Stephen PrenticeWell the MacWorld keynote came (and went). Phil Schiller is no Steve Jobs, but there again, Steve is in a class of his own! After the usual hype of unlikely expectations there were no huge surprises – annual updates to iLife and iWork, a new MacBook Pro (is a battery really THAT interesting?) and DRM-free music on iTunes. First impressions of the new iLife applications are good, and play strongly to the casual, media-savvy users which are Apple’s mainstream users (at least these days). It is interesting to see technology like facial recognition, which has been increasingly prominent on digital cameras over the last 18 months or so, making it into the computing environment, demonstrating the cross-over from the imaging technology space. By the same token, geo-tagging images is another sign of growing convergence between mobile devices and notebooks (we used to think of them as mobile computers, but these things are relative!).
Once the initial excitement has died down it will be interesting to see the extent to which these new means of organising (and to some extent searching) images will start to trickle up the food chain into the enterprise computing environment. Better and easier ways to tag images and to make more effective use of the metadata does open up some intriguing possibilities for mash-up type applications (the first of which will probably start appearing in days!).
Now the focus will shift east towards the delights (!) of Las Vegas and CES. From all the early announcments and leaks it seems that thin (VERY thin) is going to be big (or at any rate, bigger than it was last year) when it comes to flat screens. Not too much of a surprise there. The fact that you can still get a (decent) hotel room in Las Vegas probably says more about the overall trend for this CES – caution and frugality seem to be the order of the day.
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