Otaku, Cedric's weblog

iPhone and streaming HDTV

I've been looking for a solution to stream high definition files to my TV for a while, and it looks like NetGear listened.  Yesterday, they announced at the CES the EVA8000, which automatically discovers all your media files (they support all kinds of formats) on your Mac or PC, including HTDV content (the device has an HDMI connector).

Of course, it will definitely be worth waiting for the iTV announcement before making a final decision (which might not happen at Mac World, based on the latest rumors), but streamer devices are fairly common these days, so the the make-or-break feature will be support for high definition TV.  Let's hope Apple delivers on that one.

Speaking of Apple, it's not exactly been a glorious past month:

• First, the backdating option scandal that is looming over the company (Jobs seems to be fairly safe from it, but it doesn't mean other Apple executives won't be impacted).
   
• Then the iTV, which Apple pre-announced six months ago, in a dramatic break from their previous tradition (Apple never pre-announces anything, they prefer to make big splashes at MacWorld).  Some analysts called this pre-announcement a "pre-emptive strike", others identified it as Apple running scared that they might not come up with the iTV on time, a hypothesis which definitely rings more and more true now, since you can bet that NetGear won't be the only one announcing a streaming device at the CES.
   
• And finally, LinkSys announcing an iPhone family brand a month ago, thereby taking away the alleged name for Apple's rumored phone.  To be honest, this speculation looks a bit silly to me:  if Apple has been working on a phone, it's been for at least a year, and you can be sure they already knew back then that this name was already taken.  Anyway, it's funny to see everyone, fans and non-fans alike, getting all excited over the issue.

Speaking of Apple's phone, assuming it's real, will it be successful?

On one hand, the inexplicable success of the RAZR is unequivocally proving that phone users are much more interested in the form factor than the UI.  For having worked to make Gmail for Mobile work reasonably well on the RAZR for a while, I can tell you this is no picnic, and Motorola had to cut a lot of corners in order to make the RAZR look so good.  Everything in this phone is crippled:  memory, CPU, screen size and density, etc...  And it's even worse in the SLVR.

Still, the RAZR has been one the best-selling phones these past years, so it's safe to assume that as long as the Apple phone looks cool, it will sell, regardless of how good the phone really is.  Which doesn't mean that you can get away with anything when you make a phone.  If Apple wants to be able to sell to the mainstream public (not only Mac users, which only represent less than 5% of computer users in America), they will have to make it possible to synchronize their phone with Outlook and all other kinds of Windows-specific software. 

I wonder how Steve Jobs feels about that...

 

Posted by cedric at January 8, 2007 10:19 AM