It took serious privacy concerns to get Apple to move away from UDIDs, which were supposed to be anonymous: Researchers showed that it was possible to identify an iOS user by their unique ID with just a bit of additional information. A Wall Street Journal investigation in 2010 first brought public attention to the fact that dozens of apps they tested were sharing personal information with these companies, like age, gender and location. That kind of information could be connected with UDIDs to identify and track specific users’ behavior.

The Identifier for Advertisers, or IFA, is a new set of APIs rolled out quietly in September specifically for advertisers. Unlike a UDID, an IFA is not a number that is forever associated with a particular device — users can choose to reset it, or opt out altogether. Still, since September, the new identifier is not being adopted very quickly, according to Craig Palli, vice president of business development at mobile app marketing company Fiksu.

“What we see is currently less than 10 percent of the traffic is supporting IFA,” he told me in an interview last week. The traffic he’s referring to is from hundreds of thousands of app publishers’ data his company has access to. While usage rates around 10 percent are pretty small, he believes that over the next few months there will be a rapid shift coming, especially after the beginning of the year. He is forecasting that IFA use “will achieve a critical mass in the second half of Q1 or first half of Q2” 2013. By that time, it will have been about 16 months since Apple first announced it would crack down on publishers and advertisers’ usage of UDID to track users.

What’s taking so long

There are three big reasons the IFA transition has yet to take hold in meaningful numbers. One of them is Apple’s fault — an egregious bug in the system — BUT one is simply a function of bad timing, and the other relates to the sheer effort needed to steer a very large industry toward a new practice.

Many publishers, advertisers and ad networks were all set to adopt IFA. But when Apple rolled out the change in iOS 6, there was a big problem: a bug that rendered everyone’s IFA as a string of zeroes.

“It killed the whole purpose of IFA,” said Michael Oiknine, CEO of Apsalar, a mobile behavior tracking platform.

That meant companies like Apsalar and its clients had no way to measure app user behavior or the effectiveness of in-app ads. If a company tried to use Apple’s new system, it would have had a big gap in its usage statistics in trying to track users that upgraded to iOS 6, said Oiknine. In other words, moving to IFA would have been a big setback.

Bad time for a big switch

The bug is fixed now. But for many publishers, timing the transition to occur in the fall was not ideal. Making the transition from UDID to the new identifier takes time, and a lot of companies don’t want to try to make the switch around a time when a lot of people are getting new mobile devices and starting to use different apps, many for the first time. There were over 6 million iOS and Android device activations on Christmas Day alone last year. Advertisers and publishers want to get to know their new users and start showing them ads from the start.

“The industry could’ve moved a little faster if this were released in a Q1 time period and not up against a critical holiday time period,” said Palli.

But even without the timing aspect, the reality is that getting any industry to adopt a new standard quickly is always a challenge.

UDID remains the standard, Palli said — but there’s also digital fingerprinting, and first-party HTML cookies being used instead of IFA. However, he’s positive the industry is going to embrace Apple’s new solution.

“There is definitive contemplation that there be an industry transition period between UDID and IFA,” so it’s not a huge surprise it’s taking so long. It’ll happen, said Palli. “I think that the industry is highly interested and motivated to get there.”

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Just looking around last week’s IFA event in Berlin, you’ll see what I mean — a whopping great 4K television set from Sony that comes in at 84 inches across; a Windows handsets from Samsung that’s a “crazy thin” “powerhouse”.

But is there anything else out there? Are there any other ways to understand what’s happening?

Unpicking was the idea behind an IFA fringe event I spoke at called The Zeitgeist Project. Over the course of an evening, a group of speakers — including Richard Seymour of design firm Seymourpowell; Tom Uglow of Google’s Creative Lab in Australia; and Michael Wolff, co-founder of legendary branding company Wolff Olins — discussed new ideas in design, unpicked new trends, and found hero products that we thought represented a new future.

My trend was intimacy, something I explained through a short polemic you can see on The Zeitgeist Project site, but that’s worth elucidating here, too. I think it’s one of the driving trends of innovation right now, even if we can’t always see it.

Basically, I think product designers are becoming much more aware of the need to foster intimacy between the things they make and the people who use them — and we’re seeing a new vocabulary of ideas and services emerging that do precisely that.

Why? We often feel ambivalent and distanced about mass manufactured goods, and try to find different ways to make them feel special, intimate and personal. Now we’re developing new methods (both in terms of design and manufacture) to capitalize on that desire.

There are obvious, little ways that we can forge a closer bond with products — the way we use them, the small things we do to customize or personalize them, the memories and personalities we imbue them with. But those are all after the fact, and not really designed into the product itself. Consumer electronics are not like a chef’s pan, which is expected to improve as it become battered and bruised with age — the most desirable state for most electronics is fresh out of the box.

At a design level, I think we’re learning lots of new ways to foster intimacy before customers can even get their hands on the end result. We’re finding new ways to involve people.

That’s one reason Kickstarter and other crowdfunding platforms have been successful — they create a level of intimacy between the product and the customer. Partly people are buying into a dream, supporting people they are fans of, or just paying for the entertainment value of being part of a movement — but they’re also joining in because they want to have a personal relationship with a product (and the product’s creators). They want to imbue it with a story.

Crowdfunding is really about a method of service design that creates intimacy while the product is still on the drawing board.

But we’re also learning new ways to make things in ways that can foster intimacy. The craft and artisan movement has had a big impact across lots of areas — food and drink, for example — but it’s now starting to move, in a fashion, into the way we manufacture some more complex goods. And not in a hokey way either!

At one end, you have small batch manufacturing. The way that web platforms like Alibaba have helped democratize access to the resources for building products, particularly from the Chinese manufacturing base, is helping change the economics of many products. Not long ago, it would take huge capex and big teams. Now you can outsource it as easily as emailing a design.

I think the zenith of this trend may be something that’s been around for a little while, 3D printing. What started out as a way of producing rapid prototypes and three-dimensional models is now starting to bleed into the world of real products. It’s the ultimate small batch, because each product is made individually, automatically and so can be built in a fashion that is both crafted and manufactured at the same time. It’s opening the door to a level of intimacy and personalization that we haven’t seen before in products like this.

Now, I’m not claiming 3D printing will save the world. There are plenty of people who seem to be doing that, and they’re overestimating it. 3D printing, as it is, won’t change everything. But if you agree with me that fostering intimacy is a way of making better products, then you may be able to understand why, in the right circumstances, I’d encourage a product printed individually, personalized to your needs and tailored to your requirements. Imagine a pair of glasses designed to fit you and nobody else, or a handset that was actually made to fit the dimensions of your hand.

I think the combination of those things — being able to make people part of the product before it ever goes on sale, and being able to develop and produce goods that are individually tailored and made in the smallest possible batches at the right price — is the herald of a new sort of storytelling in products, an intimacy that could change the way we think about what we do.

The product I picked that best explained that trend was the Makie doll, a 3D printed doll that I’ve written about before. It’s one of the first applications of this technology in a real way, and it is all about the story — all about the relationship between you and your personalized product.

I wasn’t alone in thinking along this road: some of the other suggestions from were about ways to feel closer to products; through sound or manipulating our brains (Oxford neuroscientist Charles Spence had a great presentation); through the act of making; through emotional resonance. If you want to hear more about their ideas, you could turn to Adam Tinworth’s comprehensive liveblog or this post by the organizers, Freestate.

Will we see more of it? Perhaps not on the show floors of trade shows, at least not very soon. But in the sheds, the garages and the dreams of people all over the world, I think there’s a quest for intimacy that we should all take notice of.

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I’m not convinced the Tablet P will be a tablet sales leader — especially if AT&T continues to think subsidized LTE tablets should cost $699 — but I do credit Sony for its efforts in both the hardware and the software on the Tablet P. The clamshell runs on Google Android Honeycomb, but you might not know it based on this video first-look from Netbook News from the IFA show in Berlin.

Typical of Sony, the Tablet P looks like a refined piece of hardware. The device uses two 5.5-inch IPS displays, allowing for wide viewing angles, although I think I’d find it challenging to get past the bezel between the two screens. And the company is clearly leveraging its other lines of consumer electronics; in the video you can see how the Tablet P searches for and connects to a Sony-branded television and wireless speakers.

Of course, there’s an immediate downside to any device that uses a heavily modified user interface on top of Android when it comes to updates. As Google improves its Android tablet system, Sony will undoubtedly have to spend time and effort to rework such custom user interface elements; a process that can take months if Sony even chooses to make the changes. That means as nice as the Tablet P may look now, it could lag behind other tablets that gain new features and functions through Android updates. The good news is that Sony will have Android 3.2 on the Tablet P when it begins to ship.

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Last week, we noted that Samsung was working on Super AMOLED Plus displays in sizes up to  seven inches, which would be in products by year end. The screen technology provides some of the most vivid, eye-popping colors and is used in a few of Samsung’s current smartphones. (Related: our Super AMOLED Plus smartphone video demo) These displays max out at 800 x 480 resolution today, but Samsung is reportedly working on 1280 x 720 support on the larger screens, giving me cause to suspect the Galaxy Tab 7.7 will still have a 7-inch screen — like the current model — but the other 7 may loosely refer to 720p, or 1280 x 720 high-definition resolution.

There’s little doubt that whatever the screen size of the new Galaxy Tab 7.7, it would likely run Google Android Honeycomb, and not Gingerbread as the 7-inch Tab I currently own does. I’ll be curious to see how that plays out because I prefer Gingerbread, along with the Samsung software tweaks to improve it, over any of the Honeycomb tablets I’ve used or reviewed yet. I’m also partial to the 7-inch screen size because it offers the same portability of a smartphone, fitting in jacket pocket or back pants pocket, while also providing a larger screen experience.

Aside from the screen size, operating system and overall specifications — I’d expect a dual-core processor to power the slate — I’m looking seeing if the new tablet will support cellular voice calling. The original Galaxy Tab model actually does, but in the U.S., such functionality is stripped out. There are ways to hack voice service back in, but that’s not an ideal solution. If Samsung brings a 7-inch — or even a 7.7-inch — Galaxy Tab with Super AMOLED Plus screen and voice support, my next “smartphone” just might be a 720p tablet.

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