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iPhone 4 News Roundup
We have a slew of iPhone 4-related stories this morning, so I'm lumping them together for easier consumption/ignoring, depending on your personal feelings on the subject.
Here is a blog entry proclaiming that iOS 4 multitasking sucks and why. Here is a sketchy summary of privacy violations by Apple and AT&T — apparently they are reporting back jailbroken phones. Skunkpost has a story about the lines and sales of the new phone. But the big news of the morning is the reception problems that apparently only affect people who hold the phone in their left hands.
Goatse.
But seriously folks...the new iPhone hardware and many of the additions they are making to the OS are really great...but I'm sorry, I still can't get past the walled garden. Again, I know the app store would have everything I would likely need, but I just can't accept being told that an application would be inappropriate for me to use. And yes, I know I could just jailbreak it...but that's not the point. I don't care that I can get around it, I care that the walled garden exists in the first place. As a consumer, the best I can do is vote with my wallet.
This is only my opinion, I don't speak for others, YMMV, etc applies.
Living With a Nerd
Apple prefers if you use your phone with both hands, in particular while visiting certain web sites; it keeps you out of trouble and prevents the moisture sensor from triggering.
Possibly not for long though http://www.engadget.com/2010/06/24/iphone-4s-yellow-spot-issue-goes-away-with-a-bit-of-time/
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
They couldn't justify cutting my Apps out of the market place. I had left-handed solitaire, left-handed minesweeper. I was starting a smorgasbord of left handed products. With no justifiable reason to keep me out, and with all the bad press lately about them selectively choosing their App store, they've decided to lock me out at the hardware level.
Those dastardly fiends!
The multitasking complaint seems kind of off to me - he complains about the tray being "cluttered" after you go through a few apps because they are automatically added to the tray. But the tray is just four apps wide - how can you have clutter in only four items? And he complains he needs to press and hold to quit an app - but also complains most apps are just suspended. So then why quit an app? It's not doing anything and will be removed if you are low on memory.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Apple is using a bonding agent called Organofunctional Silane Z-6011 to bond the layers of glass. Apparently, Apple (or more likely Foxconn) is shipping these products so quickly that the evaporation process is not complete. However, after one or two days of use, especially with the screen on, will complete the evaporation process and the yellow "blotches" will disappear. How do I know? I was involved in pitching Z-6011 to Apple.
No one is denying that it exists, its just that it could very well just be the bonding agent not drying yet.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
That's angel urine. They don't allow bathroom breaks on the iPhone's heavenly assembly lines.
I would be curious about the conductivity of certain coatings. I personally hate covers for phones, as they add bulk. As a person with nickel allergies, I have to coat belt buckles and the like with acrylic. I wonder if the same would help this antenna. If so, then they could do something similar in the manufacturing process. They do similar coatings for fishing rods that weather well.
From other platforms, we know that is not a major battery drain
The people who make those platforms would beg to differ, Larry Page himself said that poor battery life in android is usually down to multitasking.
From other platforms, we know that is not a major battery drain, and it's perfectly possible for a scheduler to do automatically whatever Apple's special APIs are trying to achieve.
Um, even Google acknowledges that multitasking hurts battery life. As a geek, that's an acceptable tradeoff because you know about it. For the average consumer that can barely distinguish the difference between Li-Poly and Lipitor, all they'll know is that the battery life on their iPhone sucks and Apple is totally to blame.
With multitasking, you could run local file servers and local web servers. You could create new applications delivery platforms, local music servers, and a local file system and file manager.
With the iPhone, Apple succeeded in selling a smartphone to consumers by hiding all the complexities of a smartphone like the filesystem and a file manager. And you want to undo all of that? Maybe perhaps Apple didn't design the iPhone for geeks like you.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
MuscleNerd, one of the, if not THE foremost Apple device hacker out there has implied he has done code inspection and just through common sense says its all BS.
Oh. Well that settles it then. If "MuscleNerd" tweeted it, then that's enough for me.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
Try again. iPhone apps can't call the equivalent even of Windows 3.1 yield(); - they either run in the foreground, or they're suspended - like the DOS 5.0 task swapper.
Don't be disingenuous. The parent was correct; iOS has a kernel with a preemptive task scheduler, and there are any number of API calls which explicitly yield or do the moral equivalent (any blocking I/O API call). Even while an app runs in the foreground it is always being multitasked with other parts of the system.
Also, by definition tasks in a preemptive multitasking OS either run or are suspended, at the operating system's whim. The difference between that and a system like DOS 5 is left as an exercise for the reader.
The few exceptions need to take advantage of a special api call for music, of all things.
And other 'special' APIs for other things. Apple has tried to come up with a comprehensive list of tasks which can usefully be backgrounded on a smartphone, such as messaging, downloads, and yes, audio playback. You simply register a thread (process? dunno the exact details) as providing such a service, and the OS allows it to continue to receive timeslices (assuming it's not blocked on I/O) while your main application is held suspended because it's not in the foreground. There are significant limits on what you can do in that context, but they all make sense in terms of limiting power consumption.
If you want a real multi-tasking OS on your phone, you won't get it from Apple. Not this year, and not next year. They're already starting to fall behind in the features race.
Oh please. You're smart enough to know that iOS is built on the Darwin kernel, and what that implies about its multitasking capabilities. All the limitations are deliberate and carefully thought out. It's undeniable that they're there because Apple thinks they will provide a better overall user experience, because the path of least effort for Apple would have let users multitask anything on day 1 of the app store going live. Instead they went to the trouble of doing extra work to restrict it.
Argue against the design of iOS 4's carefully limited multitasking if you like (oh no! That would require you to actually inform yourself! Can't have that), but pretending it's not "real" and that they're falling years behind is just trollish.