Slashdot Mirror
Woz Says iPhone Features Are 'Behind'
redletterdave writes "The iPhone may be one of the bestselling smartphones on the planet, but Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak believes Apple's flagship smartphone has fallen behind its competitors, namely those built by Samsung, when it comes to smartphone features. Speaking at Businessweek's Best Brand Awards on Thursday evening, Wozniak said he was proud of how loyal Apple fans were to the iPhone, but also said 'this loyalty is not given,' shortly before denouncing his own company's smartphone. 'Currently we are, in my opinion, somewhat behind with features in the smartphone business,' Wozniak said. 'Others have caught up. Samsung is a big competitor. But precisely because they are currently making great products.'" I prefer Android, but it seems hard to find iPhone users who aren't enthusiastic about it. Whatever kind of phone you prefer, are there features you envy the users of some other variety?
my friends pay money for every little thing I download for free with my android phone. sucks to be them
Check me if I wrong, but hasn't the iPhone always been behind on features? I mean, how many years did it take just to get copy / paste.
The iPhone was never about features, it was about style and ease of use. The problem is that they set the standard and the other companies have finally caught up.
Slow Down Cowboy! It's been 1 hour, 47 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment
Get over it. Why are people so emotional about it?
If more Americans cared about the bigger issues in their lives we wouldn't be tax slaves living in a crumbling nation with an out-of-control government.
Am I the only person that feels this way?
This is the feature I envy the most: http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/android-phones-vulnerable-to-hackers/2013/02/01/f3248922-6723-11e2-9e1b-07db1d2ccd5b_story.html
The health of an ecosystem can be measured by the abundance of parasites... Actually, I forget if that's positive or negative correlation. Time to do some homework.
That's great that Wozniak can look at competing products and recognize accurately their strengths and weaknesses. That kind of objective evaluation leads to better decisions and great products. Companies that mindlessly insist that their products are the 'best' and punish any who dare to say otherwise have a difficult time putting out high quality products that people want to use. Those are the kind of companies that try to force their products on the marketplace and only have success if there is no choice but to use their products.
Quick question... is good product design about packing in as many features as possible, whether they are something people will actually use, or actually good ideas, or actually implemented in a good way, or something someone will actually use?
No. There are countless products in every market where the company that makes them does exactly that. They shove in every bell and whistle, whether it makes sense or not, whether it can be used in reality or not, and they are mediocre-at-best products. Many of them are bad, and you spend money on those features you will never use, just to get the handful that you will.
Just because the iPhone has "less features" doesn't make it a bad product. Similarly, just because some other phone has "more features" doesn't necessarily make it a better product. If it has more useful features, then it probably is a better product; if those features are implemented in a useful way that isn't buried under a horrible unusable interface, or requires everyone you interact with to also have that product for the feature to be of any use.
(None of what I said above applies to any specific product or manufacturer unless explicitly stated. This post was not meant to be a critique of any particular device, rather a critique on the concept of "more features == better")
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Amazing how the circle has turned when it comes to phones. The iPhone has gone from being the hip new boy breaking the rules to a member of the establishment that everyone else is slowly leaving behind.
It used to be that the iPhone was an inspirational device, a device that caused geek envy wherever you used it.
And now, well it's the device for the technical luddites who have more money than sense, or for those that Apple have managed to lock in to their closed-wall infrastructure and are now too wary of trying something else. In other words - it's the phone you recommend to your parents so you don't have to do tech support for them.
... other than battery life and better phone calls.
I've got a Galaxy Nexus, and the hardware is fine -- high-resolution screen, fast enough CPU, etc. The only real "lacking features" are software things, and since it's Android that's just my own fault for not finding a better app to do whatever it is.
What I seriously don't like, though, is its ability to MAKE PHONE CALLS. This is a device that people watch Netflix on, for fuck's sake. Why is it using a ~10kbps codec for voice calls with an acoustic bandpass of a few khz, and moreover one with some absolutely awful signal processing characteristics? For instance (and this is just one example), if I'm talking to someone in the wind, and there's a gust of wind on my end, the phone mutes the speaker so I can no longer hear what they're saying. Why should it do that, unless it's trying to squelch feedback, which is very much not the problem?
As for battery life, I appreciate them making the things slim, but if they'd make it another 5mm or even 8mm thicker with most of that extra volume given to battery, you'd get about four times as much life out of it. Does anyone make a phone like this?
He's a smart man. I'm sure he meant to say exactly what he said. Who are you to say what he meant?
With Apple, you are the customer, and the phone is the product.
With Google, you are the product and the customer is any company that wants every little bit of information about you.
Google even admits to this. So consider this every time you think that Google products are free. They aren't, and the price could actually be more expensive than any gadget or app you could ever buy.
Horseshit. Not what he said.
As for the question in the summary, I'd say Android handsets lack quite a few things you get in the iPhones. But he's right when he says iPhones are missing some things that some Android handsets might have.
I prefer the Android way, but only an ass would ignore that Apple does some things much, much better.
I prefer Android, but it seems hard to find iPhone users who aren't enthusiastic about it.
There are a large number of people out there who think the iPhone is the only smartphone. So when they buy a smartphone, they buy an iPhone and love it, because the only thing they compare it too is their old clamshell phone. So naturally, they are very enthusiastic about it.
Actually, on a larger level my hypothesis is that Apple products work great for anyone who does not question the arbitrary limitations put on the software by Apple in the name of "ease of use". They just assume that "phones can't do that" or "computers don't do that" and are happy; whereas if you know a little bit about how much effort it would be to have that feature, and that it's omitted solely to simplify (i.e. dumb things down), it is immensely frustrating (although it seems once one reaches Apple Guru level, all the workarounds are second nature and these things are once again painless). In short, a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing. I say this at someone who uses Linux/Android at home, but OSX/iOS at work.
When you buy a particular device, the hardware inside that device (e.g. SOC, Camera, Baseband) doesn't change. As long as Google doesn't change how the drivers interface with newer versions of the OS, the drivers for your particular device will continue to work.
This.
Abstracting the hardware from the upper parts of the OS is a solvable problem. It's a matter of considerable mental effort and architecture, but it's definitely solvable, and has been repeatedly solved in the long history of operating systems. The fact that Google somehow hasn't managed to solve this problem for Android speaks loudly about their abilities in the realm of OS design.
Here's a hint for Google engineers: monolithic is BAD!
People who say "sheeple" have about as much sophistication as an AOL user, and in fact are probably actually AOL users.
android has better privacy controls than iOS. every android app must declare permissions for the services it can use BEFORE it is installed.
The problem is that is a horrifically stupid idea.
No user can POSSIBLY know before they run the app if all of the permissions make sense. Contacts is a great example, at some point it might benefit to look something up from a contact. So you just agree.
Meanwhile on iOS the user is not asked if the app should access contacts until they are using the app and whatever they are doing triggers the request. So they know what the app does, and know EXACTLY what they did to make the app ask for contacts, so they can decide if it makes sense to have them.
Also, if you don't agree on Android generally you just can't use the app because you have to agree to everything (yes I know there are ways around that, not standard though). On iOS I can keep using the app that I've just told has no access to location or contacts, without having to pre-select access teh app should have.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley