Monthly Archives: September 2018

Direction Forward attended Apple’s annual Keynote event last week where they announced the iPhone XS, iPhone XR and the series 4 Apple Watch.

It is becoming apparent that the pricing for iPhones is increasingly high end, making it a premium product selling at around £1,000 per unit. Although for this, consumers can now have in their hand the most advanced portable display technology with the smartest identification tools.

What was previously the flagship model now appears to be the main focus, the phones discussed in this event (XS and XR models) have replaced the X, and are now the lead for the iPhone range. They both come with A12 Bionic processors, the smartest and most powerful chip a smartphone can have, and improved Face ID.

The iPhone XS has a Super Retina OLED display in two sizes, including the largest ever on an iPhone, and a breakthrough dual-camera system with Depth Control. The iPhone XR instead comes with an all-new Liquid Retina LCD display, claimed to be the most advanced in the industry.

Despite the advancements, the names of the models and editions this year are confusing. Whether this will be off-putting for consumers making a purchase choice remains to be seen. For example, the differences between the XS and XR models aren’t wholly clear – effectively the XR is the cheaper model with older display technology, but from £749+ it can hardly be called the ‘budget’ model.

Apple has skipped nine and reached ten after moving to Roman numerals last year, and are now in need of creating a new naming strategy. The logic behind this is also a bit counter intuitive – Apple pronounces the newer names as a number, reading “X” as “ten” when the logical thing to do is to read it as “X”, especially with more letters following as per “XS”.

The new series 4 Watch has had a full redesign and re-engineering. New displays, workout activation and more keeps on top of your health and keeps you connected. It seems that the Watch could be Apple’s focus for the future, instead of phones. The Watch has almost everything that the phone can do and even attempts to fill the gap of a camera with the an updated Digital Crown. Phones or tablets will likely still persist for consuming content (such as videos), but a watch could become your next go-to communications device.

Direction Forward is an Apple Partner, so please do contact us for discounted pricing if you wish to purchase their new hardware.

Read more at apple.com

Microsoft have announced they will implement a monthly charge for Windows 7 from 14th January 2020. The explanation behind this is that this charge will allow users to keep using Windows 7, beyond it’s official end of life date. Microsoft will provide what they are calling “Windows 7 Extended Security Updates” through to January 2023, for those users paying this fee.

Windows 10 is certainly popular and stable, and is proving a much better Operating System than Windows 8. However, there are still many organisations and users maintaining older Windows products for various reasons – including proprietary software that cannot be upgraded, specific machinery controls/processes, and so on.

Microsoft’s share price dropped half a percent following the announcement, whether this a reflection of a reaction to Microsoft trying to leverage fees from users for software which they have already paid remains to be seen. who have already paid for . It remains to be seen whether users will be

You can find their original announcement here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2018/09/06/helping-customers-shift-to-a-modern-desktop/

A new update is coming to Outlook for Windows. Microsoft have refreshed its look to “focus on what matters”. Their press release says:

“Many small changes in the message list help highlight the things that matter. For example, names are bolded and flagged messages stand out with a yellow background. And with a little more padding and text treatment to create a clearer visual hierarchy, scanning your inbox is easier and focusing on important messages is easier than ever. Message subjects are more prominent in the reading pane and the header now takes up less space, leaving more room for your content.”

As you can see from the image above and video below, this leads to a less cluttered interface, particularly achieved by hiding the majority of the buttons content in the “ribbon”.

As Microsoft now favour delivering software as a service, they have the opportunity to constantly tweak (and hopefully) improve, rather than having to wait for seminal update releases (which were previously every three years, eg Office 2013, Office 2016). Hopefully this will be of benefit to Outlook users, giving a cleaner interface so you can focus on the content of messages and what you are working on.