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Origin of the iPhone
rambilly brings us a story from Wired about the origin and development of the iPhone. From the article:
"Steve Jobs had tasked about 200 of Apple's top engineers with creating the iPhone. Yet here, in Apple's boardroom, it was clear that the prototype was still a disaster. It wasn't just buggy, it flat-out didn't work. The phone dropped calls constantly, the battery stopped charging before it was full, data and applications routinely became corrupted and unusable. The list of problems seemed endless. At the end of the demo, Jobs fixed the dozen or so people in the room with a level stare and said, 'We don't have a product yet.' The effect was even more terrifying than one of Jobs' trademark tantrums. When the Apple chief screamed at his staff, it was scary but familiar. This time, his relative calm was unnerving. 'It was one of the few times at Apple when I got a chill,' says someone who was in the meeting."
While, granted, this article has a much more fitting title than the last, this is a bloody dupe from yesterday!
appleguru.org
You should see the origin of the original article posted yesterday. ./
I like big butts and I cannot lie.
> It is nice that Apple is innovating,
They are not. Everything the iphone does has been available in Europe for the better part of a decade.
"but what's the good in a nice UI if the phone is lacking the the features the target market needs?"
first, it's NOT targeting the smart-phone market, it's targeting the consumer market. BIG DIFFERENCE.
not that it matters now anyway. last I heard it had a 30% of the smartphones sold in the US in the last few months, and has out sold ALL win-mobile based phones combined in that time frame. aparantly it's not doing too bad.
it is an open ended device in that it's easly upgradable by apple, at the moment. What's going to happen when the API is released (this february)? let me give you a clue: it will be the the mobile platform with the most developers. by far. from the get go - all indy mac devs will be on that API as soon as it is released. Others will follow.
and makes the point that traditional mobile phone handset businesses has been stifled and denied the opportunity to innovate by network operators.
In fact, several major US carriers (AT&T, Cingular, T-Mobile, probably others) have had GSM systems for years. They work with third party GSM phones, including the fully programmable Palm, Windows Mobile, and Nokia devices. Furthermore, you can get unlimited data for fairly reasonable monthly fees in the US.
The notion that Apple is doing anything to rescue us from carries is laughable. Apple's iPhone is a big step backwards: it's carrier locked, it's tied to Apple's desktop application (the only way to get updates), and it's non-programmable (at least for now).
The iPhone is a giant step backwards for smartphones and innovation.
If you want an innovative phone that doesn't try to shackle you, get a Symbian, Palm, or Windows Mobile phone.
It should be pointed out that the people who actually know Jobs tend to disagree with this public notion of him as a mercurial asshat.
As for your comment on the iPhone, you don't understand what the fuss is precisely because you think that more features make a better phone. Please!
one tiny little bit.
THE COMPETITION
When the article talks about all the things they needed to work out how the phone connects to networks and how the brain gets microwaved (or not) it fails to mention, that this is only news to Apple, not all the other mobile phone manufacturers of the world. Especially when the article talks about the phone being light years ahead it completely resolves into pure Apple fanboy talk.
Those are just three examples of phones that you could compare to the Iphone:
http://www.lge.com/products/model/detail/ke850.jhtml
http://www.htc.com/product/03-product_htctouch.htm
http://uk.samsungmobile.com/mobile/SGH-F700
I have one just like the last Samsung model. Mine also has WLan and, like the Samsung, it has a full sized keyboard. Nokia is not even on that list. All of the phone makers have a wide variaty of phones to fit every customers preferred style. Candy bar being the best liked. Many have important features that the Iphone is lacking. Like UMTS support to get decent speed for surfing whe web. Opera build a decent web browser complete with a proxy that "refits" webpages so they look good on a small screen years ago. It is written in Java and works on many phones.
The mobile phone market has enough players that the competition actually works (not like the OS market for PCs). Of those three phones up the all of them use a different OS for example. The HTC model even uses Microsoft Mobile, an OS that sucks less and less with each version, because they face a steep competition by Symbian. And Google just joined.
There are just two things that were new with the IPhone. First was the touchscreen that you can operate on with more than one finger. A feature that is pretty cool and was therefore swiftly copied by everyone else.
The second thing is the Apple marketing. The only thing right now that makes Apple stand out. That and their tie in with Itunes. Itunes has such a large market share, it almost became a monopoly. And now they try to extend that power to other products and markets. Sounds familiar? Another reason why the IPod-ITunes connection works so good.
And that brings us to the last little thing which the article good completely right. Back in 2002 (I would say even earlier, but the article says that was when Jobs woke up to that fact) it became clear that phones will aquire more and more memory and computing power, just like the regular PC. Some people prefer to have funtions seperate on different devices. They like their music player, phone and PDA, or just one of them. Other people like to have everything in one device. And Jobs/Apple wanted to sell Ipods to those people as well. So the Ipod needed to become a phone and a PDA.
And it did. Ipod touch is a PDA and the Iphone is a smartphone.