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Fans Cheer as Apple's iPhone Finally Hits Europe
An anonymous reader sent in this article which opens, "Apple fans lined up through Yesterday night in Germany and Britain to be among the first in Europe to buy an iPhone, the must-have gadget that is set to shake up the mobile industry." Over 10,000 phones were sold in Germany by Friday afternoon. In France, however, the iPhone doesn't arrive until the end of month.
As far as I'm concerned, the stupidest thing about the iPhone is its name. It should have been called the iPDA, which comes with a phone feature.
Other phones don't even have real web browsers
Nokia has had the series 60 browser since november 2005, which is based on WebKit, the exact same rendering engine that is powering Safari and the iPhone webbrowser.
Btw, how does that flash website look on your iPhone ? Looks great on my Nokia...
Oh cut this whiny crap already.
Of course Apple, like any other manufacturer, has to comply with EU regulations, which are a bit more strict than the US ones, overall. However Apple's internal calculation actually looks like, let's have a look at what you would need to properly import an iPhone from the US into Europe, and whether that is really that much cheaper:
That's a grand total of 361 EUR. Of course, if you're willing to smuggle it into Europe and circumvent various other legal provisions, then yes, you can have your iPhone a lot cheaper than those evil bastards at Apple are offering it for.
Re the N95... it looks like a Swiss Army Knife. Lots-o-blades, klunky. So-so battery life, etc. It boils down to the old check-list of features versus how it looks and feels and operates. I'll admit I have not USED one, though, so perhaps looks are deceiving. (P.S. The N95 has an accelerometer. I just read an article where they put out a demo application to show it off. Too bad it's not actually useful.)
In terms of Wall Street, it's precisely because Wall Street has under-estimated Apple for years that its stock has done so well. Slashdot Power Phone user opinions don't influence a stock. It turns out that the I-want-the-most-checkmarks-for-my-device crowd and Wall Street tend to agree, contrary to your assertion. Yes, Steve Jobs has achieved demi-god status in the press, including the financial press, but Wall Street still doesn't get it. How many were saying that Apple's name change (from "Apple Computer" to "Apple") and the fact that iPods were hot meant that Apple's computer business was simply a drag on profits? That there was no "halo effect"? Until last quarter, when Mac-related sales skyrocketed and they were again caught flat-footed.
In terms of the keyboard, trying it out for 15 minutes at a store will deceive you. It is quite different from a Blackberry keyboard. In some ways it's more like a full-sized keyboard, and in some ways it's like a handwriting-recognition system. My typing style changes depending on the task at hand. For extended, real text, I type ahead and don't care about mistakes. The auto-correction feature is quite good, and the magnifying-glass makes it straightforward to go back and correct the couple of words that it got wrong. For arbitrary, non-dictionary text (phone numbers, URLs, names, etc), I slow down a little and take advantage of the fact that keypresses are confirmed on the keyboard and do not register until key release, to get 100% accuracy.
I've also found that it works quite well for one-handed typing , or for putting it down on a flat surface and typing with two fingers. I don't think many of the keyboard phones do very well in situations where you don't hold the phone in two hands and use your thumbs. (And of course, stylus phones are crippled in non-standard situations.)
Your final point is backwards. You mistake check-list features for design and feel. Yes, the iPhone has similar features to other phones. It's a phone, so I would hope so. It's even inferior in some feature areas. But its the way they are designed and put together in a SYSTEM that is different. Quite different. And it is NOT that there are Apple fans out there who will buy anything Apple makes and convince everyone else to do so. Apple has its share of flops (Newton, sub-notebooks, Cube, iTV, etc) that the "faithful" did not support.
It's the design -- not just features -- first, the fandom second. And as long as some techies (and reviewers, and Wall Street) keep thinking it's the Apple "fan boys" who make Apple successful, I'll continue to make money on my stock.