Siri is a voice to text system that allows you to naturally ask Siri a question and most of the time Siri responds with a good or suitable answer. If Siri can’t help then it will suggest that you perform a web search.

What you first have to understand with Siri is that it has a limited vocabulary of around 5,000 words. Although this is a lot in terms of a voice to text system, it’s not a lot when you think that the Oxford English Dictionary contains words for over 170,000.

Siri doesn’t respond well to multiple questions.
If you provide Siri with limited information, it then asks you a second question, and you answer the second question, it seems to treat it as a new question. e.g. ask Siri where 1 Infinite Loop is in California.

Mixing words and numbers doesn’t go down well with Siri
Ask Siri something like what is the full price of the iPhone 4S in the UK and it seems to get a little confused with what you actually said.

Likewise if you ask it where 4 Bloomsbury Square in London is, it doesn’t understand the number 4

Ask Siri where you are and how to get home
If you tell Siri you’re lost, it says it can’t provide any maps or directions in the UK. It can provide them in the US though.

Apple repeatedly lose their iPhone’s in bars, so I thought I’d ask Siri what to do in the event of finding a lost or stolen iPhone.
So it seems Apple things if you find a lost iPhone you want to have a number of meetings about it.

Christmas

I decided to try Siri out to see what Siri knows about Christmas

Father’s day and Mother’s day
I quizzed Siri a week ago over when was Father’s day and Mother’s day. Although Siri came back with results, it came back with the US holidays and not UK holidays, even when using the UK voice.

Testing 1 week later Siri now doesn’t come back with any results on this question…

Siri can’t handle generic questions, it’s vocabulary isn’t wide enough
Siri simply cannot handle a generic question, although it will allow you to search the web.

First man on the moon?
Siri, who was the first man on the moon? Hmmmm, I don’t think so…

What Siri is good for?
Siri is spectacular at giving you people’s birthday’s. It can even create relationships, so if you ask it “When is mum’s birthday” it will lookup your mothers name and provide the birthday. That’s of course providing you have entered all the details in the contact record.

Siri is also good for finding out what appointments you have scheduled

Siri is also good at getting weather reports from Yahoo. Although sometimes Siri can get a little flustered, as though s/he has just been awoken from a deep sleep.

Likewise sometimes she can get the text completely wrong. I put this down to some beta bugs that need to be ironed out of the system at the server end.

Siri has been programmed to sometimes be vague or provide different answers to the same questions, e.g. in “What’s the meaning of life”.

Siri is great at playing music

Siri is great about finding out about products but isn’t quite as good at retrieving the latest news.

Sometimes Siri can get a bit pedantic and stuck in his/her way

What Siri will really get confused with is different meanings for a similar word. e.g. Soul (as in Soul Mate), Sole (as in fish)

So there you have it, Siri is still in beta so s/he will get some things wrong. If you really want to get the most out of Siri then try to use it on weather forecasts and anything to do with calendars or contacts on your iPhone. You can eve use Siri to create a reminder, although it will create it as a Task and not a reminder. I’m sure Apple can start to iron out some of these bugs and improve Siri. Although the UK voice for Siri was recorded about 5 years ago, and I suspect similarly other language voices may not be that new either.

Will Siri’s UK male voice be changed or will they have the same voice-over artist record additional strings? Ultimately it would be good to be able to choose a female voice for the UK. You can choose the US voice but then the amount of words it understands based on accent tend to drop percentage wise. I think Siri is a pretty good product as it stands already, it’s certainly better than the Android equivalent and hopefully will improve over time.

Changes include

This update contains over 200 new features, including the following:

Notifications
◦ Swipe from the top of any screen to view notifications in one place with Notification Centre
◦ New notifications appear briefly at the top of the screen
◦ View notifications from lock screen
◦ Slide the notification app icon to the right on the lock screen to go directly to the app

iMessage
◦ Send and receive unlimited text, photo and video messages with other iOS 5 users
◦ Track messages with delivery and read receipts
◦ Group messaging and secure encryption
◦ Works over mobile networks and Wi-Fi*

Newsstand
◦ Automatically organises magazine and newspaper subscriptions on Home Screen
◦ Displays the cover of the latest issue
◦ Background downloads of new issues

Reminders for managing to-do lists
◦ Syncs with iCloud, iCal and Outlook
◦ Location-based reminders when you leave or arrive at a location for iPhone 4S and iPhone 4

Built-in support for Twitter
◦ Sign in once in Settings and tweet directly from Camera, Photos, Maps, Safari and YouTube
◦ Add location to any tweet
◦ View Twitter profile pictures and usernames in Contacts

Camera improvements for devices with cameras
◦ Double-click the Home button when device is asleep to bring up a camera shortcut on iPhone 4S, iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS and iPod touch (4th generation)
◦ Volume Up button to take a picture
◦ Optional grid lines to line up shots
◦ Pinch to zoom in the preview screen
◦ Swipe to camera roll from preview screen
◦ Tap and hold to lock focus and exposure; iPad 2 and iPod touch (4th generation) only support exposure lock

Photo improvements for devices with cameras
◦ Crop and rotate
◦ Red-eye removal
◦ One-tap enhance
◦ Organise photos into albums

Mail improvements
◦ Format text using bold, italic or underlined fonts
◦ Indentation control
◦ Drag to rearrange names in address fields
◦ Flag messages
◦ Mass mark messages as flagged, read or unread
◦ Customise mail alert sounds
◦ S/MIME

Calendar improvements
◦ Year view on iPad and new Week view for iPhone and iPod touch
◦ Tap to create an event
◦ View and add event attachments

Game Center improvements
◦ Use personal photos for your Game Center account
◦ Compare your overall achievement scores with your friends
◦ Find new Game Center friends with friend recommendations and friends of friends
◦ Discover new games with custom game recommendations

AirPlay Mirroring for iPad 2 and iPhone 4S

Multitasking Gestures for iPad
◦ Use four or five fingers to pinch to the Home Screen
◦ Swipe up to reveal the multitasking bar
◦ Swipe left or right to switch between apps

On-device setup, activation and configuration with Setup Assistant

Software updates available over the air without tethering

iCloud support
◦ iTunes in the Cloud
◦ Photo Stream
◦ Documents in the Cloud
◦ Apps and Books automatic download and purchase history
◦ Backup
◦ Contacts, Calendar and Mail
◦ Find My iPhone

Redesigned Music app for iPad

Hourly weather forecast

Real-time stock quotes

Wireless sync to iTunes

Keyboard improvements
◦ Split keyboard for iPad
◦ Improved auto-correction accuracy
◦ Improved Chinese and Japanese input
◦ New Emoji keyboard
◦ Personal dictionary for auto-correction
◦ Optionally create keyboard shortcuts for frequently used words

Accessibility improvements
◦ Option to light LED flash on incoming calls and alerts for iPhone 4S and iPhone 4
◦ Custom vibration patterns for incoming calls on iPhone
◦ New interface for using iOS with mobility-impairment input devices
◦ Option to speak a selection of text
◦ Custom element labelling for VoiceOver

Exchange ActiveSync improvements
◦ Wirelessly sync tasks
◦ Mark messages as flagged, read or unread
◦ Improved offline support
◦ Save a new contact from a GAL service

More than 1,500 new developer APIs

Bug fixes

Products compatible with this software update:

• iPhone 4S
• iPhone 4
• iPhone 3GS
• iPad 2
• iPad
• iPod touch (4th generation)
• iPod touch (3rd generation)

* Normal carrier data rates may apply. Messages will be sent as SMS when iMessage is unavailable; carrier messaging fees apply.

For information on the security content of this update, please visit this website:

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1222

Looking at the price of the iPad and previous pricing, the iPad 16gb WiFi+3G goes for £499, the iPad 32gb WiFi+ 3G goes for £579 and the iPad 64gb  WiFi+3G goes for £659.

Now looking at the current iPhone 4 prices at Apple for

• iPhone 4 16gb – £510
• iPhone 4 32gb – £612

It’s most likely that Apple would be looking at something around the following…

• iPhone 4S 16gb – £499
• iPhone 4S 32gb – £599
• iPhone 4S 64gb –  £699

For the 32gb and 64gb models it’s possible they could go with something like £579 and £679 respectively.

Many millions of people worldwide were looking out for the announcement of the iPhone 5 and were left a bit deflated when there was no iPhone 5 but a newer iPhone 4 modeled on the same design of the iPhone 4.

Apple didn’t re-design the iPhone 4 because quite frankly, the iPhone 4 is the best looking and designed iPhone to date. It’s so good that Samsung and other companies are copying the design of the iPhone 4, like they did with the iPad and iPad 2 to increase their sales.

For anyone thinking there isn’t a lot of new features in the iPhone 4S, the iPhone 4S is evolutionary not revolutionary, here is a breakdown of the new features…

• iOS 5 – greatly overhauled to enhance speed, enhance notifications and a lot more
• Dual-Core  A5 chip, making the device much faster
• All new 8 megapixel camera with better CMOS (almost double the pixels over the iPhone 4′s 5 megapixel camera), f/2.4 aperture and face detection
• 1080P HD Video Recording as standard
• New Notification Message Center and iMessage
• iCloud support allowing you to have all your data in the cloud
• iTunes Match allowing you to have all your music in the cloud
• Siri. The intelligent assistant that helps you get things done. All you have to do is ask
• iPhone 4S supports ALL networks GSM and CDMA in a single phone
• AirPlay as standard
• iPhone 4S is the first phone to intelligently switch between two antennas to transmit and receive, so call quality is better. It also doubles the maximum HSDPA data speeds from 7Mbps to 14.4 Mbps. Which means faster connections, faster loading and reloading, and faster downloads.

The biggest enhancement that everyone will see on a daily usage is the A5 processor as Apple explain “Two cores in the A5 chip deliver up to two times more power and up to seven times faster graphics.2 And you’ll feel the effects. Fast. iPhone 4S is quick and responsive, which makes all the difference when you’re launching apps, browsing the web, gaming and doing just about everything. And no matter what you’re doing, you can keep on doing it. Because the A5 chip is so power-efficient, iPhone 4S has outstanding battery life.“

If you still doubt the A5 chip will enhance the iPhone 4S then “The dual-core A5 chip delivers up to two times more processing power, which makes iPhone 4S even more responsive. Pages load quicker. Gameplay is better. And everything just feels faster.“

So there might not be an iPhone 5 available this year, but these are significant enhancements over the iPhone 4, very similar to the enhancements seen from the iPad 2 over the original iPad.

To compare some of the iPhone 4S features, see the table below

Will many previous iPhone customers upgrade?  I think it will be similar to how many iPad 1 customers upgraded to iPad 2.  Eventually when your mobile phone contracts are up for renewal then many will go for the iPhone 4S.  The die-hard Apple fans will undoubtedly upgrade within the first 3 months of launch.  For anyone upgrading the main enhancements will be the Speed of the dual core processor, the enhanced camera and video recording and perhaps Siri.

Steve, R.I.P and enjoy your time looking down at us all from the great iCloud in the sky.

For the most part the Mac is a good platform, it’s not that disimilar to say Windows.  Both Mac and Windows have evolved leading with innovation as well as taking features from each other.  The big question that I had to ask like most people was, will most of the applications I use be available on the Mac, and if not, is there a suitable alternative?  For me, a good handful of apps were available (and of course being a different platform you have to purchase these again), for the ones that weren’t (like Jasc PaintShop Pro that I use a lot) there’s other applications like Pixelmator and other free alternatives.

For the most part I’m very happy with Mac OS X Lion (and Snow Leopard before that), it’s a good OS.  There’s a lot of good innovation like the gestures on the trackpad that Windows still doesn’t have, dashboard, mission control and more.  I use the Mac primarily for Blogging, Facebook, Google+, Gmail, internet Surfing, Photo Editing and it works extremely well.

What should you look at when buying a Mac?  Don’t go for the entry level model.  When you look at prices you’ll say “£1000+ for a laptop?  I can get a PC Laptop for £399!”.  Yes you can, but it’s an entry level laptop.  It might be a 15″ or 17″ laptop but it’s running a slower processor, less RAM and the build quality is probably pretty plastic.  MacBook Air’s and MacBook Pro’s are much more robust, build quality is superb in a single aluminium unibody (single block of metal hollowed out).  Take a look at a windows based laptop for around £1000-£1300 and then compare those specs to the Mac’s.  If you’re not looking to pay £1000 then quite simply you’re not looking at a high-end laptop, so the Mac’s may not be for you (likewise the better higher-end Windows laptops aren’t for you either).  If you’re okay with paying this amount of money for a laptop then you’re going to get a good laptop.  Get the best processor and RAM you can afford, ensure you get a laptop with an SSD (Solid State Drive) and one that’s the largest your an afford (yes you will need it).

The Mac’s with Snow Leopard have the AppStore as a download, Lion now has the Mac AppStore integrated fully into the Operating System. The Mac AppStore is similar to what you would see on the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch, which offers a lot of inexpensive applications (and games), and is a good first check to kitting out your Mac’s.  Apple do take 30% cut from developers through the AppStore, so you some developers still prefer to do a slightly cheaper version outside of the AppStore and to make a little more revenue per sale. However then you have to know how to install DMG files (which the Mac AppStore is just plug and play), tap on something, purchase it, it downloads and installs automatically without having to do anything else).

So if you think you’re ready, there’s no better time to make the switch or to at least try out a Mac with the Mac AppStore making it so easy.

Oh sheesh! I turned on the iPad and then was up for the next hour watching Twit.tv and the coverage they had as a news breaker.

Now I know why I couldn’t sleep, with something that big brewing.

The writing has been on the cake a long time. Steve’s resignation has been expected due to the pancreatic cancer he had and his liver transplant all within the past 7 years, and the more recent leave of absence suggesting that more health problems might be a foot (or existing ones materialising), but it still comes a shock to the best of us.

Steve also has his autobiography coming out, originally due in 2012 it’s apparently been moved forward to November 2011.

Steve has been visionary throughout the entire Apple process, although Steve is resigning as CEO he is going to still going to be around at Apple as Chairman, but just won’t have the day to day involvement in shaping products that he’s enjoyed for over the last decade.

Hard Disk drives you may not know have been around since 1956 and introduced by IBM.  Hard Drives have grown in both strength and size.  They now have shock protection, parking of heads all built-in but also incorporate imminent failure warning systems.  The sizes have grown massively over the years, and we’re now into terrabytes for some users or gigabytes for most users.

SSD’s are the newt way forward, they’re Solid State Drives, e.g. no moving parts.  No latency on having to spin the disk up to speed, e.g. 7200 rpm (revs per minute) and then having to have a head (needle) touch the disk (which can sometimes scratch the surface and damage it under movement/shock).

Think of SSD’s like a memory chip in terms of Solid State, they’re efficient, their quick, there’s no need to spin up a disc, there’s no need to have a head touch the surface.  If you try to access it, it’s there and ready.  When you take an average laptop that can take easily 45 seconds to 1 minute to boot up to the Operating System, be it Mac OS X or Windows 7, swap the Hard Disk Drive out with a Solid State Drive, and you’ll then see speeds of around 13 seconds boot time to the Operating System.  That’s about 3x times faster than a manual Hard Disk Drive.

The speed gain isn’t only seen on boot up, try to run any large weight application like Word, Excel, PowerPoint on Windows and you’ll find that it loads in <1 second.  If you try to do anything that does very heavy Hard Disk Drive access then this is really where you will see great improvements in reduced wait times.

SSD’s aren’t all that rosy though.  They’re still new for one thing, there’s still no average as they’re new on how long they’ll last.  Most manufacturers of SSD’s claim that they will most likely last less than a regular Hard Disk Drive.  Likewise if they start to die, the suggestion is they will die quickly as opposed to a spinning Hard Disk Drive, although I’m not too sure of that.  On average I find my hard drives in laptops last around 2 years or less, so if an SSD were to last 18 months, then I would still be happy if I could get the speed gain that I really crave as a power user.

The other problem with SSD’s is both price and size.  As they’re new, prices are still high although SSD costs are coming down.  Likewise 256gb SSD’s are within the grasp of most end users but if you want something larger than that, they start to get really expensive.

Which manufacturers make Solid State Drives?  Well there’s a good article over at WikiPedia that shows a comparison of which manufacturers make Hard Disk Drives vs Solid State Drives.

Now both my MacBook Air run an SSD and my Toshiba Windows 7 based SSD laptop, and I’m seeing huge amounts of speed enhancement over regular Hard Disk Drives.  I’ve been running the Macbook Air for around 9 months and the Toshiba for about 1 month.  I simply couldn’t go back to a conventional spinning Hard Disk Drive.  The only problem with costs still being high is that both the MacBook Air and the Toshiba both only have 128gb SSD’s and not 256gb SSD’s.  This really isn’t enough and for a lot of my ‘other’ documents that I tend to have in archive as well as mail PST backups, I tend to still have to plug in a removable 512gb Removable USB Hard Disk Drive, but at least most of my programs are running directly from the SSD speeding up the disk access times.

Before I get flamed by a bunch of Android users, let me say that I have both iOS and Android devices. The first reason is that Apple had a head start. Apple is an innovator and although it wasn’t the first to create a tablet, it was most certainly the first to create a tablet that just worked out of the box, with a complete ecosystem.

Apple have the right ecosystem, they have 400,000+ apps at time of writing this, Android have around 200,000 apps and Apple had a head start in the tablet arena over Google.

The biggest thing after talking to both Apple and Google fans that everyone seems to want is a device that’s upgradable. This is one thing that Apple gives all customers for a good 3-4 years. If you take a look at the iPhone 3G it’s still popular and upgraded to iOS 3, iOS 4. Okay, maybe it won’t be supported by iOS 5 perhaps, but there’s a good 3 years usage out of the device. Now take a look at Android. Samsung botched most of their upgrades for the Samsung Galaxy S, most customers couldn’t upgrade their devices because you had to connect it to Samsung Kies PC software, which just didn’t work properly.

Take a look at Sony Xperia devices, most of these wouldn’t see the light of day for an upgrade. Likewise some HTC devices although more lately have been upgradable, it’s only been because of customer pressure. HTC weren’t going to upgrade some of their phones to Gingerbread until customers forced them.

People want a device that isn’t going to be a brick or die of death in a year or two. Although people change their devices they still want to be able to use them or sell them and get a good return. This is the big problem so far with Android, it’s down to the manufacturer and sometimes not even the manufacturer, sometimes it’s down to both the manufacturer and the mobile operator. Where some customers see upgrades in some countries for a given device but not in others, or sometimes some in the same country get an update where others on another network don’t.

Another good reason as to why Apple have such a good run at the tablet market is if you take a look at other manufacturers, Microsoft still after all these years haven’t produced a single tablet (well if you exclude the WinCe devices), and look at HP, they’ve been in this market space several times in the last decade and pulled out. Palm although they weren’t yet competing in the tablet market, were in the mobile market with WebOS which was then bought up by HP, HP then decided to take part in the tablet industry (again), and have now recently decided it’s going to pull out of the tablet market.

Customers also want a device that’s going to work out of the box, not be complicated to use. Apple have this down to a tee. Likewise if you have previously owned an iPod Touch or iPhone then there’s a zero learning curve if you go to the iPad. With Android however, although it works out of the box, there’s a lot of customisation that can be done, things that can be accidentally turned on and off, or from a user perspective (broken) and that also puts off the non-technical users.

Apple have aimed their sales not at the technical user, but the non-technical user, where Android manufacturers seem a lot of the time to be targeting their products at the self confessed techy.

The other thing to think about is it’s fine to provide a device for every single kind of person out there, but this creates massive fragmentation in the operating system. That in turn makes games and apps break, not just once or twice but regularly. Bad news spreads quicker than good news, and although Apple don’t provide things like flash, the average person out there believes the devices tend to be more stable.

It’s also interesting to see how tablet manufacturer’s try to advertise their product. I have to smile when I keep seeing this advert for the Asus Eee Transformer where they actually show the tablet on the TV advert running out of battery. No worry, just plug it into the keyboard to restore some power. If you have a tablet that is capable of something like 10 hours battery power like the iPad, why would you even want to think about advertising that it WILL run out of battery power? That immediately puts me off buying the Asus tablets and I’m sure it puts off a lot of other people too.

At some point the eco seesaw will change, and it may tip in Googles favour or other manufacturers favour, but currently it’s still tipped towards Apple.

Multi-touch Gestures

• Tons more multi-touch gestures available in Lion

If you try to update some of your Mac apps then you might receive the following error message…

Unfortunately App updates don’t appear to be fully working for some apps and the message that Apple are providing definitely is the wrong message. Am I sure I didn’t purchase Clarity with another Mac AppStore account? Yes, quite simply I only have ONE AppStore account, so the error message Apple are displaying is definitely incorrect.

Just to verify I pulled up my purchase history for the same account and it shows I purchased Clarity on 1st February 2011…

Let’s hope it’s not a wide spread problem and Apple sees it and fixes it soon!