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iPhone Interest Still Going Strong
Only $220 to Make an iPhone. Bomarc writes to tell us BuinessWeek is reporting that according to a recent analysis the new iPhone only costs Apple in the neighborhood of $200 ($220 for the 8-gigabyte model) to manufacture.
iPhone User Review. Alexandros Roussos writes "It has been an unforgettable week-end for the first iPhone buyers and MacScoop will now put the focus on one of them who provided to a complete review of Apple's very anticipated gizmo."
Mistakes in the iPhone Interface. Rakesh writes "I love the iPhone. It 's here to stay as my primary cell phone. But I've come across a bunch of things that make me think Apple rushed at the end to get this thing out there. Here's my list of the top 10 mistakes Apple made with the iPhone interface."
iPhone Security Roundup. An anonymous reader writes "Although some security researchers noted problems getting their iPhone activated, others wasted no time tearing the new device apart. Seth Fogie, from Airscanner, reported passwords can be found for the device from running strings obtained from the backup images through a password cracker. Robert Graham, from Errata Security, writes about Safari and Bluetooth bugs on their blog."
iPhone Hardware Details. abdulzis writes "Engadget has the scoop on the iPhone's hardware specs through a leaked firmware. 'Sascha at Gear Log seems to think given the recently discovered Samsung chip in the iPhone, perhaps the processor in question is a Samsung S3C6400, a recently-produced 667MHz ARM1176JZF-based CPU that seems to fit the bill.'"
It's been out for what, a day or two? Longer? I wouldn't have expected it to die out so soon. Especially because it's an Apple product and they really rule at building up some hype.
Big difference, unless you'd be happy with a big 'ol bag of iPhone parts.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
That does not include essential and unavoidable licenses which in the GSM world push the BOM by further 30-40$ (depending on volumes). Add to that licenses related to digital media playback (encoders, decoders) and the phone BOM approaches 300+. That is all before the cost of developing the software. So while the margins are very "applelike", they are nowhere as obscene as the article suggests.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
Are you kidding me? It's been three fucking days!
Has society's attention span gotten so short that we are surprised when news reports on a high-profile new product spans past the Friday it was introduced through the weekend following its introduction?
Or are we just surprised that the iPhone has managed to steal a few seconds of airtime from the whole Paris Hilton thing?
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
Where is the article that does the in-indepth coverage of:
1. First iPhone user looking at porn
2. First iPhone user sitting on toilet and surfing web
3. First iPhone user to get laid because of it (those with significant others don't count).
4. First person to have an orgasm just by touching it (it being the iPhone you sicko)
They've already sold more iPhones than there are active Slashdot users.
The prediction is they will move 10+ million by the end of the year.
That's who cares. It's tech. This is a tech news site. It's the biggest thing techy to happen in the past week.
He's modded flamebait because he was baiting flame.
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
They are a vocal minority. The phrase I heard recently to describe everyone else was "circle-jerk". That's never something I'd ever even considered and I promised myself that I'd use the phrase again.
It's not that people like me want to see it go down in flames. Quite the contrary, I've been waiting for a device like the iPhone for many years. My problem is that I got that device two and a half years ago and I'm still happy with it. I welcome the competition in the market and I value Apple's UI design highly so hopefully they will drag the entire industry forward with them. I've been a mobile early adopter since GSM first came out, so to hear that another large, respected manufacturer has entered the industry is fantastic.
What annoys some of us is that it's being presented as revolutionary. It's not. It might be, if it takes off and in the future changes most peoples outlook on phones. It took the iPod to bring mp3 players to the masses but it wasn't really an evolution change in technology. It was more marketing and design, such as the white headphones serving as a constant "join us, it's great!" advertisement.
The iPhone seems to be advertised to be a leap forward. Now, it may not be Apple doing this, there is a lot of grassroots support for it as is clear based on the volume of news around it, and they may be generating this meme that it's all powerful. The problem is it's not. It would be a downgrade for me. From what I hear it has the same UI problems as the first smartphones. Having to write down numbers for example as there is no cut and paste or hyper-linking of phone numbers in text. Lot's of little quirks have been ironed out over the years; I've been running homebrew ROMs on my mine, so I've seen it at it's worst and at it's best. From reading about people using it, some of the UI is an improvement but it needs work in many places.
This is what annoys us. Sure, for most people the iPhone is a leap forward and it's sure silenced most of the "a phone is just a phone" crowd that I have discussed this with on many previous occasions on Slashdot whenever there is a story about new phone technology. So, for the majority of people, great! Enjoy it. Having the internet in your pocket is awesome, as is the lack of needing to carry around a separate media player. The integration of SMS and email is also very handy. Google maps is great, though personally I prefer things like TomTom that keep the data locally. And so on, there are so many things you can do with a device with this.
Just stop making it sound like you are the first to be doing it! :-)
I didn't buy into all the hype but my boss came in today with it and after setting it up on our WPA wireless network, getting his mail running to our servers via IMAPS, etc. it is a VERY nice device.
The EDGE network blows. But, browsing off of it from our wireless network is a breeze. The screen is solid and I was amazed at the clarity of the screen with fonts, images when zooming really close. After setting it up on the network, it does need a few things.
1. ActiveSync or something to sync to our mailserver so the user can get contacts, calendar and mail.
2. IPSec VPN ability - maybe Cisco will get a client in this?
3. Open Office documents (Excel, Word)
4. Open PDF docs.
I am sure this will get better as it goes. But, far far better than I would have expected as a first gen device. It does make my Treo 700p look poor.
Actually only the cell-phones in the US are half-ass web featured ones. Two years ago, the coolest cell in the US was the brain-dead, RAZR, granted it was sexy, but it was also brain-dead. On the other side of the planet, there were touch-screen phones that ran Linux and had Opera 7.5 as a pretty decent browser. They still rule because they can run Doom and Quake, and can render most pages without a problem. Come to think about-it, most of what the iPhone brings, you can get from a Nokia N800 with a basic GSM phone that also has Bluetooth in parallel. Actually the N800 is a lot better than the iPhone. I have an excelent IMAP client on it (Claws), I have Pidgin for IM, I have a very decent Opera 9 with flash and a lot of other goodies. The great thing about-it is that it only takes an incredibly small amount of time to port ANY gtk application to the Maemo platform that the N800 uses. The multitude of applications that have been ported to the N800 only proves that it's a better platform than most of the others.
I will give the iPhone the following:
1) Multi-touch. It sounds like it's more than a simple touch-screen. The Nokia N800 has a nice feature that detects if you touch with the stick or a finger and adjusts the input method and the menus accordingly, but I doubt that it's as cool as the one on the iPhone. I am sure that the Nokia N800+1 could easily implement something like this.
2) Screen rotation sensor.
3) Phone
Flame follows: (3) is actually one that can be put in both good and bad. The iPhone is an Edge phone on a 3G world. Granted that the network coverage for 3G in the US is a joke compared to Europe or Asia. Actually, the network coverage in the US is more like a joke. In Romania, the country that only a few years ago was under communist ruling, we have basically 100% coverage for the cell phone networks, and a lot of 3G, and nation-wide GPRS on Vodaphone (they are introducing 7.something Mbps HSUPA later this year) and EDGE on Orange (same as Vodafone). Vodafone currently has 2.8 Mbps HSDPA, and Orange has 3.6 Mbps HSDPA. In Germany it's even more impressing, you have almost full 3G coverage for the whole country.
Zapp, our only CDMA operator, has EVDO 2.4 Mbps since 2004, and they are going for an upgrade later this year. Now, allow me to be disappointed by the lame EDGE options available to the US market. I am also disappointed by the fact that Apple didn't allow the buying of unlocked phones and gave AT&T exclusivity.
BTW: The rates for Cell phone is the US are also huge. In 2005, a prepaid card from Cingular gave me "free calls" in the US, but having to pay an airtime rate of $.25/min for both outgoing and incoming calls. In Romania in 2005 the prepaid rates were somewhere around $.20 for outgoing calls, and free for incoming. I also found the fact that you get charged from the second that you make the call, even if the other party doesn't answer, to be a little disturbing, especially since a call to Romania costed around $.90 + airtime tax, and would usually take around 45s to connect to the Bucharest based operators. I've called Cingular and asked for my money back for the situations in which it didn't connect at all. Based on their pricing details I expected to be charged $0.25 in that minute until the person answers and until the call connects, and after that $0.25 + $0.90 for the call, but I was charged almost an extra dollar for each call. I find this wierd because in Europe, if the person doesn't answer, you don't pay anything, and if you receive a call (except for roaming), you don't pay anything. In the US, if someone hates you they simply have to send you a lot of Text messages, because they also cost if you receive them.
Anyway, to make a long story short, in the US the mobile phones are a lot more expensive and dumb (literally), the rates are a lot worst and the network coverage is a joke. This is coming from a guy that lives in Romania, not in the UK or France or Germany. I talk my ass off on my cell phone (and we all have a cell phone), and I never exceed than $45, except when I'm out of the country.
Coverage information is available at Coverage Maps.
UNIX was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever ones.
Microsoft has been making OS's for decades, has insane resources, and spent many years getting vista out the door. They also promised the moon and a half for Vista back in the early longhorn days, and delivered something with a way-trimmed down feature list, and it still didn't work all that great for a lot of people. Sure, many complained, but many are also using Vista and being happy with it.
Apple is making their first mobile phone ever, and while only the foolish expect it to be perfect, there are already tons of people talking about how much better the interface is than any other phone they've ever had. Many of them are also sharing what they see as the flaws in the device. And while I have no doubt that many of those people waiting in line were hardcore Apple fanboys, they're probably closing in on one million phones sold already, and I doubt there are that many Apple fanatics in the US.
To sum it up, MS needed around five years to put out a mediocre new version of their flagship product, after tons of feature cutting and multiple embarassing delays. I don't know how long Apple had been working on the iPhone, but it came out the day they said it would come out, and people seem to be genuinely impressed by it.
Apple has made it to where they are primarily by developing products that its customers think are great. MS has made it to where they are by developing products that are just good enough (and some wise business decisions). The two companies are judged differently, sure, but only because each has earned its reputation.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
Let me guess. You also can't understand why consumers will still pay money for Windows when they can have Linux for free.
You don't have to be smart to use a Mac, you just have to be smart enough to buy one