patrickbeja.com

More iPhone talk and an analysis: what the new FaceTime video call feature in the iPhone 4 means for the entire mobile phone and VOIP industries.

I’m not sure how exactly we missed this. It was probably because the announcement happened in two steps: 1) FaceTime is video calling (on WiFi), 2) FaceTime call are free and won’t count against your minutes (duh, it’s on WiFi).

The consequences are not so duh-worthy though. Think about this:
– You can switch a “regular” call to a FaceTime call, and it becomes free.
– You can initiate a FaceTime call without using a regular call.
– You don’t need to register an account or be connected to anything to use FaceTime.
– Consequently, all your normal phone contacts are already your FaceTime contacts.
– Because it’s WiFi, location doesn’t matter and you can call anyone on the planet.

Now imagine that you don’t care about the video aspect of it, as I suspect many people will once the novelty has warn off, and replace the word FaceTime in that paragraph with “Apple’s magical and revolutionary VOIP service”. You get the picture: it’s the most practical and easy to use VOIP service in the world.
Now imagine that this will potentially become a successful open standard, potentially integrated in many other products and services (other phones, iChat, Skype itself, etc). I’ll let you work out all the ways in which this is already a major event in and of itself.

My estimation is that this could dramatically hasten the switch from  “phone service providers” to “data service providers” that we know / hope is coming for all our friends in the phone industry. Yeah, that’s big.

Update: You can already transform the call in a simple voice call: pressing the home button will “remove” the video and display the home screen. The video will pause (stays on the last image), and the voice continues. Video resumes when you return to the call (works like a regular one). So effectively, FaceTime can already be used as a simple VOIP service (if you don’t want video that is).

It seems that Apple products are the only ones that get my blogging juices flowing these days… Oh well, I guess I’ll just roll with it. Besides, this is barely a “real” blog post.

There’s been a lot of talk about the new iPhone 4’s “Retina Display” screen, with some amount of tech controversy around the idea that the eye can’t discern its pixels at 12 inches. I guess that doesn’t really matter in the end; what does matter is whether or not the screen looks good / better than previous ones.
And it seems Scoble put an end to the debate with the pictures he posted today. The result leaves little doubt… Here’s part of the picture (click to get a larger-but-still-manageable version):

(more…)

I got asked this question on Formspring, and thought the somewhat unrelated answer warranted a quick blog post. Yeah, I’m silly like that. So here you go, thanks to the anonymous person who asked the question, and I hope you enjoy the answer.
And please don’t hesitate to let me know exactly how full of crap I am in the comments! 🙂

Do you think Apple may be just setting itself to be shanked by a Google/Adobe alliance on the mobile device front?

This doesn’t have an easy answer.
I think Steve Jobs is doing what he thinks is the “best solution”. The Mac has been built in that spirit, but it didn’t become the dominant platform because he was trying to make simple something that couldn’t be really simple (a computer).
With the iPhone and iPad, it’s different: they aren’t really computers per se, they are electronic “tools”. And he might succeed where the Mac (sort of) failed. The Mac is not a failure by any stretch of the imagination (although it did almost die when Jobs wasn’t at the helm), but these devices have an even wider potential. I believe the “dream” is to make iPad-like devices a lot more widely spread than today’s computers somewhere down the line, and I think it does have that potential. In that sense, Steve Jobs might realize his *real* dream, which is to really bring computers to the masses.
(more…)

Hey all, I was lucky enough to play with an iPad for an hour and a half or so, and everyone else is doing it so why not do it too! 🙂

(more…)

Hey all,

I thought it would be cool to have a super simple blog as a central point for my online stuff. The posts will probably be shorter than what I did before, and will include videos and other things like that. I’m not intending to post super often though, Twitter and Facebook will still be doing most of the work. Oh, and I’m using the very versatile Disqus commenting system, so hopefully conversations will be easy and fun.

Hope you guys enjoy it.

NB: Below this post are the archives, salvaged from my previous blogs.

So Apple announced its long awaited tablet this week, and many have commented, analysed, cried in despair and praised the oversized iPod. One thing that I have seen yet though is a deeper look at what it means for the computer world and computer users going forward. I’ll take a stab at it.

What Aunt Edna Needs

It seems that at least half the tech world is disappointed that they won’t be able to code C# or run photoshop on their iPad. I humbly believe that this is due to a very deep misunderstanding of the concept that Apple introduced this past Wednesday. Indeed, more than just a new device, they have created a new kind of machine, that many of their competitors will try to replicate in the coming months and years:

(more…)

Yesterday I got an email by a listener of The Phileas Club. I often get emails and answer them privately, but after writing this one I thought that it was summarizing my thoughts on the topic enough that I should make a blog post about it. So here is the original email, and my answer.
Quick note: the topic is sensitive, and in the past we have managed to keep these kinds of debates very civilized on this blog. If you chose to comment, please keep that tradition alive, thanks! 🙂

B.’s email:

I recently started listening to your show and started from the beginning and have been slowly catching up to the recent shows. I was a little disappointed at the sara palen talk because of the anti religious tone it took but let it go because i figured that was going on in the media at the time as well. Then I got to episode 10 and was completely offended at the comment you made that something should be done to people that preach the young earth theory. Evolution is not fact, it might be the majority view but remember that the majority also thought the world was flat at one point. There are scientists that use the same research as evolutionist and show it to back the theory of a young earth. I don’t expect you to change your view on this subject but I think you should know that our comment upset me.

(more…)

It’s been roughly six months since the last expansion came out, so I thought it would be a good time to give my thoughts about how the game has evolved and where it is today.

Short disclaimer: this is, as usual, a very long article that I’m pretty sure a lot of people won’t have the time to read. I’m ok with it; my short little fun blurbs have a much better home on my twitter page, and I aim my blog articles at some slightly more in depth analysis. My aim here isn’t to just state what I like or dislike, but rather to take a longer look at the hows and whys of the choices that were made, and try to understand the philosophy of this type of game design. I would recommend this article to any Wow fan, but also any MMO enthusiast who doesn’t have the time to get to level 80 in Wow and explore the intricacies of Blizzard’s designs.
So anyway, if you have a little bit of time to waste I hope you enjoy it and it brings something to your day! 🙂

Ok, here we go:

(more…)

“Again with Twitter?!”
Yeah I know… Twitter is here, get used to it.

Alright, so what does Twitter need? First one who says “a business model” gets a cookie. Yes, they do need that, but let me take a detour through the user side of things for a moment and I’ll get back to that in a minute.

As I have said before, Twitter’s simplicity is its strength. I don’t think they should give it up for anything. Others have tried to “enhance” the user experience by adding threading and things like that. An interesting idea on paper, but it does take away some of the product’s usability. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a hater; let’s just say it’s different and the crowds seem to be gravitating towards more simplicity.
So Twitter has to stay simple, but there is still room to expand. And I think topical conversations is indeed something that could enhance the user experience tremendously. If done right, and in the spirit of the product.
In comes the #hashtag. We all know that you can use these to specify what topic you are talking about. This is incredibly useful and I strongly believe Twitter should make it its next big push. So to put things clearly:

@notpatrick thinks @twitter should embrace #hashtags and make them the second arm of the community.

(more…)

Alright, so everyone has heard about it. Some of you probably use it. But most people have a very hard time explaining what the heck Twitter even is…
So I’ll try my hand at this. The aim is to write a short description of why so many people love Twitter so much, and explain why it is a major new form of communication, just like email and instant messaging were in their time.

If I do things right, next time your friends ask you about Twitter and you go insane trying to explain it, you can just send them to this article and they should have a vague idea of why it’s such a great tool.

(more…)