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."

Comments

Innovation pays

[alain94040]

When Apple launched the iPhone two years ago, they announced that their goal was to ship 10 million iPhones by year end. Frankly, no one had any clue how many or how few would sell. It was just a guess on the part of Apple management (really!).

And somehow, they hit the number and blew past Microsoft smartphones, Nokia and blackberry. For once innovation pays, I love it. In he last 5 years I was involved as an engineer with some of the companies designing cell phones. Ground-breaking innovation is not in their DNA. Instead, they take last year's technology and make it 20% better and faster. Middle management has no clue how to foster innovation.

You need those companies around because they drive down cost and make technology accessible. But you also need a few Apples that forego incremental improvements and shoot for the moon.

--
French iPhone Apps review site applicationiphone.com looking for contributors

Re:Innovation pays

[Midnight Thunder]

Yup, it really is amazing. I don't think anyone could have guessed it would have done so well.

I wonder how much this says something about the iPhone and how much this says of the competition. Of the competition, the way I see them:
  - For me Windows mobile suffers from the fact it feel like a desktop OS shoe horned into a mobile device.
  - Palm lost focus and the separation of hardware into two separate companies that caused more problems than it solved. Then there was the fact they decided to go with Windows mobile.
  - RIM is still the better contender, but maybe purely focusing on a business solution limits the potential size of the market.
  - Android suffers from the fact they don't control the hardware, so the quality of the experience depends as much on the device manufacturers as the work Google does.

Re:Innovation pays

[Cyberax]

Android has good chances, but it has arrived a bit late. For most practical purposes it STILL has not arrived (G1 device is too 'niche').

Re:Innovation pays

[initialE]

Well the iPhone didn't stand a chance against Windows Mobile, because there were apps and apps for WM. There were apps for every kind of conceivable thing you could put on a mobile device. It was like... windows... You know you don't want it, you just don't have a choice because you needed your apps supported. Never mind it crashes all the time. Never mind you might miss important calls and never know it. It had app support.
Then what happened? Apple releases an SDK that enables rapid app development. They produce a storefront that enables you to hang out your hat almost immediately. They even provide back-end infrastructure for apps that need to do background communication. Once again, they are a major contender. And in record time.
My question is this: Do you see this happening for Android?

Re:Innovation pays

[Ethanol-fueled]

I hope that fanboi was joking. I just picked up a 2GB Sansa for 40 bucks at a Radio Shack sale.

It's like a cheaper, better version of the iPod shuffle(it's almost identical except that it's black and has an excellent 2-color backlit screen with neat animations and tons of configuration options) which costs much less than 2 gig shuffle($70) and it uses the mass-storage protocol(caveat: you must first set that option in the menu) so that I can copy and paste my music directly into it without having to install that godawful iTunes(and by extension Quicktime and other crappola.

My girlfriend bragged about getting an ipod shuffle and itunes gift cards for Christmas and I had a good chuckle before I explained to her the benefits of non-apple hardware...seeing people's eyes open is truly a beautiful thing.

Re:Innovation pays

[Man On Pink Corner]

Even the multi-touch is not new, I was using military hardware in 1995 that did this.

On the one-in-a-thousand chance that your entire post isn't one long exercise in juvenile puffery, you could do the world a big favor by elaborating on this. Right now, other vendors aren't able to use multi-touch because Apple has patented it out the wazoo. If their patent(s) could be invalidated by prior art dating back to 1995, that would be great for everyone else.

Re:Innovation pays

[Anonymous Coward]

It's harder because taste is involved. I think a better analogy would be web browsers. They all have more or less the same feature set... some have more of one thing, some are a bit faster in certain areas, some make things a bit easier - but they all do pretty much the same thing. Yet, people get into holy wars over them.

Similarly, just about any phone will do internet - and who knows? You may even LIKE the built-in browser of your phone. Opera Mini is pretty nice, too. But the iPhone browser, IMHO, is just plain done better. It's ability to render a site just like on the desktop is, AFAIK, unmatched. It's so good that people whine about lack of Flash - as if that's usually an issue on a phone!

The other "features" of the iPhone are not unique, but I know of no other phone that combines them in such a way while still having a slender form factor. The G1 would be close if it were half the size and a bit more graceful - though to be fair I've played with iPhones a lot more than the 10 minutes I spent with a G1.

There's a lot of room for improvement... cut and paste, MMS, louder ringer, battery life, etc... but it's a very well-executed product and they did a pretty good job in choosing their tradeoffs.

Re:congratulations

[Anonymous Coward]

You can take the company I work for as a small example of what a groundbreaking change it has been.

We had about 8 treo 700w's (WM5) as our first mobile platform for our small firm. They were buggy and a total PITA. We decided that we would wait for 3g on the iphone, and compare it to whatever WM had, and upgrade then. It was no contest. WM 6.1 still is a dog of a mobile platform, and we not only upgraded those 8 people, we added another 5. Half our company is on the iPhone, and there was very little training or expense outside migrating from Verizon to AT&T. I can't see us ever considering WM again.

I have to laugh at myself a little bit

[DJRumpy]

I originally laughed at the folks who stood in line days before the release to be sure to get the first ones out of the store. I thought it was insane to pay that much for a phone or to treat it like the latest Star Wars movie. That is until I got curious and watched a few demos on the apple site a few months after it's release. I had no idea that touch technology had gone so far, or that the folks at Apple had done it so well. I was simply floored.

The techie in me took over shortly after that, and I began losing sleep until I chose to go to the store and buy one (1st gen 2G).

It's been an odd journey for me. I was a Windows guy. Not a fan by any means as their pricing and licensing infuriates me, but I didn't use any other OS as a primary.

Since my iPhone purchase, I have since purchased my first Macbook Pro, and bought my second 3G iPhone. Don't get me wrong. I see the same sort of corporate headedness from Apple that I saw from MS. Maybe not as extreme in most cases, but it's there. That being said, Apple does do things in a very polished manner which makes the attempts to lock you into Apple much less 'painful'. I just don't know how else to describe it.

All because I had to get curious about what the fascination was all about.

Kudos on what has to be one of the most innovative and most duplicated pieces of tech for the last few years running.

Re:iPhone achilles' heel

[Gordo_1]

Well, you know you're probably right to an extent. But the flip side to the arrogance shown developers is that Apple has managed to centralize, simplify and ensure a certain quality of apps for users. Apple has the upper hand right now because they've attracted a lot of eyeballs by addressing problems that no other cell phone company seemed able to address. Time will tell whether their arrogance will hinder them.

As a dedicated Blackberry Bold user myself (who regularly plays around with his girlfriend's iPhone 3G) I am left with a distinct 'last-generation' feeling when it comes to finding, installing and using apps designed for the blackberry. Of the ones that I manage to install (typically OTA via sms-sent URLs), many are designed for last-generation low-rez BBs or are converted java-midp apps that don't map navigation keys the same way RIM does... Or they're very buggy, or cause the OS to crash. Don't get me wrong, it's a plenty usable email device and good mobile phone, but it's missing a certain attention to detail when it comes to end-to-end user experience that Apple seems to have achieved with the iPhone and App Store.

Re:The interface matters

[Serious Callers Only]

I frequently find myself away from a computer but wanting to refer to some piece of information out of a Word document that's attached to some email I got.

I'm mystified as to why people still think storing important stuff in formats that can only be read by one program from one manufacturer is a good idea.

If I made a document in (say) InDesign, Quark, Wordperfect or Illustrator, and then complained I couldn't view it on the road or others couldn't view it, people would rightly suggest that I just saved it as something the recipient program could understand - pdf, rtf, jpg, png, or even txt.

However for word documents people seem to have this idea that everything must open word, and if it doesn't, it's somehow not capable enough. It's a masterstroke by Microsoft really, because if those are your expectations, you're going to be unhappy with anything but Microsoft products, for the rest of your life.

I would honestly reconsider why you store/interchange documents in a format that nothing but MS products can read fully. It may be a reality that colleagues send you stuff in that format, but it is worth trying to shift the status-quo sometimes.

PS The iPhone does read word attachments to emails (probably falls down on complex docs, I haven't tried it much). There are also some third party programs for reading docs.

Re:The interface matters

[DrgnDancer]

Really, have you been reading the thread? First, some things are just not quantifiable. I can tell you that I use many more of my iPhones features than I did my old Treo because it's easier to use them. I can tell you that pages render more correctly and are easier to navigate in Safari than they ever were in Blazer. I can tell you that my e-mail app works with POP, IMAP, and MAPI and is a single app that came with the phone, whereas the Treo could only handle POP with it's default app and did that poorly. I can tell you that the user interface works better for me, and I like sliding my finger to see the next page of apps rather than tapping a scroll bar. I can tell you lots of things that I like better, but what it all boils down to is that the phone works better for me.

I never used Blazer if I could help it, the app was barely capable of displaying a page of straight text, but anything more complicated looked like trash and was unnavigable. The only decent mail and contacts app I ever had on the Treo was "Good" which cost the company I was working for at the time $150, and after I left that company eventually forced me to completely wipe the phone because it had taken over my contacts app and didn't work anymore once I was no longer connected to the old corporate exchange server. I found the screen hard to read and both the resolution and poor font design conspired to try to make me go blind. Real Player mobile sucked as a media platform and I never found anything better (granted I didn't try that hard, the mini-headphone jack and unreliability of most of the adapters I found made music listening on the thing uncomfortable anyway). I did like having copy/paste and that's the one thing I miss. Not nearly enough to go back though. It's not like it was a function I used daily or anything.

Those are my experiences with switching from one particular smart phone to the iPhone. There are several points in there you might argue with: "well I use copy and paste a lot and don't care to surf the web on my phone", "I LOVE Good and bought my own copy, so that's really an issue for me", "How can you think the fonts on the Treo sucked? I have 20/10 vision from the eye muscle exercise my Treo gives me!", "I already have an MP3 player, why do I want my phone to do it?". Fine, great. That's way this stuff is objective. It's different for different people with different wants and needs.

I will say this though. Most of the people making positive comments about the iPhone in this thread? They use the iPhone, either their own or someone's close to them that they can play with regularly. Most of the people making negative comments? They've never used the phone or have seen one in a store and played with it a few minutes. They're objecting to features that are missing on a checklist that they think they might want or need, and don't see listed on the feature list. If you tether your phone to your laptop as a daily occurrence, the iPhone is not for you. If you copy blocks of text back and forth on a regular basis on your phone, the iPhone is not for you. Otherwise there is not much that it won't or can't do, and, at least in my opinion, do better than any similar device I've ever used before.