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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
The other time he got a chill?
The second Windows was successfully put on a mac. 0_0
Tantrum? Real men throw chairs!
Amnesty International
This article reads like one from Reader's Digest.
TFA describes how Jobs and co. designed a great device, and makes the point that traditional mobile phone handset businesses has been stifled and denied the opportunity to innovate by network operators.
It is nice that Apple is innovating, and computing on telephone platforms is advancing.
But progress may still be limited by network operators for the time being because to deploy software or services, providers have to go through the network operators.
And to consume services, consumers must first access the networks through the network operators.
Round 1 to Apple with the iphone. Round 2 is software and services.
Can innovation in software and services flourish despite network operators trying to gatekeep and tax all revenue opportunities whether they understand them or not?its hilarious slashdot has a script to tag when a reply is a duplicate, but no script to stop duplicate stories on the front page.
You should see the origin of the original article posted yesterday. ./
I like big butts and I cannot lie.
FTFA : This 4.8-ounce sliver of glass and aluminum is an explosive device that has forever changed the mobile-phone business
What an appropriate metaphor to refer to the success of a product that is powered by a lithium-ion battery.
You just got troll'd!
It fell out of the sky, accompanied by a host of angels. Everyone knows that.
Then, hovering in the air, surrounded by a wreath of misty light and cherubim, it received it's first call from God who delivered the three prophecies of Cupertina.
The first was a vision of Hell, which looked like an AT&T service agreement and 900 page bill.
The second was how to save (switch) souls from the clutches of Vista and delivered by the Virgin Mary herself in the guise of Ellen Feiss.
The third is held under tight guard by high ranking members of the Huckabee presidential campaign, and is to be revealed on the first New Moon after the current Pope dies.
So let it be written. So let it be dumb.
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."
The only reason to fear your boss is that your boss can effectively end your livelihood or career. Lauding power over people like that, throwing tantrums, and scaring your employees by staring them down or through false calm just makes me very happy I've never worked for such people. I've had some excellent bosses who've produced some excellent results and none of them have ruled by fear. There's one I remember who got accolades on retiring this year and all anyone could ever say about him was that he was calm and an absolute gentleman under pressure. In contrast when I read about Jobs and Gates I just think "goes to show money won't buy manners".
As for the iPhone can't say I understand what the fuss about this product is. Last time I participated in a discussion about it someone was rabbiting on about hacks to do video, as if video were an advanced feature for a modern phone. Please!
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Which is all fine and good, but the iPhone is NOT A SMARTPHONE. At ALL.
It has NONE of the hallmarks of a traditional smartphone.
"Most devices considered smartphones today use an identifiable operating system, often with the ability to add applications (e.g. for enhanced data processing, connectivity or entertainment) - in contrast to regular phones which only support sandboxed applications[citation needed]. These smartphone applications may be developed by the manufacturer of the device, by the network operator or by any other third-party software developer[citation needed]."
Yes, I left the 'citation needed' remarks, in respect of Wikipedia's information model.
The iPhone is a really fancy phone, perhaps a decent pocket-sized multimedia device, but smartphone/PDA it ain't - without hacking it, of course, until Apple decides to 'update' it for you.
Therefore it's futile to compare it to Blackberry/Windows Mobile/Palm devices.
Is this news?
Some boss has a tantrum in the past when a product is behind schedule.
Might have been news if it was reported AT THE TIME, before the iphone was released,
but now?
Nope..
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.
But its true. Consider...if the iphone had tanked, there is a good chance that not only Jobs would be out of a Job but that Apple could be out of luck as well. The CEO can take all the glory but they also take all the blame.
The reception of the IPhone in the European key markets (UK, Germany, France) has been lukewarm at best. I'm not saying that Apple may not be a threat to Symbian in Europe in the future, but for the time being they're far from it.
* Apple is poised to be the number one US Smartphone vendor next year if trends keep up.I'd wager that this is due to a fact of the abyssimal state of the US handset market. It isn't helped by the carriers who bolt down and cripple the handsets to borderline useless.
Apple will have a much more difficult time in Europe (let alone Japan) with the iPhone for a variety of reasons.
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
Jobs and his crew have given us a beautiful device but an ugly product. It is completely locked into its two vendors, and is not a good value.
I hate vendor lock-in. I hate being told how I can use something I bought. It's mine. I paid for it. I've earned the right to control it.
If a vendor wants my business, he needs to EARN it.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
Move along. Nothing to see here. Unless you're in the elitist minority.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
it's really funny, Slashdot has a script to tag reply duplicates, but not duplicates articles on the front page.
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.
Yes. And?
If I would want a phone with less features, I would bloody not spend 900 euros on itThat's you. I moved from a new P990i to an iPhone. It has a lot less features, but I actually use the features it has, and I'm a lot happier with it.
For example, if I want an MP3 player, I want to be able to mount it like a flash drive and copy music to and from it.Why?
Okay, I get copying from. That's useful. Fortunately, the iPod actually does allow for this. All your music is stored in an invisible directory which can easily be accessed.
I just don't get the "copy to" thing, though. I hate those dumb players which force you to use the OS to put music on them when I actually use software to manage my MP3s, and then take a few minutes after I turn them on to read all the ID3 tags into a database, or even worse, just display the music in the hierarchy it is on the device. Not to mention that it leads to all kinds of cumbersome idiocies if I add new music to my library and then want to add only the new music to my player. Also, I use smart playlists extensively. For example, my music collection does not fix on my iPhone, so I use a smart playlists which puts a bunch of random new songs on the iPhone each time I connect it to the Mac, as well as the most recent episode of my favourite podcasts, and new episodes of TV shows I like. Why in the world would I ever trade this to an MP3 player which makes me do all of that by hand?
I really have no clue why anyone could possibly think that less features could possibly be better, especially after all the other things you've said.
You want crippled? Your crappy MP3 player which forces you to put music on it using the Windows Explorer, that's crippled.
I'm afraid I don't get the point of the rest of your rambling about subnotebooks and Apple.
What, exactly, do you mean my 'non-programmable'? Developing Palm applications is quirky but not particularly hard, and I'm not aware of any Palm phone ever that wouldn't let you load third-party apps. The vast majority of the apps I use each day on my Treo 650 are third-party.
Do you mean the phone functions themselves aren't programmable? Maybe that was true at the introduction of the early Treos, I didn't have one. Even those would take third-party apps for other functions, though. Nowadays there are multiple applications that add phone and SMS and other functions, and the API is available. I have a hard time believing that the Windows side is much different.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
hey might not be carrier exclusives [...] but both are ALSO tied to their own exclusive programs
You're bullshitting. Palm, Symbian, and Windows Mobile have been available unlocked and have not been tied to any carrier for years.
and both at first where also non-programmable (yes they where and anyone who says otherwise is a liar), and only opened up a year or two later.
Again, totally wrong. All three of those systems developed out of programmable PDA platforms. Even if they had been non-programmable a decade ago, it's 2008, and the standard is that smartphones are user-programmable today, both via native APIs and via Java. Apple's iPhone is neither, and it's carrier locked, and it is tied to Apple's desktop.
It has not even been a year for Apples product and they have already promised to open up their programing before the year mark.
Apple has been vague on the specifics; just because Jobs calls it "programmable" doesn't mean it is. iPods are "programmable" as well, that doesn't mean that ISVs can create software and offer it for download. Furthermore, iPhones remain locked and tied to Apple's desktop.
So your argument is basically null and void.
You are an Apple apologist, and you don't even know your facts.
"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." I got an iphone 2 months ago. Every single word in that sentence still applies. Battery has charging issues they say is a firmware problem,, but it hasn't been fixed yet after several firmware updates, it drops calls constantly (even at full signal strength), and I routinely have to reset the phone to make crashed applications work again. As to problems, howsabout the iphone plan includes MMS, but the phone doesn't support them at all, or the inability to check relatively simple information like your call history while you're in a call?
Obviously, it's more reasonable to believe that the editors remain in their jobs despite being so mentally incompetent that their keyboards should have short-circuited through filling up with drool, and that Slashdot keeps itself afloat financially through the generosity of the Magical Website Fairies...
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).