Opinion: Apple iPad 3 launch: time for Cook to shine

Not that long ago I was sat at the London iPhone 4S announcement writing a live blog as several of the company's big wigs went through the phone that wasn't the iPhone 5 but that did become a truly monumental success for the company.

It was Tim Cook's first major consumer announcement and yet the whole thing felt muted. Cook himself was typically confident and forthright, and yet he was happy to let his team do the majority of the talking.

A few days later and we found out the sad news of Steve Jobs, and the conference was thrown into stark relief.

The questions about the lack of impact without Jobs on stage fell away. Now we knew that Jobs wouldn't only not be at the announcements of the iPad 3 and the iPhone 5, but that wouldn't be around to see the launch of his beloved devices.

iPad 3 launch

Less than six months on and we are only days away from the launch event for what is almost certainly the iPad 3 and all eyes will be on Cook as he kick starts the new post-Jobs era for Apple.

Perhaps that's overstating it a little. Apple has been beavering away on the iPad 3 for a long time, and yet this is one of the two key launches on Apple fans' calendars, with the belated iPhone 5 announcement likely to be later this year.

And it is up to Cook and his team to show that Apple is just as confident that it can flourish in the post-Jobs era as Jobs was confident that Apple would flourish in the post-PC era.

One more thing...

That doesn't mean that Cook needs to take to the stage in a black turtleneck, grandstanding, charming the crowd and closing with "one more thing".

It doesn't even mean that Cook needs to take the bulk of the time on stage; it would be entirely understandable that Apple does not want to fill the vacuum of Jobs with another single figure. Instead it will try to share the load across its luminaries: Ive, Cook, Schiller, Forstall et al.

But what it will need to do is prove that the iPhone 4S announcement was not the new Apple; that the figure-heavy presentation and sombre mood was for the perfectly acceptable reason of Jobs' illness.

Make no mistake, the iPad 3 launch is a massive deal for Apple.

Few would doubt that Apple will continue to go from strength to strength assuming it continues with the perfectionism that marked Jobs' time at Apple.

But this conference is the time for Apple to show that it can still wow the world, leave the fanboys giddy with glee and convert the cynics with the familiar spellbinding mix of showmanship and gorgeous gadgets.

Opinion: Why there's never been a better time to buy a new PC monitor

It's been a ridiculously long time coming, but affordable IPS screens for PCs have finally arrived. That makes right now perhaps the best time ever to upgrade that dusty old flat panel.

And we've Apple to thank for it.

Yup, I know that sounds ridiculous. I'd say both Apple's technological prowess and its overall influence are often overstated. And the relationship between Apple gadgets and PC screens seems pretty tenuous. But I'm convinced it's true.

Once I've explained it all, I reckon you'll agree.

It starts with Apple's shift in recent years to near-exclusive use of IPS panels in its iMacs, iPads and iPhones. IPS, of course is a sort of superior LCD technology. It delivers the best colours and viewing angles by far.

Apple doesn't just use IPS, is shouts about it. That matters because it wasn't very long ago that monitor makers wouldn't dream of putting IPS panels into their mainstream displays. I know this because I asked them and they told me. The problem, they said, is that punters aren't willing to pay even a small premium for a superior panel. The market was extremely price sensitive.

But now Apple is using IPS, punters have heard of it and think it's worth paying for. I doubt most of them really understand why. They just know Apple uses IPS, so it must be good.

The result is that LCD panel makers have tooled up for IPS in a big way. And that, somewhat ironically, means that IPS is actually cheaper than ever.

The best example here is the new AOC i2352vh. Ostensibly, it looks like any cheapo 23-inch monitor. The chassis feels flimsy, the tilt-only stand is even worse. It's the sort of screen you'd expect to see priced a little over £100 and sporting a washed out, substandard TN panel.

Except it cost a little bit more at around £135 and has a genuine, bona fide IPS panel. OK, it's very likely only a 6-bit, rather than 8-bit or 10-bit, IPS panel in terms of native colour depth. But it's still a lovely looking thing with great viewing angles and far, far better than the TN screens that normally dominate this price point.

A little further up the scale, Viewsonic has released a couple of affordable IPSers in the £160 to £200 region. The ViewSonic VP2365-LED is particularly nice.

OK, the DVI and VGA connectivity isn't exactly comprehensive. But it's got a proper, fully adjustable chassis and that gorgeous IPS panel. And not much else. Not tricks. No gimmicks. Just a great screen at a reasonable price.

My only real issue with it and other members of this newly affordable IPS army is that they all buy into the 1080p Full-HD thing. In truth, the extra vertical pixels of the 16:10 aspect 1,920 x 1,200 resolution suit PCs better than 16:9 and 1,920 x 1,080.

Moreover, TN technology has improved enormously of late. There are one or two TN screens that run IPS panels surprisingly close.

So, the absolutely ideal affordable PC monitor remains a little elusive. But things are still immeasurably better now than they were just 12 months ago.

Whether you're willing to doff your cap in Apple's direction or not, right now is simply a great time to pick up a new panel for your PC.

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Opinion: Why AMD can be the catalyst behind cheaper Ultrabooks

It's roadmap time at AMD and the big news is the promise of mobile chips that should give those snazzy new Ultrabooks powered by Intel processors a run for their money.

A little further out, AMD also hinted that ARM processor cores, currently the architecture of choice for smartphones and tablets, might find their way into its chips.

But first, Ultrabooks. A little like Intel's Centrino effort of the naughties, the Ultrabook is a simple but deceptively clever idea that has gained traction with astonishing speed. And jolly nice they are too, with their slim proportions, strong performance and excellent battery life, largely courtesy of Intel's latest Core-i-whatever mobile processors.

There's just one problem. Pricing. Intel's original pitch for Ultrabooks involved slick, super-slim computing for $1,000 or less. Just the thing to give Apple's pulchritudinous but pricey MacBook Air a beasting.

The reality for punter's wallets has been significantly less salubrious, especially in the UK. Retail stickers well above £1,000 have been common and to date only a handful have hit the shelves for under that figure.

Chip pricing to blame

Part of the problem, ironically enough, is Intel's chip pricing. AMD hasn't exactly been snapping at its heels of late. Whenever Intel's only significant competitor for PC processors falls behind, the same thing happens. Intel's prices go up and its thirst to innovate dries up.

Enter, therefore, the long awaited AMD Trinity chip. It's AMD's second performance-orientated APU (Accelerated Processing Unit) after last year's Llano model. And it looks rather promising. On the CPU side, it gets an updated version of AMD's new Bulldozer architecture, known as Piledriver.

As regular TechRadar readers will know, the Bulldozer architecture didn't deliver on the desktop. However, updated to Piledriver specification and inserted into an APU that also contains one of AMD's absolutely excellent graphics cores, now that's a different box of CPUs altogether.

We won't know for sure until we get our filthy mitts on Trinity-powered laptop PCs. But AMD recently showed off an early Trinity system developed in partnership with Compal. It's just 18mm thick and will allegedly sell for under $900.

Moreover, AMD is making some pretty startling claims for Trinity. For starters, it's said to pack double the performance per watt of the existing Llano APU along with 50 per cent better graphics performance. And Llano already has the fastest integrated graphics core of any PC chip.

But the real killer is that AMD claims Trinity will deliver all this along with better battery life than equivalent Intel mobile CPUs. What we're promised then, is a chip that goes harder and lasts longer than Intel but will also bring prices down on Ultrabooks.

Supernote, anybody?

Of course, any system powered by an AMD chip can't actually be called an Ultrabook. That's an Intel-only gig.

But if I was AMD, I'd be thinking hard for a snappy name for mouth-breathing PC shop salesmen to bandy about. Would sir prefer an Intel Ultrabook or an AMD Supernote?

Whatever, the arrival of Trinity will almost definitely be a good thing for everyone, even Ultrabook buyers. If it's any good, it'll bring down prices across the board.

But what of that tantalising prospect of an ARM-powered AMD chip? Well, AMD has been dropping bigger and better hints in recent months about its willingness to consider use ARM cores in its processors. And people have been getting excited.

In truth, there's really not much reason to do so. There's no shortage of competition and innovation in the ARM processor game. The addition of AMD to the battlefield won't make much difference. At most it'll force everyone to up their game in graphics a little. No, it's x86 why AMD can make the most impact. Fingers crossed for Trinity, folks.

Opinion: Ubuntu needs to open up

Ubuntu needs to open up

One of the great things about Linux, and free software in general, is that it doesn't suffer the hyperbole that you find in other parts of the computer industry.

At least not in the user-community-developer sphere that we live in.

Our inbox rarely filters notifications of an imminent security disaster, for example, or messages marked as important because there's a new virus that's going to spread from our phones to our netbooks through our fridges.

If one of these emails does make it through, we enjoy replying by asking what impact this might have on Linux users. The response is nearly always: "What's Linux?"

The software, distributions and hardware emerging from the world of open community development often prefer to float on their own merits rather than those of a PR company. One exception might be the discussion on whether 2012 will be the year of Linux on the desktop, but that was a joke, and one long past its best.

But there's another exception, and that's the perennial Ubuntu.

Ubuntu is breaking away from the tradition of a free software company by ramping up both expectation and anticipation for its own products in ways usually associated with its proprietary competitors.

In some aspects, this is brilliant. The slick and professional HTML5 demo site that accompanied the release of 11.10, for instance, was a wonderful taster of what the Ubuntu desktop feels like. It fulfilled a genuine purpose by helping the uninitiated realise that Linux isn't just the command line or a wasted weekend trying to get audio to work.

It can actually be a slick desktop that looks as good as the latest release of OS X, and far better than that version of Windows where you can't even change the desktop background image. No other Linux distribution puts that amount of effort into trying to win new users, and Ubuntu deserves plenty of new ones as a result of that initiative.

Talkin' loud

Ubuntu has every right to shout about its success. It's still the most popular Linux distribution, and takes great pains to create a user experience that's different from other distributions.

But the team behind Ubuntu is also getting more proactive and shouty about its own largess and self-perpetuating prophesies - and it starts at the top. Mark Shuttleworth, Ubuntu's benevolent dictator for life, wrote on his blog that he wants to see "Ubuntu on phones, tablets, TVs and smart screens everywhere" by the time 14.04 is released (in just over two years).

This statement comes only months after he told the Ubuntu Developer's Conference in Budapest that he wanted to see 200 million users within four years. A good plan, and some nice big numbers, but we have difficulty believing Ubuntu will come close.

Without any question, if either of those goals were realised, we'd be ecstatic. We want Ubuntu to win. But we don't want its advantages and achievements to be lost in a cloud of moon-gazing rhetoric.

Numbers game

If, in 2015, Ubuntu has 200 million users, let's all have a party and we'll say sorry. Ubuntu would be an unprecedented success. But when the Ubuntu team can't even give you an accurate measure of how many people are using the distribution today, or how they're estimating their numbers, how can we trust predictions for the future?

Mark also mentioned, for example, that there are currently around 20 million Ubuntu users, up from their estimate of 12 million in 2010. That's a very healthy result, but why the secrecy in how these numbers are formed?

Why not open up how these figures were calculated and let us see the 10 times growth predicted for Ubuntu over the next few years ourselves. That way we can all celebrate.

This is something the Fedora project does, for example. The Fedora wiki statistics page lists as much data as it can, including unique IP access to the downloads in a week-by-week table, complete with percentage comparisons against the previous release and updates through the package repository.

This page also includes the important disclaimer about how the exact number of users can't be derived from these statistics alone.

But you can't argue against the openness in the statistics or the growth in Fedora's popularity from one release to the next. The numbers are in front of you, and we think the Ubuntu team should be prepared to do the same, especially when they're making such bold predictions for the future of their distribution.

Openness and transparency is what makes open source software development as brilliant as it is, and it's something our competitors can't touch. They should be our weapons of choice when it comes to marketing, not hyperbole.

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Opinion: Steve Jobs: 'insanely great'

I've just found out about Steve Jobs passing away and I'm stunned. I wouldn't say I was totally surprised – after all, Jobs had been suffering from ill health for some time, but it's still a shock.

It's almost unbelievable that it's so soon after he stepped down from being CEO.

Jobs decided to relinquish his role of CEO in August after first being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2004. He had been the recipient of a liver transplant in 2009 and is survived by his wife and four children. He died peacefully surrounded by them.

Various TV news channels seem concerned with whether Apple will continue on the same tack. It will, of course, and although the shadow left by its former CEO will loom large, Apple's future seems assured.

Here, I think we should focus on what Jobs gave us. And for that, there's one voice more qualified than the others. Bill Gates.

Gates and Jobs on stage at the All Things Digital conference in 2007 is one of my all time favourite moments in tech. Two giants of technology, two different but sometimes similar paths. But still a shared appreciation of each other's strengths and what each had brought to the industry.

"For those of us lucky enough to get to work with him, it's been an insanely great honour," said Gates. "Steve and I first met nearly 30 years ago, and have been colleagues, competitors and friends over the course of more than half our lives,"

"I'm truly saddened to learn of [Steve's] death," he said. "Melinda and I extend our sincere condolences to his family and friends, and to everyone Steve has touched through his work."

Jobs founded Apple with Steve Wozniak and released the world's first so-called PC, the Apple II.

He was a perfectionist and kept to his ideals – he didn't want Apple products on the market if he didn't believe in them. He didn't bow to commercial pressures.

He wasn't on his own though; as my colleague Patrick Goss says, Sony founder Akio Morita was "renowned as a man with a spark of genius and the capacity to change his company's direction if he thought it appropriate." This guy went against the recommendation of his engineers to put the Walkman on the market.

Jobs' 2005 Stanford commencement speech was, according to our writer Gary Marshall, "typically Jobsian, smart, funny and serious".

"Have the courage to follow your heart and your intuition," Jobs said, explaining how his cancer diagnosis had affected his world view. "They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary."

I think that, in time, Jobs will be remembered as the guy who invigorated the mobile phone market with the iPhone - he certainly gave its competitors something to think about. We wouldn't have Windows Phone 7 without the iPhone. Would we have Android? It's doubtful.

Apple certainly also reinvented the MP3 player market with the iPod in 2001, but because of the explosion of the phone as an entertainment device, that may be left as a footnote.

What cannot be in dispute is that he returned to Apple in 1997 after the acquisition of NeXT - when it was virtually bankrupt - and completely reinvented the company.

Over the last decade-and-a-half, Jobs' stewardship has seen Apple produce one of the most stunning comebacks in business history, culminating with overtaking Exxon Mobil as the world's most valuable company in August.

As Gary Marshall said then, it was the beginning of one of the most incredible chapters the technology industry's ever seen. "On his first day back... he asked executives to tell him what was wrong with the stricken Apple. After some mumbled replies, he jumped in: 'It's the products!'"

And it was the products he reinvented. The original iMac was first, followed by the iPod in 2001. But it was in January 2007 he really made us rock with the original iPhone announcement. I remember being at CES in Las Vegas when the Macworld press conference was ongoing.Suddenly everything else seemed like dust.

That was an incredible moment. I can't describe how different it felt from everything that had gone before. It made me sit back from my laptop and simply think: everything has changed.

It showed that Jobs cared about what products looked like. He cared about how people used them. He was a brilliant guy and his legacy will be felt, as Gates says, for "generations to come."

Steve Jobs, former Apple CEO, born February 24, 1955, died October 5, 2011

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Opinion: Why you should buy a 3D PC monitor - and it's not for 3D

Why you should buy a 3D PC monitor

What started out as a small whine - a barely audible fizzing whisper in the background - has now become an unmistakable rushing noise. Soon it will be a deafening roar.

I speak of the air rapidly escaping from the 3D bubble, and by that I'm referring to stereoscopic 3D, not 3D graphics rendering.

Of course, you wouldn't know it from the relentless onslaught of 3D-enabled products. Whether it's tablets with 3D cameras or smartphones with lenticular screens, the sheer momentum of 3D freight train will keep pushing new gadgets and devices down the product-release track for a while yet. But never mind bursting bubbles and runaway rail vehicles, the point is that the 3D revolution is over before it's really begun.

By all accounts, sales of 3D-capable HDTVs are already on the wane. Meanwhile, even the marketing might of Hollywood can't convince punters that 3D movies are the next big thing.

On the whole, 3D movies have tanked. Even when they do score, reports suggest movie-goers prefer the 2D version of 3D movies at a rate of two to one.

Still, there's at least one unanticipated benefit for the PC platform in the form of improved LCD monitor image quality. All the 3D hype and hoopla might just have been worth it after all.

Lack of progress

The problem with PC monitors, you see, is a lack of technical progress and choice. Yes, really. The huge array of panels at your local PC store, all plastered with stickers proclaiming unimaginable feats of image rendering, is an illusion. Take a closer look and you'll soon discover that the LCD monitor market has largely concentrated around a very narrow set of specifications and technologies.

Put simply, almost every remotely affordable monitor has a TN panel with a native resolution of 1,920 x 1,080 pixels. TN panels are the cheapest, but also offer the poorest results by every image quality metric save pixel response. Meanwhile, that 1080p native resolution may be plenty for £100 worth of 22-inch screen, but it's a lot less satisfactory extended to 24-inch and beyond.

As it happens, the latest 3D-capable monitors don't address any of that. They too are almost exclusively 1080p TN screens in various sizes, but what they do deliver is 120Hz refresh rates - double that of a standard PC monitor. It makes an enormous difference.

Find that hard to believe? I'm right with you. Bigging up high-Hz refresh rates is one of the more odious marketing strategies used to flog HDTVs, and the benefits of 200Hz over 100Hz are pretty marginal.

Moreover, if you do the maths based on the pixel response of a modern PC monitor, increasing the refresh rate beyond the standard 60Hz seems futile. After all, if the full white-to-black response rate of most LCDs is roughly in the 15ms region, anything above 60Hz ought to be fairly redundant. The LCD panel simply won't be able to respond quickly enough.

Then there's the debate over how many frames per second the human eye can truly perceive. Modern cinema remains at just 24 frames per second. It's true that projectors with triple-shutter blades are commonly used, resulting in 72 images per second, but the number of different images displayed per second remains 24, which is enough for fluid motion.

A lovely thing

It's all fascinating stuff, but what I can tell you with absolute certainty is that a 120Hz monitor is a lovely, lovely thing. Suddenly, everything you touch or tweak with the mouse pointer moves more smoothly. Your whole PC feels more responsive. It's an absolutely unmistakable effect, and once you've experienced it for the first time you won't want to go back.

Let me be clear about this - I'm not talking about dancing around the virtual battlefield of a popular online game and appreciating the benefits in terms of improved hair-trigger responses. I'm talking about juggling windows on the desktop and scrolling web and document pages - routine stuff we all do every day.

That's all very well, you might be thinking, but slightly smoother computing is no big deal. To which my response would be: try it before you knock it.

I personally didn't expect the increase in desktop refresh from 60Hz to 120Hz to be perceptible, much less beneficial. In fact, if it wasn't necessary to run the desktop at 120Hz (rather than merely running certain applications at increased Hz) in order to test some of the latest 3D gubbins on the PC, I likely would not have noticed the difference.

But it is, and I duly did. Now I need a new monitor.

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Opinion: Windows 8 could make you rethink buying iPad 3

Let's make something clear. I love iOS. I use it every day. But now more details on Windows 8 have emerged, Microsoft's new OS could pose a very real challenge to Apple's tablet supremacy as well as the exponential growth of Android.

Let me explain. Despite slow sales, Windows Phone is a surprisingly good phone OS. If you're guffawing at that last sentence, we reckon you probably haven't used it.

• Windows 8: everything you need to know

But Microsoft isn't just going to stick a variant of Windows Phone onto tablets, but onto every new PC as well, as part of Windows 8. And Microsoft's new OS has a potentially game-changing trick up its sleeve.

Microsoft isn't redesigning the Windows that we all know. Indeed, Windows 8 will have a desktop that's actually very similar to Windows 7. But it will be overlaid by the Windows Phone-style interface. Two operating systems in one, you might say. And that's actually going to propel Windows 8 devices past their competitors in terms of do-it-all devices.

SEAMLESS: Windows 8 tablets will enable you to move directly between a Windows Phone-style interface and a standard Windows desktop

The iPad is a terrific device and is supreme in terms of apps, support and games. But it's not a workhorse. I know, because I use one every day. Yes, you can write stuff in Pages, do presentations and get your work email.

But it's just not as effective as a Mac or PC at doing serious work. If you disagree with this statement, we simply point you to the fact you can't attach an image in the Mail app or that sharing files between apps is still very limited.

While Apple is introducing iOS-like interface tweaks in Mac OS X 10.7 Lion (and wants to preserve Mac sales), there's still a massive opening here. Something with the flexibility of Windows but the simplicity of iOS. And yep, Windows 8 has both.

A tablet for all purposes

Suddenly, you could have one tablet that could do everything. You could use the Windows Phone-style touch interface on the sofa or the train, arrive at the office and plug it into a screen, keyboard and mouse. And instantly, there you are in the traditional Windows desktop with access to all the same stuff.

Now that's something we'd like to have.

It's actually the second masterstroke of Windows 8. The first was made at CES, with the announcement it would move beyond the traditional AMD and Intel platforms and run on ARM-based silicon.

That means the first Windows 8 tablets could be packing the quad-core chips that will be coming from various manufacturers like Qualcomm and Nvidia later this year. It's also meant that Intel and AMD have had to seriously up their game in terms of mobile architectures.

Longer term, that will mean more compute power at the same time as giving longer battery life. And, of course, being supported by such a massive spread of manufacturers is great news for Microsoft.

Finally, Windows can emerge from the shadow of the PC as we know it.

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