Spotify Lands in America!

Now, to many, this page isn't a new sight, nor is it a new site. Spotify has been in America for a little under a month now. If you don't know what Spotify is, check out the Wikipedia article, which covers the basics. For those of you who have heard of Spotify, but didn't follow its journey to the United States, I'll sum it up: Spotify attempted to get music playback licensing from the "Big Four" for a long time, eventually got a couple to sign on, and is now available to American consumers.
To find out more about Spotify, check out the many articles referenced on Wikipedia to get more of the story.
Some of you may scroll down on that Spotify site, and notice all the "great thing" that people are quoted as saying about Spotify. What bugs me about these quotes, is that they mean only that Spotify is an online digital music streaming service. The "online jukebox" has been around for years; ever heard of iLike.com? MySpace Music? Pandora Radio? Last.fm? Grooveshark? I thought so. Spotify is trying to sell itself as something new, something revolutionary. Let me share with you, the fact that Spotify is joining the music streaming war in the US. Currently, MySpace Music, Pandora Radio, and Last.fm are the apparent frontrunners, the primary belligerents. Add in Grooveshark and YouTube for media streaming, and most people have all the music they love (which Spotify claims to have), with likely every artist, every genre, and every label represented, you probably won't even have to change sites. Furthermore, Spotify, last I heard, did not have the rights to stream music from all four of the record companies, though that may have changed, and even if they do, they remain a newcomer to the land of the free, in which millions already gorge their music libraries with various forms of media, from stores, physical, digital, legitimate, illegal. Whatever the method, most Americans already have all the music they want, they love, right at their fingertips, ready for streaming, ready for download. Whether you want to pay, to stream, to download, even if you want a physical copy, say you want a computer, or a DJ to choose the music for you, America has enough methods of obtaining music. Spotify is not only coming in as a clear underdog, they're also offering yet another free service in a land where free service is slowly crippling the music industry.
Even if it is all it claims to be (that doesn't seem to be the case), it seems to me that Spotify's ads are intentionally deceptive, trying to seem as if the service is the first of its kind, which it clearly isn't. Although I dislike Spotify, I intend to give it that chance, and I hope Spotify can provide real profits for the music industry, if only to give the American economy a boost.

iPhone 5

I'm sure there are plenty of people out there, fans and foes alike of Apple Computer, that are anxious to see what the next generation of the company's popular smartphone looks like. Now, those of us without work as executives at said company remain in the dark, but there's a lot of speculation going on. This Google search for "iPhone 5" will yield a staggering number of sites dedicated to the coming device. I personally get most of my news the official way, through CNET.com (haha). This article by Lance Whitney predicts either a late September or October launch. For those of you that don't know, the majority of speculation about the iPhone 5 relates to iPhone 4S rumors, essentially stating that the next generation will be an upgrade to the platform similar to the 3G to 3GS change, giving the phone a higher-spec camera, a higher-res screen, increased iOS5 capabilities, and near field communications (see this article).

Personally, though, I have a feeling that Apple may have something a bit trickier up its sleeve. Remember when the iPhone 4 came out? Looking at this chart you'll notice that the iPhone 4 was released to almost exactly a year after the iPhone 3GS, yet was a pretty major redesign. Now, it's currently mid-August, an entire month after June, and no iPhone 5 yet. What gives? Early in the yeara report by CNET Blogger, Lance Whitney revealed that an A5 chip was likely to be included, with few other details. Now why do I believe that it will truly be the iPhone 5? Because Apple has spent more than a year developing this thing, they even pushed the release back by three months, and obviously put a lot of work into iOS5, iCloud, and iTunes 10.3+ (iTunes in the Cloud), so why wouldn't they also take that time to develop a bigger (screen), better, faster iPhone? Knowing Apple, they'll want to market the phone as "Changing it all. Again. Again." (though hopefully with less cheese, the market is lactose intolerant). So my guess is that the iPhone 5 will come shipped with a more traditional beveled back, an 8MP rear-facing camera, the A5 integrated processing chip, the standard 512MB of RAM (same as iPhone 4), 8MB flash memory (since iCloud and iTunes in the Cloud make music more easily accessible), a larger screen (pushing back the bezel above and below), and of course an NFC chip. As for appearance, I think the new iPhone is really going to start looking like the "iPad Mini" some people call it (mocking the iPad), making the case once-again ergonomic.

That's pretty much all I've got to say about the iPhone 5, we'll just have to wait to see what it actually looks like, I guess!

PS: I had a really nifty idea for a phone, where a portion of the bezel was pushed even further back, so that next to the front-facing camera could be fitted some sort of smaller display, possibly E Ink to give the user battery, signal, GPS, time, date, et al. The display would be small and low-power-consuming (such as E Ink), to display the different stuff even when the main screen is off. Maybe even a larger variation that displays incoming call info? Anyway, I think it would be cool to have a tiny status E Ink display, especially because it would only take up power whenever you signal strength dramatically changed, every minute (for time changes) or when your battery dropped to the next level of remaining energy, and even then would take very little power. That's all for today, for those of you going back to school in the coming weeks, I feel your pain and wish you well, au revoir!

A bit of Apple news

This article from Josh Lowensohn of CNET News outlines a number of recently awarded patents to Apple Computer. The article itself pretty much sums up the nature of the patents, if you're interested.

Religion

Recently, I've been thinking about religion a lot. Not necessarily my beliefs, but the foundation of belief, and of the arguments over religion. It occurred to me, that those that believe in some form of religion, are a wide-ranging group of individuals, with varying social, political, and economic views. The same naturally applies to the atheists among us. Despite the commonality of vast variations among individuals of each party, many atheists continue to attack the faith of various religious groups; and many religious groups attack the faith (or lack thereof) of atheists. Just as with other things in life, people fight over something as personal (and private) as personal faith. So what was my conclusion? Humans are innately afraid of that they do not understand. The faithful are idealists, naturally more optimistic, openly accepting the chance for salvation or improvement through various religious systems. The atheists are realists, tending to slight on the pessimistic side, refusing to believe in an intelligent creator. Of course, many exist in the grey area, as agnostics, and many haven't really decided what they believe yet. I hope I've encouraged some thought, and hopefully, we can all work on being more accepting of fellow man.

PS: I use man in the generic term for the species, sexism gets an S for stupid.