of All-Clad cookware, my personal favorite. Their LTD line is stainless steel on the inside, aluminum on the outside. And the aluminum is anodized!

You might have noticed that Apple recently licensed technology related to the creation of alloys. My theory is that this license is related to creating a new external antenna that will have an anodized outer finish.

The other benefit of this solution is that Apple could offer the iPhone in a variety of different antenna colors, as they do the iPod Nano. The solution will be both stylish and functional. How Apple!

Tell me why my idea won’t work in the comments.

Apple made a very deliberate decision in the US to achieve that price parity. They gave an exclusive to ATT, a weaker carrier, in exchange for a whopping subsidy by ATT. The result is that Apple is able to hit the price point that they believed was a necessity to achieve mass market adoption of smart phones. But, they limited themselves to those people willing to use ATT, which is a clear #2 to Verizon in the US.

ATT traded a lot of their profitability to Apple to get the exclusive on the iPhone, a bet that has clearly paid off. Without the iPhone, ATT would almost certainly have shed subscribers to Verizon in the last few years.

But if you look at International markets that enforce transparency, we are able to see the pricing disparity of the iPhone versus Android. In Denmark, the six month cost to own an iPhone 4 is $885, versus $460 to own the LG GT 460 (android) or HTC Wildfire (android). The iPhone 4 cost of ownership is 2x.

And while it’s easy to guess that if Verizon had the iPhone 4, it would outsell Moto Android phones at the same price, the pricing probably would not be the same on Verizon. If Verizon offered the same subsidy to Moto and Apple, Droids would be cheaper.

Android is well positioned to be cheaper. Multiple handset manufactures (Moto, HTC, Samsung) are fiercely competing for consumers but those competitors are unable to differentiate themselves because they all run the same OS. The result is that consumers do shop based on price and the handset makers earn significantly less than Apple does.

Another factor that leads to Android being cheaper for consumers is that the carriers like Verizon junk up the handset with branding and offers. Like a PC with crapware pre-installed, the cost of the hardware to consumers is subsidized by the companies that pay to put their offers on the device. You can be sure that Blockbuster paid to have their app pre-installed on the Droid X I just bought. If Verizon had the iPhone, they would not get to offset the price off the handset by selling space to marketing partners. Apple would certainly not allow it.

Meanwhile, Google develops the Android OS and charges nothing for its use, content to play the long game and own the software platform so that it is receptive to Google advertising. All this has the effect of lowering the cost of the device to consumers.

The final factor that props up Android in the US is that Verizon, in a brilliant marketing play, owns the Droid brand, backs it with $100MM of advertising per year and doles out the Droid monicker to particular handsets if and only if the handset manufacturers is willing to accept tight subsidies and Verizon co-branding of the experience and crapware.

It really is Mac vs PC all over again. The Android OS is positioned as a multi-vendor, good-enough, cheaper alternative to Apple’s finely crafted but tightly controlled solution. But unlike MS that wanted to be paid to install their OS, Google is giving it away (for now).

Apple has enormous manufacturing scale now. Nobody can build an iPhone for less than Apple. And Apple is the early leader with more applications. Apple is the innovator. But ultimately, Apple will probably be a minority player in smart phones over the long haul, content to accept 20% of the market and 80% of the profits. Why?

The reason I believe is that Apple is driven by different goals than Google. Apple is driven by a desire to see their vision of the world realized. Their goal is self-actualization. In their vision of the world, smartphones are elegant, uncluttered and tasteful. They don’t have porn. They are not tainted by low-brow marketing tactics of the carriers. Apple allowed ATT to sell its holy iPhone only if they would sell it exactly as the artist, Apple, intended it. They could not brand it, put anything on it or control how its used. Is Apple controlling? You bet. And you can see Apple’s orientation in the spoof video they showed at the front of the Antennagate conference? You don’t like the iPhone 4? Don’t buy it.

Google on the other hand is driven by a desire to see open and free access to information. They see mobile as a growing and important way that consumers access information and they want to make sure they can continue to be influential there. In short, Google is hell bent to organize the world’s information (for free) and Apple is hell bent to bring elegance, grace and art to our lives, but only to those who appreciate it.

Android will win this war if your definition of success is handsets sold. When the iPhone eventually does come to Verizon, people will prefer it but only if its the same price and it probably won’t be. But the good news is that this time, unlike in the Mac vc PC battle, Apple will have an installed base of one billion devices at some point and there will always be great support from ISVs for the platform.

So who’s right, Apple or Google? Well, that’s hard to say. There are people starving in the world and yet we still have art museums. Is it more useful to dedicate yourself to art or to feeding the world? Both increase human happiness. It seems that we need a balance and with Apple and Google, we have it.

I have figured out my way around the interface. It is just not as elegantly or meticulously designed as the iPhone.

But having said all that, the phone is entirely reliable. It never drops a call. Really. Never. And to be honest, I had forgotten how satisfying it is to carry a phone that can hold a phone call though whatever (I was on Verizon for 11 years before switching to ATT for the iPhone). The Droid X works in my house, even when I am on the first floor. Also, the phone never misses an incoming call.

I can read my email, in some ways more efficiently than I read it on the iPhone, it has a workable web browser, and google reader works through the browser, which is my main distraction when not reading email.

My calendar is synched with the cloud. My contacts are too. I have found that my most favorite apps are available: Kindle, NY Times, Open Table, Yelp, Facebook (just got a new release, still not perfect but getting better), and DropBox.

I could use this phone. My biggest issue? I don’t love the Droid X form factor. The phone it too large and too thick on the top. I am wondering whether I should swap it for a Droid 2 in 15 days. I can’t type on the Android keyboard all that well (although maybe I will get better) and maybe the physical keyboard will be useful for longer emails.

I know why Android is getting traction in the US. It’s because by 2007, 90% of folks in the US with a brain who were middle income or better had switched to Verizon. And for many folks, Android works well enough. That is, they are happier with an Android phone on Verizon than they would be with an iPhone on ATT.

I truly believe that if you subjectively compare the iPhone 4 to the currently shipping Android phones, the iPhone comes out on top. I don’t see many people choosing the Droid X phone I have running Android 2.1 over the iPhone 4 on the same carrier. But I can totally see why people would choose a Verizon Android phone over an ATT iPhone in the US.

If you are not the type of person who gets excited over phones, the Android experience on Moto is completely adequate. It’s head and shoulders above any feature phone you have ever owned. It is also superior to the Blackberry experience if you value web browsing and you use Google services. No, Android does not sing. The integration of the hardware and software does not border on the sublime. it’s a workhorse.

So for Apple, it’s do or die with Verizon. They have to get the device on the Verizon network soon because every day wasted helps Android get traction.

At home, where I use a Mac Pro, I type on an Apple Wireless keyboard. That was a bit of an experiment for me since it lacked a numeric keypad. But lo and behold, I found I did not miss the keypad much at all. I guess Steve was right again. And no, I don’t find laptop ergonomics all that great, especially Apple laptops. Unibody Apple laptops have a razor blade for a front edge and can raise your body temp one degree per 15 min of use on an actual lap. My theory is that Apple calls them notebook computers for fear that someone will actually catch on fire using a Macbook on their lap and sue Apple, saying they encouraged the use.

In the pointing device department, I have long been a user of the $15 Microsoft Mouse. I then bought an Apple Magic Mouse about six months ago to replace my MS Mouse when I got tired of the mouse wire getting snared and realized that I mostly held my hand in one place and moved the mouse repeatedly over the same patch of desk, lifting to reset it. Yes, I sit in an Aeron chair (best work chair ever made). And yes, I do sit at a two level adjustable height desk that I fell in love with in 1995 when I worked at Silicon Graphics in Mountain View. At my last startup, we bought eight of them. The desks clashed with the decor at DoubleClick when the company was purchased and were turned back to me to the chagrin of my wife.

So, when Apple announced a new pointing device last week, I just had to try it. I really do have a drawer full of keyboards and mice. I am not sure my wife knows quite how full it is.

Now these are early impressions. I have used the thing for eight hours. But here it is. I think I like it for some type of work but not all. And I like it more when tap-to-click is turned on. Tap-to-click is turned off by default on laptops and for good reason. With the trackpad between you and your keyboard, it is somewhat inevitable that you are going to touch the trackpad and create a click inadvertently. But with the Magic Trackpad to the right, that is not really an issue. And once you start using tap-to-click, you realize that it is actually a lot less fatiguing than clicking.

Of course there are issues. The biggest is that dragging an object across the screen or selecting large blocks of text, while holding the mouse button, requires a very different gesture than using a mouse. With a mouse you just lift the mouse and reset it, while holding the button, if you run of out desk. When tap-to-click is enabled, you can double tap and hold to grab and move something (or select text). But when you reach the end of the trackpad, you are toast. There is no way to get more real-estate.

To get around this problem you can enable drag-lock as a sub-option for tap-to-click. Drag lock is a bit cumbersome. At the end of your drag action, you need to lift your finger and tap once once to release the object. I am going to try it, but I think there is a reason that tap-to-click is not on by default. It’s an acquired taste and requires retraining.

Interestingly, the problem of running off the trackpad does not exist when using a device like the iPad, because there the touch surface is one to one aligned with the screen and so if you are dragging an object across the screen, there is always enough room to express bringing it to any edge.

The other caveat is that if you are reading a long web page, being able to rest your hand on a comfortable mouse like the MS mouse is more relaxing then holding your hand above a trackpad, even if tap-to-click is turned off. The MS mouse has a wheel for scrolling.

So what’s the verdict on the Magic Trackpad? I like it, but I do have a mouse plugged in next to it just for scrolling long web pages and for comfort. I will post a follow-up in a few weeks to report whether the Magic Trackpad is still on my desk. Post in the comments if you have one of these new Apple trackpads and tell me your experiences.

Microsoft worked hard to kill Flash by introducing Silverlight, an alternative to Flash on the web. The problem with that attack vector is that it offered nothing compelling to developers, serious engineering types or softer design types. Flash worked on the web and the installed base was there. Hence, if you needed to get some video or animation working on your website, you went where the installed base was, and that was Flash, as Adobe would happily tell you.

Then Apple came in with an entirely new platform, in a form factor (iphone) that is not particularly well suited to Flash. Through simple starvation they kept Flash from becoming important to that platform. You don’t hear engineers complaining too much about Apple not allowing or supporting Flash, because you see, we hate it anyway.

And now, we all know where this story ends. Flash is dead. The new battleground is mobile, Apple is the king and Flash is not on the platform. Developers are writing apps directly for the device in “real” programming languages with serious development tools that were not designed by wolves, and the world moves on.

Make no mistake, Flash will die. Phanfare is a pretty good example. To make our web albums work on the iPad, we need to move to HTML5. And we will, first for video, and someday for the Flash slideshows we show. And then we will have one code base that works across mobile and desktop OS.

All this reminds me that you rarely ever beat the incumbent winner at his own game. Microsoft could not beat Adobe within the desktop browser. Apple moved the field of battle. They created an entirely new platform with new devices that was so compelling that consumers flocked to it. And on that new battlefield, they slaughtered Adobe’s Flash.

Lot’s of folks have a problem with Apple’s heavy handed refusal to allow Flash on their devices. My view is that it’s good business for them and a sound technological choice. The marketplace has spoken. 85MM devices sold, none of them run Flash and the sun continues to rise.

It was a significantly greater effort that Apple put forth with mobile than Microsoft ever did with Silverlight. To be sure, killing Flash was incidental to that effort – collateral damage! But the world does not care. As to whether Apple can really legally prevent an engineer from writing in Flash and compiling through Objective C is a legal question. But don’t worry, engineers don’t want to.

• It’s a bit heavier than you might desire when holding it on your lap.
• The Amazon Kindle is a better book reader for traveling because the Kindle battery will last a week or more and the Kindle is half the weight. (Kindle is 290g, iPad is 680g).
• The iPad is much more entertaining than a Kindle but for me most of the difference requires a good network connection.
• It’s hard to find a comfortable typing position. Caveat: I don’t yet have the case that would hold the iPad in a better typing position.
• The iPad is an enjoyable way to consume media (surf the web, read email, shop).
• The device desperately needs multiple login profiles. Unlike my iPhone, which is a personal device, the iPad is a shared device. It sits in the family room for anyone to play with. Hence, I need to be able to login and have my email, calendar, contacts and bookmarks. Whether the apps can be shared across the profiles is a matter of debate (one or multiple iTunes accounts).

My belief is that the ultimate success of the iPad will depend on whether mainstream consumers, who are not knowledge workers, can live within the constraints of the text input on the device and the body position required to use it.

Although many aspects of content creation are easy on the iPad, long text input is not one of them. So the question becomes how important is text input to the average consumer?

Does the average consumer write long emails, comment in forums, comment on blogs, and produce lots of text? If so, then lacking a higher rate text input method seems like a significant limitation. But this limitation can be overcome. New input methods will be invented and speech to text will get better and better.

For me personally, I still need to get to know the device better before forming a verdict. It is very nice to be able to sit down on the couch and surf the web and read email. But I don’t find myself much more excited about responding to that email with the iPad versus the iPhone. But then, again, when I respond to long emails, it is usually work.

If you want to work with a computer for hours at a time than there are few positions more comfortable than a properly aligned Aeron chair, 30 inch display, ergonomic keyboard and Microsoft mouse. Does the average consumer do that? I do that even when pursuing hobbies. For example, planning a big trip or organizing my photos. And I switch between work and play all day long. I will take a short break and read an article, and then go right back to work.

The iPad is certainly a more intuitive computing device than a computer based on the Mac OS or Windows. Hence, I think the consumers will prefer it to those devices. The only question is about whether the iPad touch-tablet form factor accommodates the body position of humans using a computer for leisure and their text input requirements.

Now, of course, we can’t be sure every order was for an iPad. Apple does sell other stuff. But at 830am in the morning on the east coast, my guess is that most of the orders were for iPads.

This also means that Apple will sell out of all devices built in the initial manufacturing run sometime this week.

This product will change consumer computing.

1. Need to install OS X on a new drive. ($99 from Best Buy).
2. Need to install Apple Aperture to do initial culling of photos and videos that I take before uploading to Phanfare. I also do minor editing in Aperture. (some day Phanfare will solve this problem)
3. Need to install MS office because I still have some legacy files on NAS in my house.
4. Need to install VMWare because I still use Outlook for email. My Windows image was stored on a SW raid in the same machine so that is intact.
5. Need to install iLife so that I can test iPhoto with Phanfare. I don’t use much of iLife very often.
6. Need to install Firefox and Chrome. I still can’t decide what browser I want to use. Firefox has become a memory hog. Chrome lacks Java support on the Mac.
7. Need to Install dropbox. I am trying it out as a substitute for the NAS in my basement.
8. Need to install Skype. I use it mostly for text chat.

That’s it. My music was on the RAID partition so I did not lose that. Music seems to be the last remaining data challenge to get running off the cloud. Apple probably has some ideas there with the acquisition of Lala. I wrote a post on how I would like to see the music service work at Apple.

However, this version also removes our super cool image import flow and replaces it with the default image import picker. That picker forces you to import one image at a time and is much slower. You also can’t choose what album the image goes into.

We removed our custom import flow and associated user interface screen at Apple’s request. Apparently, their developer agreement changed and they no longer permit modifying that flow or allowing us to access the camera roll except through their interfaces.

While we understand the need to enforce standards and keep the platform stable, there is no doubt that Apple has failed to provide alternative methods that work as well as the ones developed by third parties, like ourselves.

It is our hope that Apple will eventually modify the rules to allow extension and customization such as we provided, or improve the native interfaces to provide the same interface. Until such time, any third party camera application for the iPhone can’t provide an experience that matches what Apple provides in their built in app.

Phanfare Photon synchronizes your media wirelessly to your iPhone and provides a full set of management and editing tools. Hence, it provides features and functionality unmatched by Apple’s built in app or their MobileMe service. But prohibiting us from modifying the camera to take photos as quickly as the built in camera app or allow fast import from the camera roll means that Phanfare Photon’s utility for capturing photos from the iPhone is somewhat limited.

This turns out not to be a huge deal for Phanfare customers, most of whom own digital SLRs and find that the iPhone is much more interesting as a multimedia display and management device than as a capture device.

We can’t possibly divine Apple’s motives for creating the set of rules that they did. The iPhone ecosystem is enormous and successful. There are over 100,000 apps. They could be trying to impede competitors to the built in iPhone experience, or they could be trying to keep the platform stable and not care what the impact is on camera apps. Unlike many out there, I think it is their right to do whatever they want with their platform.

If you don’t like what they are doing, let them know, because we have little say here. We try to follow the rules, support the platform and Apple ultimately decides what gets accepted into the app store.

It’s kind of funny, because the iPhone was a huge step forward for developers in opening up a mobile handset to third party development. Compare how open the platform is to what it was like under the old regime convincing Verizon that you wanted to go ‘on deck’ in their terrible ‘get it now’ experience. Walt Mossberg used to refer to Verizon and the other service providers as “the Soviet Ministries.”

And yet, as much as Apple broke new ground in opening up a mobile platform to developers, there is much left to be desired. For that, we may need to look to Android. Android is not competitive with the iPhone today, in my opinion, but for an app developer the platform is more open and updates can go out with no review. That’s a double edged sword. It means that developers can respond more quickly but it also means that consumers need to be more wary about destabilizing their phone by downloading an app.

We will see how it all plays out. Right now, it seems that Android is providing the open, cross hardware platform that will take longer to mature but may in fact be much larger than the more controlled Apple experience. Apple is very good at providing a strong paternal hand in crafting experiences that are seamless from end to end. The iPod and iTunes is a great example. But control by its very nature stifles innovation and drives up costs. There is a good chance that it will be Android that powers the majority of the smart phones in 5 years. If so, it will be another example where Apple led and then left open the door for someone else to be the market share leader with a lower cost solution that is more open, has a bigger ecosystem and more rough edges.

We worked with HP to get this all working. We are the first app outside of HP’s iPrint Photo that will allow you to print directly from the iPhone via Wi-Fi.

For Phanfare customers, Phanfare Photon wirelessly syncs your entire photo and video collection to your iPhone, enabling you to print any photo.

Phanfare Photon also allows you to order prints by mail – but that has been true for a while.

Phanfare Photon for the iPhone is our sandbox for showing how we believe connected digital cameras should work in the future. Every photo and video you take automatically floats up the cloud and every photo and video you have ever taken is available for viewing on the camera.

Truth is, most of our customers have digital SLRs, so they are more likely to view their photos and videos on their iPhone than take new ones, but we find our customers do take a small percent of their photos using their iPhone. And it is nice to be able to get a print in pinch.

This release talks about home printing, but of course, if you have a network connected HP printer at work, it works there too.

The details of why the rejected Google Voice are not all that surprising and will certainly be discussed by everyone endlessly. I am more interested in the review process since we go through it regularly.

In their response, Apple discloses that there are 40 full time reviewers dealing with 8500 new apps and updates per week. If you assume that Apple is neither falling behind nor catching up, that means that they spend 11.2 minutes reviewing each app (40 people working 40 hrs per week processing 8500 items per week – the average wait time of 14 days is not relevant to the calculation of throughput if my recollection of queuing theory is correct).

Apple said that every app is reviewed by two people, so that means that a reviewer has about 5 minutes to review an app. If true, the level of quality in the app store is remarkable since it takes us a lot longer than 5 minutes to QA an update of Phanfare Photon before we send it to Apple. It also means that Apple certainly relies on some degree of automation to test apps and make sure they conform in various ways. For example, I would guess that they check for the use of undocumented frameworks programatically.

Apple also states that they have reviewed about 200,000 apps in a little more than a year. But at 8500 apps per week, they are on a run rate of 442,000 apps per year, so the number of app submissions is accelerating.

But wait, there is a better way. Using an iPhone or iPod touch, a computer and a Apple Airport Express, you can setup a super cool whole house sound system all controlled by your iPhone or iPod Touch. Most people don’t seem to know how it all fits together. Here is the recipe.

First, put your music in iTunes. This is pretty easy for most people. For people my age (40s) you probably have a bunch of CDs and you probably already imported them into iTunes. If not, do that now.

Buy an Apple Airport Express for $99. This little gadget, about the size and shape of small pack of Kraft American Cheese will allow you to connect your stereo to iTunes. The Airport Express has an audio out port that runs both analog and digital PCM. You just need the right cable.

The Airport Express is a versatile little box. It can be a client to your Ethernet network, a client to your Wi-Fi network, or create a Wi-Fi cloud. It can also be a print server, but we won’t talk about that today.

Most people don’t have ethernet near their living room stereo, but do have a WiFi network in their home. Configure the Airport Express to be a client to your WiFi network using Airport Utility.

Once on the network, you can enable music sharing using Airport Utility. And once you do that, the AirPort express will show up within iTunes on your desktop.

You will need to connect the audio out port on the Airport Express to your stereo. Turn on the stereo and choose the input you selected (say Aux 1). No go back to iTunes and in the bottom right, you can choose the Airport Express as a target.

Next step, download the free Apple Remote app from the Apple App store. Using that app, you can control iTunes on your desktop. Hence, from your iPod Touch or iPhone, you can choose what music to play on your stereo. Brilliant.

You can target multiple Airport Express devices from iTunes. For each zone, for example the backyard, you just need an amplifier and two speakers. You can tell iTunes to play to all zones simultaneously.

Provided you already own a computer and stereo amplifier, you can setup this system for under $400. I put links above to cheap cables. Don’t be fooled into buy the Monster versions, especially if you buy a digital cable. if you hear sound, it works.

The computer will run a variant of the iPhone OS. It will include WiFi, bluetooth and 2 USB ports. It won’t contain a 3G radio. Good chance it includes an ethernet port. For most consumers, that tablet will be the only computing device they need. Like an iPhone or touch, it will not expose the user to the memory hierarchy or the file system because well designed consumer devices never do. Nevertheless, there are challenges and open questions.

• Will the device come with a bluetooth keyboard or will that be optional? I think it will be a lot more versatile for counter use if it has a keyboard. Will it take a mouse? new pointing device? or will you just tap on it? I think it will optionally take a mouse.
• Will they extend the iPhone OS to support multiple logins? Is the device designed to be a single user device, like an iPhone, or a multi-user device, like a personal computer? I suspect that many home users share a single login, so the answer of how to best address allowing two different people to read email and have their own bookmarks is not obvious. And remember that on the tablet, people will likely use the Apple mail app, not a web browser, to read email.
• For Photography is it client or host? Will they do a version of iPhoto for the tablet? Will they put in all the USB code and acquisition stuff to allow acquiring photos from a digital camera to the tablet? Will an iPhone be able to sync with the tablet, or do they view the tablet as a client that is either left unsynched or syncs with a personsal computer? I think the iPhoto model is entirely broken so you really need to pick your poison on this one. More on this below.
• What about iTunes? can you sync your iPod to the tablet or is the tablet a client?
• How will they allow all existing apps to run on the larger screen? Two major options here: have each app run in a little gadget window that is the size of an iPhone or redesign apps to run full screen. I think they do both. They run iPhone apps in compatibility mode in a little gadget window but most Apple apps will be redesigned to use the full screen. Given the design philosophy of iPhone apps, they could just encourage apps to build views with multiple long columns across the page, the right hand columns being deeper in to the hiearchy than the left columns (like the column view in finder).

I have long thought that iTunes should be a caching client that you can login to from anywhere and get to all music you purchased plus imported. Ditto with iPhoto (this is the Phanfare solution).

Using that model, both phones and the tablet would be clients to the cloud and the phone would sync wirelessly with the cloud even for music (as Phanfare Photon on the phone does for photos).

As they say, the devil is in the details and it will be interesting to see how Apple executes the product. I imagine a raging debate within Apple about whether people wil be presented with a “login” screen on the tablet and encouraged to “add users.”

If Apple really comes out with the tablet in October, as rumored, then I think they will do the expedient thing. That means that the tablet will be just like a phone and will need to sync with iTunes on a PC or Mac to get to its music. The one feature I expect they will add is network sync over wifi. They already have this feature in the Apple TV product, so no big deal porting it to the tablet.

]]> http://blog.phanfare.com/2009/07/open-questions-with-the-apple-tablet/feed/ 6 http://blog.phanfare.com/2009/06/i-love-my-new-verizon-iphone/ http://blog.phanfare.com/2009/06/i-love-my-new-verizon-iphone/#comments Sun, 21 Jun 2009 16:10:35 +0000 Andrew Erlichson http://blog.phanfare.com/?p=411 I am traveling down Interstate 91 South in New Hampshire, returning from my 20th Dartmouth Reunion, enjoying pretty decent data access on my iPhone 3G, even though there is zero ATT service on this stretch of the road. I am getting a few hundred kilobits/second.

Ok, there is one small detail I a left out. I am using a MiFi 2200 Wi-Fi hotspot in the car. This little device, smaller than a deck of cards, connects to the Verizon data network, establishes and EvDO connection, and puts up Wi-Fi cloud around itself.

Using the MiFi, my iPhone is essentially a Verizon iPhone. I use data more than voice, so this really does bring the better Verizon coverage to my iPhone. The device is battery operated, although you can plug it in or attach it via USB to a charging source, such as the 12-volt adapter in the car.

No doubt, this is an expensive solution. The Verizon EvDO card is over $60/month. But, truth-be-told, I have had EvDO service for over 4 years now since I find it useful when traveling. The sad truth is that while the ATT 3G network is faster than the Verizon data network when it is available, it is often not available.

When we hike out west I like having the security of a cell phone when we are on the trail. This is the first summer in 11 years where I don’t own a Verizon cell phone, and it will be nice to have the security of the Verizon network while using my iPhone.

The Mi-Fi is not perfect. I found that after being idle for several hours, it turns off the Wi-Fi network and hence essentially needs to be rebooted before you can use connected devices again. But given that it is close at hand, this is not too much of an inconvenience.

As an added bonus, the Mi-Fi supports up to 5 devices (a limitation probably imposed by Verizon) and so my laptop and my old iPhone, which is now the family iPod Touch, can also be on the network.

Carrying your own personal Wi-Fi cloud has never been easier. You could do it using a variety of devices for the past few years, but they were big and clunky and required multiple pieces of hardware. The Mi-Fi gives you a very convenient form-factor and built in battery that makes the concept significantly more useful. And by letting you share the expensive EvDo connection, it also makes Verizon’s EvDo service more economical.

]]> http://blog.phanfare.com/2009/06/i-love-my-new-verizon-iphone/feed/ 9 http://blog.phanfare.com/2009/01/garmin-disrupted-by-the-iphone/ http://blog.phanfare.com/2009/01/garmin-disrupted-by-the-iphone/#comments Mon, 26 Jan 2009 19:13:15 +0000 Andrew Erlichson http://blog.phanfare.com/?p=159 The iPhone has GPS built in with maps from google. That probably has Garmin worrying, but the truth is that the iPhone does not work all that well for street by street driving directions that it is replacing a Nuvi for most road warriors or busy moms. The Garmin device is cheaper to own (no recurring contract) than an iPhone and works really well.

Network connectivity does not yet enhance driving GPS navigators enough to make the iPhone a win there. The GPS implementation in the iPhone is slow to lock the satellite and is not well designed to use on your windshield.

Geocaching is a different story.

I have been geocaching for a few years now with my kids. For those not familiar with geocaching, it is a global treasure hunt where people hide little caches, list their GPS coordinates on geocaching.com, and then wait for people to find them. Geocaching is a lot of fun, and it can be challenging if you choose caches that include difficult terrain or a well hidden location.

To geocache, I would go to geocaching.com, find a cache that looks interesting, attach my Garmin GPS 60CSx, and download the waypoint for the cache, print out the description and hints, and then drive to the trailhead.

The 60CSx is an amazing GPS device. It is waterproof, durable, daylight readable and includes a magnetic compass so that it can tell you, even when standing still, how far away the cache is and in what direction to move.

Recently, Groundspeak, which runs Geocaching.com, came out with a Geocaching iPhone app. That app will find nearby caches based on your location, giving you the description, the hints and the ability to log field notes, all from the iPhone. You can navigate to the cache via google maps and once close by, use their simulated compass (only works when moving) to head to the hide location.

Geocaching is never quite as easy as it sounds. Even my Garmin will only isolate you to a 1000 square foot area, so you need to do some hunting. Hence, the limited accuracy of the iPhone GPS is a not a major liability. The Geocaching app on the iPhone offers an amazingly good Geocaching experience. You don’t need to plan ahead and load waypoints using a USB cable, and the built in maps support means that locally you can pretty much use Google maps on the iphone to get to the trailhead.

Of course, the iPhone is not as good a GPS device as my Garmin device, but the GPS part is good enough, and the supporting information and wireless network access to the data makes it more convenient. If a user already has an iPhone, then using it is cheaper (Geocaching app is $9.99) than buying a Garmin device. High end geocaching users probably won’t be satisfied with the iPhone geocaching experience, but it is cheaper and offers attributes the traditional solution does not. And its getting better fast. Does that sound like disruptive technology? You bet.

The iPhone is deeply disruptive to Garmin’s geocaching market. What’s worse for Garmin, they have no consumer-friendly way of adding networking to their handheld devices. They already learned that nobody will pay a subscription fee for their real-time traffic reports. They will find out that nobody will pay a subscription fee to get a data plan for their Nuvi either.

What is garmin to do? Well, to some extent, there is nothing they can do. they are going to lose the casual Geocaching market to GPS-enabled smart phones. They can try to come out with a smartphone, but this is pretty far from their knitting.

I think the only solution is to camp out at the high end and at least produce a device that is as useful as the iPhone for geocaching for those willing to pay. To do that, I would suggest they handle the data network access like the Amazon Kindle.

Rather than charge a subscription fee, let users browse for geocaches on the Garmin handheld for free. Then if the consumers wants to reveal the actual coordinates of the cache, charge a small transaction free of $1 that includes the cost of the network bandwidth. This is how Amazon handles the wireless charges for book deliver on the Kindle. Makes perfect sense.

I would be willing to pay a a small fee to get a superior GPS experience and all the ancillary geocaching information. The other obvious option is to try to create ad-supported wireless networking for the Garmin Nuvi. I doubt it would pay the freight today for access to the cell phone networks.

The iPhone (and other smartphones) won’t just disrupt the portable handheld Geocaching GPS market. They will also disrupt the point and shoot photography market for similar reasons (this is where Phanfare comes in). Canon is going to have a hard time getting consumers to pay a monthly subscription fee to get access to a data network to move their photos and video to and from the cloud, but that is exactly the convenience that smartphones are going to offer. And given that the trend is toward unlimited data plans, the bandwidth required is already sunk cost to the consumer.

Mobile photography is not very threatening to dedicated point and shoot cameras today and Canon is not much worried. Garmin is probably not seeing too many people forgo handheld GPS units for geocaching today either – but check back in two years. Things will be very different.

]]> http://blog.phanfare.com/2009/01/garmin-disrupted-by-the-iphone/feed/ 13 http://blog.phanfare.com/2008/10/photography-apps-on-the-apple-iphone/ http://blog.phanfare.com/2008/10/photography-apps-on-the-apple-iphone/#comments Sat, 04 Oct 2008 21:00:40 +0000 Andrew Erlichson http://blog.phanfare.com/?p=89 Apple recently lifted the NDA that prevented us from commenting on the iPhone platform. Practically speaking, that prevented us from saying anything negative. We have already said lots of positive things about the iPhone platform.

Overall, the platform lives up to the hype. The touch interface is ground breaking and the UI sets the bar to a new level for mobile devices.

Our goal with the iPhone is to transform it into a full-featured wireless camera. Most of that is just a small matter of programming. But there is one area where we and every other photography app is hobbled, and that is in the camera controller.

If you use the built in camera on the iPhone, it has a shot to shot time of about 3 seconds. This is not groundbreaking compared to a point and shoot camera from Nikon or Canon, but it is tolerable for many situations. Unfortunately, we are not allowed to use the same camera controller that Apple uses for its built in camera. Instead, we are forced to use a different camera controller class (this is all software) that calls the real camera controller behind the scenes. The result is awful.

Compared to the native camera controller, the one we must use has a shot to shot time of 14 seconds. You can background some of that and get it down to 9 seconds, but do that at your own peril because the camera controller also uses a lot of memory and as any iPhone developer knows, if you run out of memory, the operating system kills the app.

The shot to shot latency is not the only issue. We are also forced into an “official” workflow for the digital camera that involves a common interface that says “use photo” and “retake” after each photo. The built in camera app that Apple wrote that uses the native camera controller skips that annoying step. We can’t skip it.

The solution is to let developers use the native camera controller. Sure there is no default shutter effect or shutter sound, but that is fine with us. We can innovate there and have our own unique experience.

The iPhone is the first smartphone with a UI so good that it could possibly replace the point and shoot camera for many situations. But to realize the full potential of the platform we must be allowed to use the native camera controller libraries.

]]> http://blog.phanfare.com/2008/10/photography-apps-on-the-apple-iphone/feed/ 14 http://blog.phanfare.com/2008/09/my-iphone-3g-finally-arrived/ http://blog.phanfare.com/2008/09/my-iphone-3g-finally-arrived/#comments Mon, 15 Sep 2008 13:22:03 +0000 Andrew Erlichson http://blog.phanfare.com/?p=87 After months of carrying around an iPhone 3G with the 3G turned off because the battery only lasted until 2pm, I eagerly installed the 2.1 iPhone firmware on friday hoping that the tantalizing tidbit in the release notes that battery life might be increased for “some users” would apply to me.

Since then, I have had the 3G network turned on and I am happy to report that the battery life is much better.

At the same time, as I waited nearly 3 hours for my phone to back itself up while tethered to my Thinkpad on friday, I could not help but think that this was a painful transition for a new product with high consumer volume. Updating firmware on my electronic equipment is like breathing to me, but for most people, this would be considered a major hassle.

Nevertheless, the iPhone 3G with the 2.1 firmware is awesome and Phanfare runs great on it. Now if Apple could just give me a universal search feature on the phone…

]]> http://blog.phanfare.com/2008/09/my-iphone-3g-finally-arrived/feed/ 5 http://blog.phanfare.com/2008/09/geotagging-comes-to-phanfare/ http://blog.phanfare.com/2008/09/geotagging-comes-to-phanfare/#comments Thu, 04 Sep 2008 16:25:08 +0000 Andrew Erlichson http://blog.phanfare.com/?p=86 We are pleased to announce the introduction of Geotagging support within Phanfare so that you know where photos were taken.

Phanfare records the GPS coordinates of any photo with GPS information in the EXIF header. The process is fully automatic and compatible with cameras that support geotagging of images (such as the iPhone) and with the Eye-Fi Wi-fi enabled SD memory cards that geotag images automatically.

We automatically geotag any photos sent from the iPhone with the Phanfare iPhone app. On the web, you can click on “View Map” when viewing photos to see the location on a Google Map. On the iPhone within Safari click on the little globe in the upper right hand corner of the image.

We plan to do other things with the geodata over time. Here is the fine print on the new geotagging feature:

• Showing location is enabled for new albums but not existing albums. This is for privacy reasons. You can turn on geotagging support for older albums on an album by album basis.
• You can turn off showing map location on a per album basis. Click on album options within the web client.
• You can control whether new albums are created with geo tagging support enabled within settings
• We have been recording the GPS info from iPhoto images for at least a month so if you have older iPhone photos, they are geotagged. You just need to enable showing the info for the album.
• You can view the location of a photo on an iPhone as well.
• You can’t set the coordinates of a photo from within Phanfare. The photo has to have been tagged outside of Phanfare.

We released a few other features yesterday as well:

• A new table of contents design that handles large accounts much better and pages in albums. This design is turned off by default for existing users so you will need to enable it manually in settings
• You can now post a comment or send a message to the author when viewing photos and videos on your iPhone
• We fixed the Phanfare facebook app to work properly with the new facebook. You can even move the Phanfare widget from your Boxes page to your main profile page.

There are also numerous small bug fixes in this release. Let us know how you like it.

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