Exante Diet is a meal replacement company who offer a variety of products to help you lose weight. One of these is a bumper pack which is a month’s supply of various items selected for each specific diet plan. Until now the contents of these packs have been pre-determined by Exante Diet. However, due to customer feedback, they wanted to offer customers the option to ‘Pick Your Own Bumper Pack’.
Refreshed Media offered a solution to this by making a complex back-end function as simple and intuitive as possible for customers to use. The result is an excellent piece of functionality created as a result of the hard work from our designers and developers.
The work went live at the start of January to take advantage of the increase in traffic and new customers visiting the site, due to the month typically being ‘diet season’. Early results suggest that the ‘Pick Your Own Bumper Pack’ page is a great success. The client is extremely happy with the work, particularly the functionality of the finished product and the speed at which the project was delivered.
Following the iPhone announcements on Tuesday, some are declaring the event a bit of a let-down. Many were expecting Apple to launch the iPhone 5 so were disappointed with the release of the iPhone 4S, which is essentially an iPhone 4 with minor changes. Not quite the drastically different product as rumoured.
On appearance, there are absolutely no differences between the current iPhone 4 and 4S. The transformations are purely on the interior with the key changes made to the processor and camera. The A5 microprocessor chip will make the 4S faster than its predecessor. Those who were hoping for a better camera won’t be disappointed with an enhanced lens and 8-megapixels. The changes will result in sharper images with greater colour accuracy.
The 4S will come with iOS 5, which will also be rolled out across other iOS devices, so yet another reason as to why the Apple event may have failed to excite. That said, iOS 5 will bring some fantastic changes to existing iOS devices with a revamped notification system- no more annoying push notifications, instead there will be a more sophisticated dropdown display, with all notifications displayed in one place. Twitter fans will be delighted to hear that there will be deeper twitter integration in the upgrade. iPhone photographers will appreciate gaining quicker access from the lock screen and improved editing features. iOS 5 comes with iCloud allowing users to store all their photos, music and video in a cloud based system giving access across all Apple devices.
The biggest part of this event was the announcement of Siri, an innovative feature which turns your phone into a personal assistant. Siri uses voice recognition to complete various commands. For example, “Remind me to pick up bread at the supermarket” will put a location based reminder on your phone that will alert you on arriving at the defined supermarket.
Whilst other phones, such as Android have some voice recognition capabilities, they are quite basic in comparison to what Siri can do. Of course the proof will be in the experience. If Siri fails to prove accurate then it isn’t really worth the upgrade. If Siri delivers then this is a completely revolutionary feature. See below for a demonstration of how it will work.
So did the event really fail to deliver after so much hype and speculation? I don’t think it did. Essentially, Apple are building on a product that is actually pretty good already. I’m not sure we need something drastically different yet. With the changes being largely in iOS 5 and iCloud, this is where the interest lies. The minor changes are purely nice little extras but ultimately I think the OS upgrade will have a greater impact on phone experience.
In our previous post looking at dream iPhone features, Refreshed Media’s managing director Simon Melaniphy, said that he wouldn’t change anything on the iPhone 4. Which highlights a key point, the product works so why should we change it? We seem to have grown into a society that expects another version to be launched soon as explored by this feature here.
What are your thoughts on the Apple event? Let us know in the comments!
Since Google+ launched last week, I’ve been trying to decide whether Google+ would have any place in the social network landscape. From what I’ve seen so far, it has too many similarities to Facebook. If there was anything that made it stand out then I may be more convinced.
As Mashable has pointed out, with Google+, you are starting from scratch. Despite being able to export your Facebook contacts all photographs, conversations, shared links etc. stay on Facebook. It takes a long time to build up a network and if you already have a well-established one on a very similar website, then why would you want to switch over?
The only thing that has appealed on the Google+ side so far has been Hangouts- the group video messaging. However, Facebook has also recently announced a tie up with Skype, so it seems that video chat functionality will be available there too.
Google are really going to have to pull something very special out of the bag in order to convince people to switch. As discussed in this post, there are some very good features on Google+ such as Sparks but so far that is the only difference. There have been rumours of Google+ Games, which if done well could go in its favour. It still demands the question, is it enough? I really don’t think it will be.
Google+ needs to make itself very distinctive to Facebook in order to survive. It should stop trying to imitate the popular site and bring something of value to its users.
