Apple may be looking to kill the classic 3.5 mm headphone jack in favour of the company’s propriety ‘Lightning’ port, providing some clarity around Apple’s decision to buy Beats Music for $3.2 billion. So what now for services that use the headphone jack with the most obvious being the Square Reader? The decision to switch from the headphone jack to the Lightning connector will transform the traditional, ‘dumb’ headphones into a smart device. Since the Lightning jack can als

It would have been hard to miss the news that Apple has launched CarPlay at the Motor Show in Geneva. The objective is to give drivers a “smarter, safer, and more fun” way to use iPhones in cars. Why do I find that hard to believe? If you have not heard much about CarPlay let’s just say it connects your iPhone through Siri to your dashboard. Through commanding Siri it will allow you to easily make calls, use maps, listen to music and access messages. Nothing here that I can’t

The password as we know it died a graceful death on the 10th September 2013 when Apple launched iTouch which delivered an effective solution that responded to the consumers need for authentication to be quick, easy and most importantly more secure. So since this date the race has been on to bring to market alternative methods of authentication, so will we really see the password vanish in the near future? It is not breaking news that passwords are inconvenient and are becomin

A hallmark of Apple’s success has been the feeling it creates when you purchase their products. An amazing amount of detail has gone into defining the experience so from the moment you open the box you are emotionally connected to the product. According to the company’s 2014 Supplier Responsibility Report they are now producing their products without having to use any conflict minerals such as Tantalum and a 95% compliance rate to a 65 hour work week. So empowered with this

Android is one of the success stories of the mobile era, originally developed by Google as an open source project back in 2007 with the objective to protect Google’s search business from the rise in popularity of Apple. So when you go from zero to hero as in the case of Android which now sits on 80% of Smartphones worldwide how do you control something you have been giving away for free and in the process gain some control of device manufacturers? The first thing you do is s

It seems the news that Apple is looking to expand its mobile payments efforts is a popular item of news today across many of my feeds. There seems to be no real reason for this buzz other than it is probably a story that will generate some clicks. The truth is that it is no surprise that Apple are going to expanding their mobile payment efforts, they have been focused on this long before anyone else. Here is why I believe they are the one to watch? When the Smartphone was

You would be very familiar with the autocomplete function that is ubiquitous with any Smartphone, you start typing a word and recommendations to autocomplete are provided. You should also now be familiar with the fact that the autocomplete is an Apple patent and yesterday it was ruled in a court in California that Samsung has breached the Apple patient. So what does that mean for the good old autocomplete? The only path now for Samsung if they want to retain this functional

So Apple have finally announced the features of their flagship phone the 5S. In case you missed it they delivered the most talked about rumour and changed the home button to a fingerprint scanner, which they are calling “Touch ID”. Here is what else that is coming with the iPhone 5S that is probably not that much of a surprise: A faster phone with better graphics performance delivered with A7 64-bit chip with over a billion transistors inside. A chip named the M7 which cont

A hot topic of discussions around Apples launch on September 10th is focused on the introduction of fingerprint sensor that is tipped to replace the current home button. Since posting “Are you ready for the end of the Password as we know it?” the feedback I have received from some is that no one will want to give Apple their fingerprint, as they would be concerned that a company like Apple would have access to this type of personal data. So if they are to roll out this techno

My social media timelines was being peppered with information related to the 3rd quarter earning results for Apple this morning. As would be expected with anything to do with Apple there was a lot of information posted and as I bounced around the reports it made my dizzy. For the optimists it was a positive result with reports of slightly better than expected profit driven by the sales of the iPhone in which they sold 32.2 million. For the pessimists profit was down 22% from

I found it interesting to read that in Q1 of 2013 the top four app stores hit 13.4 billion downloads worldwide according to research by Canalys. What was more intriguing was that the revenue for all these downloads was $2.2 billion and Apple’s App Store accounted for 74% of this revenue even though Google Play had the greatest number of downloads, accounting for 51%. So why did Google Play have more downloads but less revenue? The revenue discrepancy between Android and iOS i

The Smartphone has changed the world in which we live, we hear it every day it is printed in all the content that we read, and opportunities are presented at every conference we attend. As a result we are all busy finding ways to adapt this technology into the businesses that we manage, we are looking for the opportunities to drive efficiencies while improving customer experience and engagement. So it is true the Smartphone has changed the world but the real question is are w

Last week Tony Fadell, who worked previously for Apple as a Senior Vice President for the iPod division and worked on the first three generations of the iPhone has noted that one of the options for the iPhone was to have a physical keyboard, like that of the Blackberry. The question that everyone is now asking is “what would have happened if the physical keyboard was selected over the virtual keyboard”. This is an interesting question although for me what makes the iPhone gre