Amazon Cloud Drive

Amazon has just launched an online storage service called Amazon Cloud Drive. It can be accessed through a web browser and from any computer, any operating system and by mobile devices too. OK, so that's not unusual, but it is free and you get 5Gb of online storage space for all your files. What's more, if you buy an MP3 music album from Amazon your free storage space gets bumped up to 20Gb, and you can  store your music online too. Just imagine, you can buy MP3 music and store it in the cloud where it can be accessed by any internet-connected device you own!

To claim your 5Gb of free online storage and start uploading files you just need to go to Amazon Cloud Drive and sign in with your Amazon store login name and password. If you've never ever bought anything from Amazon (is there anyone that hasn't?) you can sign up. If 5 or 20Gb isn't enough for you, it is possible to purchase larger amounts of storage ranging from 50Gb ($50/year) to 1Tb ($1000/year).

If you buy a music album from Amazon in MP3 form there is an option to have it placed in your online storage. You can then download it or play it whenever you like. In fact, Amazon has a Cloud Player which works in any web browser and there is an Android app too. Using Amazon Cloud Player you can play your music purchases from anywhere by streaming them over the internet. When you log into your Amazon account you'll see a link to the Cloud Player at the top of the page.

This raises questions of legality and it is a gray area that isn't very clear. Are you allowed to do this or not? More to the point, will the music companies allow it?

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Download problems with the Mac App Store

The Apple Mac App Store must work in a strange way because it is causing problems for some people, me included. Some people have found that they can't download any apps. They can get on to the store and click the button to get the app, but then nothing downloads, or it starts and then stops. Some people downloaded apps, but then couldn't update them when they were notified of updates. Here are some solutions for people having problems with the Mac App Store.

There is an article on the Cnet website that might be useful called Mac App Store downloads hanging related to Boot Camp. Apparently if you have Boot Camp set up on your Mac then the App Store might not work properly.

There is also an article in Apple's support database called Mac App Store: Unresponsive after clicking Updates icon. There is some advice that's worth trying.

Searching the web turned up someone who found that changing the MTU network packet size in his router to 1500 solved the problem.

I struggled for a while and then hit upon a different solution. I have an SMC router with an ADSL modem and an Apple AirPort Extreme router for the Wi-Fi:

Mac --- Wi-Fi---> AirPort Extreme --- LAN cable ---> router/ADSL modem

I couldn't download anything from the Mac App Store, even though I could browse the web with Safari, Chrome and so on. I I took the LAN cable and plugged it directly into the Mac instead of using Wi-Fi, cutting out the Wi-Fi and AirPort Extreme. The App Store worked great and downloads were really fast.

Mac --- LAN cable ---> router/ADSL modem

It seems that something in the Mac's Wi-Fi or AirPort Extreme was blocking downloads from the App Store. Whether this solves your own problem is anyone's guess, but it is worth trying.

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Cheap software in the Mac App Store

The latest Distimo report is out and it has some interesting facts and figures about Apple's Mac App Store. For example, the average selling price of the top 300 apps is $11.21, or as we say over here £6.91. That is a very low price and perhaps it has something to do with the success of the App Store. It's obviously easier to shift a lot of cheap software than expensive items and people are always on the lookout for a bargain.

This is great news for consumers and it would be fantastic if the App Store continued to supply low cost software, but is it such good news for developers? It's a bit of a gamble pricing a product very low in the hope that a sales high volume will compensate this.

You often see headlines and stories about the massive number of downloads that products get and the huge revenue that some companies earn, but the really interesting statistics are never revealed. I wonder whether a small number of people are making a lot of money and the vast majority are making very little. It's just a suspicion on mine.

There are 300,000 apps in the iOS app store (iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch), but how many can you find? Start iTunes and browse the store and you'll find a few hundred, perhaps a thousand a most, and these are apps of the week, top free/paid lists, highlighted ones and so on. There must be tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands that Apple never highlights on the few pages it dedicates to apps in the store and I'd like to know how many sales they get.

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Conflicting iPad buyer surveys

Just sitting at McDonald's reading through the latest headlines on my RSS feeds and I noticed a couple that immediately stood out. Both are articles at Apple Insider. The first one is titled Survey says 70% of first iPad 2 buyers own original iPad, but the second one says Apple attracts 70% of new buyers with iPad 2 launch - survey. So one says 70% of buyers already own the original iPad and the other says 70% don't. Which is right? They both are and it just shows that you can always find statistics to support any point of view you like.

They were both surveys that looked at the people queuing up to buy the newly launched iPad 2. There were big queues at some Apple stores and they ran right around the block - hundreds of people. The two very different survey results show that the makeup of these queues can vary greatly.

The big problem with articles and surveys like these is that some people will read just one and use it to support their argument, theory or point of view. One survey like this on its own is meaningless and to get an accurate picture of iPad 2 buyers you would really need to perform 100 surveys and then combine all the results.

The headlines of these articles aren't wrong, they are right, but they don't actually mean anything.

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Samsung rethinks its Galaxy Tab

Anyone can be a blogger (hey, look at me!) and anyone can post their thoughts, ideas and comments online, but how many are worth reading? There's a lot of rubbish posted on the web and it gets depressing and irritating reading it. I subscribe to lots of RSS feeds to keep up with the latest news and the Apple ones are the most irritating. An article titled "Samsung Gets iPad 2 Envy" starts off with the sentence "Samsung Electronics is already rethinking its Galaxy Tab lineup after the unveiling of Apple's second generation iPad." Doesn't everyone rethink everything? We'd still be swinging from trees with the rest of the apes if we never rethought anything we do and looked for better ways of doing things.

Didn't Apple rethink the iPad to come up with the iPad 2? It thought "How can we make this better next time around?" It will rethink the iPad 2 and ask the same question to come up with something even better for the iPad 3. Samsung is rethinking its Galaxy Tab lineup just as Apple is rethinking its iPad, iPod, iPhone, MacBook and iMac lineup. Car manufacturers are rethinking their cars in order to come up with better cars, chefs are rethinking their recipes to come up with even tastier ones, television manufacturers are rethinking their TVs to come up with improvements that will enhance the next generation. Everyone rethinks everything and it's the way technology progresses.

Here's another quote from the article, "We will have to improve the parts that are inadequate, " said Samsung. Once again, this is something everyone does and it's not just Samsung responding to Apple's iPad 2. I'll wager that the iPad 3 will have a better screen, perhaps a retina-type display, or a better camera with a higher resolution. After all, the back camera takes photos that are less than one megapixel! Apple will improve the parts that are inadequate when it designs the iPad 3. Everyone does this. The parts on a device produced last year are inadequate compared to what's available this year or next year, and so on.

The difference between Samsung and Apple is that Samsung is thinking out loud and sharing its thoughts with the whole world. Apple says nothing and keeps quiet. Both companies are rethinking designs and replacing inadequate parts with better ones though.

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Now is a good time to buy an iPad

It's a great time to buy an Apple iPad and there are two reasons for this. The first is that the iPad 2 has just been announce and it will be on sale in a couple of weeks. The second is that the old iPad is being sold off cheaply. So you have the opportunity to buy a top of the range new specification iPad or to save some money and buy the existing model at a cut down price, saving you lots of money. It's rare to get a bargain at the Apple store, but it's one of those occasions right now.

A 16Gb Wi-Fi iPad used to cost £439 in the UK, but in the Apple UK store right now it is just £329. That's a huge saving and let's face it, the original iPad is still a great device. That price point seems just about right and it's a shame it didn't start off at that. Mind you, the high price doesn't seem to have harmed sales. The mobile phone operator Orange is offering the current 3G iPad for just £99 with a two-year contract.

Presumably this is a limited offer that is designed to clear the warehouses of old stock and when they're gone they're gone. It would be surprising if they were still on sale a month from now, so grab one while you can. The new model isn't in the Apple store yet, but the price is likely to be the same as the old one used to be £439 for the bottom of the range model.

The new iPad looks good and the main benefits are that it has front and rear cameras. These are video cameras and they should not be confused with still cameras though. You can take photos with the back camera, but with a resolution of less than 1 megapixel, is it worth it? I've not seen a digital camera with such a low resolution for about 10 years. Where on earth did Apple get it from? It should be fine for shooting video clips though. The only snag is that the iPad is a bit big to use carry around a video camera.

The second benefit of the new iPad is that there is a dual-core processor on board and this will boost the performance. Having two cores does not mean that applications run twice as fast because they tend to run on one core. It does make the system more responsive though because if one core is tied up with a task there's always the other one. I wonder if iMovie and GarageBand, now both on the iPad, are designed to use both cores simultaneously.

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