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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."
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.
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French iPhone Apps review site applicationiphone.com looking for contributors
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.
The most interesting thing is that Seadragon must use Javascript or something similar but not Silverlight for the deep zoom it provides.... I just came out of a Silverlight presentation and deepzoom was hailed as its party piece... hmmm
According to several reports, Microsoft released a broken app called Seadragon. Apparently Microsoft achieved its expected quality goal.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Remember, remember.
Now, the iPhone isn't my cup of tea at all; but I believe the term is "p0wn3d."
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.
can we expect an onslaught of viruses? It is much easier to attack a single platform, if I understand the virus marketing info properly.
That Seadragon stuff is old. When I was in the Marines, it was a technology called Mr. Sid. It was pyramid-based layers of an image that allowed you to zoom seamlessly all the way down to the natural resolution of an image... and could be handled on a 500 MHz Pentium 3 with easy. My PC here at work was kinda struggling with the Seadragon bit.
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.
So the title is misleading and/or confusing.
Welcome! You must be new here!
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.
What English are you using? "Tops" is a verb that means "bests" or "surpasses".
And in this case, the usage is perfect. The iPhone surpasses Windows Mobile Share; or, in other words, "tops".
GPL Deconstructed
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.
"The success of iPhone 3G sales in the third quarter of 2008 propelled the Mac OS X to the No. 3 position in the global OS provider rankings. For the first time, iPhone sales exceeded sales of Microsoft Windows Mobile devices worldwide and in North America."
So in the 3rd quarter of this year, iPhone sales exceeded sales of MS mobile devices in the same period. Unless you define "market share" in terms of the last quarter sales only, MS devices still have a larger market share than the iPhone.
More phones every 3 days than iPhones in existence? Really?
Let's actually inject some numbers into the discussion, shall we?
As of October 21, 2008, there were 13 million iPhones sold. Let's be as charitable as possible toward your position and assume that not a single iPhone has been sold since then.
You state more Nokia phones sold in 3 days than 13 million. That works out to at least 1.58 billion Nokia phones sold per year.
According to Wikipedia, Nokia's sales in 2007 were about 440 million. So they would have had to increase by over a factor of 3 in 2008 for your numbers to be correct.
Furthermore, Wikipedia claims that this 440 million was 40% of global phone sales in 2007, meaning that global phone sales in 2007 were around 1.1 billion. So for your claim to be correct, Nokia would have had to sell about 50% more phones just from Nokia in 2008 than everybody in the entire industry combined sold in 2007.
Is that really the case?
Now, let's take that 1.1 billion figure, assume it's gone up a bit, and call it 1.5 billion phones sold per year at present. Three orders of magnitude give you 15 million smartphones sold per year in the entire world. That barely accounts for the iPhone, let alone Blackberry, Symbian, Windows Mobile, Palm....
So again, three orders of magnitude? Don't think so.
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
The article linked in the summary is misleading and borderline outright false.
The suggestion in the summary, that the iPhone now has a bigger marketshare than the full range of Windows mobile devices is wrong. For starters, the stats available are only relevant to Windows mobile phones- this does not include say Windows mobile PDAs without phone features so to suggest the iPhone has outsold all Windows mobile devices simply isn't true.
More importantly though is the suggestion that the iPhone has a bigger market share than Windows mobile devices, this is only somewhat true. Apple sold more iPhones than Windows mobile phones were sold in quarter 3 2008 by 1%, it has not overtaken all time or annual market share yet. We'll have to wait until next year to find out of this is a continuing pattern, 1% is still a little close to call, but I'd guess the pattern will continue, the iPhone is popular and Windows mobile really has little new to offer.
Speaking of misleading though, in response to the parent post, I'm a little intrigued by this statement:
"And somehow, they hit the number and blew past Microsoft smartphones, Nokia and blackberry."
This doesn't seem to make sense, whilst they've outsold Microsoft Windows Mobile devices for the last quarter they haven't all time, but more importantly they have neither outsold all time or last quarter Nokia and RIM's devices. They're around 1.1million units behind RIM last quarter and 10.7million behind Nokia so it seems an awful jump to suggest they've blown past Nokia and RIM when they haven't surpassed them by any metric. I think the iPhone probably will overtake Windows mobile next quarter and make it a permanent thing and I think there's probably a good chance they'll overtake RIM too to be honest, although maybe a year or two down the road. I'd be surprised if Apple ever overtakes Nokia though either in monthly sales or overall marketshare- the gap just seems too big, although I could be proven wrong of course!
I don't disagree with the sentiment of either the article itself or the parent post, that Apple has done well and that innovation is good. What I do dislike very much is fanboyism distorting fact, isn't it enough that Apple has done well without having to blow it out the water and make it something much much bigger than it really is? I don't blame the people posting here, because I too am guilty of often not only not RTFA, but certainly don't research further, this time I did however and realised how misleading TFA actually is- perhaps it'll teach me to do this a little more often. It's a shame in a way the Slashdot editors don't do their job and check these things and temporarily or permanently blacklist sites if they continue to attempt to spread misinformation.
It only took a little further reading to see how abysmally fanboy infected the linked article is:
"Microsoft, in its zeal to get Windows Mobile onto as many phones as possible, is left with a phone OS that no one wants to use"
Really? there's still 4million+ out there last quarter that would disagree. The iPhone is only 600,000 units up, it's too small a lead to start making grand statements like that, one could equally say no one wants to use the iPhone when compared to Nokia's sales stats but it would be equally wrong, because 4.7million people clearly do.
"and more importantly, one that developers don't want to code for. Developers, who have long been getting chump change for their apps, are starting to see that they can make quite a bit of money developing programs for rival platforms such as the iPhone."
Again, I'm intrigued to know where they got this from- Windows mobile is a pleasure to develop for compared to some platforms, if Microsoft is good at anything it's developer tools. I'm sure a lot of developers want to or are happy coding for it but even the latter part of the statement that it's because of chump change seems odd in light of this article- http://www.the
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