With an update to phones running iOS 6 and iOS 7, Siri now reacts with a strong, two-fold approach when mentions of suicide come up. First, the assistant offers the number of the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline and will even offer to call directly — a new feature that makes seeking help as simple as clicking “yes” on the phone. If for whatever reason the user decides to select “no”, Siri does a search of all local suicide prevention centers, offering a list and directions powered by Yelp.

It’s clear from the update that Apple wants to prevent any potential response blunder and turn Siri into a usable tool for those in crisis to get the professional aid they need. But it’s also not the first company to target specific language towards suicidal users. Google has kept a list of “trigger search” keywords to indicate a user searching for suicide since 2010, and will also send back a suggestion to call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline.

Like Google, Apple is hoping that its approach will prevent users from seeking desperate methods through its services — and will get a little help instead. And it’s needed in the wake of unsettling news last month, when the New York Times reported that more Americans are dying from suicide than car accidents.

Apple’s update may be a small step, but it is one that shows that the tech community is thinking about how its products are utilized by those in need. Siri’s response to that single question or statement could have a big impact, and now the little robotic assistant can better assist people in their darkest hours.

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Here are the main conclusions from the best reviews out there:

• The Verge spent time with the 13-inch Air and puts it this way: “13 hours and 29 minutes. That’s all you really need to know — that’s how long the new MacBook Air running Safari lasted running The Verge Battery Test, which cycles through a series of websites and images at 65 percent brightness.”
• Fortune tried out the 11-inch version and was quite happy though has one quibble: ”A week with the new 11-inch MacBook Air has convinced me that Apple’s hardware upgrade—minor as it may seem—will still be enough to convince some to upgrade or buy one for the first time based on excellent battery life alone. It doesn’t achieve 9 hours in-between charges with everyday use, but 8.5 hours of Web browsing is pretty close. And while I wish Apple would offer a build-to-order option for a higher-resolution screen—the current 1,366 x 768 resolution is really starting to feel cramped—it’s a small omission on an otherwise excellent device.”
• CNET is effusive about the battery (but strangely knocks it for not having a touchscreen): “It’s easy to say that this new version of the 13-inch MacBook Air is a modest step forward, with no physical changes to the exterior, and still no higher-res display, touch screen, or HDMI port. The battery life is a very big deal, however, and when you couple that with a $100 price cut on the base model, down to $1,099, the 13-inch MacBook Air is, despite not being the newest design on the block, still one of the most universally useful laptops you can buy.”
• PC Magazine got the 13-inch to last 15.5 hours, but also noted this: “The downside of the lower-clocked processor is that the MacBook Air is a bit slower on the multimedia benchmark tests (Handbrake and Photoshop CS6), where it lags the Windows systems with faster-clocked Core i5 processors. On the flipside, the MacBook Air is still two to four times faster than Intel Atom-powered Windows 8 slate tablets on the Handbrake test, and those Atom-powered tablets can’t run the Photoshop CS6 test at all.”

For our take on the announcements made at WWDC 2013, be sure to listen to the special edition of The GigaOM Show podcast:

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Wi-Fi is now one of the most essential services a hotel can provide apart from a bed, and yet poor internet connection is on the top 3 list of complaints from hotel guests around the world.

Nah! It is really my #1 complaint.

There was time when all of us road warriors walked around with a laptop and a phone (probably a Blackberry). Now we carry around a phone, a tablet (or a Kindle) and a laptop. I am guessing connected cameras are coming next and a slew of other gadgets with a built-in need for the network. And at the same time we are all going to be using cloud services for everything; listening to music, watching videos, working, buying and ordering food. In such a world, the network (both in terms of stability and quality) takes on greater importance.

The common refrain is — well let’s just use LTE. And while we all like to believe that LTE is the panacea to our networking woes, the fact remains that we still are heavily reliant and will be reliant on Wi-Fi, especially when on the go. According to ABI Research, there were a total of 4.9 million hotspots owned by carriers (including those run by the likes of Boingo and iPass) and the total number will hit about 6.3 million in 2016.

Of course, the place where one feels the pain most acutely is in the hotels — who in my opinion are the worst offenders in providing decent and generous connectivity. It is not as if they don’t have a way to quietly tuck in the charges into our room rates! As someone who spends a sizable amount of time on the road checking into random hotels, I can safely say that bad Wi-Fi is one of my biggest complaints.

According to Hotel Chatter’s 2013 Hotel WiFi Report:

• Nearly two-thirds of hotels offer some kind of free Wi-Fi. (It is hard to say if it really is free if the price of the hotel room goes up a few dollars a night and we don’t know about it.)
• The standard amount of bandwidth in a hotel with free Wi-Fi is usually about 1Mbps per each room. (I can categorically state that is not really true.)

It doesn’t matter if the hotels (or motels) are big or small. It doesn’t matter if they are in New York or Nashville, the fact of the matter is that both the quality of network connections and the bandwidth available on the network simply sucks. Even in the best of hotels one struggles to 500 Kbps to 600 Kbps. Try watching Netflix at that bandwidth, or in my case the MLB game! I guess our shifting media habits are killing the in-room video-on-demand business, a lucrative sideline for the hotel industry. (When I am in a really bad mood, I am likely to call it a nice racket!)

Sure, I can do some basic surfing and emails on this so-called free Wi-Fi, but that’s about it. And someone who needs to blog — and thus keep up with a whole slew of news and information sources when on the go — it is virtually impossible to use the Wi-Fi for even getting the work done. I almost always take the upgrade option, paying more for more bandwidth only to find that it still sucks. Unless these guys get their act together and build high-quality robust networks, they can’t really expect people to pay up.

For now, I almost always end up using the LTE network (if it is available.) But we are already starting to see that LTE networks are getting crowded and slower and slower. So it is not difficult to imagine things are going to get a lot worse for those of us dependent on-the-go internet.

Like I said — I love the connectivity in the hotels, I just hate the poor quality networks.

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Like Microsoft and Facebook, Apple says it sought permission from the federal government to publicly disclose how often it receives requests for user data related to national security. Apple says “We have been authorized to share some of that data, and we are providing it here in the interest of transparency.”

From Apple’s press release:

From December 1, 2012 to May 31, 2013, Apple received between 4,000 and 5,000 requests from U.S. law enforcement for customer data. Between 9,000 and 10,000 accounts or devices were specified in those requests, which came from federal, state and local authorities and included both criminal investigations and national security matters.

Notably, Apple received about half the requests that Facebook and Microsoft did. What’s not said is how often Apple complies — reports indicate that Facebook, for example, complied in some way with about 79 percent of them.

Apple says the most common type of information the government asks for has to do with stolen property (likely iPhones, iPads and other Apple devices) and locating missing people — kidnapped children, Alzheimer’s patients or suicide prevention.

Apple doesn’t characterize how often or not national security played into these requests over the past six months. But it does say that it looks at each request in order to provide only the “narrowest” set of data related to it.

The company also noted the type of data it cannot share: iMessage texts and FaceTime calls. Both are encrypted forms of messaging and “Apple cannot decrypt that data.”

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Yet quite quickly I felt myself longing for more.

Yes, Apple is still moving forward. But the competition is so much more aggressive and innovative than a few years ago, that Apple will need to speed up if it wants to be seen again as a leader in innovation and design. The question is whether it can move from being a fast follower to a faster follower, and eventually return to being in a leader position again – one that changes the game and disrupts. Then again, perhaps the bigger question is whether it even needs or wants to do that.

Credit where due

Much of what Apple aims to do with iOS 7 is laudable. The layered transparency is a positive improvement, as it offers continuity and context in a simple way. iOS 7 also uses space better, and there are fewer superfluous boxes within boxes (for example in utility apps like Calculator and Stocks). The transitions also help bring the experience to life, and make the OS feel more contemporary. In Safari it’s great to see the interface play a subservient role to the page content.

On the functional side, it’s nice to see Apple replacing the clumsy graphical back button with a swipe to go back. The multitasking view is also clearly improved. But the most positive improvements for me are found in the Photos app, where the smart clustering and grouping help users organize and make sense of all their photos, and in the location-aware app suggestions offered through Apps Near Me.

And importantly, the new design of iOS 7 is also truly comprehensive – nothing is left untouched.

Major missed opportunities

As iOS 7 continues to rely on a grid of icons at the top level of the OS, the iconography of the native apps feels surprisingly rushed and sometimes amateurish. Since Apple in its WWDC communication so clearly emphasized the need for “perfection,” it should really deliver on that too.

In some places where translucency is used the text contrast is rather poor, and it’s tricky to read the text quickly – it’s the very opposite of glanceable design. And while the Control Center is a good idea, it’s a very busy screen – and that’s the first iteration. Imagine how it will look after a few more generations and many new functions are added!

The parallax viewing on the home screen feels like a gimmick, as does the cheesy background animation in the Weather app. The photo filter fad is also given too much prominence in the camera mode. These all feel like populist design choices (a decidedly un-Apple approach.)

A course correction, not a sea change

Overall, iOS 7 feels just a bit too predictable. The first thing Apple apparently wants users to feel is delight and surprise (followed by love and connection). But iOS 7 doesn’t offer much cause for surprise because hardly anything in iOS 7 feels new. Instead it feels familiar, and that’s because many of the design approaches in iOS 7 have been lifted from other platforms.

For example, Windows 8 makes use of bold typography and uses smooth transitions to bring the experience to life; WebOS had a multitasking view remarkably similar to what was shown in iOS 7; and Nokia’s innovative MeeGo OS made swiping gestures central to the smartphone experience (while it also placed great emphasis on consistent and meaningful iconography). In iOS 7 Apple has clearly adopted these and others’ designs, and have aimed to further improve them. And so amazingly, in design Apple now finds itself in the role of a fast follower.

Cursed by the Innovator’s Dilemma

When I last wrote about design at Apple, I was asking for more fundamental changes: “a radical refresh of iOS, a category-defining entry into wearables, or a confident push into services like search or commerce.” Yes, iOS was refreshed this week, but if you look beyond the surface level, it was hardly radical. Perhaps the fact that iOS now has hundreds of millions of active users is both a blessing and a curse for Apple. With that size, its priorities have moved from disrupting others to scaling and protecting what it has. As things unfold over the next few years, Apple will probably become a new textbook example of the Innovator’s Dilemma.

In the 90′s, when Apple was in crisis and had little to lose, its “Think Different” campaign celebrated gutsy innovation. That tune has changed dramatically, and the opening video at this week’s WWDC instead celebrated patience and perfection. “If everyone is busy making everything, how can anyone perfect anything? It takes time.” Apple rose to prominence as a company that brilliantly anticipated customers’ future needs. But today Apple focuses mainly on serving their existing customers’ current needs.

When Jony Ive says that “iOS 7 is defining an important new direction,” and Tim Cook says that iOS 7 is “the biggest change to iOS since the introduction of the iPhone,” it tells me that Apple will be quite happy to continue as a fast follower. And so I will continue to admire how Apple adopts and improves the designs of others, and how it gracefully evolves iOS over time. But it seems I will have to look elsewhere for game-changing design and innovation.

Olof Schybergson is CEO and co-founder of the service design consultancy Fjord. Follow Fjord on Twitter @fjord.

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Bearing the rather clunky name of “Office Mobile for Office 365 subscribers”, the app does require a subscription to Microsoft’s cloud service, but the fundamentals are present: you can use it to access, view and edit Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents on an iPad or iPhone — although the app is optimized for the iPhone 5, so don’t expect a tablet-friendly experience.

According to the product blurb:

“Documents look like the originals, thanks to support for charts, animations, SmartArt graphics and shapes. When you make quick edits or add comments to a document, the formatting and content remain intact.”

The app can be used on Office documents received as email attachments, or those stored on SkyDrive, SkyDrive Pro or SharePoint. If your desktop Office 2013 is connected to Microsoft’s cloud, you can also pull up documents that were recently viewed there, from your mobile device.

It is possible to edit documents while offline. The app is compatible with iPhone 4 and up, and with the 3rd generation iPad and up (and yes, with the iPad mini too). Devices have to run iOS 6.1 or later.

It doesn’t seem the rollout is global just yet, though. My iPad mini, which is set to the U.K. App Store, isn’t seeing it at the time of writing. No sign of an Android version, either.

UPDATE (5am PT): Microsoft has now published a blog post explaining the functionality in greater detail.

NOTE: This article originally bore the headline “Microsoft quietly pushes out Office for iPhone and iPad”. A few minutes after posting the “… and iPad” was excised because, while the app will work on iPads, it’s not optimized for them.

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Alerts appear under a Today tab in the Notifications Center, which you can turn on in the Settings app. The data, according to some info that MacRumors found, comes from different sources within iOS. Traffic information about frequently visited locations is gathered if the user turns on the Frequent Locations feature under Location Services.

Today, at least in its current beta incarnation and as currently understood, is much less robust than Google Now, which does much more than provide traffic, weather and scheduling. Google Now will not only check traffic related to events on a user’s Google Calendar, it can alert them to everything from flight delays to sports scores, local sightseeing recommendations and package delivery notifications. All of that information is gleaned from users’ activities within other Google services. Google Now has been available on the iOS platform as part of the Google Search app since April.

But even if Today isn’t as full-featured, the ambition seems similar: to anticipate information for iOS users before they need it. Anticipatory computing is still in its infancy. But with Google and Apple, with one of the most ubiquitous mobile operating systems and one of the most ubiquitous mobile computing devices in the world, are the best candidates of moving anticipatory tech into the mainstream.

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It’s not the latest 4G-capable iPad that’s eating up all this data, though, it’s older 3G models: the iPad 2 and iPad 3 are now No. 6 and No. 7, respectively, on this list, says Actix; the rest are smartphones. There has never been a tablet, much less two, on the list of the most mobile data-hungry devices before. Actix gets this information from software it runs on the networks of eight carriers: one European, one Middle Eastern, two American and four based in the Asia Pacific region.

Why is this number suddenly growing just since the end of 2012, when the iPad 2 has been around since early 2011 and the iPad 3 since early 2012? Mobile broadband subscriptions grew 45 percent faster in the first three months of 2013 than a year earlier, according to a recently published study by Ericsson.

It could be customers are taking advantage of more flexible mobile plans, like the shared data plans AT&T and Verizon now offer. Rather than buy a separate subscription for their tablets, customers can attach to them to their smartphone plans, encouraging customers to connect their iPads to cellular networks instead of just relying on Wi-Fi connectivity.

But it could also be a sign of the continued popularity of Apple’s older model iPads. Though cellular models are more expensive, older models get sold at a discount. When the fourth-generation iPad debuted in late 2012, Apple started selling the 16GB iPad 2 + Cellular for $529 (down from the price of $629). The iPad 3, however, was discontinued.

Another thing propelling iPads up the list, Actix says, is that Apple’s tablets are consuming three times more mobile data than the average smartphone.

If this trend holds out, it could mean a windfall for carriers who can sell bigger buckets of data to tablet users, but the opposite could be true for consumers, who will end up footing those bills.

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From Apple’s iAd website:

With iAd Workbench you can target who you want, when you want, manually, automatically or both. Assign specific targeting criteria (such as device, gender, age, location and preferences) to your campaign, or have iAd find the right audience for you.

iAd Workbench

The idea is that brands can better target ads for their apps — and drive users to download them — based on the type of app and user. Workbench will also estimate each campaign’s reach, and let developers adjust how much they’re spending (either on a cost-per-click or cost-per-acquisition basis) based on the response the ads are getting.

The ads in question are banner ads that appear within iOS apps. The minimum purchase amount to participate in an ad campaign in Workbench is $50. That price is drastically lower than the required buy-in when the iAd program first debuted in 2010. At that time it was  aimed at recruiting large global brands with huge ad budgets; it was reported that Apple was charging a $1 million minimum to brands that wanted to show interactive ads to Apple’s iOS app users. Those brands included Disney, Nissan, AT&T, General Electric and more.

iAd has not worked out the way Apple had initially planned: at the end of 2012, after more than two years in business, iAd had just a  2.9 percent share of the U.S. mobile ad market. Apple’s developers are making money from their apps — Tim Cook said Monday they’ve paid developers $10 billion since 2008 and $5 billion in just the last year.

With the lower prices, smaller developers with very limited budgets will have a better chance to participate and advertise. In another nod to development outfits with fewer resources, Apple also included a new iAd Producer option, allowing quicker and easier crafting of banner ads. The original iAd concept required the creation of complex interactive ads. The new Producer offers five pre-made banners for iPhone/iPod touch and iPad that developers can quickly customize.

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• iOS 7 – unpolished by design: my friend Cap Watkins weighs in on one of the most debated topics.
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• Schiller’s zinger: Apple’s rallying cry. Ken Segall, formerly of Apple, breaks down Apple’s performance at the event.
• See Apple’s remarkable evolution from iOS 6 to iOS 7. Fast Company compares the two and offers their take on the design shift.
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