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Second-gen iPhone Confirmed?
gadgetopia writes "ITWire is reporting that the Taiwanese manufacturer Quanta has seemingly confirmed a second generation of the Apple iPhone. Another report referenced by the article suggests the new model could come with a different case design. 'Quanta and Apple already enjoy a strong relationship, with Quanta building both MacBooks and iPods for Apple to sell worldwide, although Foxconn (Hon Hai Precision Industry) is reported to be building the first batch of iPhones due to arrive in the US market by the end of June. Reports suggest Quanta has received an order for 5 million iPhones which are to be shipped in September ... Presumably this could entail a 3G or even 3.5G HSDPA iPhone for European markets due to get the iPhone by the end of the year, or even the addition of more memory - imagine a 16Gb or even 32Gb iPhone, unlikely though those will be this year mainly due to the high cost of 16 or 32Gb of flash memory.'"
Some have speculated that this is in fact a widescreen iPod, rather than a second revision of the iPhone (for a non-USA market?)
Tiger is working well for me. An update would be nice, I suppose, but frankly I don't really care that much.
I'm far more interested in seeing apple jump into the phone business and keep everyone else playing catch up.
So, Apple's going to release a product which was officially announced with tremendous fanfare 5 months before release, and now supposedly they're going to release the second rev 3 months after the release? And the 2nd rev order has already been placed with the manufacturer, even though the first rev won't be released for another month still? And it has a different case design (boy, that would piss off the accessories manufacturers)?
There are so many things wrong with this "story" I don't know where to begin. I think one of two things is happening here:
1) As someone above mentioned, this is a widescreen iPod (which has been rumored in the past to be released in September), not a new iPhone. Remember, both revisions of the Nano were announced in September as well. Or more likely,
2) There is absolutely nothing to this rumor at all.
http://www.theonion.com/content/news_briefs/apple_ hard_at_work_making
"Second-gen iPhone Confirmed?"
How can you use 'confirmed' with a question mark? It's either confirmed or it's a rumour. The word 'confirmed' is not intended to be ambiguous. In this case, it is definitely not confirmed.
As an early adopter I've owned (and occasionally trialed through work) loads of new phones - and developed 3rd party software for a couple (for fun).
The software on most phones is appaling, no attention is paid to user experience. They are not built by people who understand how to put together a good UI or a robust and appropriate interface for a mobile device - and I can't imagine they've gone through any sort of meaningful usability testing.
Smart phones are showcase of poorly designed software, with inconsistent behaviour, over complicated and badly organised system settings and unresponsive, sluggish and often unstable user interfaces - that are typically only half-implimented. This only started to be really visible once phones started getting complicated (as it's easy to make a simple system, like the early Nokia UI, easy to use).
I'm sure my last 4 or 5 phones will technically have a lot more features than the Apple Phone when it comes out - I've got 5 year old phones that I'm sure will be able to claim a richer feature set - but in the same way I've had other, more 'powerful' MP3 players than my iPod, if the user experience is right, that's more important to me. I'd rather have a smaller subset of features that just work really well, rather than bunch of confusing settings and overly complicated menus and options that insist on getting in the way rather than just behaving in a simple, minimalist manner and doing what I'm actually likely to WANT it to do.
I hope that in demonstrating how to get software right (which I have every confidence Apple will do - given their track record with things like the Newton) manufacturers will learn and develop similarly user-experience focused platforms with a similar level of polish. But I doubt it, after all they didn't learn from the Newton and the development of Palm OS has been royally screwed up.
As much as I don't want to sound like a fanboy, it's actually depressing how good the the UI on the Newton was when I think that no PDA or smartphone I've owned or even heard of since (and that must be about 20) has even been HALF as good. Sony were making some great hardware till they halted Clie development (the PEG-TH55 is still an awesome peice of kit, several years on) and the latest Nokia Smartphone range is interesting (I've got an E61 ATM), and the Sharp Zarus PDA range is really nifty too, but without good software, the hardware is just wasted.