There has been plenty of exploration of the (rumored) iPad mini, what it might look like, the bezel, the screen resolution, and so on. There have also been some analyses possible pricing and the competition with 7-inch tablets from Google and Amazon. But what about unintended consequences? There may be more that we thought.
If Apple does release an iPad mini, (or as I like to call it, the iPad 7), what will be the impact on the rest of the industry? Here’s a list from Don Reisinger: “iPad Mini: 10 Ways It Will Change the Tablet Market.” While the list is not surprising in its content, it does have food for thought. After all, sometimes the most unexpected events arise from a combination of two low-level, innocent looking events.
So when I see a list like that, I pick two or three and try to estimate what the combined effect will be.
What if Apple’s 7-inch iPad ultimately drives the small Kindle Fire and the Nook out of the market? Might that open the door to book publishers to finally deliver their own tablets, designed specifically for schools? Or might the 7-inch iPad itself, with the right price, be the trigger that ignites a more widespread use of tablets in K-12?
What if Apple so fully succeeds in legitimizing and popularizing the 7-inch market that the 9-10-inch tablets slowly fall out of favor? What effect would that have on Microsoft? Here’s a company desperate to hedge its bets in the Post-PC era with the Surface tablets.
What if Apple, in keen competition with less capable 7-inch tablets adds 3G and voice? How will that affect the carriers, and in turn, affect AT&T and FaceTime over cellular? Will every tablet, then, be required to have 3G voice capability in order to compete?
I don’t think it’s just a matter of Apple shutting the door, one that the company left wide open last Christmas, on the 7-inch tablet competitors. I think there may be a raft of unintended consequences any time Apple jumps into a new market space. It’ll be interesting to see what happens as we go along.
Tech News Debris
Today, on the first anniversary of the passing of Steve Jobs, many of us honored the man. If you’d like to explore more of the life of Mr. Jobs, here’s a great list of books and videos you may want to acquire.
Even though Bing only has 16 percent of the searches compared to Google’s 66 percent, Bing accounts for about 60-65 percent of the redirects to malicious sites. Bing isn’t doing a great job of filtering here, according to TechCrunch,”Bing Users Disproportionately Affected By Malware Redirects.” Also, it’s noteworthy that attackers are getting the most success from poisoned images rather than embedded website code. So the next time you see a security note that relates to a “maliciously crafted image,” don’t dimiss it. Those images can cause buffer overflows in your OS, insert code, and then seize control of your smartphone. For example....
There’s a new class of visual malware. Consider. Your smartphone has a lot of sensors and a camera. What if someone could tap into that vast potential. If you have an Android phone, they can. As the Technology Review at M.I.T describes it, “The US Naval Surface Warfare Center has created an Android app that secretly records your environment and reconstructs it as a 3D virtual model for a malicious user to browse.” It’s interesting that this is possible on an Android phone -- iPhones were not mentioned in the article. How might this affect IT purchases of Android phones in the U.S. government?
Do you sleep with your iPad? The headline below is meant to be humorous, but according to the Pew Research Center, there are people who are using their iPads, during non-work hours, early morning or late at night, to access more news than they ever did before. And while the article doesn’t go into it, we already know that many users read, in bed, before going to sleep. Here’s the report on how people are using iPads: “Let me guess: You sleep with your iPad, don’t you?”
I am not fond of articles that purport to tell Tim Cook how to live up to Steve Jobs. However, this article is just charming enough and has just enough truth to it to warrant your attention. The fact that I wish I had written it should tell you all you need to know. “What Apple's Tim Cook Needs To Learn From Commander Riker.”
The way I figure it, if a billion people are using Facebook, then it’s definitely something to avoid. “Facebook's Email Scanning Isn't A Privacy Issue, It's A Credibility Issue.”