Slashdot Mirror
The Perfect Phone Storm?
peter deacon writes "Is the iPhone the next Segway, the next Zune, or the next iPod? The Perfect Storm offers some iPhone details that aren't secrets, but tend to be lost upon the analysts and journalists cranking out hit pieces on the iPhone. Why is everyone from Gartner to Gizmodo calling for a boycott of the iPhone? An interesting take on how Apple's new mobile phone will push to open up the web as a mobile platform for every mobile device on the market with a standards-based browser, and how Apple 'hacked the hackers' by releasing Safari for Windows in advance of its new phone."
You must be from the US or somewhere else where mobile phones have yet to take off properly. In the UK *everyone* has a mobile phone. There are more mobile phones than people. And people aren't locked into any network for longer than the contract term, which is typically 12-18 months. After that it's your phone and if you want to unlock it and take it to another network you can. Typically, though, at the end of your contract you'll be offered a free phone and perhaps a discount on a tariff to keep you in for another 12-18 months. So yeah, perhaps someone will take an iPhone if it's free, and competitive with other phones in the same price range, and if it's fashionable (for people who are interested in that sort of thing, and let's face it, that's where the iPod made so much money for Apple, given that it's technically inferior to products from rivals), for 12-18 months.
I'm fed up with Apple fanboys who respond to every failure or setback Apple experiences by denying that Apple ever wanted that market in the first place. There's been an awful lot of it lately with the lead-balloon performance of Safari for Windows ("when Steve Jobs said it was designed to win massive market share from Firefox and Internet Explorer, what he meant was that it wasn't about market share and it's only aimed at iPhone developers..."), and it's getting pretty tedious.
Apple went straight for the enterprise with OS X servers. Remember all that triumphalism a few years back about a new supercomputer being built from Xserves? How OS X was going to be the new standard for supercomputing, how all the enterprises were going to switch switch switch? Yeah, nothing came of it, so of course the fanboys rewrite history so Apple only ever aimed for the home market.
Apple fans = Left/Labour/Democrats Windows fans = Right/Conservative/Republicans Linux fans = Anarchist/Libertarians Slashdot is rooted in the third, and most analytical, psychosocial group. As a member of that group, I know that I will never be in the majority, and I consider the other two both equally boneheaded. The sheeple of both varieties can squabble as much as they like. I don't care, as I will never use their lame software or vote for their lame politicians. A pox on both their houses! It'll be an OpenMoko Neo 1973 for me. And if it doesn't work out of the box, it'll be all the more fun! :)
So There.
So There.
What Samsung Windows Mobile device do you have? What do you want to know how to do on it? I'll explain it to you.
It costs MORE than $499? My Cingular 8525, which I suspect is better-featured than your Samsung device, ran me $430.
The ONLY undesirable thing about WM on smartphones right now is that their UI is still stuck in the stylus era. Once Microsoft wakes up and comes out with a standardized fingertip interface, if Apple insists on keeping the iPhone's API closed, MS will trundle right over them and relegate the iPhone to the world of the Newton.
+++ATH0