Zit Seng's Superwall

So say crisis communication experts, Professor Matthew Seeger and Chris Lehane, quoted by mainstream Consumer Reports. The widespread complaints about the iPhone 4 antenna problems were confirmed in a lab experiment by Consumer Report, leading to their recommendation against the iPhone 4.

The lab experiment, which involved connecting several iPhone 4 to simulated cell towers in a radio frequency isolation chamber, showed that signal levels fell as much as 20dB when the lower left corner of the phone was covered.

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I finally got to lay my hands on an Apple iPad. It looks nice, and it feels light. I couldn’t feel the bare metal though, because the owner refused to take off the protective cover. But I’m sure there would be no surprises, seeing how much the iPad has already been described in tremendous details all over the media. I still remain unmoved, however. What in the world would I use an iPad for? It’s not going to replace a MacBook Pro, and it’s not something compact enough to bring around outside of work when I don’t have a bag to stuff it in.

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It used to be our private joke about how, perhaps, the iPad predates the iPhone. They look similar, the iPad being an oversized version of the iPhone. In fact, they look even more similar if you compare with the rumoured next generation (4G) of the iPhone. It’s as if the original iPhone design was really that big (i.e. 9.56in x 7.47in), then someone higher up in Apple said: “Hey, how do you expect someone to use a phone so big…” And so, the original iPhone was shelved, and Apple engineers had to make a mini iPhone, eventually the first generation iPhone we know today.

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Well, it turned out not. Rumours surfaced earlier this week about Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer speaking at Apple’s WWDC 2010 keynote. It turns out not. The enemy’s enemy denied. The rumour had earlier said that Microsoft’s CEO would have 7 minutes at the keynote to talk about a new version of Visual Studio 2010 producing iPad, iPhone and Mac apps.

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I came across two interesting bits of news. First of which is about Android, possibly, having outsold the iPhone. This data, from NPD, may not be absolutely accurate and reflective of the real market, but it does suggest a trend of rapidly rising Android popularity. Until the end of 2009, I myself haven’t been particularly impressed with Android. There weren’t any killer hardware then, and the promise of an open Android platform was, in my opinion, not sufficiently open as I thought it should have been.

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10 hours of battery life is practically good for the entire work day! Apple has just announced updates to the entire family of MacBook Pro notebooks, and the latest 13″ models claim to run for 10 hours on battery. The next best thing is the price. At the Apple Singapore store, the price has dropped across the board, by between S$100 to S$500. We’re luckier than US customers, because in the US store, at least one model has become US$100 more expensive.

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Steve Jobs just shared with the world what is coming with the latest iPhone OS version 4.0. In a media presentation lasting about 1 hour, a couple of the simply amazing features were demonstrated by Steve Jobs, Phil Schiller and Scott Forstall. Really amazing features like, ahem, being able to set a wallpaper for your home screen. Yes, for the first time ever, iPhone users will soon be able to customize the background of their home screen. I’m sure they will spend countless hours deciding which denim texture to adorn their iPhone screen with. Steve Jobs took no less than 90 seconds to show how wallpapers are selected in his demonstration.

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Today is the Apple iPad launch day. I thought I would write a few words about this much-raved-about product. Personally, I still don’t see why and how this tablet should be so revolutionary. Maybe it is the user experience that makes the difference. Or perhaps it is the magic of Apple’s marketing. All the initial reviews pouring out now are saying lots of wonderful things about the iPad (though I’m sure Apple chose carefully where to send the early iPads). I know, it looks nice, but I just don’t know how I am going to be using it. Maybe, I’m not the kind of user that the iPad is designed for.

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I fail to be wowed by Steve Jobs latest product announcement, the all new iPad, which is supposedly so revolutionary that it creates a new product category. I guess it still does deserve its own product category, but it is nowhere so revolutionary that the media had hyped it out to be. The name itself doesn’t even sound interesting. In fact, I’m already reading a bunch of jokes about the name even before I finished watching Steve Job’s keynote video.

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In less than 24 hours, at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Apple is expected to unveil a new hardware product category at their special Media Event. It’ll be a product announcement so major that it is being compared to the likes if the iPhone launch in 2007 and Macintoshes moving to Intel processors in 2005. We’re talking about a new product category rather than simply another new product, and it has been reported that Steve Jobs was heard saying the Apple Tablet “will be the most important thing I’ve ever done.”

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