septiembre 27, 2014

Why the Apple iWatch Will Have These 6 Killer Features

iwatchconcept
We learned this week that Google, Samsung and LG are all planning smartwatches. 

Sony, Pebble, Cookoo, I’m Smart, MetaWatch and Martian already have pretty sophisticated smartwatches available, all of which interoperate with the iPhone.

You can be sure that 100 Chinese companies will make inexpensive smartwatches that support either the iPhone or Android or both.

And, of course, Apple is rumored to be working on a curved-glass “iWatch.”
Here’s why I believe Apple’s smartwatch will have a market advantage.
(Dear critic: I know you’re tempted to slam this column because I’m predicting that a product that doesn’t exist will beat other products that don’t exist. Please note, however, that all six features are based very solidly on what Apple has and does right now in real life and is not based on pie-in-the-sky wishful thinking.) 

Custom Haptics
I believe the usage model for smartwatches will be very different from smartphones.
Traditionally, wristwatches were used for telling the time — a one-second interaction. I think smartwatches will also favor one-second interactions, and lots of them.

Someone sends you a text or posts a picture on Facebook, you’ll get calendar meeting alerts and other standard types of incoming information, and they will flash on the watch.

A future, more pre-emptive and proactive Siri will nudge you about all kinds of random things: “You’re near the cleaners — pick up your laundry,” or “Do you want me to remind Steve about your meeting?” I expect us active users to be glancing at our iWatches 10 times an hour during the day to keep up on one-second messages of all kinds.

It makes sense that the iWatch will gently interrupt you constantly. But how?
Beeps are annoying and public. I believe haptics will be the main way that the iWatch will say, in effect: “Hey, look!”

Haptics are the buzzes and rumbles of physical motion you feel when your phone is on vibrate or what you feel in the controller when you play Call of Duty on Xbox and someone tosses a grenade into your bunker.

Apple has been quietly integrating custom haptics into the iPhone user interface for years. The feature lets you tap out your own pattern of vibrations, then assign a unique, custom pattern for each contact, if you choose.

In iOS 5, custom haptics was an “Accessibility” feature. In iOS 6, Apple baked it directly into the Contacts app. (Open any contact, tap Edit, tap “vibration,” scroll down and tape “Create New Vibration” under Custom.)

Hardly anyone uses this feature, and why would they? With a phone, you never really know if you’ll “feel” the buzzing. And even if you can feel some buzzing, an iPhone in your pocket isn’t solidly connected enough to your skin for you to recognize subtle custom vibrations.
But with a wristwatch, which is tightly bound to your wrist and in direct contact with your skin, you will always feel haptics.

I believe Apple will enable custom haptics for the iWatch. You’ll be able to set up custom vibration patterns for specific people and/or specific types of information, so you won’t even need to look at the watch to get some kinds of messages.

You can also be given enough information by buzzing to make a decision even to look at the watch or not look. For example, you’ll have a specific pattern of buzzes for incoming text messages and another pattern when someone in your “Close Friends” group on Facebook posts a status update. If you’re in a meeting with your boss, you might choose to check the iWatch to see the incoming text, but ignore the status update.

Send To
The boundaries between devices are breaking down. If you have other Apple hardware, such as an iPhone, iPad, MacBook Pro, iMac or Apple TV, you’ll be able to see incoming stuff, then quickly toss it over to another nearby device with a simple command. For example, someone may post a picture on Facebook. You’ll see it thumbnail size on the iWatch, and with a voice command instantly put it up on your iMac or TV.
This will be a market advantage only to users who also have other Apple products, but which is a potential market of hundreds of millions of people.

iTunes
Apple has sold a semi-smart watch before. It was called the iPod nano, and the wristband was sold separately by third-party companies in Apple Stores and elsewhere. (Apple did make available custom apps and watch faces, including a Mickey Mouse watch face.)

Note that I say that was a semi-smart watch because while it ran apps, it didn’t have a third-party app ecosystem or connect to the Internet.

In any event, the nano wristwatch was primarily a content consumption device. You plugged your Apple earbuds into it and listened to your iTunes music.

I believe Apple’s future iWatch will take it a step further, and enable you to tap into iTunes wirelessly, and listen wirelessly via Bluetooth earbuds. I believe this because Apple is quietly obsessed with Bluetooth 4.0. The iPhone was the first phone ever to get the new technology, and every Apple product since last year ships with Bluetooth 4.0 support.

You’ll be able to listen to your music, podcasts, audiobooks and iTunes U lectures. After synching with iTunes, you’ll be able to do this at the gym or while running when you don’t have your iPhone with you.

Exclusive Nike Support
Apple has a “special relationship” with Nike, especially when it comes to the wrist. The nano “wristwatch” had a Nike app. Apple CEO Tim Cook is on the Nike board of directors. And Cook also wears a Nike FuelBand wristwatch, presumably every day.

It’s also well known that people use Apple products for fitness more than any other brand of gadget by far. People buy third-party accessories to lash iPhones and iPods to their arms and other appendages, and listen to music, etc., while running, working out, hiking or whatever. They also use third-party fitness apps and accessories to monitor performance.

The wrist will be the perfect location for a fitness computer, and Apple is likely to give Nike a prominent place in the pantheon of default apps on the device, as well as a head start on accessories. In exchange, Nike is likely to remain faithful and exclusive to Apple.

Notification Center
If the Notification Center is appealing and useful on iOS and OS X it will be massively so on the iWatch.
A rational feature would be for the iWatch Notification Center to replace, rather than duplicate, iOS and OS X notifications. By simply detecting the presence of an iWatch connected via Bluetooth, Notification Center messages would appear on the watch instead of the other device, keeping those screens free from clutter and interruptions.

Female Friendliness
The single most killer feature of the iWatch from a market dominance point of view may be female friendliness.

No, I’m not being sexist. The undeniable fact is that women overwhelmingly choose smaller, thinner and lighter wristwatches than those normally chosen by men.

I predict that most of the smartwatches coming out from Google, Samsung, LG and others will be somewhat like the current generation in their bulkiness.

However, Apple’s market savvy and two-part obsessions with both having at launch the thinnest device in every category (iPhone 5, MacBook Air, iMac, etc.) plus Apple’s obsession with curved glass (Steve Jobs said Apple’s new “spaceship” headquarters will not have a single pane of flat glass) — not to mention Apple’s affinity for the Nike FuelBand, which is small, narrow, light, curved and thin — will result in Apple cornering the market for women who choose to wear smartwatches in the first two or three years after they ship.

It’s time for the smartwatch revolution. And Apple happens to be ideally positioned to rule this fledgling market like they did the touch tablet market. And they’ll do it with these 6 killer features.

Product concept image courtesy of Esben Oxholm

septiembre 17, 2014

These maps show where the world’s youngest and oldest people live

Does this tell us where the next revolution will take place?

The World

What can the median age of a country tell you about its future?
Turns out, quite a bit. Using data from the CIA Factbook, we’ve created the graphics below to show you the median age of every country in the world.
There are 1.2 billion people between the ages of 15 and 24 in the world today — and that means that many countries have populations younger than ever before.
Some believe that this "youth bulge" helps fuel social unrest — particularly when combined with high levels of youth unemployment. Writing for the Guardian last year, John Podesta, director of the progressive Center for American Progress, warned that youth unemployment is a “global time bomb,” as long as today’s millennials remain “hampered by weak economies, discrimination, and inequality of opportunity.” 
The world’s 15 youngest countries are all in Africa. Of the continent’s 200 million young people, about 75 million are unemployed. The world’s youngest country is Niger, with a median age of 15.1, and Uganda comes in at a close second at 15.5.
On the flip side, an aging population presents a different set of problems: Japan and Germany are tied for the world’s oldest countries, with median ages of 46.1. Germany’s declining birth rate might mean that its population will decrease by 19 percent, shrinking to 66 million by 2060. An aging population has a huge economic impact: in Germany, it has meant a labor shortage, leaving jobs unfilled.
What do you think will be the long-term impact of the world's shifting demographics?

North America


Central America & the Caribbean


South America


Europe


Africa


Middle East & Central Asia


Asia

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/health/140904/map-youth-elderly-world-political-unrest-economy-unemployment

septiembre 14, 2014

Between Google and Apple, the smartwatch wars are over before they've even begun

Theirs is the Earth and everything that's in it


We're stood at the foothills of a very large and formidable mountain that has the perfect smartwatch at its peak. It's still very early, not everyone's sure of their footing or the right course to take, but we are all instinctively drawn toward that pinnacle. The thing is, even with all the months and maybe years standing between humanity and its ideal wrist gadget, the winners of the race are already known. Google and Apple won.
Attempts at standalone smartwatches seem to resurface every few years. There was Microsoft's SPOT, the LG GD910 Watch Phone, and the Meta Watch — to name just three in the past decade — and none of them ever amounted to anything more than an intriguing bulletpoint in the history of personal electronics. Maybe you might have passed by one on your way to buying the latest and greatest new smartphone. It's actually the evolution of smartphones into the primary computer for many people that has now created the opportunity for smartwatches to flourish.
LG GD910
The challenges of miniaturizing displays, processors, and battery technology to the size of a watch are still present, but connecting that watch to a smartphone can offload some of its requirements and make the thing strapped to your wrist more bearable to wear and attractive to use. It also plugs the smartwatch into something critically important: an ecosystem of supportive hardware vendors and willing software developers. They are the ones who can drive a product category out of niche status and into the hands of mainstream consumers, but they demand some certainty that their investment of time and resources won't go to waste. That assurance comes from knowing that the connected smartphone is running the right operating system.

Yesterday's Apple Watch launch spoke glowingly of the "seamless" integration between the wearable device and the iPhone. Similarly, when it introduced its ZenWatch at IFA, Asus said that the watch works brilliantly with its Zen UI on Android smartphones. Both are just positive spins on the fact that an Apple Watch or an Android Wear device without a smartphone attached to it is not a terribly useful thing to have. Most of them don't even display the time all the time, making them poor substitutes for watches.
SEAMLESS SYNERGY BETWEEN SMARTPHONE AND WRIST ISN'T GOOD NEWS FOR EVERYONE
The close working relationship between smartwatch and smartphone ties down user choice in another way. If you really fancy the look of the Moto 360, you'll want to combine it with an Android handset to make the most of Google's ecosystem. The same is true of the Apple Watch and iPhone: they'll work great together and fall apart when they are, well, apart. Windows Phone and BlackBerry users aren't being served by these devices at all.
Wearables are perceived as the next frontier in consumer electronics, both because of new technological advancements and because of the rich potential to combine them with the smartphones that hundreds of millions of people already own. And because the vast majority of those users are already on either Apple or Google's mobile platforms, it only makes sense for development efforts to be focused on those two juggernauts. It's not dissimilar to how things panned out in the tablet market. Though they took different paths to their predominance, both Apple and Google relied on the strength of their smartphone software and ecosystems to drive the development of their tablet offerings. Compare them to BlackBerry's disastrous PlayBook tablet, which lacked such basic functionality as a native email client, or HP's beautiful but inadequately supported WebOS operating system and TouchPad devices. Microsoft's Windows is the only tablet alternative precisely because it's able to lean on the influence of its own ecosystem.
The Apple Watch and Android Wear at least guarantee a wide audience for any new products, whether they be hardware of software. Sony recognized this and abandoned four generations of its own smartwatch OS to join the ranks of Android Wear purveyors — aligning itself in direct competition with LG, Samsung, Motorola, and Asus, plus probably HTC and everyone else currently making Android smartphones. If even Sony, with all its resources, cannot strike out on its own, what hope is there for a third alternative beyond Android Wear and Apple's Watch?
NOTHING'S MORE ATTRACTIVE TO ECOSYSTEM BUILDERS THAN AN ALREADY THRIVING ECOSYSTEM
Facebook tried to take over an entire smartphone with the HTC First and failed dismally. Amazon is currently in the process of learning the same bitter lessons with its own Fire Phone, and BlackBerry is too busy issuing weird new phones to look to other device categories. Microsoft is apparently working on making Windows wearable, though its rumored device will be a fitness-focused band rather than an out-and-out smartwatch. Almost everyone is thus evading a direct confrontation with the duopoly of Apple and Google.
The only serious holdout may be Samsung, whose Tizen-powered smartwatches (like the newGear S) could lie within a one-company ecosystem by sheer force of corporate muscle alone. Incumbent wearable leaders like Pebble, Jawbone, and Fitbit are wisely looking to embrace and work alongside the incoming wave of smartwatches rather than fight them directly. With longer battery life, cheaper prices, and lighter form factors, they have easy ways to differentiate themselves and survive as complementary products. Apple doesn't care to fight for sales of devices with a low profit margin, and the Android Wear watches now on sale are comparatively expensive even while their makers are doing little more than breaking even.
The Pebble will continue to be a reasonable option while the Wear and Watch app stores are still maturing, however eventually it too will be surpassed by the greater variety of things you can achieve with a color display and gigabytes of memory. The smartwatches we are seeing today are still very raw, but they have already shown enough flashes of potential to hint at their widespread appeal once the current shortcomings have been ironed out.

There are still many unknown and as yet undetermined aspects of how (and why) smartwatches will be used in the future. Two things appear inevitable, however. One is that we will climb this mountain, out of curiosity as much as anything else, and the other is that we'll probably do it with smartwatches acting as companions to phones rather than as autonomous devices. As things stand today, Apple and Google look set to extend their dominance in smartphones to smartwatches without any serious contestation from the rest of the tech world.

    septiembre 10, 2014

    Apple unveils iPhone 6 Plus with 5.5-inch Retina HD display, faster A8 chip, OIS, NFC and more


    iphone 6 2
    At its special event today, Apple announced a 5.5-inch iPhone 6 dubbed the iPhone 6 Plus. As expected, the device features a much larger display to make the iPhone lineup more diverse, and better compete with Android smartphones.

    Larger display
    The larger 5.5-inch display sports a resolution of 1920 x 1080 and has 185 percent more pixels than the earlier iPhone. The new generation of displays are being branded as Retina HD displays and come with “Ion strengthened” glass. Apple adds that the new screens provide a broader angle of view.
    The iPhone 6 Plus measures 7.1mm in thickness compared to the iPhone 5s’ 7.6mm thickness.
    image iPhone 6 pixels
    The larger screen of course also comes with slightly different UI elements. To illustrate the advantages of the larger display, Apple showed a side-by-side comparison of the Messages app, and you can see that the larger display shows faces in addition to messages.
    image iPhone 6L size
    To ensure that it’s still easy to use the iPhone 6 Plus with one hand, Apple’s adding a new “Reachability mode” that slides down the entire screen, so you can easily reach the buttons at the top. This mode can be activated by double touching the home button.
    iPhone 6 reachability
    Another change Apple’s made to the iPhone 6 in view of one-handed use is the relocation of the power button: It’s now on the side rather than the top, making it easier to reach.
    A8 chip
    The iPhone 6 comes with a 64-bit A8 chip with a 20nm process. The chip boasts of an improvement of 25% in CPU and 50% in GPU performance. The A8 chip also comes with the newer generation M8 motion coprocessor that can tell when you’re cycling, running and can also calculate elevation. The elevation is measures by a new barometer sensor that can calculate the pressure difference between two points.
    image Apple A8
    Camera
    The iPhone 6 Plus comes with a new iSight camera. It has the same 8 megapixel count as earlier iPhone generations, but comes with a next-generation sensor that can do faster autofocus, and face-detection. The iPhone 6 Plus comes with Optical Image stabilisation that can shoot better images and videos even when there’s a lot of movement.
    The cameras can now shoot slo-mo videos at 240 fps, promising even better slow motion videos. The font-facing camera is even better now, with an all-new sensor that can capture 81% more light.
    image iPhone 6 camera5
    LTE
    The iPhone 6 Plus supports up to 20LTE bands, which Apple claims is the most any phone supports. It also supports VoLTE, or voice over LTE that can carry your voice over LTE networks.
    image iPhone 6 VoLTE2
    NFC
    As rumored, the iPhone 6 comes with an NFC chip, that powers Apple’s new mobile payments solution called the Apple Pay.
    image Apple payments4
    Battery Life
    The iPhone 6 Plus can play 80 hours of audio, 14 hours of video, and can last 12 hours on Wi-Fi/LTE/3G browsing. It has a 3G talk time of 24 hours and a standby time of 16 days. The larger display helped Apple pack in a larger battery capacity, which gives it a longer life than other iPhones:
    image iPhone 6 battery life
    Pricing & Availability
    The iPhone 6 Plus will cost $299, $399 and $499 respectively for the 16GB, 64GB and 128GB models with a contract. The devices ship September 19th, and preorders start this Friday, September 12.
    Developing. We’ll update the post as more details are available. Please follow our live blog for the coverage of the iPhone event as it happens.

    How will you charge the Apple Watch and what will its battery life be?

    We learned a lot about the Apple Watch today, including its powerful health app, but there's one nagging absence of information: How long will the device run before needing to be charged? All of the features listed during the presentation are impressive, but also should be incredibly resource heavy. After all, the device needs to be paired with an iPhone and, even Bluetooth, sending all that information back and forth means the devices will be communicating quite often.
    Currently all we know is how the watch will be charged. According to the presentation it will need to be charged overnight and uses an inductive charger with a special MagSafe-style magnetic attachment that clicks into the bottom of the device. While we don't have any clues to its exact running time, Tim Cook's statements about charging the device at night suggests we could be looking at up to one day of use for the device. We'll have more information about the Apple Watch's battery life as it becomes available.

    How Does The Apple Watch Compare To Other Smartwatches?


    We break down the smartphone market.






    Apple wasn’t ambiguous about its new wearable: This is definitely a watch meant to compete against all the other smartwatches out there. I’ve tried out most of the smartwatches on the market, but none of them have satisfied me yet.
    The Apple Watch won’t ship until early next year, but based on what we know so far, here’s how it compares to some of the other smartwatches it will compete against:

    Size

    Apple Watch: Either 38mm L or 42mm L.
    3

    Moto 360: 46mm L x 46mm W x 11.5mm H.
    Pebble Steel: 46mm L x 34mm W x 10.5mm H.
    LG G: 37.9mm L x 46.5mm W x 9.95mm H.

    Display

    Apple Watch: Flexible Retina display with unknown resolution.
    Moto 360: 1.56-inch LCD display with a 320x290 resolution.
    Pebble Steel: 1.26-inch mono chrome e-paper display with a 144x168 resolution.
    LG G: 1.65-inch LCD display with a 280x280 resolution.

    Price

    Apple Watch: Starting at $349
    Moto 360: $249
    Pebble Steel: $249
    LG G: $179

    Sensors

    Apple Watch: Heart rate sensor (will also help detect calorie intake) and accelerometer.

    Moto 360
    : Accelerometer, Pedometer, and optical heart-rate monitor.
    Pebble Steel: Accelerometer.
    LG G: Accelerometer.

    Battery

    Apple Watch: Unknown.
    Moto 360: “Full day.” 300mAh capacity.
    Pebble Steel: 5-7 days. 130mAh capacity.
    LG G: “Full day.” 400mAh capacity.

    Charging

    Apple Watch: Inductive charging with MagSafe-like cable.
    Moto 360: Inductive charging with custom cradle.
    Pebble Steel: Inductive charging with proprietary cable.
    Lg G: Inductive charging with custom dock.

    Apps

    Apple Watch: Apple's watch runs iOS and developers will have access to build apps specifically for the watch with WatchKit.
    Moto 360: Motorola's watch runs Google's Android Wear which lets Android developers to tweak existing apps to run on all Android Wear watches.
    Pebble Steel: The Pebble Steel runs the same Pebble OS as the original Pebble and is compatible with all available first- and third-party apps.
    LG G: LG's watch also run Android Wear like the Moto 360.

    Additional Info

    Apple Watch: Apple's watch is heavily focused on fashion, with lots of physical customization options. The watch will also be curated into three different collections featuring different materials and different watch bands. It's not currently known whether accessory makers will be able to offer their own products for the Apple Watch.
    Moto 360: The Moto 360 recently released to a bunch of fanfare for its stylish round display and sold out on the first day it was available to purchase.
    Pebble Steel: Pebble was the first widely adopted smartwatch, complete with third-party apps and watch faces. Pebble has sold more than 400,000 units and now offers the original version in several different colors.
    What do you think?

    LG G: The G watch was one of the first Android Wear watches to be teased and released. LG has already announced and shown off its second Android Wear watch, Watch R, which has a round display like the Moto 360.