Slashdot Mirror
iPhone Release Date Is June 29
willith writes "Apple has placed three iPhone commercials on their Web site today, and each ends with a tag: 'Coming June 29.' This puts to rest the question of when the thing will hit the streets, but there are still worries about allocation — AppleInsider is reporting that the supplies at Cingular/AT&T stores may be relatively tight." And some fanatic sites are already parsing the ads for such enigmas as the "mystery app."
Please, please, please Slashdot editors, can you have mercy and only post eight or ten fan boy raves about how amazingly wonderful their shiny new phones are, and how the iPhone is going to Change The Face of Communications in Our Lifetime?
I mean, it's a phone for God's sake, not a cure for cancer.
Three Squirrels
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
The two potentially big problems with it I see are:
1. Lack of tactile feedback in the UI. I.e. you have to look at it and concentrate on the UI to use it.
2. The fragility of the touch screen.
From TFA:
However, there is an odd shot in the newly released "How- To" iPhone ad, where the screen goes from the traditional 11 icon view, to a new 12 icon view. (See below).
It's a pet peeve of mine that people use the word "traditional" for things which were invented very very recently. Traditional things are generational things, handed down from one generation to another. You can't make it artificially, and you can't make it quickly.
Reminds me of this brand new Irish Pub that just opened up down the road from me. As I am an alcoholic, I was right there belly to the bar on the SECOND day they were open. I was amazed to see that all the walls of the brand new bar were full of photographs of customers having good times with their friends, in this friendly neighborhood establishment. Amusingly, for a neighborhood bar, it was surprisingly inaccessible. You couldn't really walk to it, as there were no sidewalks, just rows and rows of parking spots. I wouldn't want to walk there anyway, because the traffic from the Bed Bath and Beyond next door is crazy.
So, these photos were all over the walls of this pub, showing hundreds of people having an amazingly good time. I was really jealous of those people who showed up at this brand new bar, on the first day it was open. They were the lucky ones, having had the opportunity to both create tradition, and have a good time doing it too. But still, it was a good feeling to see that my neighborhood bar had created in just one day what some pubs in Ireland are apparently still working on after 300 years or more.
I think that the new Irish bar next door really captured the tradition which my neighborhood strip mall holds in such high regard. I'm not sure that these little icons on a phone can measure up to that.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
I disagree about the fragility of the touch screen. If children's devices (Nintendo DS) can have a touch screen, I don't see why adult devices should be concerned about the fragility of such a thing.
.... hold on. I need to go write a business plan.
As for the tactile feedback, I think you're underestimating the UI mechanisms used to use the device. The most pressing activity on a phone is dialing. If you can solve the ease of dialing issue, you can make everything much easier. If you look at the demo of the Google map, you'll see what I'm talking about. It makes dialing easy. No current phone does this right now. None.
About the only way this could get easier is if they start scanning your voice mail for phone numbers to associate with the visual voice mail
But with the iPhone your mom can too... That's what makes it different.
My xv6700 can already play mp3s, browse Google maps, take notes, record videos, etc
Sure. But this is going to be just like the iPod and the "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame." response. You can point to devices that functionally do most of the things that the iPhone will do, or maybe even more things (like run Putty and all that). What you won't find is a device that triangulates so well between features people want, high quality user-experience, and excellent industrial design.
Was the iPod revolutionary when it came out? AFAIK the Dell Jukebox was also around at that time when the iPod came out. The difference? Not much when you compare the features. They both had similar battery life, they both played both played music for your ears. Where is the difference then? The Dell Jukebox would make your ears bleed! What I mean is, you don't have to be revolutionary to beat the competition. Just take what others are doing wrong, and do it right, or in a way that you think people will enjoy. The iPod wasn't/isn't successful because of marketing only. It does a great job at being an mp3 player and not a piece of shit that you battle with just to get it working.
What about the iPhone? It's the same concept if you ask me. There are pocket pc's and blackberries that have many features that the iPhone promiss to offer its customers and whatnot. The difference is more in the interface and how you'll use it rather than discovering new features.
I say this cause I see a lot of people commenting on the iphone and saying that "X" and "Y" devices do what the iphone does.
AFAIK, a Geo Metro and a Lexus IS350 can both go from point A to point B and reach the maximum allowed speed limits on (almost) any road you'll be travelling on. The difference is the experience you get out of driving those cars.
If you're some sort of tragic square who needs to run Windows
Yeah man, it's like, can ya dig it... these freaky cats at Microsoft they, like, want you to believe they are innovative and shit, but, it's like, they just take ideas man. And ideas want to be free, like beer man, ideas can't be packaged and sold, they need to run free in the wild, man! Hay brother, keep fightin' fascism from those unhip squares at redmond, man... use the tools of the people, spoken word, rhythm and buying apple products, man!
I think the "How To" commercial does a pretty good job of showing why I expect the iPhone is going to do well.
/.ers obsess over having in their phones. But if they can see how an iPhone can be used for all their calls/mail/web/music&movies in 30sec of watching TV, *that* they'll like.
They visually explained how to use every major feature of the thing in a 30sec TV spot.
Most people neither know or care about UMTS, or HSDPA, or AGPS, or any of the other high tech acronyms that certain
Technology has progressed to the point where a well thought out interface matters more than having the latest and greatest bullet points on a spec sheet some months before the other guy. The bottleneck that needs to be addressed these days isn't generally in the machine, it's often between the user and the machine.
"The worst tyrannies were the ones where a governance required its own logic on every embedded node." - Vernor Vinge
Yeah, the only new part of that is being able to watch a DRM'd copy of Pirates of Caribbean that you paid $10 to download
Are you trying to make this sound bad? I mean, I know that writing the word "DRM" around here is like dropping chum in water filled with sharks-- people go crazy-- but hell, that sounds pretty convenient to me.
Of course, the iPhone will be able to play non-DRMed movies, so if you wanted you could go to Best Buy, spend $25 on Pirates of the Caribbean, use Handbrake to rip it as mp4, and put that on your iPhone. I mean, if you want, you have that option. Still, it sounds mighty convenient to be able to, if you like, buy Pirates for $10 and copy it to your iPhone, the whole process taking a little longer than however long you can download it over your internet connection, and being ready to go without leaving your house.
Yeah, yeah, I get it, "...but DRM is bad and $10 is too expensive!" Well you don't HAVE TO buy it from Apple, but you have that option, and I don't see anyone else giving such an elegant solution. I'll tell you, if you'd told me a couple years ago that in 2007 I'd be able to buy movies online, download them, and copy it to a hybrid iPod/phone/PDA-- showing me how easy the whole process is, how small and thin the iPhone would be-- I'm not sure I'd have believed you. I'd say, "Yeah, sure, and I'll probably have a flying car too!"
In summary: Where's my flying car?!
Like you, I am also a college student living on campus, except in Canada, though WiFi is also ubiquitous here. It is clear we have vastly different experiences. I believe the iPhone targets people like me:
A - I don't have my laptop with me when I go out with friends. Why would I lug that thing around, especially if I'm out drinking? Recipe for disaster.
B - Free public computers only exist on campus. Honestly, is campus really that exciting that you spend the vast majority of your off hours there?
1 - Plans change. This sounds like one of the initial arguments against cell phones. "I always plan ahead, so there's no need for a barrage of phone calls on the go!". Well, invariably someone screws up, or something unforeseen happens (bar closes, buddy gets run over, movie theater's closed, etc etc). Since getting my phone I've had an infinitely easier time socializing with my friends than before, and I suspect this will up the ante for that even further.
2 - 411 is $1 a call. Around here, it means dialing it, waiting. Waiting. Waiting. Describing what you're trying to find. Waiting. Waiting. Getting your answer (texted to your phone, nice), and then turning around and calling THAT number to find the actual information you need... Oh, and you might have to hold there too. With the internet at your fingertips, it's "free" (save data costs... but considering how much I plan to use the service, it's more than worth it compared to 411).
3 - Yes, because my friends are my bitches who should look up movie schedules on-call. Not that I wouldn't if I were in a real pinch, but this allows me to find the information I need independently. It also allows me to skim a page for the info I need, instead of forcing my dear friend here to recite it to me.
4 - I suppose this is where we differ. When I "hang out with friends", we hit pubs, bars, movies, restaurants, pool joints, concerts, and any other number of events and weird places. We like to explore a lot, and we bus ourselves to nearby strange cities to take in their sights and sounds. An iPhone-like device would be extremely helpful for us.
Allow me to point out a very recent example. I just returned from Toronto (Canada), where my girlfriend and I went to see the grand re-opening of the Royal Ontario Museum (highly recommended visit for anyone in the area, seriously). After taking a look at the brand spankin' new museum, we decided to take in a movie, but wanted to check the movie schedule, as well as if we'd miss the last bus out of the city. Well, unfortunately that meant:
A - Trudging down the street to the movie theatre. It's only a few blocks, but still 10 minutes wasted if I had access to their site at my fingertips.
B - Trudging to the nearest subway terminal, which has a kiosk where you can look up inter-city bus schedules.
Not rocket science by any measure, but you can start to see how an iPhone would have been useful here. A half hour information trek could've been reduced to 30 seconds. Heck, while perusing the museum we wondered about certain things, and if I had Wikipedia at my fingertips...