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FCC Approves iPhone
An anonymous reader alerted us that the iPhone is one step closer to hitting shelves. "The Federal Communications Commission approved Apple Inc.'s iPhone, clearing the way for the combined phone and music player to hit the shelves. Apple expects to begin selling the phones in late June. Some of the FCC documents confirm a few features of the phone, including it will have Bluetooth and Wi-Fi and will operate in the 1900MHz and 850MHz frequency bands. The phone uses GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications) technology and the low-speed GPRS (General Packet Radio Service) wireless data standard."
No 900/1800 GSM. Slow GPRS. No user-installable applications. Lame.
At least it has wireless!
Cute phone, 2.5G speed, no CDMA, AT&T as a captive carrier (and let's see how much music downloads will cost-- and the GPRS airtime unless WiFi is used). They enter a mature market (not the nearly virgin MP3 player market) with lots of solid competition from Korea, Inc, Scandinavia, Inc., and Motorola. It'll be very interesting to see if the Apple cache' can give it market share in a truly hot market.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Apple asked that other documents such as diagrams, a schematic of the radio, the radio bill of materials and operational descriptions remain private indefinitely. The FCC agreed to the requests.
Anyone else miss the old days when every radio came with a schematic? They were usually under the battery cover or in the manuals. It really helped spark an interest in electronics, at least for me.
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
"Just kidding!"
(stock value drops)
Vermont doesn't get to play with the new toys like the rest of the kids. Unicel has a firm grasp (sp/grasp/stranglehold) on the GSM network up here. As of current, and for what ever reason, they will also not be selling the iPhone. One would say go with Cingular or T-Mobile or which ever carrier applies, but one can't do that without penalty as well for not being on home network. If 50% of your calls, or more, are in non-network coverage areas for Cingular, you get the 'sorry-we've-dropped-you-as-valued-customer' letter.
Looks like there's a lot of room for competition (or upgrade models).
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
wow, no better than my aging Motorola E680i. (it has everything iphone will have except slightly larger screen and itunes instead of crappy Real Player)
Will we be able to write our own apps for the iphone? Would be great to use it for VOIP! And many many other things!
Bring the 3G or go home
I don't see why this is labeled flame bait as he pointed out important limitations. I used cingular/at&t and due to gprs i never even thought about using serious netapps through the cellphone due to low speed and high cost.
For my current sprint phone I cancelled net features because it was barely used on this type of phone but it's much cheaper and faster. EVDO type networks (Verizon, sprint, etc.) are far better then what AT&T are using. My greatest disappointment about the iphone was the carrier. Hip internet phone with the worst major carrier (digital broadband wise).
Hmmm... Pie...
I almost wish it had just been unequivocally rejected (as impossible as that is), because that would have been just about hi-larious.
After all the hype... "Um, never mind about that iPhone. We'll get another iNoun out in a year or two!"
...that was lame FUD that PC World posted that was debunked quite readily...please edit the article summary so I don't have to read 200 comments bashing them for using GRPS instead of EDGE.
Come on, I doubt this is going to be as big as people think. Certainly not big enough to be trolling through FCC filings for the tiniest bit of spec info to feed people's Apple lust. I have a feeling this phone will go the way of the Newton. Over-priced and before its time...
Where is the slow-newsday tag?
I've been using EDGE through T-Mobile and it's much faster than GPRS. Not sure how it compares to EVDO and I won't vouch for AT&T's network, but it's misleading to tag the iPhone with "slow GPRS" when it supports EDGE.
So this is coming out with cingular right? Where's EDGE or 3G? Congratulations Apple, you've released a phone that would have been competitve in 2003.
In my opinion the apple iphone is low tech. If I can use the U.S type as anything to work with. It only works on 850/1900 bands, only has GPRS, bluetooth and wireless. New SonyEricsson/Nokia/"Insert your brand here" phones are UMTS+GSM/850/900/1800/1900 GPRS/EDGE, they also have bluetooth, Wireless and are able to play music.
If apple plans to make a stand in the GSM/UMTS market, it has to do better.
To clarify, it does have EDGE.
I believe the 'slow GPRS' in the original post refers to GPRS/eGPRS with respect to 3G etc
it even has the iSink which combines the features of the kitchen sink and bathroom sink...
Linux fixes all the cracked Windows.
I tried the Cingular EDGE service a few months ago, and it was awful. All web access was routed through a proxy server somewhere that degraded image quality to accelerate download speeds. It was minimully better than dialup and I cancelled the service two days after signing up. With 3G service it would have been better IMHO.
The iPhone has some cool features, but with crippled wireless hardware it is going to be an uphill battle trying to compete with any other smart phone that Cingular may sell that has 3G support and can leverage off AT&T's recent investments. This campaign looks like a trainwreck leaving the station.
EDGE's theoretical maximum is 473 kbps, while EVDO's is 2.4 Mbps - five times as fast. Real world performance is more like 800-1200 kbps, which is still four times the real-world performance you can expect from EDGE.
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
I wonder who they got to sell the RF modulator.
3g will be out for the New Year. I used to sell Cingular and we where told july\august area for 1st gen to make back to school. Then the 3g for the New Year. Was told not to say anything about 3g and sell current version then sell 3g to the same people who wanted the new version when it came out..
Want to know what the killer app on the iPhone will be?
myspace.com
I'm a teacher, and I can tell you that at least 10% of my students have Sidekicks (or knockoffs), and that is all they do with them.
All.
Day.
Long.
This will be the next status item for teenagers and "trying-to-be-hip" parents everywhere. These are the people who buy a $500 purse and take it to the grocery store, or who buy $150 shoes and walk around with the tags still on. This phone costs no more than 3 pairs of pants for them. I already hear them talking about how much they hate their Sidekicks and how much they think the iPhone will rock. It's on their birthday lists. I have no doubt that Apple will be laughing all the way to the bank on this one, big time.
I'm not saying it has to happen, I'm just saying that I saw it happen with iPods and Sidekicks, and this has got all of the same symptoms.
Repetition does not transform a lie into the truth. - FDR
He doesn't need a rubber. His cock is made of solid brushed aluminum.
Maybe modular synthesizers from the 60's included schematics. No synth I have ever purchased (or perused the documentation of), dating back to 1978 - long before digital anything in synths - has included a schematic.
People don't care whether their phone has GPRS or EDGE or EVDO or 3G. The points nobody's mentioning here that will make the phone take off are:
Decent resolution camera for a a phone.
Sexy touchscreen with multi-touch! This is new to any consumer device, not just phones.
Visual voicemail. A first for any phone.
Display changes orientation when you turn the device. Again: HAWT.
The promise of web browsing in your hand that sctually renders real web pages correctly.
Built-in iPod functionality that syncs with iTunes, and lists of songs/movies you can "flip" through.
It's not how much memory it has or how fast it communicates, it is the "unquantifiable" that sells things like phones.
At the end of the day, do you think people will care about any of those things? I mean the people who actually buy these kinds of phones?
Personally I think it'll come down to style and price. They'll win on style, but the price will stop your average joe from picking one up. But who knows, maybe that's what Apple wants.
Their computer division has been competing on style for a long time now. They make a profit on each box they sell. I imagine they want the same thing with the phone, because maybe, just maybe, Apple doesn't consider a checklist of features or complete domination of every market "winning".
Unlike a certain other company that shall remain nameless.
What is is all that is. Isn't that obvious?
But not this bad. No EDGE or UMTS support? Only low end phones that are coming out for Cingular/AT&T have no EDGE/UMTS support. The way I look at this phone is a glorified HTC 8525, sans slide out keyboard. But even then, the 8525 atleast uses the faster EDGE connection.
You've read a slashdot summary and assumed it was accurate. Thanks for playing.
Read non-sarcastically: it has EDGE. Obviously, 3G will be on the next revision so you can buy it again. That's how Apple works. Not that I mind it entirely, because I always have a fairly new piece of equipment since I'll always be upgrading. A side effect of this is that my Apple products generally don't break because I don't own them long enough. Yes, I'm okay with this because I have gobs of money.
I love the tech industry.
I just wasted your mod points! HA!
Slashdot doesn't publish facts. You must be new here.
I just wasted your mod points! HA!
No 3G because so far, the 3G GSM chipsets gobble power like crazy. GULPING huge mouthfuls of power. If this phone had used 3G, the battery life would have been in the tens of minutes. Super fast... oh no, battery is dead.
It remains to be seen how much better things will be with wifi. With wifi turned on, My Dell PDA went would go from full charge down to dead in about 25 minutes. The trick was simply to not use if with the wifi unless it was plugged in, which usually meant there was a real desktop PC nearby, so why bother playing with the PDA's awful browser.
Anyway, a lot of this chatter about the iPhone has been about how great it will be, blah blah blah. Truth is, nearly nobody has actually used one for any length of time. There are no actual hands-on real-world daily-use reviews. Right now, everyone is talking about a bunch of features it's supposed to have. A "feature checklist" as others have called it.
It slices! It dices! And wait! There's more!
But features listed in a product flyer don't always mean the product actually does those things well, nor does it mean those nifty sounding features will be things people actually need and want and will actually use every day. For cost of this phone, it needs to be loaded with things that A) actually work, and B) people will want to use all of them to get value back out of their purchase.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
... pop round to meet the family.
Yours, Kali
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kali
Check out this "IPhone commercial" parody from "Late Night with Conan O Brian" :
v ideo/index.shtml#mea=55682
http://www.nbc.com/Late_Night_with_Conan_O'Brien/
*waves iPhone in face*
Go check out the test reports on the FCC website https://gullfoss2.fcc.gov/oetcf/eas/reports/ViewEx hibitReport.cfm?mode=Exhibits&RequestTimeout=500&c alledFromFrame=N&application_id=268052&fcc_id='BCG A1203'. It is worth noting that Apple filed a confidentiality request for the Test Setup/External/Internal photos and the user manual for 45 days after certification. If you are an RF/Elec. engineer the reports may be interesting to you.
This feature is not called "shuffle"... it's called iDrunkDial.
-- Terry
You weren't supposed to be able to add software or hardware to the Apple TV, either. It took about a week from release for people to figure out how to replace the hard drive, remotely log in, add new codecs, etc.
Granted, hacking the iPhone will be a little harder. I give it a month, tops, if any of the tools needed leak out of Apple or third party developers.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
There is simply no excuse for why I can't just go down to Wally World, buy any phone I want (from a $20 el-cheapo POS to a $600 PDA), plug my SIM card (or RUIM card for CDMA) into it and use it.
Regulatory capture
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I think the concept of "massive subsidies" is a myth that the carriers use to justify their ETFs and the whole concept of contracts. It would be interesting to see what happened to cell phone prices if people had to buy them first and then get service to go with the phone.
If you severed the ties between cell phone retailers and service providers the prices of both would go down. Other countries work this way.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8 2E16858179020
It has pretty much everything the iPhone has plus a few extras such as GPS/maps and the ability to add applications of your choice. It runs Windows Mobile 5.0 but is otherwise a pretty decent piece of equipment.
strike
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
Sorry to say it, but iSync works nicely even without a iPhone. It syncs my MacBook with my Nokia 6280 (over BlueTooth) - calendars and contacts. Only annoyance: Birthdays don't sync.
Stop the brainwash