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NYTimes Speculates On the Next iPhone
Achromatic1978 writes "The NYT has a story on the next revision of the iPhone, and discusses what will become of the iPhone, now that the hype is starting to slow (Jobs goal for 2008 was ten million iPhones sold — as of the first quarter, only 1.7 million have left the shelves). The WWDC is the rumored release date for a next version, and Jobs has promised that this year will see a 3G iPhone released."
1.7 million x 4 = 6.8 million in 2008. Maybe Jobs meant to round up to the nearest 10 million...
iLl believe it when iSee it.
Only three things are certain; death, taxes, and apocryphal quotations - Ben Franklin.
Jobs: "We'll just release 4 more versions of the iPhone this year and the same 1.7M painfully hip people will have no choice but to buy them, each time!"
"Wireless. About as much space as a nomad. Still Lame?"
- Steve Jobs, wondering if we're finally satisfied.
10 million minus 1.7 million means Apple is 8.3 million iPhones in the hole!!! This company is clearly beleaguered!!!
So, short sell Apple because they will not perform up-to expectations? Or will Jobs pull one of his a** and somehow sell another 9 million units?
I can't wait until Steve Jobs pulls out the new iPhone and says something on the lines of "now....with THIS new iPhone, you can send Photos right from your Photo Gallery to any of your friends... via... text... message..." and the idiots will applaud and be like 'my god, he's a genius!!!' because, well you, know 99.5% of all phones could do this for the past few years (why the iPhone can't is well beyond my comprehension)
Given the ways Apple has crippled the iPhone it seems to me that a well designed open platform has the potential to blow them out of the water.
So how is Open Moko coming along? And are there other candidates that appear to be beyond the vapor stage?
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
as much as the next guy. I also love my iPhone, and get quite fanboyish about it, but why is this news? People have been speculating about what the next iPhone will be since the last one came out of the gate. Just because the NY Times puts out pretty much the same story as everywhere else on the internet does not make it news. The article is just a nice concise retread of all the news stories out on the iPhone for the last few months.
Here, let me summarize the article for those not willing to read it: "We know the new iPhone is coming and it will have new features but we don't know what they are beyond 3G but we'll speculate to expand our word count so this is an actual article rather than a short sentence."
The iPhone users use 30x the data of others. That's because Mobile Safari is about 30x better than the competition.
I use an iPod Touch (iPhone minus the phone) as a portable web browser. Some great jail-broken apps (helluv'a ebook reader), too. Amazing experience, yet with mind-boggling weaknesses, too (copy and paste, people???). I'm hoping Opera 9 is going to catch up, because there were other advantages to more conventional PDAs, but, Mobile Safari is just too good to go away from.
Let's see... they tied their fortunes to a pretty unpopular company, AT&T, in exchange for kickbacks and didn't even try to get Verizon, the largest mobile phone service, to sell a version of their phone.
Genius, I tell you. Genius.
Most of the Apple fans I know didn't buy an iPhone because of the AT&T decision. Most of them are still not planning on getting one because they hate AT&T more than they like Apple.
One on 3G there is bandwidth to do video conferencing (fit a vga camera on the LCD screen side and off you go). I guess a whole new data plan from AT+T specific for video calls minutes, but punters will snap it up. Win for apple, Win for ATT.
10 million iphones? What makes him think that people with foreclosures & collapsing currency are going to give a shit about running out and buying a new gizmo? It's just a phone & my old one still works fine. Homeless people will not work for iphones.
Folks, once the 3g iphone is released, tons of markets will be opened opened up: Japan - big time! The Japanese *will* buy this. China SE Asia (Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand) All of these places had 3g networks in place well ahead of the US. There is a reason the iphone didn't land in those places yet, it didn't have 3g!
If you can somehow drive the phone to work.
-- if you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine
If they want to boost their numbers, they should hurry up with the darn release.
They aren't going to attract new buyers with hype like last time. Most people who really want one have one.
Their biggest untapped market are the people who are holding out for v2. I'm one of them.
The iPhone would serve me very well. But I generally don't buy version 1 of anything.
Especially when it's so crippled. Jail breaking stuff like pseudo-GPS, lack of Cut & Paste, printing, file transfer, heck it's on the network but it's almost a dumb terminal.
We version 2 holdouts are Apple's biggest iPhone 2 market. Let's go Apple, what are you waiting for?
Oh yeah, and it better be good.
Operator, give me the number for 911!
They have to wait for the latest generation of brainwashed Apple fanboy clones to be harvested before they can give the next iPhone a proper release.
Tying the hardware to CDMA doesn't make much sense if you're planning on selling the device in other parts of the world, in particular Europe. And note that the device was designed with a quad-band GSM radio, so it's possible they were thinking ahead to non-US sales.
There has been speculation about a higher-resolution camera, possible support for digital video recording, a slightly bulkier and more curved case, and the addition of a global positioning system receiver that would allow new Web services tied to a person's location.
These are all standard features on many Nokia and Windows Mobile phones.
Apple is still just trying to catch up. The only reason for strong US sales is that US carriers have been pushing such feature-poor phones that even the iPhone seems like an improvement.
If the Sheboygan Press speculated on the next iphone would it have been a /. article?
Most of the Apple fans I know didn't buy an iPhone because of the AT&T decision. Most of them are still not planning on getting one because they hate AT&T more than they like Apple.
My hate for AT&T is strong, and I haven't bought an iPhone yet in part because of that.
However, if it'd been Verizon, I'd be even more unlikely to buy (as in "probably never"). Verizon is arguably as bad or worse than AT&T in terms of general evil towards their customers.
Not that a non-evil mobile operator exists.
Tweet, tweet.
they have only sold 1.7 million. Most people know a newer, much better model is around the corner. They will fly off the shelves, as many people will replace old with new (I know of several myself) and others who don't like buying 1.0 devices (like me) will take another look.
It would have helped if they had found some way to work with Verizon and other carriers. It will be a cold day in hell (or, at least until Verizon gets considerably worse and AT&T miraculously improves in virtually every area of their service) before I switch to AT&T.
The iPhone looks cool. It's the kind of gadget I'd probably be interested in. A lot of my friends agree. But of all the people I know that wants one, only one actually got one. Everyone else is waiting for that exclusive deal to AT&T to expire and has said they're not switching carriers to get one. (Or, for that matter hacking their phone, either.)
Why companies deliberately lock themselves into agreements with other companies like this is beyond me. Maybe it's working for them. But given how far it looks like they're going to miss their target, it kind of looks like it's not.
I seem to remember that when Jobs launched the iPhone, he said he wanted 10 million sold by the end of 2008. He didn't say all in 2008 - he was including the ones sold in 2007. At that rate, they're past halfway there.
Permanently and unchangeable.
As for the objections to getting stuck in a contract, all I have to say is WTF? If I'm going to spend $400 for a phone, I'm doing it with the intention of using that phone for at least a few years. And since we've already established that ALL of the carriers suck, I don't really see the advantage in being able to switch to a different one.
I pretty much agree with everything else you wrote, but there's one advantage in being able to switch: the carrier will be slightly less inclined to treat you like dogcrap in order to keep you from leaving.
Tweet, tweet.
Or it could possibly be that you can't even buy an iPhone from Apple [store.apple.com] at the moment.
I'm not saying that the ability to utilize Microsoft's Push technology for Exchange will make up an 8 million unit defecit, but I know a lot of businesses/corporations out there passed over the iPhone for the lack of integration. In short, it was a great consumer phone, but not such a great business phone. There will be a lot of new iPhone purchases where I work once the 2.0 software is available, regardless of the hardware it goes on.
The iPhone will easily top 10 million in 2008. For a concise and logical explanation as to why, read this:
http://www.macworld.com/article/133636/2008/05/10_million_iphones.html
whj
Hey, stop confusing people with the facts! How do you expect them to start up a decent Apple hating flame war?
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
"as of the first quarter, only 1.7 million have left the shelves"
and right now you can't even walk in a store and buy one -- look online and it says "currently unavailable" -- no wonder aren't making their goal; no one can even buy a new iphone!
Great. Just as every phone in Europe and Japan moves on to 4th generation, Apple starts planning their move to 3G. Always one step ahead, just in the wrong direction.
Maybe they'll do something really revolutionary this time and include a text clipboard, too.
It makes perfect sense for AT&T to enter into an agreement like this. This makes them the sole provider of an artifically limited resource (service for an IPhone). Given that there is any demand at all for the IPhone, this can only mean good news for AT&T.
But why did Apple enter into this agreement? It artifically restricted their market to those who are willing to accept AT&T as a service provider. That will clearly send some potential buyers away to competing products. Why would you do that to yourself?
I can think of two reasons:
1) AT&T subsidized the development and/or production of the phones, thus offsetting the potential cost of lost business (one can only guess as to whether or not it was worth it).
2) Steve Jobs is a control freak who just LOVES any business model that includes any kind of vendor lock-in. Given the artificial limitations placed on software development/distribution for the IPhone, and similar behavior for every other product Apple has produced, I'd say this is a well-supported statement. I further think that Steve Jobs honestly believes that imposing arbitrary limits on his customers increases his hold on his market and hence improves overal profit, though in my opinion he is dead wrong (and I will point to the success of more open systems such as the PC and Windows (I didn't say "open," I said "more open") to support my position).
So that's why.
Steve Jobs is expecting huge second quarter sales due to the economic stimulus checks being mailed out. Time to buy apple stock?
Until Apple gets another CDMA carrier,Verizon users will be SOL. Why support another technology when you can do GSM and get most of the world?
One of the key things that has made the iPhone a non option for people in the market for a $400 phone (outside of gadget geeks) is its lack of Exchange support. The primary market for smart phones is still business users and the primary platform for email/scheduling in business is Exchange (I'm sure many of you have examples where this is not the case and I'm sure many of you get by with IMAP forwarding of your Exchange email, but in the vast majority of organizations Exchange = email/calendar). Most business users don't want to fiddle and hack. They want it to work. Now.
Version 2 of the iPhone software (which will be released to v1 iPhones, too) is supposed to have great Exchange integration. I think this will be a HUGE selling point for iPhones as it will become a viable tool in the market that it is priced in.
(I for one won't hook up Exchange to my iPhone unless my company wants to help pay the bill... but that's just me)
Steal my band's record! Seriously,
Ever stop to think that they are deliberately unavailable? Because they are bringing out a new model and anyone who bought one now would demand a refund to get the new one shortly? Apple seems to like doing this.
These are the requirements for my next phone and/or carrier:
Wifi and the ability to use wifi voip / data automatically while at a hotspot.
1M pixel camera with flash
Availability in transmission bands for any carrier I choose
-- Seriously, apple, AT&T only at the iphone launch?
A keypad/entry system with tactile feedback.
-- This puts the current iphone out of the running. Having to stare at a phone like a monkey while I use it is not an option. Full keyboard would be ideal like some of the Nokia EXX phones and that new Motorola.
No restriction on mp3 music playing, transferring, ringtones, etc.
-- The current crippling that Verizon does to their phones is unacceptable.
The ability to add third party application games and utilities.
--- Again, you suck Verizon. I can't wait to get rid of Verizon for this reason. Stupid contract.
A GPS with HR monitor would be awesome too. Then I wouldn't need any other gadget for anything, but I realize that might be asking too much. Unless hmmmmm... it's an open system and you can buy third party bluetooth HR monitors?
So right now I believe my phone will be an open platform with Virgin Mobile as the carrier. From what I can tell they don't cripple their phones and I will be able to spend $20 per month to handle the times when I'm not at a wifi hotspot (work and home are covered). I'm just waiting for that open phone that handles wifi voip well and works on the Virgin Mobile (which is Sprint in the US) network.
--David
I just see it as a convenient excuse to not buy one. I haven't bought one but my excuse is more honest, it offers nothing I need.
Now what I want is wholly different but many of us are actually more responsible with our money and realize that its wants that get people into trouble. The problem with wants is that they change. So I get an iPhone, then what? I start using it for stuff I didn't need to do because I need to justify the purchase. The problem with that approach is that any annoyance becomes a big annoyance. Suddenly I am off looking for something to satisfy new wants the previous one generated.
No, I won't blame it being on AT&T, being locked down in other ways, its price, or even it being an Apple product (I am using my iMac to type this). I simply realized I didn't need it and I am cool with it.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
roll ignores you!
Another quarter of positive GDP growth numbers came out today people. The National Bureau of Economic Research defines a recession as two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth. Sure other economic indicator have been trending lower, but please, lets not throw words around hapharzardly. I prefer them to still mean something when I go to use them.
I am a v1ral sig. Plse c0py me and h3lp me spread. Thank y0u?
I've become quite frustrated and disillusioned about the iPhone. Once the bells and whistles wore off, I've seen the obvious: it's essentially a featureless, fancy phone.
Apple's apparent apathy toward consumer feedback and requests for functionality is a serious turn off. Irregardless of whether it's a first-generation device or not, it seems they spend more time and effort trying to keep this phone "locked down" than in pursuing more useful functionality.
I'm sick of having to visit viewmymessage.com (which doesn't always work well) every time someone sends an MMS. The iPhone is devoid of basic document viewing capabilities, the camera is average.
At this stage, after a slightly buggy 1.1.4 release, the fact that I must "jailbreak" my phone to make it more useful is rather sad. This little phone is capable of so much more.
I'm not alone in this feeling; several of my friends and co-workers who have the phone are growing tired of it.
Conversely, RIM/Blackberry seems to have done it right when it comes to useful phones. Their Blackberry Bold (due in July for AT&T) will be 3G, can do iTunes, the screen size is the same as the iPhone, a real QWERTY keyboard, etc.
That will be my new phone. The iPhone will very likely become an overpriced, featureless paperweight (unless I sell it).
I love Apple computer systems, they are top notch, but I feel they messed up with the iPhone. From what I've heard of the 3G phone, there's no motivation for me to hang out and spend more money on the product line.
What I found very disappointing recently was when I posted a politely critical message about the slow development cycle of iPhone features on discussions.apple.com that got "moderated" (read: deleted) with a private response saying I wasn't allowed to be critical of Apple's internal processes.
Not only was that generally petty, I think it speaks volumes (image control, etc).
Goodbye, iPhone...
put off getting an iPhone specifically waiting for the 3G iteration. In my immediate family, I think there will be a half-dozen sales as soon as the 3G iPhone is out...I can think of another half-dozen or so friends who are waiting for the roll-out as well. I am betting Apple will have no problem meeting that 10MM figure.
The article had some glaring errors. It claimed they still need to sell 8 million phones to hit the 10 mill mark. At another point in the article they said the sales numbers dropped to 600,000 a month. If every month since they started selling them they did 600,000 phones then they had sold 6.6 million iPhones. Third grand math. The first two months they sold at a far higher rate so I'm guessing the 600,000 was an average. Also are they including foreign sales since they are available in other markets now? Now they said 10 million iPhones in 2008 in the article so they may mean at current pace he'll only sell 6.6 million this year. I believe the original goal was 10 million by the third quarter this year so there's some confusion and he's likely to pass that goal. Let's say for argument it is 10 million this year. He's opened up all the major markets except Japan, Russia and China and he's coming out with a new model in a few weeks that is likely to be an impressive upgrade. This will cause a major spike in sales, I'm holding out for the 3G model myself. With all the new markets and a new model I see them easily passing 10 million in sales this year. I'm confused at a high end phone that has exceeded sales projections and is selling 600,000 units a month is supposed to be a flop? People keep predicting the fall of Apple yet in a bad market their stock has rebounded and is staring hard at $200 a share with the iPhone the only new product on th e horizon. They have rock solid sales on computers and most of the complaints come from non users. Mac/Apple users on the whole tend to be happy with their purchases where as Microsoft users seem to be in a perpetually foul mood bitching about Vista, Server 2008 and the new Office. I'm Posting AC because I know mentioning Microsoft in abad light is taboo and boasting about Apple is a burning offense but it's true. The iPhone is a major success. My business partner wh is one of the cheapest humans on the planet wouldn't give up his iPhone for anything, crappy AT&T service and all. He's said he'd happily drop another $500 for one if he lost his. This from a guy that makes 200K+ a year and drives a car that looks like he stole it from a junkyard minutes before it was to be crushed as scrap metal. He's so happy with it he's thinking about switching to Mac computers. iPhones can't be all bad.
I looked at the first phone and thought it was kewl and am already on at&t. Thought the googleMaps thing was awesome.... till I found out it had no GPS. WTF?! Yeah, it uses something like Navizon but why would I want to rely on cell tower triangulation and some sort of Wi-Fi database? Friends do tell me it works well but I want a damned GPS. 3G sounds nice too but I guess I'll know I need more bandwidth after using it? Told all my friends I wouldn't touch it till it had GPS - uh oh looks like I'm getting an iPhone soon!
Friends tell me it's actually useful for things other than phone calls. Wow. Since my existing phone does jack EXCEPT make calls poorly that might be nice. Can't use it at work but jailbreaking it for 3rd party apps in my spare time would be interesting, screw the crippled SDK stuff. I sometimes use the woman's phone to look up stuff on the WEB but it's WinCE based and frankly sucks. Since I'm already on the service how bad could it be? Probably cost me about the same, has data, even if it's only a little better it'll be worth it.
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
GDP is crap.
Well someone must like it a little bit because it's part of the official economic definition of a recession.
Look at real numbers like CPI, OR.. Look at food prices: UP gasoline: UP airline ticket prices: UP foreign travel: DOWN.
Prices go up and down all the time, people adjust travel habits because of a weak dollar abroad - and spend more here as a result. Part of the reason why... we aren't in a recession, as much as you would like us all to be. The power of supply and demand, you should study it sometime.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
everything.
The actual goal is to sell the 10 millionth iPhone before the end of 2008, not to sell 10 million during 2008. An iPhone odometer that started at zero at launch in June 2007 is going to click over to 10,000,000 at some point. Apple's sales goal states that will happen before 2008 is done.
It's interesting how everyone seems to have their favorite "pet" cellular provider, that they swear up and down is FAR better than the competition.
I'm honestly convinced that MUCH of this is just "voodoo" - caused by complex interactions among multiple factors. (EG. You have the right make and model of phone, happen to live and work in the right places that are close to a certain carrier's towers, and/or haven't had any billing hassles with your present carrier.)
I believed all the "hype" and claims of various "review" web sites and magazines, and stuck with Verizon for years. Their service was what I'd call "decent", although I had my share of dropped calls and calls that had cross-talk on them, requiring I hang up and redial. I also paid through the nose though. For a while, I was really heavily using my phone during "peak" hours, and kept getting nailed with overage charges. Verizon flat out refused to offer me a plan with enough monthly minutes in it to solve my problem!
I finally decided I had enough, and tried switching to US Cellular. With all incoming calls free, I saved a *bundle*, and the Moto Razr phone I got with the service worked quite well for me. (I saw tons of complaints about these phones, but the one I had was flawless for over a year and a half. I finally had the battery wear out once, but that was about it.) Furthermore, I had *no* dropped calls, EVER. I don't believe I ever got a "bad line" with other conversations bleeding over on my call either.
Now, because I wanted the iPhone when it came out, I'm with AT&T. My experience is, they drop a lot of calls on me in certain areas, but the data plan with the iPhone package is FAR more generous than anything the other carriers ever offered me before. It'll be interesting to see if the 2nd. gen. iPhone keeps calls connected any better. (I'm still unsure if my poor signal issues are REALLY all AT&T's fault, or if it's partially due to the iPhone's design with the metal casing and so on.)
You know what the problem with the iPhone is? The novelty just isn't there... My g/f got one a couple weeks ago, and she spent the first week convincing people that her iPhone in her purse wasn't a tampon. Seriously. And she doesn't ever use it to listen to music because the battery life on it doesn't compare to her iPod. Another big issue is the ridiculous price that we're being charged. I mean, I just renewed my contract with AT&T and when I saw that they cost more than an iPod with the same amount of HD space... WITH a 2-year contract??? No thanks. I got an LG CU720, cost me about $300 less, the camera on it takes better quality pics, and it actually fits in my pocket. GG Apple.
Clones are people two!
What do you expect from an iPod? Play media with a very usable GUI. Anything else? Simple games maybe. They are all included. It works perfect so it crushed their enemies, made them irrelevant.
Apple thought Symbian using, theme changing, 3rd party software downloading/buying 40% Smart Phone market majority will see the fruit logo and magically convert to iPhone.
It was a horrible mistake at least in Europe.
You can see Symbian user maniacally downloading/trying/buying things but make no mistake, they are very afraid of hacking anything on device, even resident legal programs which acts like hacking things gets the boot.
Look at just one companies offerings for Symbian devices: http://shop.psiloc.com/en/ Almost none of them are possible on iPhone with such EULA. As a serious company, will they teach how to break EULA/Warranty of another commercial company and also ask money for it? I didn't even mention the huge J2ME Universe.
My Nokia E65 Symbian phone automatically changes profile based on where I am and it has a $20 universal remote, it is also used as a Skype/Multi IM client (Fring) that I gave up the computer based ones for it. Now, as an Apple Desktop user, I will see the iPhone, throw away this thing and buy iPhone to be part of 10M people. Yea, right.
Apple execs should have spent more time in Europe, especially watching how Nokia/Sony Ericsson or even J2ME phones are used.
The Nokia lets you install software, so if you don't like the mail reader that's on there, get another one.
For example, both Google and Yahoo have mail clients, and there are several other ones.
The Nokia browser uses the same engine as the iPhone browser. If you don't like it, you can always run Opera.
"Currently, the most common form of UMTS uses W-CDMA as the underlying air interface."
The air interface technology is the key since we are talking about what radio technology the chipset in the iPhone supports. Right now it supports GSM and EDGE, which employ TDMA as the air interface. Moving to 3G means adding CDMA support.
"Japan was the first country to adopt 3G technologies, and since they had not used GSM previously they had no need to build GSM compatibility into their handsets and their 3G handsets were smaller than those available elsewhere. In 2002, NTT DoCoMo's FOMA 3G network was the first commercial W-CDMA network - it was initially incompatible with the UMTS standard at the radio level but used standard USIM cards, meaning USIM card based roaming was possible (moving the USIM card into a UMTS or GSM phone when travelling). Both NTT and SoftBank Mobile (which launched 3G in December 2002) now use the standard UMTS, and their PDC 2G networks run in parallel."
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
i think the next i phone will most likely be rotary dial. sort of a, back to the basics. -Steve Kliff
It's a plus if those things are in the realm of tech.
Why does a good whopping 80% of printed and broadcasted news today seem to be speculative? Has it always been this way and I've just been too preoccupied to notice?