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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?
Patented by Apple (TM) 2013
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.
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I have a Nexus 4, I envy nobody. I have a $30 a month plan and Wi-Fi almost everywhere I go, so lack of LTE is non-issue for me. I'm completely pleased with this phone, no disappointments.
my friends pay money for every little thing I download for free with my android phone. sucks to be them
I know, paying developers for their time! What fools they are! In the grand scheme of things (given the cost of the phone and the plan), a couple of bucks here and there for apps is peanuts.
In all seriousness, what I want the iPhone to do that Android does is be able to control the hardware from a quick access screen - ie, turn the wifi or bluetooth on and off quickly without having to use the main settings app. When Apple announced they were bringing the swipe-down-from-top notification centre thing to iOS I really hoped that the ability to add those sorts of things to it would be there, but it seems not.
Other than that, I'm happy with it.
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.
The health of an ecosystem can be measured by the abundance of parasites...
Good God... calling a "walled garden" an ecosystem!
If all the animals are fed from a single trough, that's not an ecosystem, that's a farm.
Until the Android ecosystem can handle an issue as basic as providing it's users with OS and security updates, Android is not ahead at all.
Over half of the Android devices out there are still running variants of version 2 of the OS and lower while the last three Android releases are version 4 and higher.
Android needs to be rearchitected so that carriers provide drivers for the hardware, while Google takes full responsibility for updates to the OS. This approach has been working with Windows for decades.
... 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?
But many of the free apps are riddled with holes, spyware, and have zero privacy controls...
FUD.
android has better privacy controls than iOS. every android app must declare permissions for the services it can use BEFORE it is installed. i've been an android user since the G1 and i've never had a problem.
the reports that pop up every month reporting "spyware found on google play store" are from "researchers" scanning the store and recording the permissions requested by certain apps that technically do not require that permission to operate. e.g., a flashlight app that requests internet access. there's no evidence that the apps are actually spyware, they are just suspicious. the only reason you don't see such reports on iOS is because iOS apps aren't required to declare permissions, so there's no easy way to tell what the heck they are going to do.
a couple of bucks here and there for apps is peanuts.
Ah, another Apple user happy to be nickel and dimed for everything.
I know, paying for things that people make might be alien to you. For the rest of us, we realise that money can be exchanged for goods and/or services. I'm happy to support developers, especially at the low prices they charge for typical mobile applications.
I get value from a product that I pay money for, the developer gets paid. Of course I'm happy about that. Why is that such a hard concept to understand?
I've just purchased a couple of of iPads, and frankly, the "walled garden" apple thing is FUCKING annoying.
Jesus motherfucking CHRIST, but the inability to easily share documents among "apps" on a single device is fucking retarted. I don't care what the motivation was for this, but it's stupid and gets in the way.
From "app" 1, save your document in the "iBooks" thing, the iCloud, "iTunes" (lol) - then it's, oh sorry, but "app" 2 can't open said document from any of those. oh, oh, wait, app2 saves it's documents in it's own little shit hole garden, where nothing else can access it...
I wish I'd known before I bought these devices that there is no simple, easy to use, way of sharing documents among apps. Windows/linux/osx/* users will have no idea what the fuck I'm on about.
I tried to upload a simple pdf doc to a website using safari... oh no, can't do that. The fucking document can't be found anywhere. It's in appN's walled garden. Solution? Pay for iCabSomething-or-other, which is really a hacked browser which "allows" you to upload any document you want to a simple html fucking form on a website... but only after you've downloaded the document using the SAME browser so you can access it from the same shit hole garden.
It's no wonder the other executives in my team have had their fucking iPads for MONTHS but have yet to use them productively... oh wait, one of them uses it to browse and email. That's it.
FUCK apple, I thought you were better than this.