Fogey Friday 9th March

So there was a new iPad.  Oh joy of joys!!  Plus some other stuff about Pandora, Bentley, Yahoo…

AppleFruit, record label, world dominator in the slick boy's toys department.  Cor!

Radish (not Apple)

The European edition of the Wall St Journal really did ‘hold the front page’ for the new, improved, same price as the old one, iPad.  It has a higher resolution screen, faster processor, better camera and something called 4GLike 3G only faster. As of March 2012 the only 4G networks are in US and Canada. When it comes to the UK and Europe 4G will use a different wavelength and/or frequency to its US counterpart so devices designed to work in the US will not work with European 4G. They will still function, of course, but using the older, slower 3G protocols. Synergy and compatibility, don't you just love it?.  TF is still not really sure what 3GShort for 3rd Generation. Applies to mobile telephony and the bandwidth/frequencies said telephony occupies in the telecommunications spectrum. is/was aside from a contraction of 3rd Generation.  We think it’s great swathes of airspace through which only very expensive mobile telephony can occur.  It’s all immaterial anyway, coz there is no 4G in the UK.  Yet.  The big deal about 4G is that it lets you download/stream high def movies on your iPad.  But after you’ve paid iTunes for the content and then your mobile carrier for the data download you may be left to muse on whether you were that desperate to see Night at the Museum 2.

Available from March 16th from £399.  More info here.

Pandora

Pandora is a music streaming service like Spotify and Deezer.  On the face of it they are doing very well; more users consuming billions more hours of music.  Thing is Pandora pays a royalty for each listened-to song and while more users should make the service more attractive to advertisers, so far it hasn’t, which means costs are increasing while revenues are fairly static; a circumstance that has sent their share price tumbling.  But with more users listening on mobile devices it can’t be long before advertisers wise up to Pandora’s potential. Which is why the Wall St Journal thinks you should buy their stock.  If you’re located outside the US, though, you can’t access Pandora.  And if you live in the US you can’t yet get Spotify.  This is partly to do with licensing deals and the lack thereof but the upshot could well be that all those vested interests trying to cling on to the supposed value of their precious musical product will, if they don’t stop farting about and realise that music streaming is the only viable future revenue model, end up with a catalogue of assets worth precisely nothing.  Find out (possibly very little) about Pandora here, Spotify here and Deezer here.

Yahoo 2

Last week we said Yahoo was suing Facebook over copyright/patent infringement.  Not strictly true – they were just threatening to sue Facebook.  A bit like TF threatening both Klitschko brothers.  Imagine the beads of terror-sweat forming on the Zuckerberg brow.  He’ll be bricking it.

Bentley 4×4

Not tech – we know, but is this the pug-ugliest dollop of auto-cack you’ve ever seen?  It’s an Austin 1800 ‘land-crab’ with wheels made from recycled jet-engine impellers.  Bleurgh!  Apparently it’s just a concept.  Please make it stay that way.

NY Times

A selection of possibly interesting articles from the New York Times.

This one is about a very committed American person storing physical copies of every book he can lay his hands on in shipping containers.  Because as we all know, children, digital doesn’t mean for ever and there’s really no substitute for the real,  physical thing.

This details how ‘multi-tasking’ now means watching TV while farting about with some other screen-based device/toy such as a laptop, tablet or smartphoneOpposite of dumbphone. Device with which which to do pretty much anything except make telephone calls. The best smartphone handsets, such as the Apple iPhoneCostly but beautiful smartphone made by Apple. The standard by which all other smartphones are judged. and Samsung Galaxy, are expensive (the iPhone 5 starts at £529) and to get a 'free' phone you have to commit to a 2 year contract. As we know, new phones come crashing onto the market all the time, so today's state-of-the-art handset will be seriously old hat long before that contract expires. and how the geeks who’ve made the programme you’re sort-of watching (without paying proper attention) want your supplementary browsing to have something to do with their televisual creation rather than random life-wasting.

Yahoo is trying to woo users by making original programming to show on its site.  At some indeterminate point in the future Electric City, an animated series produced by Tom Hanks’s company, will also debut and we’ll write a separate bit of blurb about that later.  TF actually sat in the same room as Tom and heard/watched him be quite funny and personable in explaining the whys and wherefores of Electric City and we have a nice photo to go with it that would be a shame to waste.  But this article from the NY Times isn’t about EC but some sort of alleged comedy.

And finally, this piece is about an airline appFrom Wikipedia: A mobile application (or mobile app) is a software application designed to run on smartphones, tablet computers and other mobile devices. They are usually available through application distribution platforms, which are typically operated by the owner of the mobile operating system, such as the Apple App Store, GoogleStarted life as a mere search engine; now hell bent on world domination. More PhDs work for Google than any other single organisation and they're determined to know everything about everyone. For some reason Google thinks this inside info will help them and their chums sell us more stuff. Play, Windows Phone Store and BlackBerryOld fruit. Smartphone, most often with qwerty keypad that can only be operated by those with the fingers of an anorexic pixie. Mostly a business device that's good for emails but not much else. A misser of many boats. App World. Some apps are free, while others must be bought. Usually, they are downloaded from the platform to a target device, such as an iPhone, BlackBerry, AndroidAn operating system for mobile devices developed by Google. It is now the principal competition to Apple's iOS (i operating system). It has gone through several versions, all of which have been given wacky nicknames. The latest is known as Ice Cream Sandwich. Those Google geeks are sooo hilarious! phone or Windows Phone, but sometimes they can be downloaded to laptops or desktops. For apps with a price, generally a percentage, 20-30%, goes to the distribution provider (such as iTunes), and the rest goes to the producer of the app. The term "app" has become popular, and in 2010 was listed as "Word of the Year" by the American Dialect Society. In 2009, technology columnist David Pogue said that newer smartphones could be nicknamed "app phones" to distinguish them from earlier less-sophisticated smartphones that you can download that will help with concourse navigation and other stuff concerning the breathtaking tedium that is now your  typical airport experience.