Tag Archive for: Apple

The Emotions of an Apple Ad

Apple is known for designing products that elicit strong emotions. They rebranded the personal computer and made it colorful and fun. Last night I began thinking about how they are playing towards your emotions with the iPhone 4 and how they do it better than anybody else, especially for a product that is essentially a cell phone.

The driving force behind me thinking about this is the video for the new iPhone 4 feature Facetime. The other night I showed my parents the video and as they watched smiles formed across their faces and stayed there through the entire video. I showed the video to my sister this evening and she felt strong emotions toward the scene where the husband/future-father was seeing a sonogram live via a cell-phone. Her reaction was of sadness. I think we could all find a situation in the video where we could replace the actors with ourselves quite easily. The music, a Louis Armstrong tune, is even perfect for the video’s theme. It does not distract you from the images that flow across the screen but greatly enhances the emotions you feel while watching them. Even when you take a look at the more technical video of the iPhone 4 you feel strong emotions. You are drawn to the beauty of the device and the excitement from the people in the video transfer to the viewer. The iPhone 4 marketing material is warm, inviting, and emotional.

This is the exact opposite of every other smartphone commercial out there. When you see the Palm Pre commercial you’re greeted with a creepy looking woman that looks like that might be a Borg Queen. When you look at any of the Droid commercials you’re presented with cold, hard, emotionless machinery. I don’t know who thought that these smartphones should only be seen as a tool and not something that should be part of our daily lives, but whoever they are, they need to be fired. Apple’s people did it right.

My iMac

imac

I know my sisters are going to get on me about this, saying I don’t need another computer, but I purchased an iMac. My Windows Vista desktop has been giving me a lot of trouble over the last few weeks. I even reformatted and reinstalled Windows and it still kept bothering me. I’ve had enough. This morning I bought a 24 inch iMac to be my primary machine. I’m excited to get it because I love OSX and the apps that run on it so much. In my opinion, and in my uses, it is a much better OS than Vista (or XP) is. I can’t wait to get it and set it up.

Thoughts on iPhone OS 3.0

Unless you were living under a rock the past couple days, you probably know that OS 3.0 for the iPhone and iPod touch came out yesterday. There are many new features including copy/cut/paste, MMS (unless you are on AT&T), tethering (again, unless you are on AT&T), voice recording, push notifications, CalDAV support, among others.

After I installed the update and my phone rebooted I was excited to start testing out the new features. There was only one problem. After the update my iPhone was running slow. Very slow. Safari would freeze, applications would crash, and it took forever to find my AT&T signal. After about 15 minutes and multiple restarts, it started behaving again, and in some cases sped things up.

Copy and paste was something that I thought I would never use or if I did use it, it would be on rare occasions. I probably used copy and paste more than anything else yesterday. It is great with the Tweetdeck iPhone app. I wanted to copy a url and paste it in for a tweet and it worked perfectly. The part where it came in handy the most was setting up my Google Calendars.

With OS 3.0, you can finally add Google Calendars using CalDAV. I can’t use Google’s Exchange sync because I have my work’s Exchange account on my phone and you’re only allowed to add one Exchange account. I added my first Google calendar filling out the normal credentials, but it only syncs the main calendar on your Google account. If you have multiple calendars, what do you do? This is where the group calendar comes into play thanks to great instructions here. You add the calendars the same way, but when you are finished you go into advanced options and replace your email address with the randomly generated email address that Google creates. If you have ever seen this email address, it is quite long. Luckily, I could copy the address on my desktop and email it to myself, then open up the mail app and copy it from the email and paste it into the calendar settings. Cross app copy and paste ftw! Also with copy and paste you can also finally email multiple pictures instead of sending a separate email for each image. Awesome.

OS 3.0 is a solid release that brought a lot of long-awaited features. It will be even better once AT&T get their act together. The only thing that I really want to use right now but can’t is MMS. AT&T really dropped the ball on this one. They are trying to hide the fact that their network is not all that great. How can they not be ready for iPhone picture or video messaging when every other phone on their network has the capability to do so already? The only answer is their network can’t handle it. That has to be the same reason tethering isn’t available yet. I’m glad that Apple make the snarky remarks during the WWCD singling out AT&T. This must be a PR nightmare for them. There are a lot of angry customers.

Microsoft Just Doesn’t Get It

John Gruber at Daring Fireball recently posted a quote from Steve Ballmer of Microsoft.

“Apple gained about one point, but now I think the tide has really turned back the other direction. The economy is helpful. Paying an extra $500 for a computer in this environment — same piece of hardware — paying $500 more to get a logo on it? I think that’s a more challenging proposition for the average person than it used to be.”

What Ballmer doesn’t understand is that is not the only reason people buy Apple products. If you could (legally) buy any PC and run OSX on it flawlessly for the same price as a PC with Windows, I’d be willing to be that Microsoft would see Windows’ OS share drop dramatically. People aren’t buying Apple products for the logo. They aren’t spending more money on hardware. They are spending more money on a great OS, great support from the manufacturer, and an all-around great computing experience. That is what Microsoft doesn’t get.

Outlook 2007

I use Microsoft Outlook 2007 at work for our work email. It’s an exchange account so I had to use it over other mail clients. I’ve grown to like it over the past year, but I never used it for anything other than email. I don’t keep a calendar at my work, nor do I save contacts in the address book, no I never used the program to its full potential.

Last week my Gmail account was hacked (still not sure exactly what happened) so I wanted to create a new email address to start using to replace Gmail. I will probably never stop using my Gmail account, but I will use the new email address I created for my more pertinent information. I decided to sign up for a Mobile Me account. I never would have even considered paying for an email account in the past, but since I got my iPhone I’ve been looking for an easy way to keep my calendars, email, and contacts all in one place. I could sync the calendar on the iPhone with Google Calendar, but only if I synced it with my MacBook first. I wanted something that would sync my calendars over the air. Mobile Me became that answer. I still have to open up my MacBook for it to sync with Google, but I don’t have to sync my iPhone to it anymore. Now my iPhone syncs with my PC only.

I decided to setup the Mobile Me account on my PC in Outlook and have it sync my contacts and calendars as well. While the Mobile Me website is a nice looking website, I don’t want to have to log in to webmail whenever I want to check email. In the past, using Gmail, I didn’t mind because Gmail login was integrated with all my other Google services and I have a Gmail notifier installed in Firefox. Outlook 2007 is much better than I would have ever thought. After all, it is a Microsoft product and I am beginning to loathe everything about Microsoft. They actually did do something right for once though. Outlook 2007 is better than 2003 by leaps and bounds, and Mobile Me works quite well with it. There were a few weird inconsistencies with deleted items appearing with just a line struck through it, but I believe I fixed that issue and everything should be working great now.