But it doesn’t matter. It’s just a reason to shop, and shoppers just love having sales and discounts. It’s not quite the right time to buy any Apple hardware, though, because we’re all expecting refreshes coming up not too far away. There’s the iPad 3 and the rumoured slimmer MacBook Pro (or some reorganization of the MacBook Air/Pro product lines). So, actually, Red Friday wasn’t all that exciting. There were good discounts, however, if you happened to be already needing to buy something right away. MacBook Airs, for example, were going for S$120 less.

Something did catch my attention though. The Parrot AR.Drone. It’s now back to the original S$449 price, but it was going for about S$368 (almost 20% discount).

What is the AR.Drone? It’s a remote-controlled quadricopter. Yeah, you’ve seen those toy RC helicopters, and those are plenty cheap. This Parrot AR.Drone is rather expensive eh?

Well, it’s quite a different toy. This is remote-controlled over Wifi from a free iPhone or Android application. The gadget has four propellers, hence being called a quadricopter. It has two video cameras, one forward facing and the other downward facing, and live video can be streamed to the iPhone or Android application. It also has a bunch of sensors to help it automatically stabilize itself, hover over a fixed position, automatically maintain vertical separation from ground obstacles, etc.

The drone runs Linux, and Parrot provides a SDK so that you can build interesting applications with the AR.Drone. I had this pet project idea before: Build a robot guard that can patrol an area while providing video surveillance. This AR.Drone can almost be that platform to build such a solution. The “problem” with the AR.Drone, however, is its battery life. The AR.Drone’s specifications list its flight time as about 15 minutes on a single charge, although some independent reviewers have reported longer times, albeit only slightly.

Now, if someone could build some sort of inductive charging circuitry to recharge the AR.Drone’s battery… that would be awesome.

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I can’t wait for an Android tablet, namely the Samsung one, to hit the market to see how well Android will fare.

We need some balance. The Samsung Galaxy Tab, the name of Samsung’s upcoming Android-based tablet, is set to hit the markets in the US in mid October (at least rumoured to be). It’s getting a bit too much to see iPads everywhere.

It’ll be fun to see if the Galaxy Tab’s 7″ screen or iPad’s 9.7″ screen will prove more usable. Small is more portable, but big is nicer to see. Tough choice for the hardware designers. 7″ and 9.7″ could be a world of difference, making or breaking the usability of the product.

The Galaxy Tab looks nice, almost as nice as the iPad, I must say, but not quite the same yet. Feature-wise, the Galaxy Tab is a winner (unless you count the smaller screen as a disadvantage). But you know how it often is… specifications sometimes looses out to design.

There’s also the issue of the app-experience on Android to consider. After all, the tablet isn’t going to be just a fashion statement… it is going to get used. So there needs to be sufficient quantity of useful, quality, apps.

I’m still a bit uncertain about the practicality of a tablet. Too small to do productive work (I think), but too big to be so portable to bring it with you always (unless you always carry a bag… and most men don’t do that). But I’m beginning to recognize it’s entertainment value while attending a boring slow meeting.

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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.

We’ve read and heard so many reports about various tests and experiments to “confirm” the antenna problem. But this is by far the most scientific test (at least it looks like) to date. Furthermore, for a mainstream media to boldly not recommend the iPhone 4, that’s something pretty startling. (I mean, after all, Consumer Report risks incurring the divine wrath of Apple Inc…)

Consumer Report found that taping the antenna gap in the lower left corner with “thick, non-conductive material” helped alleviate the problem. A duct tape would work, although it would certainly make the iPhone 4 pretty ugly. Or, you could put the phone in a protective casing, which Apple recommends. Or just hold the phone differently, as Steve Jobs recommends.

Practically every product that Apple has launched has faced some sort of “big problem” that fuels bigger problems like class action suits. This seems like one of the biggest challenge yet. It seems like a pretty fatal mistake if the signal problems are truly due to a design issue. I can’t wait to see how Apple responds to this, and of course, whether there would be an iPhone 4 recall.

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I did see how the iPad was very useful for farming though. Yes, those Farm Wars kind of farming. Farming on a phone is too difficult given how tiny the screen is. Farming on a notebook or desktop isn’t as fun because it is not touch-enabled.

I don’t suppose people buy iPad to do farming or farming-like applications. (Or perhaps they do?)

But regardless what I think, the iPads are selling very well. The iPhone 4 is doing even better. I’m afraid one day, “phone” == “iPhone”. It’s not a phone if it isn’t an iPhone. Then it gets very problematic, not least because Steve Jobs decides what a phone is and what a phone can do. Or not do. Like it won’t run flash. Like multitasking revolves around 7 crippled services.

I can’t help but think that the i-things are not actually keeping pace technologically.

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Then, what do you know? It turns out to be true. The iPad project did predate the iPhone, according to Steve Jobs.

Our joke went on that, a few years later, the original super-clunky iPhone design was taken out of storage and revived. Minus the phone part. The camera too. The future iPad generations will probably put back the phone and camera.

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Microsoft is risking becoming irrelevant. They aren’t the giant that they used to be anymore, and I wouldn’t have been surprised had Microsoft decided to pick sides. Already, Microsoft seems to be leaning toward Apple when they supported the latter’s anti-Flash campaign. Apple’s becoming the new Microsoft. Incidentally, Apple’s market capitalization passed Microsoft’s by US$2B for the first time earlier this week.

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But 2010 started off with many good things going for Android, one of which is Google’s own branded phone, the Nexus One. I’m still not terribly pleased about the state of proprietary drivers and various other software packages, but I think there is a direction that phones are quick becoming like commodity PCs. This is, of course, the model that Google wants: the hardware doesn’t matter, you still get access to Google services.

The second news is a rumour about possibly free MobileMe service. This is likely the result of the growing competition between Apple and Google. I always thought MobileMe ought to have been free. Apple wants to sell hardware. Their services had always been the means to get people to buy their hardware. Why, then, charge for the services. I’m not sure if MobileMe is really that great, so even if it had been free, it may not be enough to win Mac/iPhone/iPad users over from Google services. But “free” will surely be a good start.

Now, the interesting question is, which platform will prevail in the next 5 years? I’m wondering if Android/Google will be the Microsoft of the mobile platform, and the iPhone OS will be something like what the Mac OS X is in the PC world right now?

Oh, and Microsoft is in danger of becoming irrelevant. The only thing “precious” about Microsoft right now is Office. There is no better Office. As much as pockets of users around the world want to commit to OpenOffice, I still think Microsoft Office is better. Maybe Microsoft would be forced to open-source Office and sell services around it.

I like the idea of web/online services. But I’m worried about the domination of Google. What would really be cool is, if we could configure another service provider and our Android device will work just as it had, without needing Google at all. We need to be able to replace Google, just like being able to configure a different IMAP server for email. So if Google turns evil, we could simply subscribe to a different service provider.

But of course, Google wants world domination. If they can squabble with another country government, and direct resources of the NSA… I’d wonder what they could do next.

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The Singapore prices haven’t been “right” for some time considering the SGD-USD exchange rates. It has gotten to a point that the Apple notebooks were commanding too high a premium compared with other PC notebooks. So it’s about time that they dropped the prices somewhat. I think S$1788 (was S$1988) for the entry level 13″ modem is a sweet deal, and S$1648 with education discount is really nice.

The catch, unfortunately, is that while all the 15″ and 17″ MacBook Pros now sport new Intel Core i5 and i7 processors, the 13″ models use the same Intel Core 2 Duo as before. The 13″ models do get a modest speed bump in the processor speed as well as new Nvidia GeForce 320M graphics.

Yet, despite no other obvious hardware changes that I can see, including no changes in physical size, the battery life has gone up from 7 hours to 10 hours. That’s like a 42% improvement. Surely the Nvidia GeForce 320M doesn’t make up the 42″ improvement. I wonder what battery changes they’ve done. Did the other components get smaller so Apple could now pack a bigger battery, or did they squeeze out more capacity in the battery space?

It’s a bit sad that the 13″ models don’t get new processors. New processors would be nice. But the price and 10 hours battery are simply amazing. You could last a work day without the power brick, without having to compromise with an underpowered ULV processor.

The now-not-so-new iPad is still the main feature on Apple’s website. It shows where the marketing priority is right now. I suppose as a new product type, the iPad deserves some extra attention.

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It just simply amazes me how such yester-year’s features can be passed off as “new” and still inspire so much excitement. Wallpaper. Can you imagine that, wallpaper being a new feature? Not now, but soon?

What else is new? Folders. Folders so you can organize your apps. So instead of organizing your 180 apps into a bunch of screens, you could now have 2000 apps in screens and folders. Wah.

Then, finally, the iPhone will multitask. Yeah, finally. But wait a minute. It’s not quite what you’d think multitasking is. What happens is that the iPhone OS will expose a set of services to perform background operations. It’s still not as if the apps can do any arbitrary thing they like in the background. It sounds like an evolution of the Apple Push Notification that was released last year. In fact, it really seems like that, because now there is local notifications… which doesn’t need a central Apple server to push notifications to the phone.

The one thing that looked interesting to me is iAds. It’s not what ‘d consider revolutionary. But it is an improvement in how mobile advertising can work within mobile applications. There’s no Flash involved but just plain HTML5, a point Steve Jobs stressed a couple of times, and it is quite impressive what HTML5 is capable of delivering. You should zoom in to this part of Steve Jobs’s presentation.

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It’s really amazing that sales of the iPad in 2010 alone is already estimated at 7.1 million, according to iSuppli. That sounds like too big a number, but other estimates are just as impressive: Needham estimates 2 million for 2010, 120,000 for first day, 240,000 pre-orders in first two weeks, etc. So, no matter how you look at it, the iPad is already winning big. Much bigger than the Google Nexus One, for example. Oh okay, wrong product category. Much bigger than the JooJoo, which mustered just 90 pre-orders as at 22 February 2010. Good luck to the JooJoo.

I will just wait and see how long the excitement holds out. It is really more like an oversized phone than a slimmed down notebook. I haven’t seen a really good “use case” for the iPad.

At any rate, for Singapore buyers, the iPad is not yet available here. Just keep waiting.

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