Tech Geeks

Steve Jobs pushed the envelope many times when it came to product design, and the results weren't always pretty. Here are seven products created under his direction that failed commercially or functionally:

1. Apple III (1981) — The successor to the very popular Apple II was focused on business users and priced accordingly. Unfortunately, the hardware was unreliable. Apple lost the business market to the IBM PC, launched the same year, and a rapidly expanding market of PC clones.

2. Lisa (1983) — The first commercially produced computer with a graphical user interface cost $9,995 when it launched. It quickly fell into the shadow of the cheaper Macintosh, launched a year later.

3. NeXT Computer (1989) — Jobs' venture after being forced out of Apple created a computer that was in many ways ahead of its time, but in the vein of the Apple III and Lisa, it was also too expensive to catch on with mainstream users.

4. Puck Mouse (1998) — The new iMac was the first major product created after Jobs' return to Apple in 1996, and it was a big success, despite its tiny, round mouse. Users couldn't tell which way it was oriented by feel, and it tended to disappear in the cup of the hand, making it hard to use.

5. The Cube (2000) — This small desktop computer was beautifully encased in a cube of clear plastic. It won design awards but was a flop in stores because of its high price. Also, it didn't really offer any functional benefits over other Macs. Apple's designs are iconic, but people aren't usually willing to pay a premium for design alone. The Cube idea lives on in the Mac Mini, a more successful but less eye-catching small Mac.

6. iTunes phone (2005) — It's easy to forget that the iPhone wasn't Apple's first venture into the cellphone business. It formed a partnership with Motorola Inc. to launch the ROKR in late 2005. As a phone, it was decent if unexciting, but as a music player, it fell far short of the iPod. It could only hold 100 songs, and transferring them from the computer was a slow process. It was also criticized for not allowing users to download music over the cellular network, a limitation that also applied to the first iPhone. Some even called the ROKR "the iPhone."

7. Apple TV (2007) — Apple's foray into the living room was an uncharacteristically half-hearted effort — Jobs later referred to the Apple TV as a "hobby." It was a small box that connected to a TV and to a Mac in the home. A tiny remote allowed the owner to play music and movies from the PC on the TV. It was expensive, at $249, and complicated to set up and use. Movies purchased from iTunes were low resolution and looked blurry on HDTV sets. In 2010, Apple introduced a much improved, cheaper Apple TV designed to connect directly to the Internet.

London, Sept 3 (ANI): Google chairman Eric Schmidt has called Apple's Steve Jobs as 'the best' company boss in 50 or 100 years.

Schmidt, who sat on Apple's board between 2006 and 2009, handed down the praise at a technology conference, and said that Apple's former CEO deserved the praise because he built the company into a powerful corporation not once, but twice.

The assessment puts Jobs ahead of other American industry giants such as oil magnate John D Rockefeller and car maker Henry Ford, the BBC reports.

Jobs' first term as head of Apple lasted from the late 1970s when the company was founded until 1985. He resigned after losing a boardroom battle over the future of the company.

In 1997, Steve Jobs returned as CEO and launched the iMac range of personal computers.

Since then he has introduced the iPod, iPad and iPhone, all of which had made huge amounts of money for Apple. (ANI)

Will tablets follow the mobile handset pattern? Long dominated by multinationals like Nokia, Samsung and Motorola, and later raided by RIM's BlackBerry, Apple's iPhone, and various HTC models, this market was turned on its head by a clutch of Indian manufacturers who based their operations in countries like China and Taiwan, and pulled off a coup.

As the market share of the Indian manufacturers, led by Micromax, Lava and Spice, climbed from zero in 2008 to more than 20 per cent in 2010, market leader Nokia lost ground, with its share falling from 46 per cent to 35 per cent in the same period.

What gave Indian companies the edge was a rich list of features and long battery life for their products, and low prices. Should we brace for an encore in tablets? "The tablet market is clearly going the mobile handset way," says Naveen Mishra, lead telecom analyst at Cyber Media Research. He believes the market adoption of Indian tablets will speed up once Broadband Wireless Access takes off. Tablets are all about use of data on the move.

The tablet market is at 100,000 pieces a year and expected to grow at 35 per cent, say current estimates. "Beetel is trying to break the affordability barrier," says Vinod Sawhny, Executive Director and Chief Executive Officer, Beetel Teletech. Jain of LACS is trying to do exactly the same, and more forcefully. He believes that many people in India aspire to owning a tablet - make it more affordable and they will come in droves. "At Rs 6,000-7,000, our products will have a much larger multiplier effect," says Jain. More so because he has tied up with finance companies, so customers can buy his tablet on a 12-month instalment scheme.

Sawhny and Jain both believe that there is a large untapped market in the rural and semiurban space. The lowering of the entry price, therefore, would be critical, as will be the world of applications that these companies can open up to the user.

They had better hurry, because Micromax and Lava are getting ready to launch their tablets, too

There are primarily three ways to send an email to several recipients in one go - using theTo, Cc and Bcc fields. By default you see only the first, but the other two can be made visible by clicking on their links - refer image below.

In any of these fields - whether it's To:, Cc: or Bcc - you can enter more than one email address and separate by commas.

As you can understand, sending an email to multiple recipients simultaneously is a real time-saver. In fact, copying-pasting the message to individual recipients when the email needs to be sent to many is not recommended unless, of course, you want to personalize each email with the name of the recipient.

Both Cc and Bcc forward a copy of the message to everyone you've listed. The main difference between Cc or Carbon copy and Bcc (Blind carbon copy) is that, with the latter, the recipients do not get to know each other. For instance, putting all your friends' emails in the Bcc field and asking them to meet you at a chosen rendezvous would make everyone feel special until they arrive at the venue!

Use the Gmail Cc field when you don't care if recipients get to know each other. Bcc is reserved for those "special and secretive" email messages, if you know what I mean. Here is a little advice for Bcc field usage - enter an alternate email address of yours in the To: field (because you cannot leave it empty) and put everyone else in Bcc: -. This way everyone else will see only your (other) email address.

Sending emails frequently to the same list of people can be tiring because you need to enter each email address. Gmail has a better solution which I use a lot and check the scenario below to understand how it works.

Planning to regularly update your friends with the happenings in your life? I suggest you create a "Group" of all your friends using the Gmail Contacts section. You would then be able to email everyone without going through the trouble of typing each person's email address each time. Simply select everyone in the group and send your message.