One of my 2015 goals is to increase storytelling across online venues, and by more than just writing.
If I could do over the purchase, iPhone 6 Plus would be my pick instead, however. For example, homegrown Apple and Google apps and connected services are absent. Apps choices aren't as mature, and cloud offerings are comparatively meager.
Windows Phone is the weakest among the majors-Android and iOS being the other two. Companies like Apple, Google, and Microsoft sell lifestyle platforms around which someone builds stuff. If they were, I would use Nokia Lumia Icon today for photography and videography benefits.
The smartphone isn't the best I've used, but it fits my Apple lifestyle, where how content and behavior syncs better than if I used, say, an Android device. I started using both services in October. Amazon and Apple make more of your purchased digital ditties available anytime, anywhere, and on anything. Life-changing understates the value.īoth sharing mechanisms are modern in that they better enable contextual cloud computing, which, as I have asserted in the past, is the new current paradigm. While similar to Amazon's cloud program, there is more-sharing personal content, such as calendars and photos. The feature is life-changing.Īpple Family Sharing allows "six people in your family to share each other’s iTunes, iBooks, and App Store purchases without sharing accounts", according to the company. My wife and I now access a single, combined personal Kindle catalog, which will save us beaucoup bucks and encourage reading some of the same books simultaneously. Long-standing problem: Content is tied to the account of the single purchaser, making sharing, say, an ebook with others anywhere from difficult to impossible.Īmazon Family Library shares apps, audiobooks, and ebooks among two primary account holders (presumably adults) and up to four child accounts. Late-year, Apple and Amazon extended usage rights for digital content from one person to others, presumably within a family or household.
The two "A" companies deserve credit for releasing the most important, digital-lifestyle changing products of 2014-and the innovation is as much, if not more, about licensing rights as technology. Note: While the list looks like four, it's five because the first is two combined.Īmazon Family Library and Apple Family Sharing I can't imagine using anything else.įollowing the lead of my BetaNews colleagues Mihaita Bamburic, Ian Barker, Alan Buckingham, Brian Fagioli, and Wayne Williams, I review my year in tech, and unlike 2013 focus on products that released during the year. I present my 2014 personal tech alphabetically, from company name, rather than order of importance-because they all matter. Today, I'm all Apple-13-inch MacBook Pro Retina Display with 512GB SSD, iPhone 6 128GB, and iPad Air 128GB. While commendable the effort, Windows poorly fit my lifestyle. Midyear, I switched out to all Microsoft-buying Surface Pro 3 and Nokia Lumia Icon. 1, 2014, my core computing comprised Chromebook, Nexus tablet, and Nexus smartphone. Looking back on this last day of the year, I wonder how my daily tech changed so much since the first. The next version of Microsoft’s operating system, Windows 10, will include a unified store for both Windows and Windows Phone apps, so making sure the Store is as efficient and as cleanly presented as possible will be essential. Microsoft also intends to continue working to improve app discovery next year, which is something it was particularly poor at in the beginning (personally, I think splitting "New" from "Rising" would help tremendously here).
The software giant plans to focus its attention on in-app advertising going forward, which is good news for developers, but less so for consumers.
According to Microsoft, in-app purchasing and in-app advertising currently account for 35 percent and 58 percent of Windows Store revenue respectively.
The software giant has also revealed big plans are afoot for 2015.Įnhancements next year include expanded payment options in emerging markets with carrier billing, and more monetization options. Microsoft says it has seen an 80 percent increase in registered developers and a 60 percent increase in app selection too, which is good news for the platform. The Windows Store might still be a bit of a mess, and there aren’t anywhere near as many decent apps as those found in the Apple App Store and Google Play, but things are definitely improving.Ĭhanges to the store in 2014 resulted in 30 percent more active users, and over 110 percent year-over-year increase in app downloads and gross sales.