Will the Cloud Challenge Apple's Dynasty?

The news may be about the iPad this weekend but it's the cloud that will hover hot over Apple by the Fall and in many respects challenge its hegemony over how we store and share music and video.

According to CNET, that's about the time of year that it looks like Apple will unveil its cloud-based music service.

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In the meantime we are seeing a number of storage services emerge for the iPad that could be used for people to store their music and other media. Yesterday, we looked at the Box.net app. Dropbox has an iPad app as does SugarSync.

And then there are the forces that are not tethered to the iPad at all.

Last week, Canonical started a public beta for its cloud-based music service.

Most cloud-based services allow you to store your own music in the cloud. With Canonical, you purchase your music through its music store that syncs with your device and your own personal cloud. That means you control your

Apple appears to be looking at a similar strategy, allowing consumers to store music and movies in the cloud, albeit the media being that from the major labels and even more so, the studios. Will they go for it? Well, a long time ago, perhaps, but with the options available, the studios, have far more possibilities to pursue.

But how can the Apple strategy work in a cloud built on open-source? Apple's Fair Play digital rights management software is intended to keep music, movies and other entertainment locked down so it can not be shared. It's in contrast to the open-nature of cloud computing that we see with services that allow for online storage lockers. People will find ways to store and organize data in the way they wish. That makes sense for a number of reasons:

• People have media on multiple devices. Keeping it in the cloud makes it easier to access.


• Syncing to the cloud makes sense. Cables? Dongles? That's old school. You can update a file in the cloud and see that same update on your smart phone.


• If a number of people have their own personal clouds than that means we can share, right? Yes it does!

It's that last point that must give Apple a bit of a chill. For years, iTunes seemed like the only option. But Apple has locked down its hardware, software and the content. In league with the labels and studios, Apple has used DRM to get its leverage at the expense of us all.

Will that strategy continue to work? Well, it's going to take a while but all these storage providers know that those home videos can bloat a hard drive pretty fast.

Or maybe just maybe, Steve will put the screws back in the iPad, give us the schematics and let us all see what we really can do with that tablet.

He'll then thank Cory Doctorow for waking him up and sure enough we'll all wonder if we had just fallen into a hot tub time machine.

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E-Books on the iPad: iBooks vs. Kindle for iPad

Ever since Steve Jobs first announced iBooks for the iPad, pundits have been wondering about the future of the Kindle and similar e-book readers in the face of this new competition. Now that we actually have access to an iPad, we had a chance to take a closer look at both the iBooks and Amazon's Kindle for iPad apps. We are still waiting for the B&N iPad app, but both iBooks and iPad for Kindle already highlight the iPad's potential as an e-book reader.

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iBooks

It doesn't come as a surprise that Apple managed to develop the prettier e-reader app. Switching from the iBooks store - which looks a lot like the App Store - to your bookshelf is done through a nifty animation. Newly downloaded books and samples smoothly slide into the bookshelf and thanks to a faux 3d look and a page-flip animation, the app itself mimics the look and feel of a book. When you click on a book in your shelf, it flips open and zoom to the page you left off.

Flipping the iPad to landscape mode switches iBooks from displaying on page per screen to a more book-like two-page view. Given how wide the iPad's screen its, this makes it a lot easier to read as the individual lines are much shorter.

With regards to customization, iBooks allows its users to change the size of the font, but also the font itself (Baskerville, Cochin, Palatino, Times New Roman and Verdana). You can also set the screen brightness right from within any book, which is great for reading at night. As far as we can see, however, you can't switch to white text on a black background.

Another neat feature is the search function that feels a lot like Spotlight on OSX. This search feature is extremely fast - though sadly it only works for the book that you are currently reading. You can't search through all of your library, though you can initiate a Google and Wikipedia search from within any book (these open up Safari, however).

The iBooks app can also read DRM-free ePub texts. You simply download the e-book to your computer, drag it into iTunes and after your next sync, it will appear in iBooks.

iBooks Store

The iBooks store mostly features books between $9.99 and $14.99 (with a few outliers). There are currently about 30,000 free books in the store (courtesy of Project Gutenberg) and about 60,000 books from most major publishers - though there are still some holdouts. Every book in the store allows you to download a free sample (sometimes more than 50 pages long).

Kindle for iPad

Amazon, of course, offers a far larger store than Apple. With close to 450,000 paid and free books. It's worth noting that the Kindle store also launched with slightly more books (about 88,000).

Compared to iBooks, Kindle for iPad feels a bit more pedestrian, as it doesn't feature fancy animations. Pages just slide left and right and instead of two-page view when you flip the iPad to landscape mode, you just get a single page with a very wide layout. The Kindle app also doesn't allow users to customize the font of a book, though it does offer the standard screen brightness and font size settings.

Unlike the iBooks app, which only has a bookmark feature, the Kindle app allows users to annotate books and highlight passages in these texts. For students, this is a must-have feature and it's surprising that Apple didn't include this in its app.

As with its other mobile apps, Amazon forces its readers to download apps from the Kindle online store. The only way to access this is through the browser. Here, Apple's ability to integrate the store into the e-reader application is a big plus.

Verdict: iBooks is the Better App; Kindle is the Better Platform

In terms of functionality, the choice between the two apps depends on your needs. If you need to highlight and if you want to take notes, then the Kindle app is the only way to go. If you just want to read, the iBooks apps is just fine. Prices in both the iBooks and Kindle store are likely to be very similar - especially now that Amazon is slowly giving up on its idea of selling all e-books at $9.99.

The real advantage of the Kindle app is that you can read and sync books with more devices. You can start reading a book on the iPad at home or on the plane, for example, and then continue reading on your iPhone while you are waiting in line at the post office. Chances are that Apple will launch an iBooks app for the iPhone sooner or later, but until then, investing in Kindle books seems like a smarter decision as you don't lock yourself completely into Apple's smaller ecosystem.

More About the iPad Launch

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iPad: Citrix Brings Windows 7 Back to the Future

When will the iPad deliver in the enterprise? We first asked this question on Feb 11th when we interviewed the Citrix team. At the time, we gave it a thumbs-up as the Citrix team had good answers for all of our questions.

Today, with the launch of the iPad, Citrix has delivered on its promise of making Citrix Receiver (powered by XENApps) for iPad available as a day one app in the iPad app store. Seeing is believing, so today we took a look at the new application on the new device.

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Citrix isn't shy about the opportunity for iPad. The demonstration they shared focused on one of the toughest IT nuts to crack, health care applications in the hospital. From what we see, with some reasonable configuration, the iPad, with Citrix Receiver installed, is ready to read and write health care records today.

Citrix Reciever uses software virtualization to bring backoffice applications all sorts of smart clients, including Windows, Windows Phone, iPhone, and iPad. Here is a demonstration offered by Citrix on the Citrix Receiver on iPad.

Today, the ReadWriteWeb team installed the Citrix Reciever for iPad app, here's first impressions.

• Real-time setup. The app installed perfectly, but setting up the Citrix account takes 15 minutes. In our real-time world, we found ourselves downloading other apps and almost forgot to check back. A minor issue, but perhaps something to consider for enterprise deployments.


• Gestures. In the world of iPad, point and click converts to pinch and slide. As noted in our earlier post, Apple has done a lot of the heavy lifting to get parity with mouse and finger controls. Still, we asked the question of whether gestures mapped, our first impression is that all the basics are there.


• Custom icons for each application session. We reported that this might be an important feature. Citrix acknowledged it being part of the implementation. Today, we see that this part of the framework enabled by Apple and supported by Citrix. Each enterprise application can be dropped onto the iPad home screen and it will have a custom icon per your setup.


• Streaming. One of the considerations for all software virtualization is the ability to stream real-time changes from screen to screen. In the demonstration above, we see examples of real-time application heart visualization. This capability seems to be a key for leveraging existing investments and to avoid having to re-build these applications for iPad.
  

Citrix has done some heavy lifting to prepare iPad for the enterprise by focusing on its strength in preparing back office enterprise applications to be available to smart clients like iPad.

Now, the big question. Are you preparing your enterprise for iPad? Do you have questions or wish-list items for the team at Citrix?

Credit: Frederic Lardinois RWW's brave iPad owner who wrestled control of his new day-one device from his family to do this evaluation.

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Is the iPad Magical? Our First Impressions

After a surprisingly short wait in line at our local Apple Store, where about 100 people lined up for their reserved iPads - and another 100 who didn't have a reservations - we finally took possession of our very own Apple tablet. We will take a closer look at all the apps, hardware and iPad-optimized web sites over the course of the next few days, but here are our first impressions after spending some quality time with the iPad.

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It's Very Fast, A Little Bit Heavy and a Little Bit Magical

Without a doubt, the first thing you will notice is the sheer speed of the iPad. Web pages render very fast, switching from landscape to portrait mode only takes a second - even in image and video-heavy apps like the Popular Science app or the ABC Player - and apps open extremely fast.

The device itself is light for its size, but still feels a bit heavy when holding it with one hand. Most of the time, we don't thing this will be and issue as you will probably hold the device with two hands, but if you have wrist issues, this is definitely something to keep in mind.

A More Intimate Experience

Apple uses the word "magical" whenever the company talks about the iPad. After using the iPad for a while, we can't quite call it magical, but it's definitely a huge step forward for personal computing. Being able to manipulate the web with your fingers directly on the screen, browsing through the New York Times or Popular Science app on the couch and checking up on your Twitter friends in the TweetDeck app just takes on another dimension when you are using the iPad. It is indeed, as Apple calls it, a more intimate experience.

Yes, the iPad doesn't do multitasking, chances are that you won't want to use it for heavy content creation tasks and the iPhone was more revolutionary than the iPad, but if you already use your iPhone to surf the web on the couch and keep up with email, the iPad is better at all of these tasks than the iPhone and more comfortable to use than a laptop or netbook.

Read on for more detailed impressions of some of the iPad's hardware and software features.

Screen

Apple wasn't kidding when it said that the screen on the iPad would be gorgeous. It's not just that the extra screen estate allowed developers to build easier to use apps, but the screen really makes colors pop and the viewing angle is close to 180 degrees.

At the end of the day, though, it's really the size of the screen that makes all the difference when compared to an iPod touch. While some developers have only re-purposed their iPhone apps for the iPad so far, some apps like the Epicurious cooking app are already making good use of this extra screen estate by putting tabs on the side and bottom of the screen.

Of course, we don't have any hands-on experience about the iPad's battery life yet, but we will update this post later today with more info once we get some more real-life data.

Virtual Keyboard

The iPad keyboard takes some getting used to. On a lap or on a table with the iPad in Apple's nifty case, typing with two hands is easy. If your hands are big, you can probably use both of your thumbs to type in portrait mode. Typing in landscape mode with the iPad in your hands means that you can only use one hand, however, and the iPad can quickly feel a bit heavy if you are holding it with just one hand.

Apple's Own Apps

We haven't had a chance to fully appreciate Apple's own email, contacts, calendar apps, but our first impression is that they are all well designed, work as advertised and - thanks to making use of the bigger screen - are generally much easier to use on the iPad than on the iPhone. Safari, of course, is the highlight here, where web sites render just about as fast as on a notebook and browsing even non-mobile optimized sites feels perfectly natural (though, of course, without Flash some sites just don't work very well).

The iPod app now looks a lot more like iTunes, with a sidebar on the right (in portrait and landscape mode). Interestingly, Apple did not include cover flow here.

More About the iPad Launch

Click here for our full archive of posts about the iPad launch.

Come back throughout the day for more of our coverage of the iPad launch.

iBooks

iBooks, Apple's e-book app, is a very capable e-book reader. Prices in the iBook store are typically between $9.99 and $14.99 (we also found a few books for $16.99 and Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged retails for $27.99). It's worth noting that the store also features a huge selection of free books from Project Gutenberg. We will take a closer look at the iBooks app and compare it to the other e-readers on the iPad later today.

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