Jambalaya

Keep taking the tablets

Unless you’ve been living in a cave for the past week you’ve probably heard how overwhelming hype gave way to underwhelming reality on Wednesday when Apple announced the iPad 2. Successor to the bizarrely successful iPad, launched just 12 months ago, the iPad 2 boasts a whole host of features that were missing from the original and whose addition is just enough to keep Apple ahead in the latest game they started.

Cameras? Check. Dual-core processor?. The things that were announced by Steve Jobs were things that could and should have been in the original iPad and things which do nothing to invigorate the market. These, along with the things that DIDN’T debut on Wednesday, probably tell us more about Apple’s business model than anything else.

What Apple do, have always done, and continue to do, is sell a lifestyle. This they do by creating and selling incredibly well designed hardware coupled with amazingly intuitive software to create a package that Just Works. They take a failing or flailing product category and breathe new life into it. Just as mp3 players existed before the iPod and smartphones existed before the iPhone, tablet computers existed before the iPad. I had the misfortune of trying quite a few of them and they were pretty universally woeful. The reason behind that is because the vast majority of tech companies have a ‘where can we go with what we have?’ attitude. Apple, on the other hand, have a ‘what do we need to get what we want?’ attitude.

The problem is, they also have a ‘bare minimum’ attitude. The iPad COULD have had all of the features of the iPad 2 and more. But why bother? When you’re innovating a category to the extent that it pretty much becomes a new category there’s no need to produce a device which does everything it ever could - all you need is a device that does enough to make people buy it. For the second generation you listen to user feedback and see what you can do but, more importantly, you look at what the competition is doing. As usual, the competition is playing a game of ‘catchup and extend’ whereby they try to come up with something that’s as good as the original but with a unique or enhanced feature which seeks to make the original look pale by comparison.

This is in no means unique in the tech world. There have always been, and will always be, companies that come up with something and other companies that take that work and run with it. The problem at the moment is that is seems Apple is the only company that’s capable of any kind of original thought. I suspect you could count on the fingers of one leg the number of companies that had tablet computers of the ‘iPad type’ in development and now there are many. But to have one company calling the shots is bad for everyone because, as we saw on Wednesday, they can come up with a point release which catches them up to the opposition, call it a major release and send the world into a spin once again.

The iPad 2 is not a bad device. In fact, it’s almost certainly a very good device and will sell in the millions. But it’s neither amazing nor revolutionary and the reason for that is that no one is providing a decent enough counterpoint to Apple. Until that happens - until there’s a tech company that understands not just technology but people too - then what we will get is fanfare-led innovation followed by ‘me too’ products and complacency.

So, you can either drink the Kool-Aid or not. But Apple’s going nowhere and neither are its profits.

Evernote

Evernote is a note making, editing and organising service. It exists, in its most basic, as a web-based service which allows users to login and create or edit notes which can then be accessed from any connected computer in the world. So far, so good. The beauty, however, lies in its applications and extensions, which make it a far more powerful means of capturing and storing text, sounds and graphics.

1. The desktop app (Windows and Mac OSX) is a desktop version of the web service but with a richer and less annoying editing environment. It also allows you to export and import notes, on which more later.
2. The web browser plugin allows you, with a single click, to turn highlighted text into a note.
3. The phone app gives you access to all of your notes on the move. With versions for iPhone, Blackberry, Palm Pre, Windows Mobile and Android it pretty comprehensively covers the smartphone marketplace, ignoring symbian which, frankly, so is the rest of the world.
4. Finally, if that’s not enough, you can send a tweet to ‘@MyEN’ and it will turn your tweet into a note. How cool is that? I mean seriously…

So what can Evernote do? Well, it can do pretty much everything you want it to do with regards text, audio and pictures. It stores your notes in ‘the cloud’ so you can access your notes from any computer with web access but you can also access and edit notes from your phone. In addition to that you can attach files (audio, picture or pdf) up to 25MB, you can create ‘notebooks’ to keep a group of related notes together, you can tag notes to the same effect and also make them easier to sort and search for and you can merge notes together - especially useful for the Twitter thing - if you have a few related notes that could usefully be all in one.

The desktop application can import notes in two formats - Evernote’s format (a simple XML-based file) or Microsoft OneNote 2007 - and can export to three formats - Evernote’s format, HTML or MHT (website archive - something to do with Microsoft, I believe). It’s great if you want to publish to the web but adds a layer of complexity if you just want your note as plain text - but then, why would you? You can also e-mail notes so, for example, if you have an e-mail to blog gateway then you could use Evernote for that.

The iPhone app has landscape editing so if, like me, you’re proficient at typing with two thumbs but only in landscape mode then you’re in luck. It can also add geolocation info so you can tell where you were when you made a particular note if you feel the need. This blog entry was, of course, written in Evernote (both iPhone and web on my linux notebook before final editing on the desktop) before I c/pd it into the blog entry box. It’s still early days for me - I downloaded months ago and never used it until recently - but already I find it useful and am considering paying for the premium version.

As you’ve probably already started thinking, there are many different ways in which this could be useful. For example, you could browse around for interesting articles at lunchtime and clip them to Evernote for reading on the journey home. You could keep a note of public transport timetables that you use regularly so you have easy access to them wherever you are. If you were writing a book you could use Evernote to organise your work and make it instantly accessible so, if you have a few minutes to spare, you can do a spot of editing. The possibilities are reasonably endless.

Of course, there are ways to do the things that Evernote does, separately, but Evernote keeps everything together in one place, is highly searchable (they claim to be able to index text in images although I have not tried this) and comes at everyone’s favourite price point of ‘free’. And if the 40MB monthly upload limit (around 20,000 notes or a bunch of cameraphone pictures) isn’t enough for you then you can pay some money ($5/month, $45/year) to upgrade to premium and get 500MB per month plus a host of other perks such as the ability to add any type of file, search within PDFs and, of course, no ads. The ads aren’t intrusive, in my opinion, but I know people vary as to the extent to which they’re willing to tolerate such things. And with Evernote I certainly feel I’m getting a lot more service out of my ‘ad tolerance’ than I do from a lot of other free apps and services I use.

It’s not without its imperfections though. The extent to which you can access your notes on your iPhone/iPod Touch offline is limited (unless you pay for premium) - it seems to me that notes created or recently accessed on the  phone are present offline but others only have headers. You can’t edit notes on a phone if they have any formatting in them - they have to be in unformatted (Arial 12pt) text otherwise you can only view them. The desktop app also seems to stop working if your computer sleeps and then you wake it up again. But frankly these are things that I can happily live with.

So that’s probably more than you need to know. If you haven’t already thought of a specific use for it yet then have a Google and see what uses other people have found for it. But give it a go and I reckon before long you’ll find it very useful indeed. If not, you can always ask for your money back!

Click here to go to the Evernote Website