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iPhone Gets Better Battery, Scratch Resistant Glass
Dekortage writes "Prior to its much-hyped launch on June 29, Apple has announced upgrades to its battery life (almost 40% more than originally announced) and scratch resistance (using "optical quality glass" rather than plastics). The announcement also includes a comparison chart pitting the iPhone against smartphones from Nokia, Samsung, Palm, and Blackberry."
No actual phone SDK, no GPS, no synching with major office software, etc. Being able to sync perfectly with the desktop OS with 10% market share is still only syncing perfectly with 10% of the market share, no matter how well it does it, or how great it looks when it's doing it. It doesn't do anything other phones can't do (and which do other things the iPhone can't).
The "third-party development" doesn't touch the phone, any more than a website touches the computer it's running on. It'll make loads of web-integration tools possible, but seeing as it's hardware, you'd expect custom apps to be able to use the hardware. As it is, all they can interface with is the screen and the speaker. Compare that to pretty much every other phone on the market, and it does look a bit shallow, to say the least.
I'm not railing on Apple - I'd be shitting candy if they bought out a phone which was as capable as some of the other smart-phones on the market, and looked as good as the iPhone, but it's looking more like a cluster-fuck of conflicting interests, corporate shennanigans, locked-in, locked-down needlessly-expensive technology.
Eh, everyone's comparing on the wrong points...
1. Does it get everything right with the UI in harmony with its features in harmony with high quality, in harmony with beauty and great design, balanced with good customer service, marketability, fashion, desirability, user needs and usability, all understood and designed-in from the start?
Oh right, it's the balance of everything together, not individual features, that people want... ohhhh we are so closed minded in the technology world..... but Apple's not.
(There should be light bulbs going on in the parts of your brain that connect combinations of different discrete fields and views right now, if they're not then you didn't get a good enough liberal arts education (probably a one-track engineering student right?), and should enroll in the nearest university).
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