iOS ease-of-use? Ha!

For inexplicable (or, at least, unexplained) reasons, Apple doesn't allow browser extensions on iOS (iPad and iPhone). Browser extensions are small apps that allow you to things such as save a link to a service such as Pocket.
Pocket, formerly Read It Later, allows you to save links for later reading. It also provides a cleaner version of the web page so that you can read it without ads and other cruft that accompanies most web content. I've been using Pocket/Read It Later for years and recommend it to anyone who uses the web a lot.
Installing the extension on all browsers on Windows and OSX is easy and fast. You get an icon on the browser toolbar.

On Windows, Mac, and Android, you can then save a link from your browser to Pocket. Clicking the icon saves the link to Pocket.
On Safari on iOS, however, here's what you have to do to set up a bookmarklet so that you can save to Pocket. (For the record, Chrome on iOS doesn't support extensions, either.)

How to Save to Pocket on iPad

For people new to or not adept with computing devices in general, this is onerous. For the record, Pocket isn't the only one afflicted by this Apple limitation. Other apps such as Instapaper and Evernote have to provide the same gnarly work-arounds.

You can save links to a Reading List that is synchronized with Safari elsewhere, such as on your Mac. You cannot, however, get at your Reading List from other browsers, via iCloud, or on an Android device.
In a word, pfft.

Living and working in a tech news bubble

While the tech press is all tangled up with the upcoming Microsoft, Apple, and Google product announcements, it's time for for a marketing reality check. What are consumers generally hearing about these new products?

It turns out that the mainstream media isn't covering this and so, we can assume, most folks aren’t receiving much reason to get excited. Local newspapers and television stations and even a few national channels give only passing mention to topics such as the Microsoft Surface tablet, iPad Mini, or Nexus 7, or Windows 8.

I chose several Boston-area television and newspaper web sites along with a couple of national resources: WBZ (CBS), WCVB (ABC), and WHDH (NBC), Boston Globe, Boston Herald, Worcester Telegram (a nearby, mid-sized daily), CNN, PBS, and Fox News. For each site, I searched for articles with certain keywords in the title.

Note: I would have used Bing on IE for searching in an effort to replicate what a typical non-technical user might use. Bing, however, doesn’t support date-filtering of its search queries.

The Microsoft Surface tablet is a hot new product second only to Windows 8 in terms of company impact. The people who are cover Microsoft and Windows products for a living are having a hard time understanding, let alone explaining the difference between a Windows 8 tablet and a Windows RT tablet, both due for the release this week. The average news consumer is troubled by a surfeit of news to confuse. On average, people have been offered one story about the Surface in the past month. Most sites, in fact, hadn’t reported on the Surface after the June announcement and the recent scheduling of the product release.

The Nexus 7 is a fun product that's receiving a lot of good coverage in the trades. In our local media survey, however, only one site, the Boston Globe, had a story about Google’s breakout tablet.

Apple has an announcement scheduled for October 23. Most people who speculate about such things expect that we’ll learn about a 7-or-so-inch iPad that’s generally been called the iPad Mini.

Meanwhile, all of the chatter about the iPhone 5 hasn’t made clear just what Apple released. I sat with a person recently while an ad for the refreshed iPod line showed up on TV. Seeing the brightly colored bouncing devices, she asked, "Is that the new iPhone?"

Microsoft is betting the company on its radical redesign of the user interface in Windows 8. While the tech press has been covering each of the nooks and crannies, Windows 8 has received scant coverage in our press pool. We found an average of fewer than four stories in the last month. During the same period, the sites averaged more than 27 stories about Big Bird. CNN and the Boston Globe provided peak coverage while PBS, home of our faithful feathered friend, posted just one. After the spike following the October 3 debate, Big Bird’s gone back to quieter corners while Windows 8 coverage continues its slow climb.

The results for Windows phone, including the much anticipated Windows Phone 8 release, were too small to measure.

If you search the web for these products, you’ll find lots of coverage. Google news search provides a much higher return on tech news, so it’s not surprising that these terms are more visible in Google news sites. Most folks, however, aren’t searching for news about gadgets and software. Google Hot Trends shows the current topics in high demand. People are interested in sports, celebrities, and a few disasters and tragedies. Their lives are uncluttered by commentary about tech in general and new product releases, unless it’s something from Apple. Watch the trends in the days after Apple’s announcement.

For those of us in the tech marketing trades, it’s good to spend an afternoon with people who don’t give a damn about this stuff. It’s good to remember that, for people are buying these products, technology is a tool and not a goal.

 

More on education and marketing

Online course and textbook company Kno announced that it is offering a line of K-12 textbooks. The materials are available for the iPad and web browsers. Native Windows and Android apps are in the queue.

Kno has partnered with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, one of the major textbook publishers in the world. If you browse over to the HMH web site on your iPad (because you want to see how things look), you can find the catalog for each grade and subject area:

If you click Browse, you can see what they have to offer:

Flash doesn't run on an iPad. It also does not run on Android, so that you can't browse the catalog from your Android phone or tablet.

This is not an auspicious beginning for Kno.

Did Linux miss its moment again?

This morning's news includes a note that preorders are available for Spark, the open KDE tablet. To which the tech press, behaving like political reporters responding to the next not-Mitt,  proclaims that ebruary seems to be shaping up to be the month of Linux tablets.

Um, no.

Unless you think that two Linux tablet announcement is a big deal.

Linux users have been saying for years that this is the year that companies and civilians will adopt Linux for desktop systems.

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="580" caption="Google Trends for Linux desktop"][/caption]

Even with new, slick renditions of Linux from Ubuntu, Mint, and others, it just never got the respect or traction that Linux advocates sought. It's too bad. Linux is a very good, solid, secure desktop operating system. It runs well on older, less powerful systems. It just never made it to your aunt's computer.

And, then came the iPad. The tablet runs a deeply proprietary operating system from Apple. It owns the mind share, even if its market share is slipping. Some forecasts suggest that tablet sales will pass desktop/laptop sales within three or so years.

Android, Google's tablet and phone operating system, is Linux-based and open source, but the interface is defined by Google and the hardware manufacturers. There are options to load various custom ROMs on tablets, of course. All the same, it's all still the province of hackers and hobbyists.

Linux still owns the server environment, including pretty much everything that makes the web the web. The story remains, however, is that not only did Linux miss the chance to claim the desktop, the desktop computer itself may be moving to the back of the pack.

Miss a minute, miss a lot.

3+1 things about the tablet wars

Apple doesn't have to worry too much about the Kindle Fire or Nook Color or their kin. The people who buy a tablet based on price will still wish that they'd bought an iPad.  The people who buy a Nook have a specific reason for doing so and most will be happy with their choice. Apple would not have reached them anyway.

The people who buy iPads (iPad buyers are exactly who you think they are, but with pets (infographic) | VentureBeat), may not know quite why they did. Or, they probably knew exactly why they bought one, but are embarrassed to give the real answer. (Sort of like saying you bought Playboy for the interviews.)

Apple has managed the near-impossible: they became the generic name for a type of product while retaining their distinct intellectual property rights. (See their series of brutal take-down suits in Europe and Australia  over the Samsung Galaxy. Nilay Patel explains it all in Apple sues Samsung: a complete lawsuit analysis on The Verge.) Apple won the music player (iPod), integrated monitor-system (iMac), and ultra-ultra notebook computer (MacBook).

1. The iPad still defines the terms of engagement. It's iPad vs. not-iPad, even when it isn't. When Jeff Bezos announced the Kindle Fire, he didn't mention the iPad at all. He didn't have to and shouldn't have.


2. Retail strength trumps specs. Barnes and Noble makes better systems than Amazon, but Amazon can and will deliver anything to you effortlessly.
   Buying books and magazines on the Nook and iPad has been a confusing and unsatisfying experience. Amazon figured out how to do that a dozen years ago and no one else is close.


3. When the battle moves to the Cloud, Amazon may be able to get the upper hand. Apple's never done really well with Internet services. iTunes works because they control the start and end of the pipe and there's no chance to get lost.  Their servers rarely handle peak loads well.
   I think that Google should buy Barnes and Noble. Then it would be a fair fight between the Kindle and the Nook.

+1
None of these is a social product. Social media is glued onto each product like an afterthought. Apple doesn't know how to do social. (Remember Ping?)  The promised deep integration of Twitter is nowhere to be found in iOS5. Amazon doesn't even have the native Android Twitter client in its app store. The Nook leaves a bag of tools on the table and says, "Here, you do it."

By the way, there are plenty of tablet comparisons and reviews out there. You don't need one more from me.This one is pretty good: A human review of the Kindle Fire – Marco.org, as is the venerable CR: Kindle Fire and Nook Tablet: How the specs compare.

My own experience is that I pre-ordered a Kindle Fire, received it on Wednesday and boxed it up for return yesterday morning. I have a Nook that's now running CyanogenMod. Much of the time, I bring my iPad to meetings instead of my laptop.

For the next year and probably two, Apple will own and define the tablet market. One of these companies still has to figure  out a coherent social strategy for tablets. If Google doesn't buy B&N, Facebook should consider it make a serious social tablet.

Note to Sam's Club: don't display your home page on your iPad display model

While strolling through Sam's Club, I saw the iPad 2 on display, showing the Sam's Club page.

Not only is Adobe Flash Player not available for the iPad, but it probably won't ever be available.
Rule for all retailers: If you're going to demo your page on the iPad, make sure that it works on the iPad.