What would Steve have done? Photo: Seerpress

Heat issues, insanely long charging time, misleading battery indicator, LTE that is only compatible with bands in North America, and worse WiFi performance are some of the quirks a potential buyer should weigh up before purchasing the New iPad.

Early adopters of the New iPad have had about two weeks to play around with their new toy now, and many are reporting some quite frustrating issues.

1. The iPad runs HOT. An Engadget test showed that the new iPad runs approximately 10 degrees centigrade hotter than the iPad 2. If I still lived in England I’d consider that a selling point when my hands need defrosting in the winter, but here in Singapore it leads to some nasty sweaty palms while surfing the web. While it is by no means burning hot, it is still uncomfortable if you live in tropical weather.
2. The battery in the new iPad is MASSIVE. Its watt-hour rating is virtually the same as the battery in the 11″ Macbook Air, albeit at a lower voltage. The problem is that the charger for the new iPad has less than a quarter of the charging power compared to the Macbook’s adaptor. Tests from various review sites have confirmed that from 0% charge to 100% charge takes a whopping 9 hours. For your average user, this means if you’ve been using the iPad throughout the day, and the remaining charge is 10% or less, chances are that if you plug in your iPad before you go to bed, it will not have a full charge when you wake up.
3. Heat Issues: Quote from Consumer Reports: ”We ran our test while the new iPad was propped on the iPad Smart Cover, plugged in, and after it had run Infinity Blade II uninterrupted for about 45 minutes. The device’s 4G connection was not turned on, though its Wi-fi link was. The ambient room temperature was about 72 degrees. (Apple recommends not using the iPad in environments over 95 degrees.) When unplugged, the back of the new iPad reached temperatures as high as 113 degrees Fahrenheit. It was only when plugged in that it hit 116 degrees. The hottest areas weren’t evenly distributed throughout the iPad’s back, but were concentrated near one corner of the display as shown in the images taken from the rear of the device above.” To make things worse, while the game was running, Consumer Reports observed that the iPad was unable to charge, in fact, the level of charge dropped. The charger just couldn’t provide enough juice for the load.
4. Ray Soneira, president of DisplayMate Technologies ran some tests on the new iPad’s battery indicator. According to him, when the iPad’s battery meter first shows 100%, the tablet is actually charged only to 90% capacity, which means users could potentially have more than an hour less battery life than if it really was charged to 100%. Apple has since issued a statement confirming that this is true. “My essential point is simply that if the new iPad is fully charged overnight, then my tests show it will run 11.6 hours, which is 1.2 hours longer than if it just charged to 100%, or 10.4 hours,” said Soneira. “This will matter to some users.”
5. Headlines all over the world proclaimed that the new iPad would have LTE. What they didn’t proclaim was the fact that it would only be compatible with North American LTE bands, leaving iPad users in the rest of the world with a radio they would probably never get to use. The company was found guilty of false advertising by Australia’s competition authority for promoting the iPad 3 as a 4G device even though it’s incompatible with Australian LTE networks. Apple is now offering refunds to anyone in Australia who might be disappointed. It looks like the rest of the world will just have to use their new iPad on 3G.
6. Tablet PC Review has discovered that the new iPad has even weaker WiFi reception than the iPad 2. If like me you were already experiencing bad reception in certain parts of your house, consider buying a bigger antenna for your router.

So, does this mean you should look for another tablet? All said and done, the New iPad is arguably the best tablet out there at the moment, and most of these issues are not deal breakers, for me anyway. The one issue that really could potentially be a deal breaker for me is the charging time, and the fact that the battery actually discharges when plugged in under a heavy load. Insufficient testing cannot be blamed for this, as any first year university electrical/electronic engineer would have been able to calculate on paper the charging time given the capacity of the battery and the output of the charger. It really makes me wonder if Steve would have released the iPad 3 with the same charger knowing the recharge time. Is this one of the first signs of Apple being run by Tim Cook, an Operations Person instead of Steve Jobs, a product person?

We wanted to hear from developers what it’s like publishing their wares on the new Mac App Store.

So we talked to Aayush Arya of Caramel Cloud Software, a brand-new software company based in India. Caramel Cloud just published Notificant, a reminder app that lets you send notices to an unlimited number of Macs. So it’s like Growl, but for multiple machines.

Q. What’s the story behind Notificant?

A. While I was working at Robosoft, one of the things that frustrated me was that I could not access several websites due to restrictions placed on the network. Given how much time I spend researching (read: wasting time) on Twitter and elsewhere, I really longed for a fast, efficient way to send links back to the Mac at my house, so they would be on the desktop when I got back. I used email for this at the time but it was very limited, by its very nature, and it resulted in a lot of useless clutter. I am also an awfully forgetful person and I wanted an app to remind me of stuff to do on my Mac’s desktop, which I spend most of my day in front of. And that was the birth of Notificant (which at that time I had dubbed “Notifi”).

Q. How long did it take to build?

A. It took us four months to go from concept to final product, and then a couple of days to get Apple’s approval (yes, it was that quick). When Apple announced the Mac App Store, we were nowhere near ready to ship the final product by January 20 (which is the date we’d expected the Mac App Store to be released). But we tried our best, and I had an absolutely crazily talented team to work with, and we got it done, even when the eventual deadline ended up being 15 sooner than we had been gunning for.

Q. Have you ever developed a Mac software before? How do you think the App Store is affecting developers and apps?

A. I have never developed any applications before, Mac or non-Mac, unless you count the ones we made in high school to exercise our skills (and mostly just to gain bragging rights in the classroom). I think the Mac App Store presents a challenge for existing Mac developers, because there is no provisioning for transitioning existing users over to the new way of doing things without making them pay again for the privilege. There are also some issues surrounding piracy being much easier when there is only one global security blanket covering all applications in the store.

For new developers, however, or for existing developers releasing new applications, it represents a tremendous opportunity. We would have launched our application using traditional methods of distribution even if the Mac App Store hadn’t come about but it made the whole process a lot easier and faster for us. It does restrict a lot of your freedoms and could use improvement in certain areas, but for the most part, we are glad to be on it.

Q. Would you consider developing apps for outside the App Store?

A. The future is long and we cannot predict with certainty what we might want to do a few years down the line but we have no short term, or even foreseeable long term, plans to do any development outside the Mac and iOS App Stores. Not while we are developing on Apple’s platforms, at the very least.

Q. After seeing the prices on the App Store, how do you feel about setting the price for Notificant at USD4.99?

A. We are really happy about the price. We want every Mac user to use Notificant and benefit from it and therefore did not want to price it out of anyone’s reach, but we did not want it to be at $1 or $2 either. We are charging a one-time fee for the app itself and the web service backing it up is made available free of cost, but we are paying monthly fees to keep it going. We think we struck a good balance there, but we’ll have to wait some more to see how it all shakes out.

Q. How’s the first weekend sales like?

A. One of the things we could not do before the launch because of our mad dash to the finish line was marketing. The first time anyone heard of Notificant outside the company was on January 6 itself, and maybe on January 10, for most of the current customers. So the launch day and weekend sales were nothing to write home about, but we came into our own as soon as the weekday kicked off, thanks to some great coverage by various publications. We’ve made our entry into the Top Paid applications list on the American, Canadian and French versions of the store and hope to make it to the Top 10 eventually.

Q. How did you promote Notificant?

A. So far, the only promotion we have done is through Preshit and my individual Twitter accounts and the company’s official one, alongside the blog post announcing Notificant. Besides that, we have reached out to and been contacted by various publications and some of them have resulted in news blurbs and reviews, most notably on The Loop, MacStories, The Next Web and Smoking Apples. We have not done any paid advertising so far but may look into the possibility in future.

Q. Is there a promo code program for Mac apps like with iOS apps?

A. Not yet, there isn’t. We expect that Apple will add it eventually.

Q. What made you decide on a career change from writing about Apple to developing apps?

A. I first thought of starting a software company when I had just gotten out of high school. I was really good at programming, but I was poor at mathematics and science, both of which were required subjects to take up any software-related course in college. So I dropped the idea. Then when I started writing for Macworld, I started getting the itch again and I began to research ways to get into it.

The one big push was the launch of the iPhone, as you might expect. That, and the launch of the App Store, really took my aspirations sky high. Eventually, I got myself inducted into an established software development company in India called Robosoft and worked there for three months as an intern. Then I left them to start on my own. That was five months ago and here we are today.

As Steve Jobs unveiled the ‘magical device‘ in Cupertino, fans all over the world have been waiting with bated breath for the iPad to hit their shores.

After what seems like ages, today is the day, Apple fans in Singapore and Hong Kong will finally be able to get their hands on the iPad .

iPad was unveiled across various resellers in Singapore and Hong Kong. Excitement in Singapore was palpable, with reports of it being sold out, emerging within minutes of opening the shop. This was the case in Hong Kong too.

Images of long queues in front of Apple Reseller shops are surfacing from Twitterati. And folks are rushing from one shop to the other to get their hands on shiny new iPad.

For those of you, unable to join or follow this frenzy, fret not. We are presenting some choice tweets, videos and pictures from iPad release in Singapore and Hong Kong.

Hong Kong

Wow! It’s almost as crazy as the McDonalds-Snoopy frenzy of ’97! - @JayOatway

Just one more picture showing how far the line goes into exchange square. http://flic.kr/p/8kW6FQ – @midnitie:

Estimated reports for iPad stock this morning in Hong Kong between 2500-5,000 units – @neonpunch

Singapore

#iPadSG queue at Challenger Jurong East. 90 units! http://yfrog.com/0mdjokj http://yfrog.com/6b1y6cj – @smashpop

Queue outside epicentre Ion http://yfrog.com/bftmrjj http://yfrog.com/jdy37eaj – @burnflare

I’m tempted to go out and buy an accessory I barely need to feel included in today’s #iPadSG festivities – @yjsoon

Videos

From neonpunch

iPad unveiling at Multimedia Integrated store in Singapore

Rates

[Image Credit: Newstatesman]

Shanghai's new Apple Store (credit: myuibe)

Asia can’t get enough of Apple’s Macintosh. The company reported a 160% year-on-year jump in Asian Mac sales after selling a record-breaking 3.47 million computers in its third quarter ended June 26.

Korea and China were the fastest growing Asian markets for the Mac, rising by 184% and 144% respectively. Hong Kong Mac sales grew by nearly 100% while Mac sales globally rose by a third. Asia was Apple’s fastest growing market for Macs.

The Mac helped Apple release a blockbuster set of third quarter numbers, with USD3.25 billion in earnings for the period. Apple’s stock is up by more than 2% after its earnings beat Wall Street estimates, which were lowered because of ‘Antennagate’ surrounding iPhone 4.

Apple COO Tim Cook did a conference call yesterday that contained some interesting nuggets about how Asia consumes Apple products. Here’s a round-up from across the web:- US Mac unit sales were up 40% in the Americas compared to 71% in Asia [Apple Insider]

- Wall Street analysts expected Apple to sell 3.2 million Macs globally but the company sold 3.47 million [Thomson Reuters]

- Mac sales grew 160% in Asia-Pacific but rose 66% in Europe [Thomson Reuters]

- Cook calls Asian sales “phenomenal”, citing Mac sales unit sales growth in China (144%), Korea (184%) and Hong Kong (almost 100%). and believes the region still has plenty of growth left for the iPhone and iPad. [Mac Observer]

- 100 million iOS devices have been sold in total, with strong growth in Asia, Europe and Japan for the iPhone [Business Insider]

- iPad launches in nine more countries on July 23, including Singapore, Hong Kong and New Zealand. [Apple]

And here’s Apple’s PR release on its earnings.

Bonus: Check out Flickr user myuibe’s gallery of Apple’s new Shanghai store.

Take for example Orsiso and 2359 Media. Orsiso’s social networking application created using the Flex platform is an ingenious product, that’s really helpful in managing your various social networks. Flex provides an open source framework to build their Rich Internet Application(RIA) with highly interactive and expressive UI. If you want to know how to develop flex-based applications, and take your product to the next level, you know where to go.

Similarly, 2359 Media’s turnkey mobile publishing platform, which run’s on the iPhone platform, is going to change the way publishers get their content on mobile platforms. With lots of mobile platforms in the market today, developers are usually at a loss to pick one. But when it comes to the iPhone, the glamour and glitz associated with it, and the cool apps that are already built on it, takes it a notch higher.

This is why e27 is bringing you Developer Series 3: Startups and Platforms! You will get to meet 4 of the hottest startups and understand the technologies they are built on. The technical directors of the startups will give you an insider perspective of their startups technology as well as the platforms they are built on.

Event Details

Date:	16th September 2009
Time:	6.30pm – 9.30pm
Location	SMU School of Information Systems, Level 5, Function Room 5.1 (map here)
Sponsored By:
Supported By:
Cost:	FREE!
RSVP:	Fill up the Form Below !!

Programme

Speakers

Jerome Poudevigne, Orsiso

Sofware specialist, familiar with all aspects of software development in a great variety of domains, such as shrink-wrapped software, custom application, enterprise systems, on-board computers, large Web applications.A career spanning five countries – a substantial experience building cross cultural teams. Strategic technology management in companies from 3 to 100 employees. Interested in innovative and adventurous projects, with regional responsibilities over Asia and/or Europe. Specialties. Industry standards such as Java, C++, C, SQL, Web technologies such as XML, PHP, Apache. Databases : Oracle, MySQL etc. Familiar with many development methodologies, from waterfall development cycle to extreme programming, with an emphasis on quality assurance.

Zhou Wenhan, 2359 Media

Zhou Wenhan, Co-Founder of 2359Media.com, will give insights on what application users want on their mobile phones and what are the best practices for developing content driven mobile applications. Prior to 2359Media, Wenhan was a key employee at GetQuik.com, an online marketplace for consumers to order food from restaurants across Silicon Valley.

Gary Teo, SavantDegrees

Gary has more than 7 years of experience in consulting since his co-founding of his software consultancy firm: WITS. Gary has overseen the development and implementation of dozen of e-commerce system, social websites and even open source systems in the course of his work. Gary served as a Web Architect in Ring 2 Communications, where he directed the development and implementation of their corporate web products. Gary is also a lecturer in software development at Raffles Design Institute as well as Raffles College.Gary has more than 7 years of experience in consulting since his co-founding of his software consultancy firm: WITS. Gary has overseen the development and implementation of dozen of e-commerce system, social websites and even open source systems in the course of his work. Gary served as a Web Architect in Ring 2 Communications, where he directed the development and implementation of their corporate web products. Gary is also a lecturer in software development at Raffles Design Institute as well as Raffles College. Gary is currently the VP of Consulting for Savant Degrees.

Tan Choon Ngee, Azaas

Mr Tan Choon Ngee is Director, aZaaS Pte Ltd. He has overall P+L responsibility for the businesses spanning Asia and is tasked to create a profitable product business, develop highly skilled and motivated sales and technical team, as well as the creation of the associated partnerships, business infrastructure and processes required to support the business. Choon Ngee has more than 10 years of IT Sales, Marketing and Consulting experience with leading organizations like JP Morgan and Crimson Logic. Choon Ngee has developed several businesses focussed purely on Microsoft Technologies during this period.

e27: First of all, could you tell us a little about how you ended up living and working in Asia during the past 9 years?

Benjamin Joffe: I love food ending with “i” – sushi, kimchi and jiaozi. And manga too maybe?
More seriously, I was attracted to learning a new language while doing my engineering degree. I wrote my first Japanese character in 1996 and came to Japan first in 1998. I found that I was more active there than back home and decided to came back for work in 2000. I stayed about 4 years in Japan.

While in Japan, I got interested in both Korea and China. I felt I had missed a window for China in 2001 so by 2003 I decided to move to Korea for an executive training with the EU and helping a mobile SNS startup – back in 2003 it was probably too much bleeding edge.

After a year in Korea I wanted to see something new and I decided to go ahead and moved to Beijing.
On the work part, I came across a lot of innovations that initially I thought – like many observers – too local to work elsewhere. Then I realized many concepts were being “reinvented” after a while and found there was an “arbitration” opportunity. +8* is the company I built a company around this idea.

Now I also have better eyes to see beyond the “cultural layer” and understand market structures to see what could work or not in other markets, and how to adapt ideas. It took me 9 years to acquire this “augmented reality” vision.

e27: How did your interest in Asian social networks start?

Benjamin Joffe:

I was working in Japan in 2001 and visited Korea on a business trip. I saw Cyworld and probably asked the right questions – beyond the avatars’ designs. I met the original founder a bit later and we are now good friends. (editor note: both ben and cyworld founder Yong Joon Hyoung are now working together at Cmune)

He helped me to understand that social networks were not so much about engineering as they were about sociology, psychology and design. He can tell you about “Social Process Re-engineering” and “Personal Resource Planning”, then you realize “social networking” is a very basic first step towards what could be done.

e27: QQ and Mixi aren’t exactly as well known as Facebook outside of the countries of their origination. Yet in your slides as well as in recent news, they’ve done significantly better than their western counterparts such as Facebook, can you tell us why this is so?

Benjamin Joffe:

Those services are not well known because it seems the interest threshold from Westerners for looking at an Asian company is around 1 billion USD. This is the revenue of Tencent last year and the valuation of Mixi, DeNA, GREE or Changyou that was the first company to IPO on Nasdaq after 6 months of no IPO. Changyou is a Chinese online gaming company monetizing with virtual goods. This should send a strong signal.

Of course, the concept used by those companies has not changed much between the moment they made 1 million, 10 million, 100 million and 1 billion. There are also a lot of very good concepts making less than 1 billion.

Facebook has been stuck with “low hanging fruits” trying to monetize with ads. There was not enough ads in Korea or in China to make gaming or social networks viable so they tried new models. One of them worked beyond expectations; it was the virtual goods model. The West is very excited about this model now. Cyworld had it for 10 years.

e27: Do you think that Asian social networks such as QQ and Mixi can become as mainstream as Facebook outside of Asia?

Benjamin Joffe:

There are no “Asian social networks”. There are business models, service concepts and companies.
As companies, I think QQ and Mixi have very little chances to succeed outside their home market due to management, culture, finance and competition. However, I think their concepts can work very well if correctly adapted. After all, Mixi started as a localized version of Friendster, so why not the other way?

We published reports on both Tencent and Cyworld that were purchased by companies in US, Germany, France, Russia, Vietnam and more. We also did custom projects for Western companies that tell us that “the best place to learn about virtual goods is Asia”. We also met some people at Facebook and MySpace and shared some ideas with them. Now, Facebook and MySpace have an equally hard time in markets where there is mature and well-financed competition.

e27: What lessons can Asian companies and start-ups draw from the success of these social networks within Asia?

Benjamin Joffe:

Best lessons are that:
(1) You can get paid by users even in markets with low income and rampant piracy. China proved that 5~15% of users paying is enough to make billions. It looks like many people in the West still think “people don’t want to pay for content” even if iTunes and Apple’s App Store proved them wrong. Asian companies have a hard time convincing investors who don’t understand what they do. They should learn that it’s possible to do great things with little money if you focus on monetizing early.

(2) They should also learn that they might build very successful local players by leveraging their local knowledge and the best practices from other markets. One of our clients wants to be the QQ of Russia, another one the QQ of Vietnam and another the Cyworld of the Arab world. Building local or regional champions is easier than world leaders. Remember neither Facebook, MySpace, Google or MSN dominate in China, Japan and Korea.

e27: Do you think Asian social networks will continue with their current success in say, another 5 years time?

Benjamin Joffe:

Cyworld has been around for 10 years and people are growing out of it, waiting for the next thing. Cyworld came around with early ADSL (just a few Mbps) and is trying to migrate to 3D to leverage the super-broadband speed but it’s hard for them to change that much – especially since all founders have left since the acquisition. They are fortunate it is so hard to build a company in Korea they don’t have a lot of competition.

DeNA and Gree are the emblems of 3G services in Japan. In 5 years 4G will be around and it is likely another round of companies will take the spotlight.

I have more confidence in China’s QQ as they are basically “communication infrasctructure”. This is a very solid position – QQ IM starts before the browser! I think Tencent will be around and probably in even better shape as in 5 years China will have maybe 500 million Internet users instead of 300 now. Also, mobile will be better and will help monetize even more.

For other Chinese SNS especially Facebook adaptations I think they might stick for a while as they raised a lot of capital and can survive with that regardless of revenue, offering 5 years of free lunches for their users. Those companies have not really innovated much and only constant innovation can help them survive in such a competitive market. Competition from gaming companies, QQ and Baidu is likely to be stiff.

Benjamin Joffe will be presenting a case study on Asian Innovation at the unConference Singapore 2009.

This article is part of a feature series on prominent attendees of  unConference 2009 on May 16th. Follow the event on twitter here. (event hashtag: #unconf2009)

There are also other similar, but smaller funds announced to invest in Facebook Apps – $10 million fbFund and a Facebook-only fund from Bay Partners.

Read more about this article. Which brings us to this question, who is interested in doing iPhone Apps in Singapore? If you are, drop us a note! :)