Growing Apples

Going back to 1990, the purchase of a just released Macintosh Classic computer began my long-running love affair with Apple products. Before that time computers in my experience were all ugly boxes with black screens of lime green text, possessing no characteristics or features that held any interest for me. A suitcase heavy black Sanyo word processor with an inside roll of paper for printing, and capable of producing English and Japanese served well enough. The Mac Classic though was a whole new ballgame and with its sidekick StyleWriter printer sent the word processor straight into hibernation.

New Mac models were released, I upgraded to something a little bigger each time, and in 1994 got a Newton Message Pad 120, representing a whole new direction in personal data management. It was the first of the PDA devices, and while the core idea was sound, the hardware was clunky and the operating system full of holes. An earlier Scriblets post explained this device in more detail, but to shorten the story let’s just say the Newton didn’t live up to Apple expectations and by 1998 was history.

In 2007 Apple did the expected, carrying vastly improved Newton Message Pad technology into the design and operating system of the iPhone. That was quickly followed by the iPod Touch release, more of the same technology. Didn’t take me long to buy an iPhone when it was first released in Japan, and once again I was Apple-dazzled. The next big thrill came with the purchase of an iMac, a design that deserved all the awards that eventually came its way. Sleek, classy, smart and beautiful—Apple could do no wrong.

Then came April 2010 and the ultimate device, another one that owed it’s initial development to the old Newton. Enter the iPad. But for all the whiz-bang fireworks and glamour this one didn’t grab me, didn’t leave me with tongue hanging out. No sale. I chose to watch the iPad for a while, to wait and see what would happen in a year or so with a later model. From its unveiling and the press releases that followed, the iPad impressed more as a toy than a device that would increase, speed up or improve productivity. The first thought was that it had a “get more-spend more” idea built into it, a concept that would have users regularly feeding Apple and the App Store with a desire for more apps, more games, more ‘cool’ stuff. That notion left me resistant to the idea of owning an iPad.

On March 2, 2011 Apple unveiled the iPad 2. After almost a year of looking, reading and thinking about the the iPad I was ready to take a hard look at the iPad 2 with an eye toward buying one if it impressed me as having usefulness above and beyond playing games, checking Facebook and watching YouTube. At the end of May I placed an order for the iPad 2.

It arrived five days ago and slightly disappointed is the verdict. Compare the photos here of the iPhone and the old Newton Message Pad. The iPhone photo was taken with the iPad, the Newton photo with the iPhone. The camera on the iPad 2 isn’t even close to the iPhone camera. For me the biggest attraction on the iPad 2 was the email, offering a fourth option for checking, writing and sending email apart from the iPhone, laptop and iMac. Basically, the email works just fine; fast and dependable. I also like the way I can slant the iPad by folding the cover, making typing very easy on its large keyboard. Definitely a big plus. On the other hand, the spellcheck is clunky, there is no option for bold, italic or underlined type in email—or if there is, I have not found it in five days of searching. There is also no option for colorizing text, sometimes a useful function. Most troublesome was having to input all my contacts manually, since syncing the iPad with the iMac skipped the address book. Is that really supposed to happen? What does sync mean, if not copying and aligning data on two separate devices?

Using Safari on the iPad is also less than smooth. Here there is a good possibility that I will come to understand it all better in time and find moving between websites easier. With Safari the iPad doesn’t impress me as being as intuitive as what I’ve come to expect from Apple. The hope is that more practice and experience will open a few doors, reveal a few shortcuts.

The iBooks app and the downloaded books are beautiful, much more so than eBooks on the Kindle, and I do like most of the features, but miss the dictionary that is a part of the Kindle. I also miss the lightness of the Amazon eReader. The iPad 2 is a whopping 1.33 lbs (608 grams) and feels like reading text off a brick. The Kindle is also clear and easy to read in bright sunshine, a quality missing in the iPad. The search text feature is good, the page numbering much better than Kindle, a choice of fonts and sizes is available and the brightness of the page is adjustable, but there is no one-tap dictionary like that in the Kindle.

Am I sorry that I bought the iPad 2? Mmm…probably not. I depend upon Apple’s superior technology to either show me the way or to fix the clumsy bits in future iOS system upgrades. Meanwhile, I will give the new iPad a run for the money and hope that Apple is not holding its breath waiting for me to begin purchasing apps in their humongous profit generating App Store.

iReview

Some excitement in the air these days with release of the new iPhone 4. Despite my usual enthusiasm for things Apple, this one is not on my shopping list. The video introducing it makes it look with all its new features like something close to the Holy Grail, but I want to turn back the pages and focus for a minute on the older iPhone.

Funny how an iPhone loses its telephoning capabilities and somehow seems better. I have an iPhone from Japan that doesn’t work outside of that country unless you want to pay peak time overseas charges. I don’t want to pay, so shut off my service in April. The phone belongs to me, so naturally it moved to Florida, too.

The iPhone 3G came to Japan on July 11, 2008. Hard to be exact, but I bought it around the end of that month. Then, a month later, the fascination with its flashy bells and whistles faded into the background. Ninety percent of the available apps held little interest for me, the Internet connection was too slow and too small, text messaging I don’t do, and the actual telephone technology was inferior to my Japanese cell phone. In that way, my praise and raves turned to moans and gripes.

I stayed with the iPhone for a couple of reasons: I love the email, and I’m nuts about the camera. These two features are strong on their own, but put them together and the mix is dynamite. I might feel differently if I had better camera equipment apart from the iPhone, but my camera-camera is a little troublesome and takes only okay photos.

The iPhone’s 2.0 megapixel camera impressed me from the beginning, and good photographs are not that elusive with a little practice. There are times when I feel like the camera has an intuitive eye and pulls my focus into a better frame, more interesting composition. No special bag of photo tricks or aptitude in my photography, and the iPhone photos surprise me more often than not. More than once I’ve looked at the result and wondered, “Wow! Did I take that picture?”

But that’s not the end. With the iPhone’s super email features, a good photo can be on your Mac desktop in minutes, and there’s small limit to what you can do there with iPhoto and Photoshop to make a good snap better.

These two features, email and camera have been a blessing for me in terms of getting photos quickly for use in this blog. From early on, the iPhone became more important for this than any of its other capabilities. It wasn’t until a year or so after getting the phone that I learned it wouldn’t be compatible with AT&T because of a different architecture built in to accommodate the Japanese system, which actually IS a 3rd generation architecture. Disappointing, but not enough to make me abandon the phone. The telephone part of the device may not work in the US, but the WI-FI works like a dream and makes having the phone an advantage.

The flower photo above is an example of a quick snapshot I took on the street. No Photoshop fine tuning in the picture. I clicked the shutter and got what you see here.

Soundtrack

One of my favorite books of some year past is Rohinton Mistry’s epic novel of Bombay, during India’s state of emergency in the mid 1970s, A Fine Balance. I read the book shortly after it came out in 1995, but as I sometimes do with special books, I reread this one over the past week. I won’t say much about the book now, other than to recommend it, and to share a favorite paragraph near the end of the book’s 600 pages…

‘As he spoke, he absently pulled out a fountain pen, unscrewed the cap, and put the nib to his nose. She watched, perplexed, as each nostril in turn was pressed shut and the ink fragrance inhaled deeply. Fortified by his fix of Royal Blue, he continued…’

• • • • • • • •

About the only exercise I stick with these days is walking. While in Japan I had the long, almost endless walking path along the blossom strewn Kanda River, which I took frequent advantage of. Now in Florida and on the beach, I have another superb walking environment just outside my door. There isn’t a lot I can call established or routine about my days here now, but one regime apart from the daily blog post is a three-mile early morning walk on the beach. Somehow, I hold onto that discipline doggedly and never falter in covering my daily distance on the clean white sands of NSB.

There aren’t a great many people on the beach when I go out for a walk, but most of the nine or ten I pass are like me, getting in their own time of exercise. The sounds around me, the surf, winds and birdcalls are as much a part of the experience as the movement of feet and legs. Everyone is different, and some people I pass are walking to the beat of an iPod, or following the distracted cadence of a cell phone conversation. I tried the iPod walk once, but didn’t care for the wall it put up between me and the natural setting. And I do walk with a cell phone in my pocket, just in case, but it would be a rare instance for a phone call to shatter the sanctity of those three miles walking south, feet skirting the surf.

I am trying to learn the names of the common birds, and already know a few of them, like the ever present oystercatchers and white ibis. Earlier pages in the blog have explained my fascination with brown pelicans.

My denuded Japanese iPhone still has a few useful functions, and one of them is a pedometer, which keeps a history of distance walked, time, steps and calories burned. It now tells me I’ve walked thirty-seven miles of white sand since the first outing twelve days ago.

I’m looking forward to the late weeks of summer when there is a chance of encountering newly hatched sea turtles scrambling for the waterline. The giant turtles will soon be arriving all along this stretch of protected coastline to deposit their eggs in nests far up from the surf. The nesting area is a twenty mile stretch of beach, and around 150,000 pounds of eggs are laid each year. It’s always a perilous dash for the baby turtles, and nature very often turns against many. In summers past I’ve ‘rescued’ hatchlings found unmoving at the water’s edge, keeping them safe until the turtle specialists picked them up. I am told they hold them for a few weeks until they grow stronger and can be dropped off at a favorable site twenty-five miles offshore. Hard to imagine when holding a turtle hatchling in the palm of your hand that one day it will grow to be the size of an 800 pound boulder.

A Worm in the Apple?

It was something of a shock to see in The Japan Times this morning a report that Apple Japan is being called to the mat for questionable billing on iTunes purchases. 95 cases have been reported, involving five credit card companies and hundreds of thousands of yen. Apple has yet to comment.

The Consumer Affairs Agency says that this kind of irregularity has been on the increase since autumn of last year, and that the amounts range from a few hundred yen to several hundred thousand. One woman was charged for several purchases totaling over ¥100,000 ($1,100), and says that even though she is registered with iTunes, she has not made an iTunes purchase in recent years.

The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, as well as the Internal Affairs and Communications Ministry are involved and looking into the possibility of whether or not it is a case of personal data theft. They are advising customers to check bills carefully and to report any suspicious charges.

Another woman wrote to complain that she doesn’t even own an Apple computer, iPhone, iPod or have an iTunes account, but has charges on her credit card from Apple.

What’s going on here? Is Apple Japan, via their iTunes billing running a scam of some sort? Not very likely. Investigators are most surely going to uncover personal data theft taking place far from the billing department inside Apple. In answer to the woman who owns no Apple products, yet is being billed, one reader responded, ‘Your credit card info has been stolen by hackers hacking into an account of yours, not an Apple account. I’ve never had an Apple account or used iTunes and the same thing happened to me three days ago. My bank discovered the fraud and called me right away.’

The whole mess is almost certain to be connected to the theft of personal data. However, it could be exacerbated by people using obvious passwords, maybe even the last name. If iTunes has your credit card on record, then anyone with your password can use your account to makes purchases. Of course, it’s smart to keep a careful eye on all your credit card billing, but a strong password is a good defense. I’ve had no trouble with my own iTunes billing and I wonder if it might be because my password is rated as very strong.

In the end, I seriously doubt that this will turn out to be a wormy Apple.

Technology: Battles & Bait

Consider for a moment Associated Press technology writer, Peter Svensson’s analogy of having to buy a new set of CDs every time you buy a stereo system.

For all my faithfulness and consumer support for Steve Jobs and Apple, I sometimes fear he and his company are leading us to just such a crippling state of affairs. The soon to be released (and totally awesome!) iPad is an example in point. Lurking beneath the sleek ‘cool’ and handheld power of this new device is a recipe for even greater technological addiction, one which includes increased consumer spending, and a battle of alternate operating systems.

But make no mistake about my own two-sided position in this issue. Since the 1990 Macintosh Classic computer I have owned a least a baker’s dozen Apple computers, a Newton, more than a few iPods and the now the iconic iPhone. I have all but worshipped at the altar of Apple technology from the very beginning, but in recent years have had to admit to some fading of the rose. I now see questions where once I jumped with complete trust at everything coming out of their warehouse doors.

Two examples may illustrate my disillusion. Many users, including myself, look forward to, and quickly buy system upgrades from Apple. How rare is it to discover that the latest upgrade frequently makes one or two installed applications obsolete? Nothing for it but to shell out for application upgrades. That may be small beer when the software application is an inexpensive one, but another altogether when it’s one with an upgrade costing hundreds of dollars. My experience on two occasions. (I’m still getting over the Snow Leopard OS upgrade.) Then there is the fabulous iPhone, which becomes not so fabulous when you travel abroad, or move to another country. In such cases the iPhone becomes a basically useless toy. Without paying overseas rates there is no phone, no email, texting, YouTube, Apps Store, navigational maps, or anything Internet connected. A Tokyo acquaintance recently spent a month in Australia, where he used his iPhone as freely as he does at home in Japan. He later received a bill in the thousands. Pleading ignorance of the system fell on deaf ears. Unless you’re rich as Croesus, outside of home ground your iPhone becomes a glorified iPod.

The dazzling new iPad now threatens to ignite an e-reader systems battle between Apple, Amazon’s Kindle, the Sony e-reader, and the Barnes & Noble Nook. All but Apple and Amazon (including libraries) use an Adobe system for their e-readers. Apple is nearly infamous for its reluctance to collaborate, and Amazon claims the leader’s position. So where does that leave me if I want to transfer my Kindle books to an iPad? In the end it will surely leave me spending more money for something that should have been designed to include an element of collaborative spirit.

I doubt that Steve Jobs would lose much sleep in learning that the iPad is not on this follower’s shopping list. Sort of leaves one to wonder about the Orwell-Huxley dilemma wherein we are killed by the things we fear, or on the other hand by the things we love.