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WWDC '08 Sees Slimmer, Improved, 3G iPhone
Many of us have been watching Apple's WWDC 2008 keynote unfold live. There are many exciting tidbits, but most of all is the announcement of the 3G iPhone. Featuring an even thinner profile, black plastic back, metal buttons, flush headphone jack, improved audio, GPS support, and improved battery life, this is bound to make quite a few people stand up and take notice. Update 18:54 GMT by SM: Best of all it looks like they really took the price point to heart, 8GB iPhones are now $199 and a 16GB model will be available for $299, coming to an Apple store riot near you on July 11,2008.
My question is how does that affect the price of the other iPods, especially the Nano and the Touch... I guess that will probably be answered in the next couple of minutes... Hopefully, anyway. Maybe it just means larger Nanos at the same price point, and reduced prices on the Touches.
Does Apple allow existing users to upgrade, possibly restarting their 2yr contract, or are they forced to hold to the terms of their previous contract with the old hardware?
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
Depressing, still no video and no camera upgrade. Half what I was hoping for but the other half was a disappointment. How about charge another $100 and give me a better camera model and what's with the no video support???? Kind of a let down after waiting a year.
The OS has had a full point release and there doesn't seem to be much for it.
Where's iChat or am I supposed to keep spending like $0.15 a text for SMS. Speaking of SMS, where's the damn MMS?
How about spam filtering on the mail client. This is supposed to be "just like the desktop OS X" so how hard can it be to upgrade the mail client to more completely resemble the functionality of mail.app on the desktop?
No discussion of how the 1st gen phones will handle location.
Nice one month slip on the OS and app store.
So as a 1st generation owner, the only major upgrade in my day to day is the ability to get 3rd party apps. Hopefully 3rd party apps will fill in the gaping holes.
A little adblock would be super helpful too...
Sheldon
The question is, can you walk into the store and get an iPhone for this price, without having to sign a 2 year contract.
The reason the iPhone originally cost so much more than we're used to seeing phones cost, is because it was not subsidized by a 2 year service contract.
Now that they've lowered the price, can I still walk into the Apple store and buy a new iPhone and walk out without signing a contract.
I hope you're not pretending to be evil while secretly being good. That would be dishonest.
Will over seas iphone be unlocked by law and will it work in the us.
Well, it looks like he didn't have any announcements about prices on iPods, and according to the Apple Store, they're still all the same. But the iPhone was always described as "The best iPod [Apple] has ever made," among other things...
And now, for $199, you can buy an 8GB 3G iPhone, which is a pretty sweet iPod plus a phone, internet connectivity, 3rd party apps, or you can buy an 8GB nano, which is just an iPod with a tiny screen and a wheel. I understand that this new iPhone price may be subsidized by the carriers, and that it probably locks a customer into the 2 year contract even more than they were with the old iPhone, but still, there's something about seeing these prices on the website that just doesn't sit right. Not to mention that the 8GB iPhone is now $100 less expensive than the 8GB iPod Touch, which has less hardware built into it... (by the way, does the Touch get GPS, too?).
I'm still expecting either price cuts or big storage increases on the Flash-based iPods. In any case, if I were in the market for a new iPod, I'd wait a little longer before I buy.
I plan on unlocking mine...
If you think that's bad, a local radio station just reported on the announcement of these new iPhones.
With everything they could be reporting on you'd think there would be something more newsworthy. People come to sites like Slashdot to read about this sort of thing, but to have a news service report on a product release is a bit ridiculous.
I'm sure Apple's marketing department is ecstatic over all this free advertising. I can only imagine how daunting it must be for potential competitors of all sizes. The bigger companies have to spend a fortune to get even a fraction of the attention Apple gets. And for the small guys it's hopeless.
There are a lot of great phones out there that aren't getting the attention they deserve, although the great ones are available predominantly overseas. I'm not discounting the iPhone, it's very good, but I do think it's overrated. In the very least undeserving of all the attention its getting. You can't read a review anymore that doesn't try to compare a phone, especially smart phones, against the iPhone.
The best part is when Apple trumpets a standard feature as something new and revolutionary.
My wife and I both have prepaid phones that we use sparingly and our total cost is under $20/month. As we hit our 30s and started a family, our use patterns changed dramatically - we're no longer 20-something party animals who need to be yapping/smsing on the phone to everyone throughout the day. We saved almost $500 in cell charges last year without changing our behavior.
I certainly hope not. I for one do NOT like being charged for stuff that should have been there from the start. Come on, Apple(i hope) isn't Microsoft, they shouldn't be pulling this bullshit unless they want their base to turn on them. I feel like I'm using a Microsoft product when I use Leopard, I don't do anything special with my SR macbook, but have had plenty of kernel panics and odd crashes, esp. of iTunes. Really does make me feel like I'm using a Microsoft product. I don't even want to see what their server version is like. I was forced into using a Tiger Open Directory server at work, and its a buggy pile, I shudder to think what Leopard must be like.
Apple support doesn't help any either. At one point they actually told me that a problem I was experiencing was a bug and that I should have to come up with a workaround, and still charged us an incident for such a lovely revelation. I am having issues getting our new Leopard workstations to connect to the Tiger open directory(another Apple product!) and the support guy hasn't done anything in the past 3 weeks to really help, despite the massive amount of money we are paying Apple.
Leopard wouldn't bother me so much if we weren't FORCED to use it if we want new hardware. We are starting to replace our aging powermac G5s(which still work for the most part, but as the hardware ages we are running out of spares) and settled on the shiniest Mac Pros that came out in January. However, as part of the deal we were forced to use Leopard, you cannot install Tiger on these machines. So instead of focusing on what our customer needs, we have to deal with an endless Apple bug parade or just stick to aging hardware. There is no middle ground. Apple makes fun of Vista customers going back to XP, but at least they have the option! If I could run Tiger on my macbook or the new mac pros at work, I would in a second but Apple is so arrogant that they refuse to let me do so and instead have to put up with their bullshit.
Furthermore, Apple seems to not realize that the rest of the world doesn't always work like they do. For example, look at Java. Apple was over a year late on getting Java 6 on the mac, and now it only exists for Leopard 64-bit intel users. WTF? It can run on Windows 2k for crying out loud! There are many more examples of Apple's hubris, but that is one of the best imo. It prevents us from going to Java 6 because we haven't replaced everything here with 64 bit intel Leopard machines....
The situation with Apple of late kind of reminds me of the ending of Animal Farm, when the rest of the animals couldn't tell the difference between pigs and humans. I am starting to not see the difference between Apple and Microsoft....
Monstar L
Most smartphones are even more expensive month-to-month. What's your point?
Smartphones are bloody expensive? Most people don't have any reason to care about smartphones? If this was from Nokia or Microsoft the only people who would care would be the yuppies who can actually justify the cost?
Rubbish. If potential customers are *unwilling* to buy a product, it is the vendor's problem. More so than the consumers', even.
If I am unwilling to purchase an XBox 360 for whatever reason, opting instead for a PS3, is that really my problem? No, if it's anyone's it's Microsoft's.
I like basketball!!1!
You're mixing up technologies. CDMA, TDMA, FDMA, OFDMA are all ways of getting the data in and out of the air. CDMA the cellular technology isn't just the air interface. GSM 3G uses W-CDMA as an air interface. That says nothing about which frequency bands, authentication or other interoperability barriers you'll encounter. It's just the way they utilize the bandwidth. LTE is based on OFDMA, which is kind of like CDMA crossed with TDMA and FDMA (your data is not only XORed with a chipping code like CDMA, but you also have timeslots to transmit them in and a number of subcarriers you're allowed to use.) I don't think you'll see a grand unified mobile network anytime soon. :-)
It certainly is just preference.
I've used a Windows Mobile phone for the past 2.5 years. I started tracking my usage of the features. e-mail and web browsing are the two features I use the most. Both are horribly flawed on Windows Mobile.
Pocket Outlook is great, as long as you're only connecting to Exchange servers. Switch to IMAP, and the server configuration determines the usability, because Pocket Outlook does not support IMAP namespaces properly. The mail server from which I get my mail uses namespaces, and Pocket Outlook locks up when I try to get mail there. I had to do stupid hacks (forwarding mail off, at first, and later using a proxy to re-write requests.)
Pocket Internet Explorer (PIE) is a different beast. It's crap, even for a mobile browser. Simple pages will render fine, but anything even moderately complex will not work. When I first started using my phone, I just did everything through Google's gateway. That's really not how I want to use the web. Later on, I started using my phone to copy down interesting URLs for perusal at home. The browser on my phone became little more than a portal to IMDB and Wikipedia.
Opera Mobile is a bit better, but you pay for it, and it's still got rendering issues with some sites.
What's great about the iPhone, in my opinion, is the support. Even though it has a real web browser, popular websites fall all over themselves trying to put together a version of the site optimized for iPhone's screen. When there isn't an optimized version, you can view the full version (albeit slowly--hopefully 3G will help address that) and zoom specific portions of the page that you want to look at. For me, since what I really want is a data device (I could do without the phone part, honestly), the better the browser and mail client, the better the device. I've tried all the major phone operating systems, and by far, Apple blows them away. RIM does come closest, no doubt, but the web browsing experience just can't compete.
Well, not really. What its really about is spreading some of the interesting innovations in Leopard universally throughout the system. For example, the reference to multi core processors in the Snow Leopard press release is clearly about spreading the new NSOperation, among other things. Stuff like that. This goes pretty far beyond a "bug fix" release.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
Wait ... 12.3 - 11.6 = 0.7. Does the definition of "a couple" now include 7/10 as a possible meaning?
It's also possible that "slimmer" meant the average depth over the entire area of the device. Think of how much thinner something seems when the edges taper off compared to something the same maximum thickness but uniform thickness over its area. And remember, Apple cares a great deal about aesthetics.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Frankly, some of the announcements were just lame. Scientific calc? Oh wow, that took what... maybe five minutes in XCode... Why haven't they ported Grapher.app yet? Announcements for VoIP apps were conspicuously missing. So were P2P apps. Gee, I wonder why? </ sarcasm> Yet they can still manage to lob an "ActiveStink" joke... Hmm, maybe people with glass phones shouldn't throw rocks...
I realize that you're probably being facetious, but take a look at Sprint's SERO plan.
In a nutshell, if you sign up for a two-year contract through the right avenues, for $30/month you can get 500 minutes, free nights and weekends that start at 7 pm, unlimited in-network calling, unlimited roaming, unlimited text messaging and 3G data, and a few other perks that I don't really use. You can probably also get a pretty hefty chunk off of whatever phone you're planning to buy; I got $350 off of a Mogul.
For what it's worth, you may not be able to replace your home internet. Tethering is officially not allowed, although I've been connecting my Mogul to my laptop via Bluetooth for mobile 'net access for several months now and nobody seems to have noticed.
Karma: Terrifying (mostly affected by atrocities you've committed)
The first gen iPhone has that same SIM tray and you can swap SIMs in it. That doesn't mean they'll work though - you have to jailbreak and unlock the network lock to make another SIM work.
Or it could be even simpler. They will have a limited supply and would rather give it to the brick and mortar Apple Stores and AT&T stores. Now they may force you to sign a contract, but since under the current system you already do that with the iTunes then I don't know how anything has changed. It may be as you say but based on the roll out last year it's more about lines outside of stores and perception of demand.
An unnecessary loophole, given that you could just pick one off the shelf and buy it.
Now, it appears as though you will not be able to purchase one without (a) signing up for a new AT&T account or (b) proving the existence of a current iPhone account you will be upgrading to. Since the new iPhone is pretty clearly subsidized, dropping the contract would require return of the iPhone.
I blogged about the idea of 'transparent synchronisation' today.
I think it's interesting that the next killer mobile application may not be a mobile application at all, but rather, an application that makes it completely irrelevant and transparent that I am mobile. Regardless of whether I sit down at my desktop at home, my laptop in the airport lounge, or my phone on the go, I get the same, live, consistent view of all of my electronic stuff. This is a hard problem, that's been done quite poorly for the most part. I wonder if Apple has cracked it with Mobile Me?
M@
Are the GPS maps stored or downloaded ad-hoc? because for those of us that actually travel and use GPS in foreign lands, paying 3G roaming rates isn't exactly a bargain.
The built in maps probably would not cache. In the case of travel, you'd probably be more likely to purchase one of the several thousand stand-alone GPS apps that will eventually appear on the app store that do come with datasets or allow you to download them.
OK, MobileMe sounds great, but what about Bluetooth syncing? again, if you are traveling, you can't rely on getting a WiFi signal between your phone and your laptop to sync your calendar (and you don't want to have to remember to plug it into USB either).
USB sync would be how you'd do things if you were without any WiFi. If you are someone so remote you have no WiFi, why are you constantly updating your calendar anyway?
What about that camera? still 2MP, in 2008? AutoFocus, anything?
The camera is the price you pay for keeping the phone price really low. There are way better standalone cameras than any cell-phone camera, if you care about image quality...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Ultimately the Touch is dead as a product unless there's some real price cutting happening this month.
O2 just announced that the iphone will be available on Pay and Go in the UK. If we're to take Steve's words literally ($199 maximum price everywhere) it'll be priced at the same as the contract price - £99 (O2 have only announced their contract rates.. Free iphones on higher contracts!).
So I can buy an 8GB ipod touch for £179, or an 8GB PayG iphone for £99 - and the iphone has GPS, 2.0 software for free.
Can't see many people buying the more expensive product.