Now that the world has had a bit of time to get used to its new digital assistant – Apple’s Siri, who arrived with her sexy 1980’s robot voice on the iPhone 4S, it is time to stop asking her mad questions just to see if the programmers had actually set her to answer them (I like how they put in a whole bunch of different answers for “Who’s your daddy?”) and think about how this new technology could further advance to help us with our social media stuff.  There are certainly some hints that Apple might be thinking this way, and if so, future updates to Siri could revolutionize the way we stay on top of our social media presences.

Siri Needs to be Connected

One interesting thing about Siri in its current form, is that even though it only interacts with the iPhone’s own software, you need to be connected to the internet to use it.  This seems somewhat unnecessary – why would you need the internet to get Siri to set an alarm or take a note?  Most of what she currently does for you is interacting with the built in apps like the calendar and notes or with the phone and text functionality, so you would expect that all to work without a data connection.  It seems that the fact that you need to be online to use Siri is an indication that later upgrades to Siri will interact more with the internet, and, hopefully, non Apple sites and services.

Slight Tweaks

The Siri technology currently allows you to do things like say “Tell Steve I’ll be late”.  This is effectively two commands, one, to create a message saying “I’ll be late”, and two, to send it to Steve.  You can see how this could easily, should the integration exist, be tweaked to allow you to change the “Tell Steve” part of the command to “Tweet”, or “Update my status to”.  It would not take those crazy geniuses at Apple long to have Siri tweeting and updating your status for you, providing Twitter and Facebook allow it.

Further Interaction

Being able to tweet or update your status using Siri would save time and be kind of neat, but it would only be a gateway to a whole bunch of other interactions the interface could have with your social networks.  You could ask Siri to search on a hashtag and read back the results, or use it to share sites on Facebook as you browse with Safari (again, via voice control).  It could, eventually, become the natural way we interact with our social world through our phones.

Impact on Marketing

What these changes could mean for marketers is that they would need to consider not only how easy their message is to find, but how catchy it is when read out.  It would also mean far more emphasis would be put on user generated content than on static pages – think about it, when people surf with an iPhone, most of what they do is through apps rather than the browser.  Extended use of Siri would further separate the user from the old school world of having to remember a site’s URL.

These are just some ideas, but it is going to be important to keep tabs on Apple and how they are moving voice recognition technology forward.  They brought touch screen into the mainstream, this could be the next big thing.

Ok, so you’re thinking of buying an IPad2 and are wondering if it’s really worth making the change. Well let’s take a look at a critical review of the brand new IPad2.

First obvious point when you pick up an IPad2 is the fact that it’s incredibly thin and light, it also sits perfectly naturally in the hand which after all is the entire point of a tablet device. The whole box of tricks weighs less than 2 pounds and this makes using it for long periods of time an absolute breeze.

The RAM in the machine has now been doubled and the leap to 512MB means that you can play all kinds of graphics based games with no jerky graphics and an obvious smoothness of movement.

There are now two cameras and Apple has added its own face to face conferencing system which it calls Facetime. This means that you can chat with friends and family at the touch of a button wherever you might be in the world (assuming you have internet access). It can’t be used over a 3g connection but its fine over any Wi-Fi connection which means most people can access the feature easily and quickly. Imagine being in one country on one side of the world and  being able to fire up the IPad and speak face to face to your partner on the other side of the world…….incredible.

The improved RAM allows extensive multitasking and in reality this happens quickly enough for 99% of users more used to the dreadful task speeds of even the most modern laptop devices.

The massive advantage that most Apple devices have is the huge collection of Apps……..and the IPad2 is no exception. The Apple store lists over 70,000 different apps for the IPad2. These cover most user requirements including photo editing and drawing as well as most gaming and motion based applications. These work brilliantly on the IPad with little jerkiness and for the most part great clarity and smoothness of motion.

The main advantage of the IPad2 is the serious lack of weight and its amazing battery life. My recent purchase lasted over 10 hours with the Wi-Fi turned on and this is great when added to the sheer variety of e-books available.

Drawbacks

If you ask me about drawbacks then the most obvious is the lack of USB support and no SD card slot. The addition of both these would not add massively to the price and would cement the IPads position as the king of tablet machines. The more Apple can pack into this machine as standard the more sales and the more the machine will be the absolute pick of all possible choices in this market.
All in all the IPad2 is a wonderful machine with only a few relatively minor drawbacks. Go visit your local Apple store and play with it for a while. Most people are totally convinced that they need one of these once they have had chance to play with one for more than 10 minutes!