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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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