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Apple iPhone Rumors Resurface
donkeyDevil writes: "Following the rule of 'i before e except before P,' rumors of an iPhone resurface in the New York Times (registration required).
The evidence: OS features, foiled acquisition attempts, PIXO relations, and the genius of Steven P. Jobs.
Unmentioned, Apple's tried phones before. PIE produced a nifty desktop phone design, Apple Europe produced some nice telephone-computer integration software."
The thing is, a phone and a Computer are the two things that everyone has on their desk. Judging by their past successes (keyboards, mice) maybe Microsoft should start making phones as well.
If these companies want to compete in the future of VoIP, then they need to start building up their knowledge base now. Even if they start by building regular POTS phones, they will gain the expertise and experience of phone ergonomics and production.
There is an intersting discussion about this in the register. To summarise, it makes little sense for Apple to design and build its own phone - a partnership with Sony and Ericson would be more reasonable. Designing and builind a portable phone is much more expensive that building a MP3 player. All Apple wants is to integrate the phone into their digital hub.
Mobile phones are an extremely competitive market: if you bring out an overpriced phone (relative to the other phones on the market), it just plain doesn't matter how cool it is - you won't sell enough volume to make a profit. Makers like Nokia can afford to make uber-cool super-phones, because they enhance the company image and make you want to buy a cheaper Nokia phone. Apple doesn't have that kind of market model, so how are they going to succeed on their own?
What's your damage, Heather?
The reductionism of the history of Apple to "Wasn't that Newton a bad proposition?" is especially obvious and seems like the sort of journalistic conceit that pushes faked-up drama in a story. I mean:
The Newton might have lost Apple money, okay. But it lost Apple money for a variety of reasons -- among them the problem Apple's always had with supply chain on its products, and the way Apple collapsed in the laptop market for years before releasing the first shoddy Power PC powerbooks. To lump Apple's entire fortune as a company into that one product just to create a false sort of journalistic flow in the story is just lame.
Real story: There are some indirect signs that Apple may enter the PDA market again. They did once before, but they were a little ahead of the market and they eventually cut bait. Wait and see.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
I'll tell you what *I* think needs to be done: integration of iPod with a full Palm OS capability.
One thing that keeps me from getting an iPod is that I already have too many damn gadgets that I need to function. Pager (work), cell phone (personal), Palm pilot, wallet, and keys. If I add a iPod to this mix, I run out of pocket space. And I don't want to clip three or four things to my belt.
I know that Apple is moving to include calendar and contact information on the iPod, but read-only access is not enough, and entering data through the five buttons + wheel on the iPod would be tedious.
iPod + Palm + phone *might* someday be even better, but a hard drive in a cell phone seems a bit much. I've never really liked the idea of being hooked to my cell phone through a headset.
Of the 12 new OS X features the company has been emphasizing on its Web site, most would be desirable for a hand-held phone, including chat capabilities, mail, an address book, calendar features, automatic networking and a synchronization feature that will become available in September.
Um, as far as I know, most computers come with address books, chat capabilities, calendar features, automatic networking and synchrinization features. Does that mean MS is coming out with a portable phone just because outlook has all these features? This guy is TOTALLY grasping at straws here. iPhone my ass.
This, of course, doesn't prove anything but it is interesting nonetheless.
Registrant:
Apple Computer, Inc. (IPHONE11-DOM)
1 Infinite Loop
Cupertino, CA 95014
US
Domain Name: IPHONE.ORG
Administrative Contact, Technical Contact:
Eddings, Kenneth (KE557) eddingsk@APPLE.COM
Apple Computer, Inc.
1 Infinite Loop
M/SAti 60-DR
Cupertino, CA 95014
408 974-4286 (FAX) 408 974-1560
Record expires on 15-Dec-2003.
Record created on 15-Dec-1999.
Database last updated on 18-Aug-2002 05:26:24 EDT.
Domain servers in listed order:
NSERVER.APPLE.COM 17.254.0.50
NSERVER2.APPLE.COM 17.254.0.59
News Flash: After the iPod, iMac, iTunes, etc. etc., Steve Jobs today announced that from today he will be officially refering to himself as iI.
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
Err....mistake? From whose viewpoint? Apple got to service their customers first, got a cool product to entice the OS-agnostic to their machines for a while, and then once demand had died down a bit they added Win compatibility and now have access to that market too.
I don't see much in the way of a mistake being made there.
Cheers,
Ian
I agree, but in the beginning they didn't have more units to sell. Production was soaked up entirely by demand from Mac users. Well, Mac users and me that is - I went the XPlay beta route in order to use it on Windows.
When demand slackened a little, they introduced the Windows compatibility to expand the number of people they could sell to.
Cheers,
Ian
Palm is currently the OS of choice in a grand total of zero of the major phone producers. Symbian however is the OS of choice in pretty much the whole raft of them.
Partnering with Palm for phones would be akin to partnering with Suse for the Mainframe market. Apple are much more likely to partner with the companies of the future like SonyEricsion, or to develop standard extensions to Symbian to make all Symbian phones interoperate seemlessly with the Mac.
Palm needs to change, it not a reliable OS for phones to run on. Symbian is, and it has the backing.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
I'll tell you why not. Because Apple doesn't produce cookie-cutter products. Steve Jobs can't just go to the company that builds Nokias and say, "Produce XXXXXX of these, but oh yeah -- make the case white and silver."
For Apple, it doesn't work like that. Not anymore. Apple has come the conclusion -- rightly -- that the ergonomics and user-interface are just as important as functionality. No, they are integral to the functionality of the device.
For most people this is so obvious that it usually gets overlooked. A great book that demonstrates this is The Design of Everyday Things -- if you haven't read it and are in product engineering/design, I highly recommend it.
The point is, what truly sets Apple apart, is its attention to detail. The small details can make or break a product, and they know that. It's particularly well-evidenced in their laptop designs and the iPod. If you haven't had a chance to play with either of these, find someone who owns one and spend 30 minutes of your life with it, and you'll see what I'm saying...
blog |
I get the feeling you didn't read very carefully. The article specified new features to the OS that would interface well with a Bluetooth-enabled phone.
The thing is, right now, there aren't a lot of Bluetooth-enabled phones on the market. I don't know a single person that has one. I know I am in the market for one, personally, and if Apple releases one, I'll be in line for it.
Right now, it behooves Apple to release one, too, because the market for the specific product is wide open...and if they have a bunch of Mac users out there, looking at Bluetooth-enabled phones, they're going to want to be a player in that market.
blog |
I already own a $400 POS desk phone called by the name of iPhone. It has a 640x480 monochrome touch screen. It was bundled with a bigplanet multi-level marketing scheme my parents bought into a few years ago. I doubt Apple would want to be associated with such a butt-ugly piece of hardware.
They'd have to come up with a better name if they released a phone of any kind.
A solution to the problem with music today
I wonder if they'll have Ellen Feiss doing Switch commercials. "My old Nokia phone went BEEPBEEPBEEPBEPPBEEP! It ate my voicemail. Bummer."
"I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar."
-Hoban Washburn
Apple's certainly got something up its sleeve when it comes to telephony, but everyone's hung up on the hardware aspects - why not think about software for a second?
.mac or OS X Server as some sort of add-on.
With QuickTime 6 (especially) the potential for clear, bandwidth-adaptable communications is right in the OS. Anyone who's seen streaming QT6 broadcasts knows that it's a quantum leap in quality over previous incarnations. There is a strong likelihood that some form of realtime video conferencing will be built into future versions of iChat - using Rendezvous and the Address Book to locate people across LANs and WANs, for instance. Now, eliminate the video component, and imagine those algorithms being brought to bear on multiple audio streams. You could pack quite a lot of conversations on a Gigabit Ethernet connection...and with the appropriate gateways, iChat becomes a softphone. I presume Apple is already up to speed on H.323 and its rapidly rising successor, SIP.
Furthermore, with the emergence of T.38 Fax-over-IP, Apple could integrate a T.38 client into the OS (as part of Print Center or a Telephony Center) to work with FoIP servers like XMediusFAX.
I've even heard that Apple might integrate IP faxing into
Future versions of Xserve might be used as VoIP gateways and softswitches - combined with the usual hardware from Cisco, Alcatel, Avaya etc.
If there is a hardware "phone" it might not come from Apple. Most likely it will just be a 3rd-party phone or PDA loaded with a combo of Bluetooth and 802.11g to allow synchronization and wireless "roaming" in-office, respectively. I've seen solutions like this (minus Bluetooth) running on Compaq iPaq PDAs, so there's no reason Apple can't do it.
Link to this article, no registration required.
Apple's Chief in the Risky Land of the Handhelds
The problem with phones is that there are significant issues of network compatability.
The US, Apple's core market, has too many incompatible cellular phone networks. Having multiple versions of the iPhone that support PCS, GSM, and god-knows-how-many-analog versions would be a pain in the ass in the logistics and product development perspective. Making a phone available only on one network would limit the market significantly.
Even worse, an iPhone would have to compete with phones given away for free from the network operators. The Nokia 3390 phone that Voicestream gave me for free is extremely well designed and easy to use - I don't see how Apple could improve on it, besides maybe Bluetooth PC-phone integration. But I would certainly never pay hundreds of dollars for that.
There was no "equivalent device." And if you mean costing somewhat more than a "less-than-inspirational-but-pretty-similar device" then don't say "3 to 4 times more." It's those kind of tired exaggerations that keep folks stuck in the (well-earned) early 90's Anti-Apple mindset.
And if you're going to insist that it isn't an exaggeration show me a device which was on sale within 3 months of the introduction of the iPod, in the same size/weight class, same capacity, same transfer speeds, which also doubled as a hard drive....at less than the iPod price.
No? Thanks for playing our little game. Next!
You like your Macintosh better than me, don't you Dave? Dave? Can you hear me Dave?
Did anyone read the article about the design of the iPod? Apple basically bought all the parts off the shelf, with the exception of the case. They didn't build it all from scratch, and used existing parts wherever possible. So given the relative success of the iPod, the logical choice for the design of the iPhone would be to partner with Sony or Ericsson, let them provide the guts, and let Ivo dream up the nifty case.
.mac, downloading all your contacts and stuff? That's assuming you don't spring for the Bluetooth adapter.
Then consider all the new stuff in Jaguar. Some posters have said, "Like including chat and address books in the OS is anything unusual". Well, it's not... except that Apple is all about the "Digital Hub". What do you wanna bet the iPhone will have the ability to sync with
The biggest problem with phones is they aren't like MP3 players, in that phone services are localized. You can't use your bitching Sony with Nextel, or whatever. If they want the phone to work, they'll need to have the best penetration possible in terms of phone use.
I think there's at least a decent chance.
ZOMG I WOULD LOVE TO KNOW ABOUT YOUR FEELINGS ON MACINTOSH VERSUS WINDOWS, VI VERSUS EMACS, AND HOW YOU'RE NOT A DORK
will they be unable to get press passes to Macworld SF?
It's that time of the year when someone has to post a link to this other idea from Apple. :)
If you open yourself to the foo, You and foo become one.
In most countries, handset prices for contract mobiles are subsidised heavily by the networks. Even prepay phones are subsidised to some extent. This means that a phone will always be cheaper than an equivalent PDA. As an example, I just got a newly released T68i, off-net price ~300GBP. I got it for free on an Orange contract.
1) Palm is tanking, badly.
2) Handspring has yet to support OS X native despite platitudes for over a year.
3) Windows CE devices are not Mac compatible.
4) Sony doesn't support Mac OS directly.
Apple's PDA section of the digital hub is about to get very sparse and remain unsupported if it doesn't do something fairly soon. Options are:
1) Kick Handspring in the nuts. (Please do!)
2) Buy Palm outright.
3) Convince Sony to play nice.
4) Live with outdated PDAs.
Or, in my not so humble opionion, dump the whole problem by making the right move and producing (either on their own or in cahoots with a mobile phone manufacturer) a combined PDA/phone.
Think about it, it doesn't make sense to spend time and effort syncing your PDA, your Phone, your iPod, and your desktop. It makes a lot more sense to start putting them into one device, and syncing that to your desktop.
Battery life is now reasonable to support it, Apple has repeatedly proved that the can put out UI that makes a device world class. (See the iPod). And nobody else out there wants to support Apple's hub strategy, they all want a share of the Bill Gates' market.
While I don't agree that Apple will likely produce a proprietary phone. They don't have to. All they have to do is work their interface magic on the front end of one.
Who care's who's 'talk to the network guts' live inside the phone, at that level, there is no differentiation from Nokia, to Erricson to Kyocera. What's going to make thing killer is a new 'front end' that makes your phone a better tool. And who's produced the most innovative tools in the last 15 years?
After all that Steve has done for the age of the Personal Computer...and all he continues to do... you go ballistic over a little "genius" hyperbole? Switch to decaf already, sheesh. The guy has some pretty serious accomplishments/credentials and merits a comment or two of that nature.
You like your Macintosh better than me, don't you Dave? Dave? Can you hear me Dave?
According to the whois
Record created: 1997-03-19 00:00:00 UTC by NSI
ibooks came out after 1998. Considering how that site and the laptop are quite different things, there should be no trademark overlap issues, but also Apple would have no rightful ownership over the domain.
that makes cell phones?
Everybody has mentioned Sony and (sp) Eriksson, but even if there was a chance in hell of this kind of product getting sold, I don't think they'd buy from either of those two. (Apple isn't selling its own PDA because the market is saturated and no one is making money. The cellular handset market is 10 thousand times worse, so don't look for this any time soon. Eriksson might make a likely partner, but longterm Sony is a major competitor in the digital-lifestyle space, so I don't see them going there. Eriksson or Nokia, maybe.)
Who does Apple know that makes phones? A company established in the cellular industry, maybe down on its luck in recent years, looking for a breakthrough product? Maybe one that sells things like phones and has been getting good press lately for Bluetooth gear seeing as how Apple loves Bluetooth. If oonly there was a company that Apple already had a relationship with, then we'd know who they might go to for this sort of thing.
If only I could think of a company like that...
Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside a dog, its too dark to read.
iTunes,iSync,iCal,iMovie,iEtc ....
Not all 'i' products have to be hardware. I think it would be awesome if 'iPhone' was just a software piece to make voice communication on the internet easier and possibly integrate it in with one of those bluetooth sony/ericson phones. Now that would be awesome.
Ryan
I'm surprised that no one has yet mentioned that Motorola's past relationship with Apple could be a factor in this... Moto makes phone chips and could be more willing to put R&D into improving PowerPC chips again if Apple makes phones with their other chips. (Or Apple could go elsewhere to "punish" Moto for failing to abide by Moore's Law.)
Those who complain about affect & effect on
Apple announces their entrance into the bionics market with a new prosthetic for the rest of us: the iEye.
"We feel that a clear vision is needed in the synthetic vision market, and Apple is excited to bring a new light to users with vision problems." said CEO Steve Jobs at a recent press conference.
The iEye uses Bluetooth technology to mesh the camera of the iEye to a user's Macintosh product. From there, a second Bluetooth receptor disguised as a user's 2nd molar sends basic visual stimuli to the user's brain.
"We know that our vision-impaired users will give their eyeteeth for our new product." Jobs said.
International versions of the iEye include the PopEye (for maritime users with stronger water resistant features), and the EyeYiEye (for members of the Hispanic community).
When asked why the iEye uses a Mac as a "middleman" device rather than transmitting the signal directly to the molar-shaped receptor, Apple responded, "Uh...it's..um...a part of the digital hub...and...er...well, it goes well with...um...can we call you back on this?"
Steve Austin-style "boop-boop-boop-boop" sound effects for magnification will be available in a later package.
Vos teneo officium eram periculosus ut vos recipero is.
if it weren't for the ever-gullible 4% of the computer buying public who can be fooled all of the time...
Read the above and complete the following. "This guy is..."
A. "...clearly aproaching all things Macintosh in a level-headed and unbiased way and thus your opinion should be given due consideration."
B. "...obviously a knee-jerk Mac basher who knows just enough about the platform to knock it a good one whenever the opportunity arises."
Hm... let me think....
You like your Macintosh better than me, don't you Dave? Dave? Can you hear me Dave?
For some people, this may make a great deal of sense, but my PDA is not just a contact manager.
I use my pda all day long. I take notes on it in meetings. I read news on it on the subway or the bathroom (<-- not always easy to tell the difference ...). I would not want my phone ringing while in a development meeting. I don't want to put up with the added bulk or cost of other devices vying for battery life. I don't even want color in my PDA (not until there's good reason for it).
I do want easy synching of info between desktop, phone, pda and music machine, but i want the best of each - for my use - doing each of these things. This should not be that difficult (there are enough data synching interfaces / ports on all of these devices), and my hope is Apple pulls it off with hardware or software or both.
Japan's mobile phones are generations ahead of anything coming out of Europe, let alone the US. That's one of the reasons why Motorolla and Nokia haven't been able to penetrate the Japanese market at all. (The other reason is that they don't want to invest in network compability).
J-phone started selling phones with video cameras years before the Sony Ericsson T68. The latest lineup from Sony Ericsson seriously puts the T68 to shame. You can hardly find monochrome phones anymore - nearly every new phone in the market has a color screen. All those cool features that are being promised in 5 years from 3G (video conferencing, multi-player games, streaming music, Java, etc.) were available yesterday by au, j-phone , and DoCoMo.
Now I don't want to write Apple off just yet - Apple has a great brand in Japan for product innovation and design. But to think that Apple will come out with a phone that can beat the Japanese in cool factor (see the Keitai Gallery for the newest and coolest) is pushing it.
Apple is making progress towards this. Don;t know if anyone has seen, but the SonyEriccsson t-68i will be able to synch the calender, address book etc. in it with Mac OS 10.2 via bluetooth. Have yet to see it work in person, but as a Mac user it's enough to make me consider buying one as I'm looking for a new phone anyway.
I don't think Apple management walks on water - any engineering company can create new gadgets - but their design philosophy and willingness to push beyond what's already been done make all the difference. Of course they won't manufacture it themselves - again, the iPod showed their willingness to admit their limitations. When it comes to consumer electronics, they're not a fabrication outfit, they're a design house, with an emphasis on integration with their existing line of software. I'm excited to see what they come up with next.
Was that out loud?
Ooops, the "Showcase of Japanese Keitai Culture" is actually at http://nooper.co.jp/showcase/?l=en. It's a great site that shows the latest cool keitai (mobile phones) from Japan.
Cellphones aren't about building hardware. Cellphone hardware is given away at cost (or you pay dearly for it, depending on your perspective.)
Cellphones are all about minutes. And that is where the competition is. The NYT says "building the hardware is easy, but building the infrastructure is hard". Which is why they miss the point--- apple isn't going to try and make money on cellphone hardware, apple is going to try and make money on cellphone minutes (if they even do this at all).
They would do this by providing an easy to use cellphone (certainly built by someone else and possibly co-branded) but would introduce some compelling feature that adds minutes, and adds value to the infrastructure carrier. And thus do a deal with them.
Much like they thought they'd make money with their earthlink partnership (which they may have, just hasn't been gangbusters, I bet.)
The iPod took and MP3 player and added three killer features: the useability of the wheel, the next generation battery, and the next generation storage device (a small hard drive.) Expect an iphone, if there is one, to have three killer features as well.
But I suspect that all thats going on is Apple is spending R&D money watching the market, and keeping efforts going to integrate the mac into the "Digital hub" of our lives.
When and idea comes up that improves this integration, apple turns it into a product (iSync)
It will make more money, and is far easier to grow mac market share, than to enter a totally new market and try to dominate it. The Newton was not a bad idea because it CREATED a totally new market. But a PDA or Phone would be pointless until there were three significant advantages (like the iPod had) and even then the MP3 player market was tiny when Apple entered it, and the PDA and phone markets are already big.
Apple's watching the convergence and I'm sure product ideas are developed periodically-- I'm sure they've internally built apple brand/style iPhones-- but that doesn't mean they are planning to release one. All products from good companies go thru these revisions, and speculative development to see if there really is an opportunity there.
But the economics of the situation is that unless there are some compelling reasons to believe this would be very profitable to apple, they are highly unlikely to do it. Better to spend the time and money and FOCUS on improving the Mac profitability.
Yeah, and you guys panned the ipod too: http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23
Is this what you're up to? :)
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BECOME A PR AGENT AND WIN A FREE SCOTTeVEST
We are encouraging all our loyal customers and readers to help us get some press coverage. So, we have a brand new contest. Here's how it works: if you send an email to a member of the press, AND they do an article on the product, then you get a free SCOTTeVEST. Some limitations apply, like (a) no spamming, (b) only major publications and Web sites apply (not school newspapers or smaller websites), (c) does not apply to any press that we have already received or work in progress, and (d) you must be the catalyst of the coverage as verified by the reporter. The first person who gets a favorable post on Slashdot gets a prototype of the next version for free (limited sizes available).
That's my point, actually. The Archos came out well before iPod - I believe it was over a year earlier. Yes, it was heavier (and it DID in fact double as a hard drive) and it didn't use firewire - but PC's don't come with firewire cards, they come with USB. And, again, it cost less. Do not misinterpret what I am saying. The iPod is a far better device, without question. Yes, Mac's are more refined and are, in my opinion, better - I use one at home in conjunction with Linux and Windows machines. If "ignoring the capabilities" is a trait of a PC-zealot, then you are the PC-zealot, not me, as you have twice now misread (hopefully intentionally) the specifications of the Archos devices.
Yes, Apple insiders have known for some time now that Apple is working on the iMammal in order to take the market in computerized mammals by storm. While they foresee many virtual pet applications, the first application of this new technology will be to replace the blowup doll. Here's a prototype.
I got to admit that thing looks sweet. I want one with PalmOS in it. And I want it for $200. Is that so wrong?
...the P800 is not the T68i. And yes, Steve and Avi and the ganage were brandishing T68i's at MWNY.
Here it is. I guess it was 'borrowed' from Steve Jobs while he was testing it.
M$Phone nice? Please. It had all of the typical problems of
M$ products. Promising feature set, shitty implementation.
Sometimes it would ring and you couldn't pick up.
Sometimes it would ring and 95 would exception fault.
Sometimes it wouldn't ring at all.
Sometimes it would un-sync itself with the base station and you
had to do that strange mating dance with the phone and the base.
Sometimes it would keep recording a message and wouldn't
drop the line until it would fill up your disk and then crash.
They never updated the software from v1.0
When 98 came out, it stopped working and you couldn't
install new on 98. I wanted to write my own handler for it
to get around the bugs but despite of all of the hype about
a telephony API, it didn't use it and M$ never published
specs or an API or ActiveX control for it.
It set a new standard in M$ suck-ness. I was glad to retire it.
Piece of shit.
I'll tell you why not. Because Apple doesn't produce cookie-cutter products. Steve Jobs can't just go to the company that builds Nokias and say, "Produce XXXXXX of these, but oh yeah -- make the case white and silver."
Isn't that exactly what he does with computers? What makes you think he wouldn't do the same thing with phones?
Oh, that's right, you're stuck in Jobs' Reality Distortion Field.
Sub-par performance, sluggish UI, overpriced commodity hardware, DDR mated to an outdated SDR bus... It's crap, but it's not cookie-cutter crap, so that magically makes it a good product?
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
(It's nice that Macs have always come standard with fancy options like networking and special interfaces. But it's also why Mac prices are higher and profit margins are lower.)
If the internal politics at Apple are anything like other development orgs, it went like this. The FAT versus HFS decision was made by engineers, not marketeers. The marketeers either didn't understand the impact of this decision or were not consulted. Somewhere along the line, somebody realized that this was excluding most of the potential market, so there had to be a FAT version. But obviously they didn't even start on this until the HFS version was finished. (If the iPod had been less succesful, they never would have started at all. I'm still waiting for my Windows port of the Newton Development Kit.) This might seem dumb in terms of grabbing market share, but working on both versions in tandem would have meant hiring more people -- and development orgs are under a lot of pressure to keep their head counts down.