Taking the tablets

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Now it’s BlackBerry’s turn. The New York Times report explains:

The introduction of a tablet computer will not end criticism from some analysts that R.I.M. is now playing catch-up with Apple. But in a bid to distinguish the PlayBook from Apple’s iPad, Michael Lazaridis, R.I.M.’s co-chief executive, said that the new tablet contained several features requested by corporate information technology departments.

In an address to conference attendees, Mr. Lazaridis called the PlayBook “the world’s first professional tablet” and repeatedly emphasized that it was fully compatible with the special servers that corporations and governments now used to control and monitor employees’ BlackBerry devices.

While the company offered some specifics about the new device, it left many questions unanswered, most notably the tablet’s price. The company was also vague about its release date, indicating only that it would be available early next year.

Among the PlayBook’s novel features are outlets that allow it to display material on computer monitors or television sets, but Mr. Lazaridis made no effort to use them during his presentation. As animations showing the device’s features appeared above him on a giant screen, he did little more with the PlayBook in his hand than switch it on.

“It’s a very real product,” said Charles S. Golvin, principal analyst with Forrester Research. “But obviously it’s very much a work in progress.”

Lady of the lake

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Lakeside view, originally uploaded by jjn1.

Taken on Friday at one of my favourite golf courses — Killarney. It wasn’t clear whether this lady was a golf widow or just someone who wanted to drink in the entrancing view on a perfect late-September day. Not that it makes any difference. It was a nice moment, either way.

Larger version here.

Apple’s Suez canal

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This morning’s Observer column.

At the centre of the Appleverse sits a single, crucial piece of desktop software – iTunes. You can do very little with an Apple device without hooking it up to iTunes. Until now, this has given Apple a key strategic advantage over all other competitors. But, as Britain discovered with the Suez canal in the 1950s, being unduly dependent on a single strategic asset can also have serious downsides.

The problem is that iTunes is now a pretty ancient piece of software. When it first appeared in 2001 as a reworking of SoundJam, a program Apple bought from a Californian company in 1999, it provided an elegant way of doing just one thing: getting songs from CDs on to your computer’s hard drive. But over the years, more and more functions have been added: first the management of iPods, then the Apple online store. Then iTunes became the conduit for managing one’s iPhone. The latest addition is the Ping social-networking function.

This is what the industry calls “feature creep” on an heroic scale…

Hasselblad H4D-31: medium format digital for downsizing millionaires

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At Photokina today, Hasselblad introduced the H4D-31, a camera that actually makes digital medium format photography considerably more affordable (albeit still pretty darn expensive for a “young photographer”).

The camera weighs in at 31 megapixels rather than 40, but the 22.5% decrease in resolution translates into a generous 35% decrease in price: the H4D-31 costs about $13,000. You also get your choice of a 80mm prime lens or a lens adapter that allows you to use V-System lenses you already own.

Hmmm… That’s only £8,300 in old money. A snip, dear boy, a snip. A mere bagatelle, as Bertie Wooster might say. Form an orderly queue.

[Source]

Me no Leica

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… as Dorothy Parker observed in reviewing Christopher Isherwood’s play I am a Camera.

This latest nonsense (a ‘skin’ for the iPhone 4) presumeably stems from Steve Jobs’s throwaway remark, when launching the phone, that the device felt “like a Leica”.

You can buy one here if you insist.

The Principal’s Nose and other stories

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The September 6 edition of the New Yorker has a lovely piece (sadly, behind a paywall) by John McPhee about this year’s British Open, which was played on the Old Course at St Andrews. At one point, McPhee walked the course with David Hamilton, a noted golf historian, who drew attention to

certain “Presbyterian features” of the course — the Valley of Sin, the Pulpit bunker, the bunker named Hell — pointing them out as we passed them. St Andrews’ pot bunkers are nothing like the scalloped sands of other courses. The many dozens of them on the Old Course are small, cylindrical, scarcely wider than a golf swing, and of varying depth — four feet, six feet, but always enough to retain a few strokes. Their faces are vertical, layered, stratigraphic walls of ancestral turf. As you look down a fairway, they suggest the mouths of small caves, or, collectively, the sharp perforations of a kitchen grater. On the sixteenth, he called attention to a pair of them in mid-fairway, only a yard or two apart, with a mound between them that suggested cartilage. The name of this hazard is the Principal’s Nose. Hamilton told a joke about a local man playing the course, who suffered a seizure at the Principal’s Nose. His playing partner called 999, the UK version of 911, and was soon speaking with a person in Bangalore. The playing partner reported the seizure and said that the victim was at the Principal’s Nose bunker on the sixteenth hole on the Old Course at St Andrews, in Scotland; and Bangalore asked, “Which nostril?”

It’s a lovely piece, in all kinds of ways. And very good on the touchy subject of the seventeenth hole, which is almost as fiendish as the fifth in Lahinch.

The death of language

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This comes from an Irish Times column by Fintan O’Toole. He’s writing about a recent interview given by Brian Cowen, the Irish Taoiseach [Prime Minister]. But he could have been writing about any member of the UK Con-Dem coalition government.

For two years now, official speech has been a one-way process. The Government decided that it would do things of immense consequence, knowing there was very little public support for those actions. Never in the history of the State has a government adopted policies of such significance in the absence of any kind of public consensus in their favour.

Once you go down that road, real communication ceases. The Government can talk, but it cannot listen. Anything it would be likely to hear – public opinion, objective evidence, expert analysis – would tend to undermine its chosen certainties. So the talk has to be one-way. It has to be aimed, not at engaging in debate, but at getting across the idea that there is nothing to be debated. There are no choices, no alternatives, no legitimate differences. The purpose of all official speech is not to communicate, but to kill communication.

This is why the question hovering over all the fuss around Brian Cowen’s infamous interview is not “was he hung-over” It is Dorothy Parker’s response to the news that president Calvin Coolidge had died: “How could they tell?”

If you read the transcript without listening to the voice, Cowen’s interview on Morning Ireland is almost indistinguishable from the one he gave a few days earlier to RTÉ radio’s This Week programme. And that in turn is the same as almost every interview he has given in the last two years.

This is not because Cowen can’t communicate. In private, or on semi-formal occasions, he is articulate and engaging. It is because, as Taoiseach, he must speak a language as dead as Manx or Crimean Gothic. When words are used, not to stimulate discussion, but to deny the possibility of discussion, they die. They wither into verbiage. They become spin that has stopped spinning, propaganda that no one expects to fool anyone. And the first official language of the State is no longer Irish or English, it is this system of empty sounds, spoken into a void.

Whenever politicians invoke TINA (there is no alternative) you know they’re lying. Or kidding themselves. There’s a lot of lying and self-delusion going on at the moment.

Thanks to Lorcan Dempsey for the link.