Steve Jobs & The World of Mobile/Apps: The Inside Scoop Steve Jobs & The World of Mobile is a nicely bound hardcover volume with a built-in bonus: It’s a two-fer, with Apps: The Inside Scoop when you flip the book over. The novel presentation makes for an appealing, engaging read; in tech terms, it’s a very good UE, or User Experience.
Meyer, who calls himself “The CEO Futurist,” is a business consultant and expert on evolving technology. This book serves as a primer on the mobile revolution and a tribute to late Apple visionary Steve Jobs. On the flip side, it’s a fun introduction to the array of apps now available to do almost everything.
Meyer writes in a conversational style, and the text and graphics combined read like a PowerPoint presentation. The book, however, is a prisoner of time: Although it’s as up-to-date as possible, the statistics he quotes are from earlier in 2012; he writes about the iPhone 5 release as in the future, although it went on sale before the book’s release.
Once you accept that fact, the book is entertaining and enlightening. Tech or gadget junkies may already know a lot of this information, but others will be fascinated by his insights into mobile phones and tablets, and his comparisons of brands from Apple and Android down to Nokia and Windows phones.
Meyer is a passionate promoter of NFC, or Near Field Communications, which allows you to tap your phone to pay for your Starbucks drink. He’s embedded NFC chips into the book so you can tap for videos and websites, and it also includes QR codes — those square Rorschach test-like bar codes — so you can reach those websites using a QR app if your phone doesn’t have an NFC app.
This technology combines digital and analog media in a clever way that could become standard in years to come — if books are still published on dead trees, that is.
Also available as an ebook.
