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iPhone Tops Windows Mobile Share; MS Releases iPhone App
walterbyrd notes that new data from Gartner indicates that the successful launch of the iPhone 3G was enough to push iPhone market share over that of Windows Mobile devices — the entire range of them. And reader Spy Hunter writes: "Seadragon Mobile is Microsoft's first iPhone application. Seadragon is a technology for streaming zoomable user interfaces, and this iPhone incarnation allows viewing huge collections of gigapixel-sized images over WiFi or 3G. If you don't have an iPhone, you can also try Seadragon in your browser via Seadragon Ajax."
You can complain about cut and paste or how the iphone is locked down or too expensive or doesn't run linux, but it's been a real donkey punch to the industry, and even rival companies acknowledge (and applaud) it for raising the bar (at least in the US).
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Is it surprising?
WinCE was originally developed as a PalmOS competitor/beater, running on fat Psion 5 look-a-likes with dire keyboards, snail-like interfaces and the stability of Mount Etna.
Since that time the platform has remained the same. The browser is still ancient, and their best promises for the next version are "IE 6" quality, i.e., irrelevant. Sure, there are new interfaces, the software is a little more up to date, the kernel has been switched to a more modern variant, it does wireless, bluetooth, 3G, etc, but it's still the same at heart. Rubbish.
Microsoft - you could sell iPhone Office for $99 and make a mint. Or you could sell licenses to WinMob+Pocket Office to manufacturers for cents. Microsoft have always said they'll develop where the market is. If the iPhone and iPod Touch ecosystem continues to grow, surely it is but a matter of time before they develop iPhone viewers, and then editors, for their file formats - before the formats become irrelevant... Pocket Project for iPhone would result in many a fevered brow in managers' offices around the world.
I think the iPhone has one major achilles' heel which is Apple's ludicrous approval process. Developer frustration is beginning to boil over as many go weeks and months without so much as a peep as to where their hard work stands. And then after waiting for so long, they get notified that there's a misspelling, or that Apple doesn't like your icon. If they continue to alienate developers like this, and if Google, RIM, Nokia, and Microsoft provide a far more open experience, I think you'll start to see this juggernaut start to slow down. Other factors include just how much stupid stuff an AppStore user has to wade through to get to the good apps, and the extreme fragility of the Xcode code signing / deployment system is (sudden 0xE8000001 errors with the SDK 2.2 update, anyone?) iPhone is a good platform to develop for, but Apple's inability to get its SDK tools solid and its completely confusing, inconsistent, and nebulous approval system are just plain painful.
"For once innovation pays"
Funny you say that. There is nothing the iPhone does that an old WM6 phone can't do. iPhone sells due to marketing. Same for iPods. Other MP3 players do more for less, but can't market like Apple can.
There are two types of creativity (innovation) - thinking up things no one has done before and taking what a bunch of people have done before and putting it all together. Apple does some of the first but mostly does the second type. They not only put it all together, they do so in an attractive package that usually works well.
What? Beat one of the most niche market shares (Windows mobile) in the mobile phone market?
I could of guessed that, it's got a Apple logo.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
I have never come across a device that allows me to use it how I LIVE, more than the iPhone does. Most every device forces you to adapt to how it works, make changes to how you like to do things in order to get productive use out of the device. The iPhone just seems to fit like a glove to how I like to do things with a smartphone.
I dont have to compromise, I just use it, it works, especially the GPS feature.
I've had numerous cell phones over the past 15 years from a variety of manufacturers, as well as a few PDAs. The iPhone is the first of them that I really use regularly for a variety of tasks. The interface is relatively easy to use, the applications perform well, and updates and syncing are straightforward. This isn't about any individual component in the mix, it's the overall integration.
As to the innovation, Apple is the first company to tell the US wireless carriers that the cellphone vendor is defining platform. In the past, you never really knew what features you were going to get and what features would be removed so that the wireless carrier could charge you to use the feature. I can't imagine that Verizon would have agreed to network changes in order to support visual voicemail without having it disabled by default and then charging on a per message basis (or some other equally obnoxious plan). In fact, Verzion probably would have required that all of the interface buttons be reordered or some other silliness like they seem to do with so many of the Motorola phones they carry. Apple also worked to ensure that the data plan was unlimited so that you would be encouraged to use the device without fear of bandwidth charges.
Certainly there are improvements to be made - it's not as if it's perfect by any means - but at least I know that I can get upgrades as they come out, rather than getting a device that gets little or no improvement over the course of my 2 year contract. Or one that requires me to go track down a kiosk and hope for the best.
Yup, it really is amazing. I don't think anyone could have guessed it would have done so well.
Some of use knew right from the moment we saw the demo that it would become incredibly popular. Of course, many of us also get ignored when we start ranting about how important usability is and how there is more to design than aesthetics.
Apple fanboy? Dude, at least read the summary. Nokia are still leaps and bounds ahead of Apple. It's doubtful they'll lose that spot anywhere in the next few years. If you were 'really' involved with any cell phone company, particularly as an engineer, you'd know that almost every hardware function of either of the two iPhone models thus far has been a knock off of stuff Nokia (and many others) have been doing for several years already. So it has a cute little finger sensitive display, this is not new either, but what else is actually innovative? Everything it does is simply following spec sheets that others have forged long before them.
Wake me when they come up with technology that really does forego any incremental improvements, and actually does consist of stuff that nobody else has already done 4 years ago.
Ah, in case you hadn't noticed, people are buying up this "stolen, recycled" engineering in droves. Do you think I really give a rats ass who invented the shatterproof coating on the windshield when I'm shopping for my new car? Hell no. Do I care who invented the fuel injector design? Hell no. Speak to me in things I DO care about, like a quality product, which is exactly what Apple has delivered, and they're reaping the rewards from it.
Wake me up when you've found that mind-bending design you keep holding your breath for. With todays ADD fashion, you'll find more "innovation" coming from the Marketing department than the Engineering "recycling center".
The interface of the Treo is borderline terrible. Familiarity != intuitive. If you can hand your Treo to your 65 year old grandmother and she can figure it out without you walking her through each step, I'll eat my hat.
The fact that I never have to use a stylus or navigate an extremely poorly thought out menu bar at the top of the screen makes an iPhone so much less aggravating as a portable device.
I've used a Treo, and I'd rather keep my old Motorola V300 than use one of those daily.
There is no office software, there is no remote desktop, there is a pretty interface though.
If you think the iphone interface is just pretty you haven't really used it despite claims to the contrary. While the iphone is hardly perfect it is a HELL of a lot more usable for most folks than any Windows mobile, Palm or Nokia phone I've ever held - and I've used a LOT of them. Seriously - a LOT.
As for remote desktop you are wrong, they do exist.
Regarding office software, I'm quite sure it will come for whatever it's worth. I've never seen anyone actually do anything genuinely useful to a word, excel or powerpoint file on a PDA or smartphone - and I'm pretty geeky about this stuff. It's a nice checkbox feature that never actually gets used. I had the ability on my last PDA and I never once used it. I can't even think of a situation where I would use it. Maybe you actually do but that would make you very unusual.
That is nice, but it's a very long way away from matching the feature set of my 6 year old phone.
My Nokia E70 has roughly the same feature set as my wife's iPhone. But you know what? Only on paper are they comparable. Other than the physical keyboard the interface on the iPhone is vastly superior - and the virtual keyboard works well enough. Yes I can often get the same stuff done but it's way more of a pain in the ass on the Nokia. Same with the Treos I've used in the past - some Windows mobile, some PalmOS. There is more to a mobile device than just a feature set - it has to actually be usable.
So what makes the Iphone so awesome? Nothing.
There are millions of folks who actually use one that would probably disagree with you, myself included. I've heavily used numerous smartphone and PDA devices from RIM, Nokia, Palm, and a bunch based on Windows mobile. For most (not all - most) people I'm not aware of a device I could honestly recommend as better than an iPhone. If you have particular needs, yes there are other good devices that might suit you better. But the iPhone isn't selling so well because it is mediocre - it actually works pretty darn well. I can't say the same for a lot of other "smart" phone devices.
What makes it popular is the apple mystic and excellent marketing, but there is a reason serious business users shy away from it.
No, the reason business users don't use it is because Apple hasn't created the back end security and administration features corporate IT departments REQUIRE and RIM currently provides. Apple has recognized this and made some moves in that direction but it will take time to develop. It has nothing to do with any inherent superiority of blackberries as devices. I've used plenty of them and they are fine but corporate types don't use them because of the device itself - they use them because of the infrastructure.
I guess that, as they did for the mp3 player marker, Apple has shown the world that customers do care about quality a lot more than the established manufacturers give them credit for.
Once the competitors take that into account, Apple's market share will start to decline. But it may keep going up for quite a while before the competition catches up.
What's so innovative about the iphone? Not trolling, I really am curious what is so innovative about it.
They made it work like a phone with web functionality, as opposed to making it work like a PDA with cell phone functionality.
It's difficult to explain until you've sat down and used it. It's not about feature comparisons, it's more like comparing a regular coffee cup to one of those fancy thermal mugs that have a thicker handle, a lid, and a flap to close it. They both do the same job but the latter was a little more thought out for a coffee drinker. (It's also more expensive and lots of people find ways to make due without it.)
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Sure we have. Apache has approached 70% of all webservers at various times. It seems to have fewer in-the-wild exploits than the underdog IIS.
Apple has shown the world that customers do care about quality
One lesson I take from Apple, Snap-on, Vice Grip and Virgin, (just to name a few that spring to mind), is that no matter how crowded a market is, you can still compete with higher quality instead of lower pricing.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
iPhone sells due to marketing.
The key to Apple marketing is the quality of the product.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Maybe it is a little creative, but not that much. What is really creative is a company like Alias wavefront (or whoever bought them out) writing Maya, and then having pixar (or anyone) come along and use that software to make films like Cars. Be realistic though, what apple have done is not exactly rocket science, they took existing off the shelf tech and wedged it in to a piece of plastic. Having a computer draft up a circuit diagram for interconnecting things like a bluetooth chip, a wifi chip, a CCD, a 3G chip, a GSM chip, LCD, and some assorted electronics, then wedge all that together - this is lego, slightly more expensive lego, but definitely lego. It's not innovation when sony ericsson, nokia, LG, samsung, and a whole host of others were already building stuff in the same way.
Don't get me wrong, I think their interface is kind of cool, it definitely shook up the existing players, but the technology is neither new, nor as profound as people are saying. Even the multi-touch is not new, I was using military hardware in 1995 that did this. I'm not American, so my view is perhaps not the same as yours, the iPhone may well be unusual in your (their) markets, but in my stores, it's kind of crippled up against what I can get at a cheaper price point. (I live in Asia)
Um, that's precisely what "market share" means. The term you're looking for is "installed base".
Afterall, white plastic coated in clear plastic is a whole lot of plastic. It feels like quality because its shiny and has some weight behind it. Metal feels more firm than plastic.
The "original mini" you were complaining about was cased in aluminum, unlike every other MP3 player on the market at the time. iPod Nanos are still made with aluminum, unlike... that's right, every other MP3 player on the market.
... and then they built the supercollider.
I always felt like most of the hype around the iPhone's launch missed the point. The hype was deserved, but everyone was hyping the wrong part.
What I saw was Apple not launching a cell-phone, they were launching a new mobile computing platform that could also be used as a cell-phone. It's a fundamental paradigm shift. Even now when I read rumours of Apple launching a netbook I think to myself that they've already done it- the iPhone. Back then journalists scoffed at the price and laughed at suggestions that Apple might worry giants like Nokia but they simply didn't get it. The iPhone isn't simply a phone, it's the first of the next-generation in mobile computing.
Comparing Apple's market share to Nokia's or other established phone manufacturers misses the point, because they are simply making phones. Even RIM just makes phones - call them smart phones if you prefer, but the basic way in which RIM have approached the Blackberry is the same as the way Nokia approaches the design of their phones. They do different things in different ways, but they are, first and foremost, phones. The parent poster is spot on when he refers to a new phone simply being the old phone but 20% faster etc etc etc. It's like car manufacturing, where many of today's cars are just the result of decades of incremental improvements on an old and outdated design.
In some ways the iPhone is a technical trojan horse but with a sophistication beyond Sony using the PS3 to get BluRay players into living rooms. The iPhone is getting real mobile computers into people's hands, with the 'real' internet (ignoring the Flash issue), and a real operating system. If people think it's just a phone that can play games, or a combination of a phone and an iPod then fine- Apple have done their job. They've made a mobile computer that is so easy to use people take it for granted...
I always thought that the iPhone deserved every bit of hype it received when it was launched, but not for the glossy interface or slick design. It was taking on industry giants such as Nokia and instantly making their corporate model obsolete, and offering instead a new paradigm in regards to mobile personal computers.
Putting syrup in coffee is some form of blasphemy.
A computer doesn't just "draft up a circuit diagram" and connect chips like Lego. PCB design and layout is a real engineering discipline that takes real engineers to make a real working product. The computer tools are just that, they provide tools to make the engineer's job easier, but they don't magic up a circuit diagram automatically. It takes a real engineer with real experience to make a high speed digital design work properly. It is much more tricky than writing software because the real world (which includes things like parasitic inductance and capacitance, trace impedances, RF interference) heavily impinges on high speed digital design. There are almost books written on the subject of using decoupling capacitors alone and tomes of information on innocuous subjects that to the untrained eye look simple, like power and ground planes. In a high speed digital design, a PCB trace isn't simply a wire linking A to B to the engineer who is deciding where it should go on the PCB.
It takes a significant amount of time and effort, and a significant amount of knowledge to put together even relatively straightforward high speed digital designs. With the iPhone you also have to cram it into a very constrained amount of space, too. You can bet the engineers who laid out the PCB spent a great deal of time making sure that not only it would fit, but the resultant device would work and pass FCC testing.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
What? Beat one of the most niche market shares (Windows mobile) in the mobile phone market?
I agree. I'm not sure why you got modded down - this statement is to the point of the matter. The other day, there was an article where people were saying how great the Iphone because it had sold more than the only just released Android. I don't know if it's true that the Iphone is more popular than Windows Mobile - if it is, then that's bad for Windows mobile, but comments on this story are as if people think that these are the only two phones that exist!
Wake me up when they're competing with the likes of Motorola and Nokia - why don't we ever get stories about them?
(Trying to claim that the Iphone is a "smart" phone, and then restrict the market they are looking at, doesn't really help - most phones these days can do the things that were once the domain of smartphones; other new phones by major manufacturers such as Nokia have just as much right to claim the "smartphone" label as the Iphone does.)
This is exactly what I saw. It's putting OS X on a phone, but in a way that doesn't feel like you are using a desktop OS. That's why I sprang for the iTouch. With the WiFi I essentially have a "netbook" in my hands!
Not to mention a development platform that shares a great deal of functionality with the iPhone.
"how can they call it a MINE if everything here is THEIRS?!?!" -Straight Jacket
The iTunes store.
My PDA has a phone in it. The interface is clean, simple and familiar. It does everything the Iphone does, and a HUGE list of things the iphone will NEVER be able to do.
A HUGE list of things the iPhone will NEVER do? Careful there. Many people have had to eat crow after using the "never" word. With iPhone's extensibility via 3rd party applications, it's truly hard to define the boundaries of the iPhone. Sure, for the time being, Apple has locked out certain features from 3rd party developers, but remember, in the beginning, the only way to get 3rd party apps on the iPhone was to jailbreak it. What happened? Apple opened the doors to developers. Jailbreaking still happens, but in all honestly, I hear less talk about jailbreaking from colleagues now than I did before Apple allowed 3rd parties to play in Apple's sandbox. I'm sure as time pushes on, we'll see the iPhone grow and mature in ways many people NEVER thought possible.
It's cute, but it's a really long way away from being a smart phone. There is no office software, there is no remote desktop, there is a pretty interface though. That is nice, but it's a very long way away from matching the feature set of my 6 year old phone.
As one other poster mentioned, office software on a PDA is fairly limiting. The iPhone will let you view Word, Excel and PDF documents. That's typically enough for most users - the ability to view. So you can't make a direct change - big whoop. Besides, who wants to work an excel spreadsheet on a 3" screen anyway? Albeit, with the iPhone's zoom ability, it can be done, but I don't know that I'd ever go there myself.
As for Remote Desktop - You are DEAD WRONG. I've been using RDP on the iPhone for months now. I connect to my corporate servers through VPN and I can establish an RDC connection to any (Windows) server/desktop I have access to. I also have SSH/Telnet abilities for accessing my Linux/UNIX servers too. And of course, there's also a VNC client for accessing anything else (Windows, Mac, Linux, etc.). I even have a green-screen terminal app for accessing IBM AS/400's (just in case). No my friend - you are sorely mistaken - the iPhone has many methods for remote connectivity support.
So what makes the Iphone so awesome? Nothing. What makes it popular is the apple mystic and excellent marketing, but there is a reason serious business users shy away from it.
Maybe to some extent this is true. But I don't believe that it's the final answer. I am not an Apple fanboy myself - well, maybe a little. Honestly though - prior to OS X, you couldn't pay me to use a Mac - I HATED Macs with a passion. I thought the interface was butt ugly to look at, the OS felt really chaotic, un-structured and clumsy to me and I felt encumbered by it. I was also a DOS/Windows junkie until OS X hit the scene with a touch of UNIX/Linux for flavor. Nowadays, my home-office has Windows to my left, OS X in the center and Linux to my right. My Mac is my primary machine of choice - it's best of both worlds. My Windows box is there for "compatibility" purposes only. The Linux box is there for me to do whatever with. So far, none of this has anything to do with Apple's mystique or marketing. It has to do with the fact that I like products that work well and get the job done while accommodating my personal style.
You are right however, business user's have not truly embraced the iPhone -- yet. The Blackberry has the dominant footprint - with it's backend server technology, integration into the corporate world, etc. The iPhone was a late adopter of MS Exchange integration. And for all the "effort" Apple has put into the iPhone's "speakerphone" abilities, the iPhone still sucks as a speakerphone. The other caveat is the ability to manage several blackberries (access, right's management, etc.) through the blackberry server. At this point in time, the iPhone has no such capabilities (that I am aware of). Technically, if you wanted to do something similar, you would have to
Except... most people don't want cut and paste. They WANT iTunes to manage their music for them. They WANT their stuff to be automatically transferred to their Shuffle without thinking about playlists or what to transfer or anything like that.
This is the reason people like you don't "get" the iPod, or other products that seem to sell well despite a perceived wall of difficulties. Most people want things to work without much fuss; they couldn't care less what "mass storage" is or how that might be better (or worse!).
Laughable at best. Tell me, how do you listen to all the songs you haven't heard in four months but you like (you've rated more than 3 stars) and have the words 'puke' in the title? Oh that's right, you can't, unless you write some insane script that no normal person could ever hope of doing. Meanwhile, the iPod user can do it in less than a minute.
Let me tell you something - the iPod was not the first media player, nor is it the only media player. Why does it dominate? Sure, Apple has a good marketing campaign, but more than that, if the usability was crap, these things wouldn't be practically throwing themselves off the shelves. Meanwhile other hardware manufacturers spit out great media players with better specs and cooler features... yet they go nowhere because for all of them (yes ALL), their interfaces and way of managing large music libraries is crap.
Oh and the difference between mass storage and library management? Instead of dragging the music to the drive, you drag it to... get this... THE LIBRARY. Oh my god, it's so hard to understand! Just like you people and your complete stubbornness in looking objectively at library management and realizing that a flat, non-relational file based structure is primitive at best.