Not content with churning out yet another in a long line of MacBook Air clones, Acer’s announced AcerCloud. To be fair, apart from the functionality and Steve Jobs’s presentation, Acer’s service is pretty much nothing like Apple’s. If we totally ignore its PicStream feature, which is nothing at all like Photo Stream, honest, and the ’30 days’ content stream, which is totally different to Apple’s ’30  days’ content stream, it’s like an entirely new thing. Which essentially means Acer used a slightly different shade of blue in its slides.

Look, I know Apple didn’t invent cloud services. I’m not stupid. But this cloning thing is just crazy. What does Acer hope to achieve with this, bar some short-term press and also quite a bit of ridicule? Unlike Apple, it cannot back iCloud with a content ecosystem. More to the point, it’s offering nothing new, something shared by the vast majority of companies in tech.

Perhaps waiting to see what Apple does and copying it will remain a viable strategy for these companies. But the one thing they should be trying to copy is Apple’s ability to iterate. Apple has rarely invented new things, but it has taken existing systems and heavily reworked them. It didn’t invent computers, but the Apple II brought a number of features to home computing that hadn’t before been widely available, in a system that was relatively simple to use. It didn’t invent WIMP-based computing, but Mac OS moved on concepts invented at XEROX in a big way.

MP3 players existed before the iPod, but it was Apple’s device that propelled them into the mainstream, largely through thinking how they should be done, not how they were already done. Apple didn’t invent the smartphone, but it was the first to make one that was a pleasure to use, and that you didn’t want to hurl out of the window, in a desperate hope of hitting one of the UI designers. And Apple didn’t invent the tablet, but it sure feels like that sometimes with the iPad, which was the first of these devices to really work in a seamless fashion.

The first company to start innovating and iterating really has a big chance of grabbing more of the space Apple’s nabbed—not only in sales but also in grabbing headlines for doing new things, rather than just ripping off something that exists. There will be a diminishing space for other players, where only the giants will remain (Samsung, Dell, and so on). Everyone else is, in the long term, screwed—and they only have themselves to blame, the copycats.

Hat-tip: The Verge.

There are plenty of rumours flying around about an Apple television. My hope is that Apple won’t enter the TV space directly—I think doing so is unnecessary and risky, and I can’t see much value that Apple could bring. Instead, I’d like to see the existing Apple TV move from being a hobby to a unit every iOS device owner must own, simply because it’s so fab.

Right now, it’s not there, but it has potential. On its own, it’s a reasonable piece of kit for movie rentals. If your Apple TV’s wired into an amp, it’s a great means of getting music from your iOS devices to your home music system. Using AirPlay, it’s also possible to stream a bunch of content, including files incompatible with iTunes, should you invest in AirVideo or streamtome. (And by ‘invest’, I mean ‘spend a couple of bucks’—it’s not like apps are expensive.) Should Apple power-up the Apple TV and reduce lag, it’s also going to become a great gaming device.

The main sticking point for me with the Apple TV remains television programming. In the UK, TV series are far too expensive (anything up to double what you’d pay for a DVD box-set) and many popular series are absent. The US gets things better, merely being lumbered with overpriced content. One of the very few Apple rumours I’m happy to believe is that TV companies are reluctant to cave to Apple’s demands, in making their shows cheaper or more readily available, because, well, um… THE MUSIC INDUSTRY!

Apple totally destroyed the music industry, didn’t it? Steve Jobs totally wrecked things for those guys, and made Apple far too powerful in that space. Particularly terrible things Apple has done include:

• encouraging more people to buy digital music, rather than just downloading it from the naughtyweb;
• convincing labels to drop DRM, leading to people being able to do what they want with digital music purchases, thereby leading to more sales;
• effectively monetising pirated music, through iTunes Match.

You can see why TV companies won’t cede any measure of ‘control’ to Apple. They might encourage more people to buy digital content, rather than downloading for free! Maybe Apple could somehow figure out how to monetise downloaded content with the video equivalent of iTunes Match, thereby making studios more money! And, um… …  …

No, it turns out I don’t get it either. Maybe those guys just really like shiny discs?

(Note: I know the real sticking point that gets TV companies’ knickers in a twist is Apple’s cut, but NEWSFLASH: a large chunk of something is a bigger figure than all of nothing.)

Gnh. First day of work in 2012 and already I’m getting angry by online reporting. Various sites report citizens of Belarus are now banned from visiting foreign websites, referring to an article published last Friday by the US Library of Congress. The thing is, no-one appears to be asking Belarus. And some comments on the aforelinked articles are interesting:

On The Next Web, ufoby writes:

The article is not quite correct. Yes, the internet is regulated and yes it’s bad. But the regulations don’t have any list of banned websites. At least not yet. So you still can access anything. What regulated now is local businesses that can’t have websites hosted outside Belarus, should only use .by domain name and have a complicated offline procedure of registration. Access is also regulated, but in a different way it’s described here. You can only access internet with the passport. That’s it. It means to install it home you should be registered at a service provider with a passport. To use it in internet cafe you should show passport. Restaurants, cafes and other public spaces are also obligated to ask the passport from anyone who tries to use Wi-Fi.

And on TorrentFreak, Sandra de Palma writes:

I think the law is mis-interpreted by all the blogs and news sites that picked this story up. It says that as a business owner with a web site, your site has to be hosted in the country and that it has to have a .by domain name.

Normal web site users can still access Google, Wikipedia and other web content which is not located in the country.

At the time of writing, BBC tech reporter Dave Lee is on Twitter providing a different take to the existing online reports:

Foreign Office tells me Belarus law does not apply to individuals seeking foreign websites, unlike every blog in the universe is reporting. [link]

Although it’s not a ban on foreign internet, Belarus web law does prohibit visiting the websites of opposition groups. [link]

From what I can tell from this mess, things don’t look great for web use in Belarus, much in the same way they don’t look great in the USA when you take into account SOPA. However, today’s reporting has been sensationalist, with publications more or less cloning existing reports verbatim, without checking alternative sources, not least those in Belarus. Perhaps the reports will turn out to be accurate in the short- or long-term, but it won’t be through investigation—it’ll be through luck, having relied on a single source that may or may not be accurate.

Sarah Perez reporting for TechCrunch on the latest mobile market-share numbers, where iOS accounts for about half of usage:

Of course, it may not be fair to compare iOS directly with the other mobile platforms, given that the iPad accounts for a good bit of Apple’s market share in this slice of mobile data.

Slightly odd comment, given that the same isn’t said about Android devices. Bizarrely, though, depicted a pie chart splitting elements separates the iPad, iPhone and iPod (i.e. devices) but on the Android side separates flavours of the OS (Android 2.2, Android 2.3, etc.). That isn’t very fair, and yet it’s what you get when accessing the OS versions pie chart in the associated Net Applications report. This is roughly equivalent to the desktop version listing iMac, MacBook Air and Mac mini on the Mac side and Windows 7, Vista and XP on the Windows side. Bonkers.

UPDATE: Net Applications has responded to a query about the above:

Our reporting online goes 2 levels deep.  Currently, Apple is a unique case in that it is the provider of both the hardware and OS, and the same OS is used on multiple devices.  We had to make a decision which way to report Apple data – with OS version numbers or device type as the second level of or online reporting.  Most feedback we’ve received has been that device type is more intriguing than OS version number

So the reasoning is “this is what people want”, which means direct comparisons aren’t possible, thereby rendering the data somewhat meaningless. Still, the press seems happy to compare Apple to every other Android manufacturer rather than separating out each vendor—mixing and matching data and massaging figures to a publication’s agenda is how things are all to often. It’s a pity, then, that some of those providing the data aren’t really helping.

Taylor Hatmaker for Tecca, reporting on the 6 biggest technology flops of 2011 (an article with the URL ‘worst-technology-of-2011’):

3. iPhone 4S

Man, that iPhone 4S was a total disaster, wasn’t it? I mean, apart from the record sales and the new technology inside it, obviously.

While it’s no flop when it comes to sales figures, the iPhone 4S remains one of 2011’s biggest consumer letdowns.

So, hang on: the iPhone 4S is not a sales flop, just a consumer letdown? I guess that explains the huge number of consumers that bought one, and why it’s been included it in an article entitled ‘A Year In Fail: The 6 biggest technology flops of 2011’ and not ‘The 6 biggest consumer letdowns for people who were expecting digital unicorns’.

Earlier this year, Apple’s iPad 2 upped its prececessor’s [sic] appeal considerably, slimming the original slate down while speeding it up — but it’s tough to not be disappointed by the iconic company’s most recent handset.

*no new form-factor sadface*

Apple’s newest iteration of the iPhone is certainly nothing to sneeze at — it’s still one of the fastest, best-looking smartphones on the block — but it’s no iPhone 5.

*NO NEW FORM-FACTOR SADFACE*

After spending the better part of the year salivating over a reinvented iPhone with a larger screen, a thinner profile, and other untold Apple-flavored wonders,

All of which were ‘announced’ by rumours coming from unnamed and unreliable ‘sources’, natch, and not Apple itself…

Apple aficionados were presented with the iPhone 4S — a nominal upgrade over the previous model that touted the now much-parodied Siri app as its main selling point.

That is, if we ignore the camera upgrade, faster CPU, and redesigned antenna. But these things count for nothing if the body is the same, clearly.

While Siri is a capable (if at times perhaps too capable) virtual companion, 2011 is still an off-year when it comes to the world’s must-have gadget. Patience is a virtue, and all eyes are on 2012’s iPhone to up the ante.

Because in becoming the fastest-selling Apple iPhone ever, the iPhone 4S didn’t up the ante at all. Still, maybe next year everyone will be happy. Oh no, hang on a sec, next year will be exactly the same, with people predicting summer iPhone-shaped unicorns and getting all disappointed when Tim Cook and chums ‘only’ present a new iPhone, the fools!