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How Big Will the iPhone Become?
palewook writes "Combine the best elements of an iPod with a BlackBerry's addictive usefulness, and you may just get Apple's Next Big Thing. Around 2009, when the lower cost version of iPhone appears, Business Week believes the yearly market for iPhones could be over 10 billion dollars a year. Its an interesting prediction; if those numbers come to pass, iPhone could become a bigger source of revenue than the traditional iPod. 'The answer may not come until 2009. By then, Apple should have begun creating lower-cost iPhone variants to reach consumers scared off by the introductory $499 price. It also will probably have moved into overseas markets and cut deals with more carriers to utilize higher-speed wireless networks. So while most analysts look for Apple to sell around 3 million units this year and 10 to 12 million in 2008, many figure that 20 million will move in 2009.'"
Dimensions 4.5 x 2.4 x 0.46 inches / 115 x 61 x 11.6mm
I doubt it will get much bigger. Maybe a little to fit a 3G radio in a future revision.
Next question.
With many of the recent comments on the iPhone suggesting the real acceptance test will be whether your Mum can use it, when I saw the article's title I thought - ah! now they're going to produce a 'large button' version for older users.
Any sufficiently advanced bug is indistinguishable from a feature.
How about we wait until they've sold *one* until we predict that they'll sell 20 million 2 years from now.
My previous comment may have been in error.
I now believe that the iPhone will sell 456 million units and will indeed Change the Face of Communications as We Know It.
Mmmmm... Kool-Aid....
Three Squirrels
I want buttons.. Real touchy feely buttons. I can learn to navigate buttons in the dark, while driving and in numerous situations where I don't want to LOOK at the phone.
If my Crystal Ball is any indication, we're in for a surprise.
I tend to think that additional features follow the law of diminishing returns: after a while extra crap becomes a burden rathern than a selling point. It's my opinion that people feel confused and overwhelmed by one device that "does it all." The beauty of the iPod was that it did what it was intended to do exceedingly well. It didn't have poorly conceived features tagged on to simply add more bullet points to the packaging. I really hope that the iPhone can walk the line between all-in-one usefullness and confusing novelty well.
By 2009, Steve Ballmer will be ordering chairs by the truckload.
Most of the stuff on
5 hours of talk/video time? (16 hours if you only play audio) I doubt that it is going to make that much of an impact with that kind of battery life. I know thats longer than the video play time of a video iPod, but if your iPod runs out of power, chances are you are going to be annoyed, but thats about it. If your phone dies, you could miss an important email/call/whatever. Then you will probably be much more pissed.
Just my 2 cents, I think its a great device otherwise, but great devices with no power are pretty much expensive bricks.
Monstar L
Now that slashdotters never RTFA, we're ready for the next step: only read the title. You, sir, not only deserve a +5 Funny, you truly deserve a +5 Insightful for this discovery.
ID: the nose did not occur naturally, how would we wear glasses otherwise? (apologies to Voltaire)
The iPhone doesn't exist in a vacuum. Apple have (arguably) raised the bar on screen quality, usability, features and memory size, and the people who currently have 100% of the mobile phone market won't be ignoring that. The question is how quickly their corporate cultures can switch round to building phones that are not just designed to tick boxes on a features checklist but are actually good at the things they can currently just about do.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
Whilst people will buy it as a fashion statement, it's going to struggle as it's previous generation in some ways. It's biggest problem is it doesn't support 3G which for many people is a must have feature.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
It will be reliability. This isn't an iPod; you're iPod breaks and so you can't listen to music or watch videos, that's a shame. But people are wedded to their mobile phones -- if these things can't stand up to the pounding that a normal mobile phone takes in the course of a day, you're going to see sales tail off pretty damned fast.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
This year more than half of Nokia's revenues come from sub 50 Euro phones.
And this percentage is increasing.
I personally can see why. I want a phone to be a phone nothing more nothing less.
I've has a treo [great palm pilot - lousy phone) and was bought a p800 (lousy PDA, lousy phone).
I now have a Nokia 5nnn thingy with the bouncy rubber case which comes with a camera I
have never used, an FM radio I have never used, a compass! which I have used and some other
bells and whistles but it works very well as a phone.
I will spend even less money the next time I buy one and get more of what I really
want from the thing -- simple user interface and long battery life.
Old COBOL programmers never die. They just code in C.
...I don't think the iPhone is going to be big at all.
The ipod was/is huge becuase it was a relatively early entrant in a market that was just on the verge of exploding in size, and it was hugely advertised and hyped, and there wasn't any real competition for at least a couple of years. The tie-in with iTunes helped too.
The mobile phone market is completely different to this. Completely. There is an enormous existing market which has already been through most of its rapid-growth phase. There are huge, competent companies churning out amazingly sophisticated models of all types (just this quarter, the SonyEricsson W880 and the Nokia N95 are great examples), and they are refreshing those models at a furious pace.
The mobile markets differ around the world, but the Western European model essentially removes the purchase price from the end-user. I haven't paid more than $100 US for a new phone in eight years, and I'm a technophile who upgrades every year, ususally to a high-end just-released model.
Apple have no experience at making phones. They make stuff which can be good to use, but that's hard in the phone world. Above all, phones have to be good phones first, then be good ipods, then have other stuff they do well. My SonyEricsson W850 is a very good phone, a great walkman, and also lets me browse the Internet at broadband speeds in a decent way, has good Java games available, a decent-enough camera, a torch, alarm clock and so on. It's very hard to get right the phone bit, and nothign of what I've read about the iPhone tells me it'll be any good at that. It's not 3G which rules it out for many technophiles including myself, too.
Apple might talk about a low-cost verion in 2009, but the others will have cheaper phones that do far more in 2007, let alone 2008 or 2009.
They might be moderately successful in a niche in the USA, (and in the mobile pheon world, the US is a niche), but I cannot see it becoming widely successful elsewhere. I might be wrong - it might have a neat feature that'll make it a must-have - but I'll be very surprised if they do - and the second it's out, the competitors will be throwing together better competing phones.
I believe they approached Verizon initially, as they did a lot of carriers. However, Cingular was the only network at the time who were willing to partner with Apple on Apple's terms: Apple was to design the phone, control every aspect of it, and prevent the network from stuff their own software and logo all over it. That may seem reasonable from the perspective of a hardware designer, but must networks were used to stamping all approved phones with their own software/logo/etc. Blame Verizon for declining a reasonable partnership.
For me, whether or not to get an iPhone all hinges on how much the data plan is going to cost. I'd gladly pay $1000 or more for a single device that could be a usable network terminal, music player, gps, and phone, but I'm not going to pay 30-70 dollars every month for the life of the device to use it.
Considering that decent home broadband is now 25-60 dollars most places here, I really can't see paying more than 5-10 dollars for the bandwidth, and maybe another $5-10 for the portable aspect. But then isn't that already built into my base cell plan? So we'll see if AT&T comes up with a reasonably priced plan or not.
Using an iPhone may indeed let me leave the MBPro in the office much of the time. For these types of users, iPhone makes a BIG difference with the iphone in a pocket rather than a ten pound bag with charger and extension cord. People hereabouts have complained about only 1 cell provider, no 3G, no 20 gig memory, no EU sales, but to fully debug everything before going global, Apple has picked it right to limit it to N. America. Obviously the rest of the options will come, as the 3rd party applications will. Hey, the phone is not even out, and everyone has statements about various forms of failure. If you want to see failures, take a look at all the losing products from MS over the last 10 years. MS has existed profitably because of two long standing products, and those financed the losses on all the "new" products.
Yeah, but one of the draws of the iPhone (as with any smart phone) is it's internet-browsing abilities...what's the point of browsing the net on a network that is marginally quicker than dial-up? Especially on your shiny brand new $500+ phone.
Living With a Nerd
... but in the end it's waaaaay the fuck too expensive. Original iPod was $399; I still have mine.Yeah, it was way too expensive then, and I knew it. Thing was, it blew away my Rio Diamond; it also blew away the 6 CD changer in my lexus that I had spent $3K on.
I knew then it would be huge, and I bought apple stock at $14. I think that was around 2001. It took a couple of years for APPL to get some traction, but today is at $127.
Apple sees long term better than most tech companies today, in my opinion. The iPhone will take off just like the iPod did.
Anyways
sigs are for losers (except to point out that sigs are for losers)
What do I know though? I won't pay over the odds for a piece of technology just because it looks cool. I don't think I'm the target market.
"Physics is to math as sex is to masturbation." -R. Feynman
Assuming the iPhone is a hit amongst GSM users, to truly expand, Sprint, Verizon and all the CDMA networks may be the biggest obstacle to iPhone's success. Once people get addicted to their iPhones, at it's pricing, they'd want to keep it for a while. Will that be possible?
The best solution IMO, is for them to build in the hardware for all the major networks into the device (which ought to be possible). I'd buy a phone just for that capability. Then perhaps you can have phone usage on one network and data plans on another.
Alternatively, akin to something I am considering, one could buy a phone with 3Gness and run a VoIP service or Skype on it 24/7 and thereby use it as a phone... If the iPhone manages that, who knows...
Cheers!
Atheist: Buddhist in a Prius
Ok Apple fan boys go ahead and mod me troll.
But without corporations pushing their email to these devices you won't get the blackberry user base, and lets face it most big corporations haven't liked anything else Apple up to this point so why change for this product?
Now the home user? The reason most don't have a smart phone is that they just don't need it. Most of the regular phones on the market already do far more and are alot more complicated than people want them to be. The average person is going to ask why they need to upgrade to this expensive phone when their normal phone does far more than they ever wanted it to do.
So there will be a bunch of apple fans and tech geeks that buy this initially then it's sales will plummet and Apple will can the project.
Ok I'm done burning my karma now.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
When it comes to software quality and user satisfaction, yes ... Hyundai sells way more cars than Porsche, but there's no disputing which one everybody would rather drive.
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws-Plato
In 2010 Slashdot will be full of people lamenting that it has become impossible to buy a simple ipod without all the useless phone functions thrown in.
Nuffsaid
________
Don't know about his cat, but Schroedinger is definitely dead.
I think you have the target market entirely wrong. The iPhone is not going to compete with a Blackberry wielded by a businessman. The Blackberry market is a fairly small market that really focuses on young professionals. Your average teenager or college student doesn't have a Blackberry. The iPhone is targeted solidly at the same market as the iPod, which is to say the holy grail of throwing money into the wind to score trendiness, 12-24. Obviously there is going to be plenty of spill over to other markets, but the bread and butter will be a young crowd looking for something 'hip' and new. The iPhone is going to have to be pretty and 'cool' first and functional second. Your Blackberry on the other hand could be the ugliest phone on the face of the planet, yet be kept for its functionality. The iPhone will have no such luxury.
Functionality will of course be important, especially if this market opens up a little, but the 'cool' factor will be paramount. Apple already has a head start on this though. Apple has a killer marketing campaign already in place for the iPod that will be studied religiously by marketing people for years to come. The iPhone with its close relation to the iPod will likely be able to ride off the marketing inertia that the iPod already has. Throw on top of this marketing a spiffy looking product with enough functionality to beat the competition, and you have a winner. Apple also has the advantage in that the cell phone/MP3 hybrid market right now is pathetic. Cell phone markers are just now starting to pull their shit together and make decent hybrid devices, but I am deeply skeptical that they will have enough inertia to compete by the time the iPhone comes out.
If they had another year or two more the competitors to Apple might be able to put up a fight, but as things stand now I personally think that they are screwed and about to get the same kind of beating that device makers in the MP3 market got. It will be another 5 years before good non-Apple mp3/phone devices begin slowly claw their way back. You can see this in the MP3 player market. When Apple hit the mp3 player market, it was the best and it soundly thrashed the competition. Even today, with other companies putting out great non-Apple MP3 devices Apple continues to dominate because the thrashing gave early MP3 player markers was so thorough. I predict the same thing to happen the MP3 player/phone hybrid market.
Overhype.
The article doesn't mention the required monthly charge to use the features on the iphone. A quick internet search doesn't reveal the cost either. Why is this such a big secret? People keep comparing the ipod to the iphone but because one of the devices requires a regular monthly payment to make it function I think they are two completely different markets. Ipods didn't take any initial investment to use or maintain use if you ripped your own CD collection. The iphone is a paperweight without the service plan that is offered through only one provider. So why hasn't the monthly service cost been given yet? AT&T doesn't even have a iphone website yet, even though one of the first Google paid ads shown are for AT&T wireless services.
Ok Apple fan boys go ahead and mod me troll.
Why do that? Why not mod you up and up and up... to make it easier to find your post later. There is a large difference between being a troll, and being wrong. I'm sure you sincerely believe what you say.
But without corporations pushing their email to these devices you won't get the blackberry user base, and lets face it most big corporations haven't liked anything else Apple up to this point so why change for this product?
On the other hand, what if consumer push is more interesting to more people than business email push? The Yahoo push mail is an interesting option. Does everyone on earth really have more interest in their business email than the personal stuff?
Now the home user? The reason most don't have a smart phone is that they just don't need it. Most of the regular phones on the market already do far more and are alot more complicated than people want them to be.
Sounds like a a great idea then is to take a complicated device and make it much simpler. I'm not sure I know any company that has any experience at that.
The average person is going to ask why they need to upgrade to this expensive phone when their normal phone does far more than they ever wanted it to do.
Does the average person really like the phone they have?
So there will be a bunch of apple fans and tech geeks that buy this initially then it's sales will plummet and Apple will can the project.
Ok I'm done burning my karma now.
You misspelled "credibility". Brave of you to post where we can all read your thoughts in a year.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
their computer business? Niche.
Really? When you look at the areas of largest growth (Laptops) Apple is doing extremely well, like 15% of all laptop sales in the US. That is more than a niche as it's a higher percentage than other large computer makers manage.
Why do people assume that just because a market with a huge degree of locking factor (desktop computers) Apple has made slower headway than the wide open music player market, that Apple can be any less successful in a market where it's equally easy to change devices (now that we have number portability). Sure some people are in contracts they cannot get out of, but all contracts expire eventually. And when they do there is a high degree of device fungibility. Apple has shown they can thrive in that environment.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
This story seems to provide a pretty reasonable background on the deal: How Steve Jobs Played Hardball In iPhone Birth: In Deal With Cingular He Called The Shots; Flirting With Verizon . It provides some clues as to the complexity of the negotiations that Apple engaged in. It doesn't cover everything, though.
1. Retail channel
There were many big problems to solve simultaneously, perhaps including one that couldn't be solved any other way, than partnering with at least one carrier: consumers today buy cell phones from wireless providers. That meant that Apple had to get the iPhone into wireless stores to really break into the market with anything other than a hobbyist handset maker niche. AT&T has over 2000 stores in the U.S., apparently. Other large wireless providers are similar in scale of retail presence. Wireless providers have stores in airports, big malls, little malls, downtown areas, inside of other stores like Radio Shack, Costco, etc. Apple couldn't build that kind of retail network in time to sell the iPhone, it needed to get the device into places where people were already looking for phones.
2. Give and Take of Negotiations & Shaking the Industry
I suspect that Apple would have preferred to be able to secure deals with multiple vendors in the U.S. However, the cell phone industry is seriously distorted, globally, not merely in the U.S. The handset makers think that the wireless carrier is the customer, which is the ultimate cause of cell phone suckage. Cell phones are camels designed by committes of people who have never even imagined a desert oasis, let alone been to one. Apple probably had to grant a period of exclusivity to Cingular / AT&T in order to get the rest of the things Apple needed for the iPhone to be an industry shaker -- which it already has been, despite the fact that it won't even be in consumer hands for a few more weeks. And Apple got a whole lot of stuff, some of it unprecedented including changes to the provider's network to support "visual voicemail". Companies like Verizon, even though they may provide good service to their customers, also are wed to the distorted market. They perceive bluetooth as a competitive threat, and cripple it in their phones to lock their customers into their ringtone sales engine and into paying extra to transfer photos from the phone to their computer. Apple's insistance that the iPhone not be hobbled by the carrier led Verizon to say "Thanks, we'll try it our way." But the Djinni is out of the bottle, on June 29. As consumers learn what these devices can really do, they'll be demanding blue tooth sync, 802.11 connection to their PCs, and other iPhone features from Verizon. Verizon will see its subscriber base shrink if they don't provide similar, un-hobbled capability to their customers.
3. HSPDA vs. EVDO
There's another interesting tidbit regarding the 3G network market in the U.S. that might be a factor. AT&T/T-Mobile/MISC GSM Vendors appear to be seriously lagging behind Verizon/Sprint/Alltell, which blanketed the U.S. Market with 2.4 Mbit EVDO data service many months ago. In fact this seems to be "common wisdom" amongst Slashdot / Gizmodo / Engadget geeks. As everyone knows, AT&T and the many other network providers around the globe are betting on the other major 3G network technology, HSPDA. What seems to have been overlooked, in the frustration with the slow pace of 3G rollout from the GSM vendors, is that HSPDA seems on the brink of crushing EVDO in terms of bandwidth. According to that wikipedia page "Current HSDPA deployments now support 1.8 Mbit/s, 3.6 Mbit/s, 7.2 Mbit/s and 14.4 Mbit/s in downlink." One of my gadget geek friends was able to confirm that HSPDA service is available in his
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
I think that the new form factor for the iPhone is great. My only problem is that I already have a phone that I like and wouldn't switch cell providers just to get a new phone. What I really want is an iPod with the wide screen form factor that was rumored for the last 2 years to finally show up. But I realize that actually introducing such a device would most likely eat into the sales figures for the iPhone. What do you think are the odds of finally getting a widescreen iPod?
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law - Aleister Crowley
1) No synching with Outlook.
2) No synching with enterprise email services.
Do all of the 'bad for business' arguments really boil down to issues with MS proprietary stuff?
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
Until last week I would never have dreamed of owning an iPod or iPhone now, I am seriously considering the iPhone. What caused this change? My daughter graduated and for a graduation present, I bought her a 30GB iPod. I've always felt that while Apple products have some unique features that they were overpriced and not all that much better than their other-brand or no-brand counterparts. I've never been one to pay extra for style or "bling" and that is exactly what I thought Apple brought to the party. Still my daughter was celebrating a major accomplishment, she wanted an iPod and I wanted to give her a special present for her big day.
The iPod surprised me. I was impressed with virtually everything about it. I liked the simple controls. The sound clarity was top notch. The screen was crisp and clear. Even the battery charged quickly! "Fit and finish" were awesome. I went out to the iTunes store and bought Alice Cooper's "Schools Out" and made that the first song put on the iPod (a symbolic gesture); even that was faster and far easier than I expected! In little time at all I had 500+ songs on it (and told her the rest of her CD collection was up to her to put on).
Now, I'm a believer. While paying several hundred bucks for a tiny electronic object that is nothing more than an entertainment device still feels kind of steep, I can finally understand why many (including my daughter) like it so much. When I started seeing the iPhone commercials, I was very impressed and really think that Apple may just be the company with the experience and foresight to actually build the right all-inclusive portable device for communications and entertainment. While I may balk at the hefty price, I have to say that I am at least tempted and can certainly understand why some people will rush out to buy one of these "phones" (they really aren't a phone anymore, that is just one of many functions). I'll probably wait for a few months but, I think that my next phone will probably be an iPhone.
it's called an Ipaq. I paid $200 for a refurb. It's a gps (tomtom) unit, with camera, internet, email, MS Office, plays games and videos AND has 4 GB of storage. I don't get the iPhone hype.
Anything you say will be held against you.
It's not about ssh, X Windows, or iWork. The current "smart phone" industry is providing people with a big heavy feature they don't presently want -- MS Office on their phone. Yeah, it makes for dramatic commercials where spreadsheets are edited at the last second before a big meeting and a billion dollar merger is saved. In practice, people running billion dollar mergers don't really care what's in the spreadsheet. They don't read them, they have people who have people who read them for them. This feature was added to smart phones by Microsoft because Excel is what they had lying about to sell, and because it makes for dramatic advertisements.
The iPhone is about a balance of features that people really want. Business people would love an iPod in their phone, because they spend a fair bit of time on airplanes, in hotels, in airports, in taxi cabs. They also would love an easy to use map system that could help them find a decent restaurant nearby. The Apple iPhone commercials don't look like they target business users, but they nail squarely what a business user wants from a phone. They want to carry less shit with them. They want to be able to quickly look up something on the internet, or bookmark something they heard about for reference later. They're going to buy an iPhone and their older iPod and Palm Pilot will be in a drawer.
The biggest thing, however, will be ease of use. If the Address book doesn't have some asinine limit of 500 contact numbers (it wont') and if it syncs easily and reliably (it will) and if the web browser really works and if Google Maps are easy to use on the iPhone, these things are going to be the hottest new business gadget since the original Palm Pilot.
It's about efficiency. Carry one or two fewer devices everywhere I go. Carry one device that's easy to learn and easy to use, rather than so hard to learn that many users don't even know about the advanced features and so hard to use that the advanced features they know about rarely get touched. Sending text messages, checking email, and placing and receiving calls need to work well.
A few business people I know are going to get an iPhone for one feature: visual voicemail (random access to voicemail queue). They calculate that the time and annoyance they will save with that single feature more than justifies the cost of the device.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
For one of those 'lower cost' Macs and it's been 20 years??? How long do we have to wait for a lower cost iPhone again??
So Long and Thanks for all the Fish.
The last thing we need is a phone that takes both hands to operate.
In California, using a non-hands-free phone while driving becomes a moving violation in mid-2008. Washington State is doing this too. (That was enacted right after a 5-car collision caused by a Blackberry user.) I've had my truck rear-ended twice by people on cell phones. One said to the cop, afterwards, "I was just finishing my call". Had a near miss two weeks ago; someone pulling out of a parking space on a busy street was using a phone, so they couldn't turn the wheel fast enough and drove across two lanes of traffic before straightening out.
Remember the iDrive, from BMW? That was a disaster, hated by many owners. Too much "head down" time, looking at the display instead of the road.
The future is hands-free, not two-handed.
Lastly, and the biggest reason why the iPhone is not for business. As systems administrator I can't remotely manage and secure the phones for my organization. If a Treo is lost and there are important sensitive documents on the phone I can simply erase everything on it so that any person they may find it on a park bench somewhere will not see that sensitive information. I can do this all wireless and in real-time.
There's no way to know about this until after the iphone is out... and with running OS X, Apple could concievably allow you to ssh into an iPhone or maybe even run remote desktop.... though I doubt they've had time to get such features ready for launch. But I see no reason why they couldn't in a year or so. I also bet the iphone can lock its data from the casual snoop like an ipod can already.Considering OS X for the desktop still lacks these advanced management, monitoring, and security tools I don't think the phone is going to get it anytime soon. I will admit, the day that Apple does close this whole I imagine their market share will rise much faster. Combine that with binary compatibility with Windows and Apple would have all it needs to become dominant. I don't see it happening though, Apple has always seemed content to be a smaller player in the field of business.
Did you write the above just to troll? OS X Server has had this sort of stuff for years... plus you can easily get ports of most of the Linux utilities as well. I thought this sort of stuff would be common knowledge by now. OS X is a Unix... the shared libraries are weird, but you can still port all of the wonderful FOSS stuff over.And "Apple" and Windows are not binary compatible, you can just dual boot Windows and OS X on a mac now.
p.s. I'm not a fanboi, just trying to understand the "iPhone bad for business" meme, 'cuz everyone I work with wants to get one for business... but we're kinda unique in not using MS Office much and using mostly Linux stuff instead.
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
It's definitely not just about aesthetics of the device. The primary driver behind the iPhone form factor is efficient use of device front real-estate. Buttons have been proliferating like mad on "smart phones for years, and it's not helping them sell to the broader market. Why? Well, the devices intimidate some users. Other users find them to be cumbersome. 40% of the surface is keypad, leaving only a tiny screen you can't really use for much besides text messages. They buttons can't be changed after they are stamped out. You may want QUERTY, somebody else might want right-hand-Dvorak. Somebody else wants a two-thumb layout. You may want a numeric keypad layout when you're dialing, but no other time.
Yes, the touch screen could be seen as a design risk, and it's possible that it will be rejected by the market. There are undoubtedly other people like you who are adicted to buttons, and dialing in the dark. I suspect that even most of those people will find that they can adapt to the iPhone easily enough, particularly if it provides haptic feedback as a user preference. (Some people might want that turned off -- something you can't do with a button.)
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
is kind of a geek, but a non-techie, she resisted when i bought her a 19" LCD as a gift, but last night we were watching TV and a commercial for the iPhone came on. She was like, "Oh my god, what is that?!?" I kept my mouth shut untill the end of the ad and she asked how much it was. "$600." "Thats it?!". In fact as i was typing this she was on apples website and asked me if the student discount would be availible on iPhones. I think Apple's got a winner on their hands.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
I could see this being very effective. I have noticed that the tactile feedback given by the vibration feature in the Nintendo Wii's controller is fantastic. It doens't have to be overwhelming to let you know that something is going on.
I'm not sure how well this will work with the iPhone but I could see it solving the tactile keyboard feedback problem. This is the first I had heard about this feature.
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
The iPhone is awesome. Everything my iBook has including WiFi for VoIP.
Too bad they partnered with AT&T so at minimum it's going to cost you 600(+tax) plus another $100/month at least. At $3,000 for a phone that won't even work in my house, or lab, or many other places because the monopoly AT&T has no reason to make it work - I live in silicon valley so even less reason AT&T should make anything work. AT&T can just go screw themselves and take Apple along with them.
When you can buy it without the completely useless AT&T plan, it will sell faster then they possibly make them for many years to come.
Poor Apple, gonna catch an STD getting screwed by a dirty whore like AT&T.
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
I had a phone with Windows mobile on it. It sucked ass big time. There wasn't really one thing it did well other than crash.
Then, I got a Blackberry. Their desktop 'push' concept sucks, although to be fair, it worked pretty reliably. The service was bloody expensive though. Also there was no DUN support at the time, which is my biggest need in a phone.
Now I have a Treo 650. It sucks the least, but still sucks pretty bad. The DUN support is good, although the cell company was useless support-wise, the email works via IMAP and the software isn't too bad. Seriously though. Palm, I'm looking at you. You've had products on the market for 10 years now. The product itself has usually been pretty decent. Your syncing software, and the whole notion of conduits, is not only bad, it's pathetic. No Palm device I've ever had has synched reliably with any OS, let alone one that's not MS. But, I hear you boys are going over to linux. That might maybe possibly help. We'll see.
My point is, if the iPhone sucks anywhere close to as much ass as the other ones AND lacks a keypad, thereby limiting texting potential, it'll be DOA.
Message contains 1 attachment: spam.gif
No they don't. "To skip to the next message, press 6. To return to the previous message press 5".
There's little redesign in this part. You press a button and dollars to donuts it's sending a DTMF tone.
The list of actual messages would just come down via GPRS, at the start. The whole "we rebuilt it from the ground up" is marketing spin, not much more.
that mwst be qwite the keyboard configwration ;)
reech bee-yond ur clip-0n
I just got a RAZR V3M and Verizon deliberately disabled the OBEX function (Object Exchange) which was probably enabled by accident on the V3C, since it's been diabled on most of the other Verizon phones since it was invented.
There. I fixed it for you.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.