Neowin uncovered the first mockup of a real Windows 8 tablet. It’s called the HP Slate. It’s a business computer, and the specs include an Intel(not ARM-based) processor, 10.1-inch touch screen, a promised 8 hours of battery life (Intel had been suggesting 9 hours as a minimum spec), and “multi-touch or digital pen” input. (Let the scoffing about digital pens begin.) It’s also supposed to be 9.2mm thick, which is a hair thinner than the latest iPad. (via Business Insider) So, that’s what the next Nook will look like!
Zoom

Neowin uncovered the first mockup of a real Windows 8 tablet. It’s called the HP Slate.

It’s a business computer, and the specs include an Intel(not ARM-based) processor, 10.1-inch touch screen, a promised 8 hours of battery life (Intel had been suggesting 9 hours as a minimum spec), and “multi-touch or digital pen” input. (Let the scoffing about digital pens begin.) It’s also supposed to be 9.2mm thick, which is a hair thinner than the latest iPad.

So, that’s what the next Nook will look like!

Just In The Nook Of Time?

Microsoft settles some patent disputes with Barnes & Noble’s Nook division by investing $300M into the company. The market cheers. Am I missing something?

Microsoft’s Nook Deal, Aiming at Amazon, Sets Up Battle in E-Books - Michael De La Merced and Julie Bosman via NYTimes.com

Microsoft agreed to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in Barnes & Noble’s Nook division on Monday, giving the bookstore chain stronger footing in the hotly contested electronic book market and creating an alliance that could intensify the fight over the future of digital reading.

The deal, which gives Microsoft a 17.6 percent stake, values the Nook unit at $1.7 billion — roughly double Barnes & Noble’s entire market value as of last Friday — and bolsters the bookseller’s efforts to make its digital business the linchpin of its future growth.

The announcement was the latest surprise in an unpredictable and rapidly shifting e-book market, which is crowded with technology giants trying to chip away at Amazon.com’s dominance. Amazon once had close to 90 percent of the e-book market, but since then, a handful of players, including Apple, Google and now Microsoft, have edged in.

So, B & N is a bookseller, with hundreds of stores. Remember when Borders went bankrupt? And Tower Records? The days of blazing a new trail in retail by undifferentiated sales are done.

Stowe Boyd via stoweboyd.com

Successful retail in the US is falling into two categories: companies selling their own products, like Apple, and focused specialty providers, like Trader Joe’s and Uniqlo. Otherwise: a wasteland. And soon we will be dismantling all the big box stores.

So, this is a bail out. B & N needs big cash to compete against Kindle, because Amazon is underpricing the device to hold onto the market in the face of growing market penetration of iPad and iPhone as better mobile reading devices. Microsoft, who completely missed the ereader market and who is fighting Apple and Google in the smart device marketplace, hope that a strategic partnership with B & N around the Nook can help, but how?

Unmentioned is the idea that some soon-to-market version of the Nook will be a Windows 8 device, instead of running Nook’s proprietary OS. And a spin-out of the Nook division into a new company, called Nook, with even more cash from Microsoft. Otherwise the whole thing makes no sense.

Apple, Twitter, And The Social OS

Mathew Ingram wonders — apparently based on some thoughts by Barry Ritholtz — whether Apple should spend $10B and buy Twitter:

Mathew Ingram, Should Apple buy Twitter?

Apple’s best effort by far at adding those kinds of social elements came when the company integrated Twitter at a deep — and for Apple, a fairly radical — level into the operating system on the iPhone and iPad (and even into its new desktop OS, OS-X Mountain Lion). Never before had Apple built support for a third-party service into its devices and software in such a fundamental way. This helped fuel rumors about an Apple acquisition, just as Ritholtz and others have used it to justify such a deal: if Apple wants to integrate Twitter so deeply, why not just acquire it so that it has full control?

The fact that Apple likes to control things from end-to-end is well known, which is just one of the reasons why the deep Twitter integration was a bit of a surprise. But does it really need to own Twitter in order to get the benefits of that integration? I don’t think so. It can get all the positive aspects of Twitter support without having to own the company — and it doesn’t have to worry about the hassle of maintaining a third-party service that is used for a wide variety of different purposes that Apple has no real interest in.

Not only that, but buying Twitter could actually harm Apple’s attempts to integrate more social aspects into its devices, because it would make it even less likely that the company would ever strike a similar deal with Facebook — something it has tried to do a number of times. It could be that Facebook has no intention of ever partnering with Apple, and the two may wind up becoming adversaries as their interests converge, but acquiring Twitter would likely remove any chance of the two ever working together in even a small way.

So, Mathew comes down pretty strongly on the negative side of a possible acquisition, but omits the long-range view: the next generation of operating systems will be social at the core.

Most of today’s operating systems are still based on 1990 thinking. They are based on WIMP (windows, icons, menus, pointer). They don’t know about the Web, so users have to move back and forth from their local store of docs and files to the cloud, a thousand times a day. And the biggest surprise of the Web has been the rise of social, which is supported on our computers through apps.

All of these limitations will be attacked in new operating systems, which will be web-aware, post-WIMP, and inherently social.

Apple is headed into a battle with Google, Facebook, and maybe Microsoft (Windows 8 looks pretty good), and one of the primary areas of contention will be building social primitives into the operating environment.

Google will build its social architecture in Android. Facebook will become more than just an app platform: it will become a mobile OS. Windows 9 or some future version will incorporate some approach to social. And iOS and Mac OS X have started to move this way by including Twitter in the mix, as a fundamental social protocol.

Apple should pay the $10B for Twitter, and make it into the social layer of its OSs, and as the social framework of its apps. For example, Ping in iTunes could be rewired to rely on Twitter, fixing its design as Barry Ritholz points out, and future social TV and second screen apps could be based on Twitter, as well, which makes sense because Twitter is the leading second screen app today. The coming battle for social TV will be hugely important, and Twitter really positions Apple in that space.

So, Mathew is being too conservative, because he thinks Apple may want to ‘work with’ Facebook in the future. But that can’t be where Apple is headed.

digithoughts: MWC 2012: Microsoft and Nokia et al. need to step up The MWC in Barcelona 2012 is almost over. Phone vendors are pushing Android devices everywhere. Low-end, high-end, mid-end and experimental phones are all running Android. Except for the Symbian based Nokia 808 with its 41 MP camera sensor. The biggest Windows Phone 7 introductions at the MWC were two budget oriented devices, the Nokia Lumia 610 and the ZTE Orbit.  There is nothing wrong in going after a wider audience by covering more price points; it’s just that there are no high-end WP7 devices to begin with. Don’t get me wrong, the Nokia Lumia 800 is a nice phone. But so is the even better spec’d iPhone 4 from 2010. Windows Phone 7 devices are lagging behind with relatively low spec’d screens, processing power and lack of front facing cameras (on most phones). High-end WP7 phones barely match mid-end Android or iOS devices.  In order to succeed, computing platforms need momentum and network effect. Users/buyers attract more developers to push out great apps which attract more buyers which attract more developers etc etc. How do you get that momentum going? Well it’s hard, but the first thing you need is hit products. Hit products such as the iPhone 3G, the HTC Hero (in Europe), the original Motorola Droid (in the US) and the Samsung Galaxy S. Devices that eat their way into the consumer mindshare. It is great to have lower-end devices available as well. As a complement. But it’s the hit products that get the ball rolling. Windows Phone 7 had a late start in the race of modern mobile operating systems and Microsoft and device vendors need to push even harder than the competition in order to catch up. In my mind, the system is almost there; just give a device geek like me a reason to buy into it.  Graph: Asymco Windows 8 needs a hit phone, or it’s dead.
Zoom

digithoughts:

MWC 2012: Microsoft and Nokia et al. need to step up

The MWC in Barcelona 2012 is almost over. Phone vendors are pushing Android devices everywhere. Low-end, high-end, mid-end and experimental phones are all running Android. Except for the Symbian based Nokia 808 with its 41 MP camera sensor. The biggest Windows Phone 7 introductions at the MWC were two budget oriented devices, the Nokia Lumia 610 and the ZTE Orbit. 

There is nothing wrong in going after a wider audience by covering more price points; it’s just that there are no high-end WP7 devices to begin with. Don’t get me wrong, the Nokia Lumia 800 is a nice phone. But so is the even better spec’d iPhone 4 from 2010. Windows Phone 7 devices are lagging behind with relatively low spec’d screens, processing power and lack of front facing cameras (on most phones). High-end WP7 phones barely match mid-end Android or iOS devices. 

In order to succeed, computing platforms need momentum and network effect. Users/buyers attract more developers to push out great apps which attract more buyers which attract more developers etc etc. How do you get that momentum going? Well it’s hard, but the first thing you need is hit products. Hit products such as the iPhone 3G, the HTC Hero (in Europe), the original Motorola Droid (in the US) and the Samsung Galaxy S. Devices that eat their way into the consumer mindshare. It is great to have lower-end devices available as well. As a complement. But it’s the hit products that get the ball rolling. Windows Phone 7 had a late start in the race of modern mobile operating systems and Microsoft and device vendors need to push even harder than the competition in order to catch up. In my mind, the system is almost there; just give a device geek like me a reason to buy into it. 

Graph: Asymco

Windows 8 needs a hit phone, or it’s dead.

Hopscotching between new Metro programs and old Desktop ones–which is what most Windows 8 users will do at first–is going to be an inherently disjointed, unsatisfying stopgap. Windows 8 will only be a landmark operating system if consumers embrace Metro. And they’ll only do that if developers write outstanding Metro programs, and if PC manufacturers create machines that are truly designed with Metro in mind.

That’s a lot of ifs. Most of them will be tackled by other hardware and software makers, not Microsoft. And even once Windows 8 has been released, it will take years, not months, before it’s clear how well they’ve addressed them.

Which is okay. Microsoft is intent on getting this operating system out the door in time for this year’s holiday PCs, but Windows 8 isn’t primarily about moving boxes in 2012. What it’s trying to build is a foundation for a Windows that stands a chance of being relevant a decade or two from now.

- Harry McCracken, Windows 8 Consumer Preview: One Step Closer to the PC’s Future via TIME.com

Microsoft’s huge gamble. If they lose with Windows 8, they will be just another enterprise software company, with a number of shrinking divisions that should/could be sold off or spun out.

Daring Fireball: All His Life Has He Looked Away, to the Future, to the Horizon. Never His Mind on Where He Was. What He Was Doing.

Gruber responds to a Windows 8 fan boy, Paul Thurrott, who twittered ‘Hello, Windows 8? This is iPad. You win.’ after seeing a demo on a Samsung-produced tablet:

John Gruber via Daring Fireball

What did Microsoft show, though? They showed a Metro-style touchscreen tablet user interface that is, without argument, original. No accusations of ripping off the iPad here. Microsoft is admirably blazing its own trail.

But the OS reportedly isn’t coming out for at least a year. The demo tablet hardware from Samsung they’re showing it on (and giving to Build attendees) is a Core i5 Intel-based PC replete with a fan. Spec-wise these units are much more like MacBook Airs than iPads. Presumably actual shipping iPad-competing Windows 8 tablets will use low-power mobile CPUs — be they ARM, Atom, whatever, just so long as they get iPad-caliber long battery life and low temperatures.

How will Windows 8 run on such hardware? When will they actually ship? How many as-yet-unannounced iPad 3s will Apple have sold by the time the first Windows 8 tablet hits stores? (Not to mention the many tens of millions of iPad 2s Apple will sell in just the next quarter alone.)

It’s all in the future. All potential, nothing actual. Think about how different Apple’s and Microsoft’s approaches are. Apple unveiled the iPad to the public only when it was a completely finished product, two months before it hit stores. The demo units we in the press had access to that day were exactly like the mass-produced iPads that shipped to customers two months later. Can you imagine Apple doing with the iPad what Microsoft is doing with Windows 8? Say, showing a prototype iPad at WWDC in June 2009, running on MacBook Pro-caliber Intel hardware? Letting the public and the press play with the OS in half-finished alpha state on prototype hardware? Impossible even to imagine. (There were no hands-on demos, let alone take-home prototypes or developer downloads, when Apple showed a “sneak preview” of Mac OS X Lion at last year’s “Back to the Mac” event.)

I’m not passing judgment here — at least not yet — regarding which strategy is superior. I simply wish to direct your attention at how utterly different the two companies are.

Gruber seems to be making a corporate culture argument, but I think this is also a case of Microsoft playing catch-up, from way back in the pack.They hope to stall some buyers from buying an iPad, thinking that some razzamatazz might hypnotize them.

But iPad is clearly dominating the tablet space, and I don’t think Microsoft has a chance.

I am still betting on a Microsoft/Facebook social OS alliance. I wonder how closely integrated Facebook will be in Windows 8, when it launches.

Twitter: The Social Kernel For iOS 5 

[Update: I pulled a section of this out, as I was corrected about iMessage being the next version of Messages:

Project via comments

Actually, iMessage and the SMS app in iOS5 are one and the same thing. If the person you are sending a message to doesn’t have an iOS device, it sends it as an SMS.  If the person does, it recognises it in the To field and sends it as an iMessage.  In effect, Apple are embracing and extending the SMS protocol with this service. It is a huge move.

I stand corrected.]

Yesterday’s announcements from Apple included the new iMessage: an iOS-only messaging system, which is apparently intended to remove the last rationale that BlackBerry users might have to not adopt iPhones:

Darrell Etherington, iMessage: Biting RIM’s style and sticking it to network operators

BBM is one of the few remaining advantages RIM’s aging platform has over its younger competition in the smartphone market. (Check out this tweet representative of reaction toiMessage’s announcement if you don’t believe me.) People appreciated the way it integrates tightly to your device, and its delivery and read receipts let you know your messages aren’t getting lost in the ether. It’s been a life raft for RIM in the violent sea of the ongoing mobile battle BlackBerry faces with iOS and Android.

However, iMessage brings a lot of what’s good about BBM not only to the iPhone, which just passed RIM in terms of U.S. smartphone ownership trentds, but also to all iOS devices. With iPad and iPod touch users factored in, the potential audience for iMessage is huge, and it should cause at least some BBM-faithful to flee RIM’s platform for greener pastures.

Apple’s move also pushes the mobile carriers down in the stack, allowing iOS users to bypass SMS or proprietary messaging solutions. This is a painful but inevitable evolution.

iMessage is just a tactical play targeting BBM: a old-school pre-social, buddylist-style proprietary messaging system. It’s not strategic, really.

In the long run, it looks like Apple is planning to use Twitter as the platform for social communication, building Twitter into iOS instead of building protocols on which Twitter and other networks could run.

As reported by Marshall Kirkpatrick, Twitter on iOS 5 will be a platform for social apps:

My summary, in a sentence: iOS apps will look like, feel like, read from and publish to Twitter like never before. And they’ll do that in many cases instead of using Facebook.

[Jason] Costa [the newly hired Twitter Developer Relations leader] summarizes thusly.

“There is single sign-on, which allows you to retrieve a user’s identity, avatar, and other profile data.” That sounds like Facebook Connect, but I’m going to guess that Twitter will not prohibit developers from caching that data for time-shifted, aggregate, offline or other interesting types of analysis. Letting users skip having to create an account with every new app they download and instead click to log-in with their Twitter accounts is going to make many users very happy and encourage every iOS owner to get a Twitter account if they don’t have one already. App developers will get more and better populated user accounts, faster.

“There’s also a frictionless core signing service, allowing you to make and sign any call to the Twitter API.” To be honest, I’m not really sure what this means. Perhaps it means that parts of the Twitter API that require user authentication will be accessible via the same single sign-on feature discussed above.

“There is follow graph synchronization, which enables you to bootstrap a user’s social graph for your app.” In other words, apps will be able to offer users to find their Twitter friends who are also using a new app they’ve installed, and connect with them there too. That’s the kind of solution to the user-level “cold start problem” that Facebook Connect has been so helpful with for web apps.

“Furthermore, there is the tweet sheet feature, giving your app distribution and reach across Twitter.” Again, like Facebook Connect, this is a feature that appears to make it easy for apps to publish user activity and promotional messages out into the Twitter streams of a user’s friends. Facebook has a complicated algorithm that determines how often an app is allowed to publish messages out into the Newsfeed of a user’s friends, based on how much interactions messages from that app have received in the past. That’s a spam control mechanism that I’m going to guess Twitter will not replicate, at least at first.

It looks like Apple is going to give Twitter this deep and central role in its social OS plans, and allow the smaller more agile company to manage the building of an ecology of social apps on top of the paired architecture.

If even remotely successful, Apple will want to acquire Twitter, and Twitter will want to be acquired. These two will become as inseparable as NeXT was to Apple, when they regrooved Mac OS to be built upon the Mach Unix kernel. Here though, Apple will be making Twitter — and the open follower model Twitter resides on — the social kernel for iOS going forward.

This is a grand land grab by Apple and Twitter, an effort to block a Google/Facebook coalition on Android, or a Microsoft/Facebook partnership on Windows 8.

What about the competition? I predict Facebook will be too reluctant to partner with anyone, and may be at work on plans to launch its own hardware. Google is too slow on the social network side (the most expensive error of all time?), so they are stuck in the water. Microsoft is making credible efforts with Windows 7 and 8, but have no social network story. Microsoft is far enough behind the curve to possibly cede the social sphere to Facebook, too. RIM is falling like a stone, and would probably like to be bought, and either Google or Microsoft might bite, but that’s just tactics. None of these players has a strategic answer to the Apple move with Twitter.

What I don’t understand, though, is why iMessage isn’t written as a social app on top of Twitter. That would be the right path, and would simplify the Venn diagram tremendously. But Apple is opting to run both worlds — the pre-social and the social — in parallel, at least for a time, instead of doubling down on its social push with Twitter.

related

Windows 8: The Beginning of the End of Windows - Michael Mace

Michael Mace, via

Whether or not Windows 8 is a financial success for Microsoft, we’ve now crossed a critical threshold. The old Windows of mice and icons is officially obsolete. That resets the playing field for everybody in computing.

Mace is right, because iOS reset the playing field, and Microsoft is playing catch-up. But Windows 8 might be a credible response.

And Mace is right about obsoleting itself:

Microsoft will pay a serious price for the Windows 8 announcement.  Most PC users haven’t yet upgraded to Windows 7, and some Microsoft execs have been bragging in public about the revenue to come from upgrading all of those people.  Forget about it.  I think you’d be an idiot to buy Windows 7 for an existing PC when you know Windows 8 is coming.  It would be like buying a horse-drawn carriage after Ford announced the Model T.

And developers will skip Windows 7 too. And they will have to make a hard judgment call about Windows 8: will users transition to a new untried platform just because it will run old Windows apps badly? Or will users use this time of disruption to make a clean assessment of needed functionality, and opt for iOS or Android, and leave Windows 8 in the dustbin of history?

I am betting that Microsoft will retain some portion of the most entrenched Windows users and developers, but those that are less invested will move to where the action is fastest and the platform is most stable, and that is going to be Apple iOS, trailed by Google’s Android, and with Microsoft Windows 8 becoming a very distant third.

[…] it’s a fundamentally flawed idea for Microsoft to build their next-generation OS and interface on top of the existing Windows. The idea is that you get the new stuff right alongside Windows as we know it. Microsoft is obviously trying to learn from Apple, but they clearly don’t understand why the iPad runs iOS, and not Mac OS X.

Microsoft’s demo video shows Excel — the full version of Excel for Windows — running alongside new touch-based apps. They can make buttons more “touch friendly” all they want, but they’ll never make Excel for Windows feel right on a touchscreen UI. Consider the differences between the iWork apps for the Mac and iPad. The iPad versions aren’t “touch friendly” versions of the Mac apps — they’re entirely new beasts designed and programmed from the ground up for the touchscreen and for the different rules and tradeoffs of the iOS interface (no explicit saving, no file system, ready to quit at a moment’s notice, no processing in the background, etc.).

The ability to run Mac OS X apps on the iPad, with full access to the file system, peripherals, etc., would make the iPad worse, not better. The iPad succeeds because it has eliminated complexity, not because it has covered up the complexity of the Mac with a touch-based “shell”. iOS’s lack of backward compatibility with any existing software means that all apps for iOS are written specifically for iOS.

John Gruber,  Why Windows 8 Is Fundamentally Flawed as a Response to the iPad