Apple maintains the ability to "kill" (Apple's term) software users install on their own Apple hardware.
As does Google (and Mozilla, for that matter). In fact, Google and Mozilla actually *have* both employed their kill switches. Apple has never done this. Their curated store has made it unnecessary, in spite of having significantly more apps to deal with.
Apple maintains the control they need to decide on a case-by-case basis who gets to run what program. Apple retains the power to make it hard for any user(s) to watch porn through an application. How Apple uses this power may change over time, denying some users access to an app but allowing others.
And what makes you think any of those "mays" are even remotely likely? What possible reason would Apple have to do any of those things?
The truth is, there is no such reason. You're simply making absurd claims because it's the only way to make the "kill switch" scary enough for a sane person to give half a shit about.
Apple can apply this power with absolutely no legal ability for the user to gainsay Apple's power, predict who is denied what, or understand for what reason someone was denied complete control of their computer.
That sentence is absolutely false.
We would not stand for this control in any other medium.
Which is why CBS is required to broadcast any program I want them to, and DVD discs don't have region codes, and digital cameras don't have water sensing dots, and stock stereos in cars don't have proprietary connectors, and TiVo doesn't have the ability to remotely erase recorded shows, and movie theaters don't disallow outside foods, and Google doesn't have the exact same kill switch and the exact same control over their own Android Marketplace and they have *actually* done the thing you are trying to scare people by saying that Apple *might* do!
It should not be up to anyone but the owner of the device to exert control over what they wish to read or run.
And with few exceptions, that's the case with iOS.
Understand your sentiment, but keep in mind that one of the reasons Android is selling so well these days is because it is considered an open system, even by those who don't really understand the implications, as opposed to iOS.
I highly doubt that even 5% of Android sales had "freedom" as a significant factor. Most people don't care. They bought Android phones because they were the best phone at the lowest price on their carrier. Never once do they intend to run an Android update. In fact, if even half that could tell you which dessert name they are running, or what the next one is, I would be amazed.
This attitude of theirs doesn't really seem to have any point to it. Taking it off hurts nothing at all. Leaving it on costs them sales. Maybe not tons, but a sale is a sale. Why go out of your way to lose sales?
Support costs, the ability to charge (the carrier) for updates, and the ability to arbitrarily obsolete a handset.
The added value of those apps may be questionable (I guess they exist for people who can't open the browser and look for bikini-clad girls that way), but they should be held to the same criteria as any Playboy app.
They are. One particular criteria that mattered here was "are you an established, respected brand?".
If there will be a policy change it would seem that Playboy would be at an advantage by having a headstart by knowing this change would come ahead of time, most likely due to discussion between them and those responsible at Apple.
I don't see why this should be a problem. First off, Playboy has an advantage over them by simply being Playboy. Second, it's pretty clear that Apple is working closely with magazines right now to get the subscription model right.
In either case Apple would apparently be giving Playboy preferential treatment.
You state this like it's some bad thing. Apple always asks a few respected members of whatever industry they are going into to help them get it right. They did this with music, with video, with iOS apps. And they are doing this now as well. It's very rational.
Which wouldn't be -entirely- surprising, given Apple's recent re-iteration that they're not fond of apps from publishers that simply link people to the online content where the user then has to pay for the subscription - thus skirting Apple's desire to take a good chunk of advertising income / subscription fees by running this through their infrastructure.
It's difficult to say how much the 30% revenue plays a role in these sorts of decisions. Apple spends a lot on keeping the stores and the infrastructures running smoothly (watch how fast that 10 billion download counter is spinning, and that doesn't even count upgrades). But more to the point, every time there is a decision like this which benefits Apple financially outside of their core profit models, their decision also tends to add far more value to their core product than it generates in direct revenue. On the topic of magazine subscriptions specifically, just like the rest of the store, the iOS platform benefits immensely by being absolutely simple. If you have to manage your subscriptions individually with each magazine (or each publisher) it's going to be inefficient and people who would otherwise like to subscribe will not due to the hassle involved. On the other hand, if it all goes through the very same login and credit card that you use to buy music, tv, films, apps, books, etc., then it's going to be just as easy as those things, and people will be more likely to make use of it. This also provides a significant value to the consumer over Android, which has almost no unifying feature at all (something which geeks love, but consumers hate).
So I really doubt that 30% is the primary motivating factor here. Apple sold over 60 million iOS devices since late September. Their core profit center is in hardware. If they can bolster the value of their hardware, that's gotta be their primary goal. If they can make some extra cash along the way, that's great, but I suspect the motivation is to use that cut primarily to cover operating costs and invest in expansion, so that they essentially get their "value multiplier" that is iTunes (many geeks hate, but consumers love) for free. It's absolutely brilliant, and their numbers from yesterday prove this out.
Sure, three or four years is more difficult than just one year, but he did well for the one year, so it's a bit absurd to conclude that he will fail over a longer term.
But if Steve goes, whence Apple? I'm sure he has a large cadre of lieutenants who can make good decisions in his stead, but can they get along? Can they drive the teams and call BS on half-assed engineering like Jobs? Do they have his business acumen?
I dunno. Why not ask 2009 Apple how it did without Steve Jobs? Tim Cook has been doing a great job.
When Steve decides to give up the mantle, will Apple be able to adjust to the absence and still succeed in the same ways?
Why not? Apple won't be identical without Jobs, but he righted a wayward ship and has been piloting it for the past decade. Apple will do fine with another competent (even if not as capable as Jobs) pilot. What you're describing is that the only thing keeping the Apple ship on course is Jobs' constant hand on the wheel. I don't think there's any reason to think the ship is going to go astray with a different leader.
I doubt it, and that's why I've shorted Apple stock. Frankly, I suggest you all do likewise.
How amusing. What you are saying is that Apple (and specifically, AAPL) will never be as successful or as valuable as it is right now. That's a mighty bold statement, and based on a single, tenuous assumption. We'll see shortly how things pan out, but I'm quite confident Wall Street won't come to the same conclusion as you have.
In 1999, when he and Phil Schiller announced the iBook with built-in WiFi, the term WiFi hadn't even been invented yet, it was called AirPort by Apple, and 802.11b by everyone else, and Apple products were the first to have it built-in. Apple worked with Lucent in the development of 802.11b.
You assume all cellular radio modules (and Nokia is heavily involved in making their own) are created equal? That all mobile phones are generally equal in reception?
I'm assuming nothing of the sort. You, however, are assuming Nokia has superior reception. This is something that can be quantified (although with a ton of caveats), and often is quantified. If it were the case that Nokia (or any other handset maker) were consistently outclassing the rest of the industry in terms of reception quality, it would be trumpeted.
Just snarkily saying that Nokia gets better reception, then providing a small anecdotal example set in an extreme situation does not really justify the assertion behind it. US cell service isn't criticized because one Nokia phone gets better reception in a particular valley than a handful of other phones.
I know I'm probably taking your remark more seriously than it was originally intended, so don't take my replies all that seriously either.
Yet whenever you read about WebOS on the Internet, the one thing that everyone talks about is the task management system.
That is because they find it easier to move between tasks than on other platforms.
I'm not quite sure how this is possible. On iOS, switching between tasks is identical to launching apps. The fact that it's a distinct thing on WebOS is what I'm getting at.
But THAT in turn is because of the clear focus on simple tasks that live in a world where you shift between them constantly.
To the occlusion of non-simple tasks?
So what the users see and say they like, is only a symptom of a deeper reason. It's why when someone says they like something about a system you have to go deeper to understand why they like it so much when it may seem superficial at first glance.
That's what I did. Why is a task management interface always the number one thing mentioned? To be certain, it must be because it is quite fantastic, but it should be at best just an example, like, "the interface is fantastic, for example..." and it shouldn't be the universally given example. Otherwise, it just appears like some obscure sub-feature, a feature to manage actual features, is the only good thing about it.
Also, I disagree strongly with "you have to go deeper". If someone is talking up a platform, the listener shouldn't have to look deeply into what they are hearing. Sure, you may have to do that from time to time because some people are bad at conveying information, but this should not be so universal.
If this was just one person here and there, it would be a problem with the person, but it's basically everyone, which strongly implies the problem lies with the platform.
But when it comes to the average consumer having WebOS advocated to them, hearing "it has a great task switcher" and waxing poetic over it, is not very compelling.
I agree with that which is why it didn't sell well. WebOS has a major marketing problem, which with any luck HP will put forth some effort to resolve.
I don't think this was the result of marketing. It's the result of being extremely fantastic in a very non-important way to most people. Unless you just mean going forward, in which case I wholly agree. I don't see HP being able to get this right, though, but I do look forward to seeing how this turns out.
Interestingly what I'm not sure of is how much sense WebOS makes on a tablet vs. something like a phone. Use of a tablet is much longer lived and I'm not sure the whole "simple task use" suffices on what is inherently a more powerful platform. But Palm had some pretty clever designers so perhaps they have re-thought the core idea for tablets.
With this I think I understand what you are trying to say about "simple tasks". To somewhat oversimplify things to highlight the differences, you are placing WebOS, as a phone system, closer to an advanced, perhaps even ideal, "feature phone", than an app phone, right? *Kind* of like how the Kin was marketed (but minus the social networking focus, and the overall craptasticness of the Kin).
If that's the case, then I think WebOS really should get a second chance in the handset market. The feature phone is pretty much at a dead end and WebOS sounds like it can revitalize and revolutionize it similar to how iOS did to the smartphone market.
I agree it's hardly encouraging for the market in general that everyone else's is so poor that the feature comes as a great thing.
It's a meta-feature. It's a feature that's a side-effect of a feature. It's not using your device, it's managing your ability to use your advice.
When someone says that the best thing about an OS is not what you directly do with it, but what you have to do in order to directly do things with it, you've missed something. That should be a footnote, not the primary highlight.
I agree that Android handles this very poorly (although in a very compelling way to a certain type of geek). iOS handles this by doing away with the necessity of such a feature altogether.
But if you are being disparaging on WebOS, it's a sign of the overall polish and consistent vision they brought forward.
I don't disagree all that much on this point, except that it's a very strange thing to promote as a primary feature of an OS.
That vision may or may not have survived the HP acquisition, that remains to be seen,
HP has a golden opportunity here. From a consumer perspective, I think a market where Android, WebOS, and iOS are all strong players (and Blackberry, Windows Phone, and the rest are all also-rans) will benefit pretty much every consumer-segment very well.
but it was a hell of a lot more consistent than Android has had to date (Honeycomb might rectify some of that). iOS also implement a consistent vision, but one I personally don't like.
I'm sure there are a good number of people with your similar preferences. For that reason, I hope HP does well with WebOS. The odds are somewhat long, though, given how long they've been without a product and how much momentum they've missed out on over the past year.
It's hardly encouraging when the top thing one can come up with in praise of WebOS is that it has a great task switcher.
If you understand WebOS it's not.
Yet whenever you read about WebOS on the Internet, the one thing that everyone talks about is the task management system. Secondarily they talk about the beauty of the UI. After that, there is really nothing.
Because the thing that derives from the nice task switcher, is that it's really a platform dedicated to light tasks in ways others are not.
That's what I like, it's just differently focused than the other more all-encompassing platforms.
And that's perfectly fine. I realize that there are plenty of people (although relatively few overall, a sizable niche on its own) who will strongly prefer WebOS on this very foundation.
But when it comes to the average consumer having WebOS advocated to them, hearing "it has a great task switcher" and waxing poetic over it, is not very compelling.
Because the usability of the feature you use every day doesn't count?
Because the fact that you have to use the feature every day is a failure in the first place. It's not a primary feature, it's a feature that is required solely due to the negative side-effects of other features.
I prefer iOS's solution to this, which is to make that feature wholly unnecessary. I do realize that there is a type of geek that prefers to specifically manage this stuff themselves, and of those, there are some that will prefer Android's completely customizable way to do so, and others will prefer WebOS's more elegant way.
There are far, far more, however, who are better served by doing away with it altogether.
The problem is that only Blackberry is actually bringing forth anything remotely like that (only seen in their playbook demos thusfar). Android and iOS still have crappy management that still fails to make the state of things intuitively obvious and concrete.
I disagree with this with regards to iOS. iOS completely does away with the need for an Android style task manager because it does the management itself. The difference between running, suspended, and quit is negligible enough on iOS that the user never really needs to know the difference. I know this is a bit of a turn off to the geeks who like to be the complete master of their device. For those, they can either jailbreak or just buy an Android phone. But for the overwhelmingly vast majority of consumers, they are much better served by having an essentially invisible multitasking system than they are by one that has a need to be managed.
This is not merely historical because it *still* isn't fixed in the rest of the world.
My "historical" comment was to an AC's assertion that WebOS was better than iOS in one particular way.
It may seem like a trivial thing to people who don't have it, but it's pretty damn annoying when it isn't there.
Sort of. It's one thing, and it's not a particularly central thing to the system, its necessity is a side-effect. You don't have a task management system because you want it, but because it's necessary when trying to fully multitask on such limited hardware.
The fact that the one thing people seem to love about WebOS is its task management is telling. It's like highlighting the fact that it's easy to access the oil pan when asked why a specific car is so good. You'd think that if the phone/car where so good, you'd have more important things to highlight, and not just one single thing that is more about maintenance than anything else. Android's solution is to make maintenance completely open and exposed to the user (and thus makes maintenance something beyond most people), WebOS's solution is to make maintenance elegant, and Apple's solution is to make maintenance unnecessary.
As if Maemo and MeeGo have already died? Maemo has a very active open source community and, even though MeeGo will supplant it, will live on for a long time.
It doesn't matter if it has an active open source community. What matters is whether it has an active user community, in the context of how it's doing compared with Android and iOS.
Slashdot Mirror
Apple maintains the ability to "kill" (Apple's term) software users install on their own Apple hardware.
As does Google (and Mozilla, for that matter). In fact, Google and Mozilla actually *have* both employed their kill switches. Apple has never done this. Their curated store has made it unnecessary, in spite of having significantly more apps to deal with.
Apple maintains the control they need to decide on a case-by-case basis who gets to run what program. Apple retains the power to make it hard for any user(s) to watch porn through an application. How Apple uses this power may change over time, denying some users access to an app but allowing others.
And what makes you think any of those "mays" are even remotely likely? What possible reason would Apple have to do any of those things?
The truth is, there is no such reason. You're simply making absurd claims because it's the only way to make the "kill switch" scary enough for a sane person to give half a shit about.
Apple can apply this power with absolutely no legal ability for the user to gainsay Apple's power, predict who is denied what, or understand for what reason someone was denied complete control of their computer.
That sentence is absolutely false.
We would not stand for this control in any other medium.
Which is why CBS is required to broadcast any program I want them to, and DVD discs don't have region codes, and digital cameras don't have water sensing dots, and stock stereos in cars don't have proprietary connectors, and TiVo doesn't have the ability to remotely erase recorded shows, and movie theaters don't disallow outside foods, and Google doesn't have the exact same kill switch and the exact same control over their own Android Marketplace and they have *actually* done the thing you are trying to scare people by saying that Apple *might* do!
It should not be up to anyone but the owner of the device to exert control over what they wish to read or run.
And with few exceptions, that's the case with iOS.
The idea that it's not "safe" to develop for iOS is absurd.
Understand your sentiment, but keep in mind that one of the reasons Android is selling so well these days is because it is considered an open system, even by those who don't really understand the implications, as opposed to iOS.
I highly doubt that even 5% of Android sales had "freedom" as a significant factor. Most people don't care. They bought Android phones because they were the best phone at the lowest price on their carrier. Never once do they intend to run an Android update. In fact, if even half that could tell you which dessert name they are running, or what the next one is, I would be amazed.
Exactly.
This attitude of theirs doesn't really seem to have any point to it. Taking it off hurts nothing at all. Leaving it on costs them sales. Maybe not tons, but a sale is a sale. Why go out of your way to lose sales?
Support costs, the ability to charge (the carrier) for updates, and the ability to arbitrarily obsolete a handset.
The problem is that the humor is indistinguishable from serious posts. Comparing Apple to evil dictatorships is standard fare in these parts.
So I make clean apps that they ban and then they allow this?
Is your app a magazine? No.
WHY? Because children's pictures were in it!
I agree it's a pretty stupid ban (based on your description), but you can't not see a huge difference here.
If you seek prosperity for the iPad and Apple in general
Because Apple's "walled garden" has severely hampered Apple's prosperity...
The added value of those apps may be questionable (I guess they exist for people who can't open the browser and look for bikini-clad girls that way), but they should be held to the same criteria as any Playboy app.
They are. One particular criteria that mattered here was "are you an established, respected brand?".
If there will be a policy change it would seem that Playboy would be at an advantage by having a headstart by knowing this change would come ahead of time, most likely due to discussion between them and those responsible at Apple.
I don't see why this should be a problem. First off, Playboy has an advantage over them by simply being Playboy. Second, it's pretty clear that Apple is working closely with magazines right now to get the subscription model right.
In either case Apple would apparently be giving Playboy preferential treatment.
You state this like it's some bad thing. Apple always asks a few respected members of whatever industry they are going into to help them get it right. They did this with music, with video, with iOS apps. And they are doing this now as well. It's very rational.
Which wouldn't be -entirely- surprising, given Apple's recent re-iteration that they're not fond of apps from publishers that simply link people to the online content where the user then has to pay for the subscription - thus skirting Apple's desire to take a good chunk of advertising income / subscription fees by running this through their infrastructure.
It's difficult to say how much the 30% revenue plays a role in these sorts of decisions. Apple spends a lot on keeping the stores and the infrastructures running smoothly (watch how fast that 10 billion download counter is spinning, and that doesn't even count upgrades). But more to the point, every time there is a decision like this which benefits Apple financially outside of their core profit models, their decision also tends to add far more value to their core product than it generates in direct revenue. On the topic of magazine subscriptions specifically, just like the rest of the store, the iOS platform benefits immensely by being absolutely simple. If you have to manage your subscriptions individually with each magazine (or each publisher) it's going to be inefficient and people who would otherwise like to subscribe will not due to the hassle involved. On the other hand, if it all goes through the very same login and credit card that you use to buy music, tv, films, apps, books, etc., then it's going to be just as easy as those things, and people will be more likely to make use of it. This also provides a significant value to the consumer over Android, which has almost no unifying feature at all (something which geeks love, but consumers hate).
So I really doubt that 30% is the primary motivating factor here. Apple sold over 60 million iOS devices since late September. Their core profit center is in hardware. If they can bolster the value of their hardware, that's gotta be their primary goal. If they can make some extra cash along the way, that's great, but I suspect the motivation is to use that cut primarily to cover operating costs and invest in expansion, so that they essentially get their "value multiplier" that is iTunes (many geeks hate, but consumers love) for free. It's absolutely brilliant, and their numbers from yesterday prove this out.
Um, yeah. Some folks might beg to differ.
The same folks that were in denial about the housing bubble right up until it burst?
Correct. When someone makes a mistake, they are then destined to make mistakes forever, and will never again able to be right about something.
Sure, three or four years is more difficult than just one year, but he did well for the one year, so it's a bit absurd to conclude that he will fail over a longer term.
But if Steve goes, whence Apple? I'm sure he has a large cadre of lieutenants who can make good decisions in his stead, but can they get along? Can they drive the teams and call BS on half-assed engineering like Jobs? Do they have his business acumen?
I dunno. Why not ask 2009 Apple how it did without Steve Jobs? Tim Cook has been doing a great job.
When Steve decides to give up the mantle, will Apple be able to adjust to the absence and still succeed in the same ways?
Why not? Apple won't be identical without Jobs, but he righted a wayward ship and has been piloting it for the past decade. Apple will do fine with another competent (even if not as capable as Jobs) pilot. What you're describing is that the only thing keeping the Apple ship on course is Jobs' constant hand on the wheel. I don't think there's any reason to think the ship is going to go astray with a different leader.
I doubt it, and that's why I've shorted Apple stock. Frankly, I suggest you all do likewise.
How amusing. What you are saying is that Apple (and specifically, AAPL) will never be as successful or as valuable as it is right now. That's a mighty bold statement, and based on a single, tenuous assumption. We'll see shortly how things pan out, but I'm quite confident Wall Street won't come to the same conclusion as you have.
In other words, Steve Jobs is an evil mastermind and any time he does something non-evil, it's just an evil ploy to appear non-evil...
In 1999, when he and Phil Schiller announced the iBook with built-in WiFi, the term WiFi hadn't even been invented yet, it was called AirPort by Apple, and 802.11b by everyone else, and Apple products were the first to have it built-in. Apple worked with Lucent in the development of 802.11b.
(disregard if you were being ironic)
You assume all cellular radio modules (and Nokia is heavily involved in making their own) are created equal? That all mobile phones are generally equal in reception?
I'm assuming nothing of the sort. You, however, are assuming Nokia has superior reception. This is something that can be quantified (although with a ton of caveats), and often is quantified. If it were the case that Nokia (or any other handset maker) were consistently outclassing the rest of the industry in terms of reception quality, it would be trumpeted.
Just snarkily saying that Nokia gets better reception, then providing a small anecdotal example set in an extreme situation does not really justify the assertion behind it. US cell service isn't criticized because one Nokia phone gets better reception in a particular valley than a handful of other phones.
I know I'm probably taking your remark more seriously than it was originally intended, so don't take my replies all that seriously either.
Yet whenever you read about WebOS on the Internet, the one thing that everyone talks about is the task management system.
That is because they find it easier to move between tasks than on other platforms.
I'm not quite sure how this is possible. On iOS, switching between tasks is identical to launching apps. The fact that it's a distinct thing on WebOS is what I'm getting at.
But THAT in turn is because of the clear focus on simple tasks that live in a world where you shift between them constantly.
To the occlusion of non-simple tasks?
So what the users see and say they like, is only a symptom of a deeper reason. It's why when someone says they like something about a system you have to go deeper to understand why they like it so much when it may seem superficial at first glance.
That's what I did. Why is a task management interface always the number one thing mentioned? To be certain, it must be because it is quite fantastic, but it should be at best just an example, like, "the interface is fantastic, for example..." and it shouldn't be the universally given example. Otherwise, it just appears like some obscure sub-feature, a feature to manage actual features, is the only good thing about it.
Also, I disagree strongly with "you have to go deeper". If someone is talking up a platform, the listener shouldn't have to look deeply into what they are hearing. Sure, you may have to do that from time to time because some people are bad at conveying information, but this should not be so universal.
If this was just one person here and there, it would be a problem with the person, but it's basically everyone, which strongly implies the problem lies with the platform.
But when it comes to the average consumer having WebOS advocated to them, hearing "it has a great task switcher" and waxing poetic over it, is not very compelling.
I agree with that which is why it didn't sell well. WebOS has a major marketing problem, which with any luck HP will put forth some effort to resolve.
I don't think this was the result of marketing. It's the result of being extremely fantastic in a very non-important way to most people. Unless you just mean going forward, in which case I wholly agree. I don't see HP being able to get this right, though, but I do look forward to seeing how this turns out.
Interestingly what I'm not sure of is how much sense WebOS makes on a tablet vs. something like a phone. Use of a tablet is much longer lived and I'm not sure the whole "simple task use" suffices on what is inherently a more powerful platform. But Palm had some pretty clever designers so perhaps they have re-thought the core idea for tablets.
With this I think I understand what you are trying to say about "simple tasks". To somewhat oversimplify things to highlight the differences, you are placing WebOS, as a phone system, closer to an advanced, perhaps even ideal, "feature phone", than an app phone, right? *Kind* of like how the Kin was marketed (but minus the social networking focus, and the overall craptasticness of the Kin).
If that's the case, then I think WebOS really should get a second chance in the handset market. The feature phone is pretty much at a dead end and WebOS sounds like it can revitalize and revolutionize it similar to how iOS did to the smartphone market.
I agree it's hardly encouraging for the market in general that everyone else's is so poor that the feature comes as a great thing.
It's a meta-feature. It's a feature that's a side-effect of a feature. It's not using your device, it's managing your ability to use your advice.
When someone says that the best thing about an OS is not what you directly do with it, but what you have to do in order to directly do things with it, you've missed something. That should be a footnote, not the primary highlight.
I agree that Android handles this very poorly (although in a very compelling way to a certain type of geek). iOS handles this by doing away with the necessity of such a feature altogether.
But if you are being disparaging on WebOS, it's a sign of the overall polish and consistent vision they brought forward.
I don't disagree all that much on this point, except that it's a very strange thing to promote as a primary feature of an OS.
That vision may or may not have survived the HP acquisition, that remains to be seen,
HP has a golden opportunity here. From a consumer perspective, I think a market where Android, WebOS, and iOS are all strong players (and Blackberry, Windows Phone, and the rest are all also-rans) will benefit pretty much every consumer-segment very well.
but it was a hell of a lot more consistent than Android has had to date (Honeycomb might rectify some of that). iOS also implement a consistent vision, but one I personally don't like.
I'm sure there are a good number of people with your similar preferences. For that reason, I hope HP does well with WebOS. The odds are somewhat long, though, given how long they've been without a product and how much momentum they've missed out on over the past year.
It's hardly encouraging when the top thing one can come up with in praise of WebOS is that it has a great task switcher.
If you understand WebOS it's not.
Yet whenever you read about WebOS on the Internet, the one thing that everyone talks about is the task management system. Secondarily they talk about the beauty of the UI. After that, there is really nothing.
Because the thing that derives from the nice task switcher, is that it's really a platform dedicated to light tasks in ways others are not.
That's what I like, it's just differently focused than the other more all-encompassing platforms.
And that's perfectly fine. I realize that there are plenty of people (although relatively few overall, a sizable niche on its own) who will strongly prefer WebOS on this very foundation.
But when it comes to the average consumer having WebOS advocated to them, hearing "it has a great task switcher" and waxing poetic over it, is not very compelling.
Because the usability of the feature you use every day doesn't count?
Because the fact that you have to use the feature every day is a failure in the first place. It's not a primary feature, it's a feature that is required solely due to the negative side-effects of other features.
I prefer iOS's solution to this, which is to make that feature wholly unnecessary. I do realize that there is a type of geek that prefers to specifically manage this stuff themselves, and of those, there are some that will prefer Android's completely customizable way to do so, and others will prefer WebOS's more elegant way.
There are far, far more, however, who are better served by doing away with it altogether.
The problem is that only Blackberry is actually bringing forth anything remotely like that (only seen in their playbook demos thusfar). Android and iOS still have crappy management that still fails to make the state of things intuitively obvious and concrete.
I disagree with this with regards to iOS. iOS completely does away with the need for an Android style task manager because it does the management itself. The difference between running, suspended, and quit is negligible enough on iOS that the user never really needs to know the difference. I know this is a bit of a turn off to the geeks who like to be the complete master of their device. For those, they can either jailbreak or just buy an Android phone. But for the overwhelmingly vast majority of consumers, they are much better served by having an essentially invisible multitasking system than they are by one that has a need to be managed.
This is not merely historical because it *still* isn't fixed in the rest of the world.
My "historical" comment was to an AC's assertion that WebOS was better than iOS in one particular way.
It may seem like a trivial thing to people who don't have it, but it's pretty damn annoying when it isn't there.
Sort of. It's one thing, and it's not a particularly central thing to the system, its necessity is a side-effect. You don't have a task management system because you want it, but because it's necessary when trying to fully multitask on such limited hardware.
The fact that the one thing people seem to love about WebOS is its task management is telling. It's like highlighting the fact that it's easy to access the oil pan when asked why a specific car is so good. You'd think that if the phone/car where so good, you'd have more important things to highlight, and not just one single thing that is more about maintenance than anything else. Android's solution is to make maintenance completely open and exposed to the user (and thus makes maintenance something beyond most people), WebOS's solution is to make maintenance elegant, and Apple's solution is to make maintenance unnecessary.
Nokia phones come with their own cell towers?
The point being it's not now. Ergo, not relevant to WebOS's current value, as opposed to its historical value.
Might as well laud PalmOS over WP7, given how much better it was than WinCE at the time...
Only in one particular way, almost a year ago. Are you trying to find a way to heap even weaker praise on WebOS than Junta did?
As if Maemo and MeeGo have already died? Maemo has a very active open source community and, even though MeeGo will supplant it, will live on for a long time.
It doesn't matter if it has an active open source community. What matters is whether it has an active user community, in the context of how it's doing compared with Android and iOS.
It's hardly encouraging when the top thing one can come up with in praise of WebOS is that it has a great task switcher.