The iPhone *is* a real tablet computer running a real operating system. It is crippled a bit, yes, but some of us would like to have a couple key features without having to haul a laptop around.
I would argue that Windows Mobile more fits that bill. My current phone has NetHack, a telnet client, a real keyboard, and can run any of three(+) web browsers.
I think that one of the most revolutionary end-user paradigm shifts that Microsoft ever did was to compiler Internet Explorer and Windows Explorer into one.
Think about it. The Internet, a seamless extension of your desktop. Why shift between the two? When broadband first came out, everything clicked into place, and I understood the eloquence of having IE and Explorer as one. Pick a window, type a website, get my data. Hit back. On my hard drive again.
Konqueror accomplishes this to even a greater extent. KDE has horrible UI in so many places, but they got one thing (more or less) right. Konqueror goes out of its way to integrate all the various file management techniques into one.
SFTP, ick, under Windows, have to load up some separate program to manage it.[1] In KDE, nope. It is just an extension of my computer. Not even an extension, except for the latency, it IS my computer. Files and web sites sharing tabs, why not?
I also loved having tabbed file browsing. I (just) missed out on the Dual Pane file manager craze, but tabbed file managers are a good substitute.
KDE sucks in a thousand other small (medium sized, and large) ways. Heck in of itself Konqueror has at least half a dozen UI issues that can be spotted within the first 5 minutes of using it. But do not claim that it is not very "Unix" like.
It is very Unix like. Files are files, a file is a file is a file. Does it really matter where it resides?
[1]Actually 2 commerical programs exist that allow the user to mount SFTP and SCP connections as drives. They still suck compared to FISH though.
As stated in another thread. I can issue OTA software updates to every person with a Blackberry where I work with a few clicks of a mouse. You can basically change any setting and update the unit remotely including the OS and perform deactivation/initial activation. We do this frequently.
The update is therefore technically delivered by the "user", the corporation. Blackberries differ in that the owner is typically a company. Companies can send out messages to all their employees who have one: "Be sure to have your Blackberry phone in an area where you receive good reception between 9:00am and 9:30am this coming Monday, we will be rolling out an update."
Especially since Blackberries are so closely tied to corporations internal networks, weighing the costs of bricking a device versus exposure of sensitive data will almost always come down in favor of protecting the data and maybe having a small chance of killing a few phones.
The iPhone (and most cell phones for that matter) are not intended for corporate use. As such, the data that they deal with is typically not sensitive[1], and phone updates can wait until the user is able to safely tether the device.
Also it becomes a UI issue. iPhone = Good UI. Disrupting the user from making calls for some random update is not a good practice. Blackberry = Good Corporate Citizen. Security first.
[1]On the same scale that corporate data is. There are even federal laws that deal with the consequences for allowing a foreign competitor to acquire proprietary information due to lack of proper security practices.
For a device as advanced as the iPhone, I'm shocked that this update can't be automatically done via WiFi or EDGE
Firmware Updates are done tethered for good reasons. Typically modern cell phones support limited over the air (OTA) updates, but firmware updates fall outside those bounds.
The reasons? If anything goes wrong, the phone is effectively dead. The firmware[1] is the first thing that a phone loads when it is booted. If anything goes wrong during a firmware update and the firmware becomes corrupted, the phone cannot even boot. This means that you cannot even try to re-apply the same update (or revert to a previous firmware version), or do anything else for that matter!
Firmware typically cannot be patched in place while the phone is running, in other words, it is not a background task.
To recap, for a firmware update to take place, the phone has to go into a special mode, 100% complete the update, and if anything fails in a non-controlled manner, you have what is essentially a dead device.
An OTA update would make the phone spontaneously go into a special "sorry you cannot make calls your phone is being updated right now" mode (violating numerous human interface guidelines right there), and many user's first reaction would be to turn the phone off and then on again.
Which would, of course, kill the phone.
Doh.
Tethered updates are typically user initiated, and when done, are accompanied by large (possibly flashing) text telling the user not to turn off or disconnect their device. The user is informed of both the steps entailed in the process, and how to avoid the inherit dangers of firmware flashing.
Human interface guidelines achieved! Well, more or less, most firmware flashing apps are not exactly user friendly, but I have not seen Apple's take on it.
[1] ROM, etc. ROMs in phones are often times not actually read only. Thus the term firmware.
Seriously. 640x480 screen, 2MP+, broadband internet. FM radio? Hah, stream MP3s from your home PC!
Yah they cost starting at $300+ w/o a contract. The problem is that the only way to get the really sexy Windows Mobile phones is without a contract, because so few carriers offer them!
Heck, we have had sexy phones available here for years now!
The I-Mate ultimates are also coming out soon, and they are some awesome phones. With 128MB of RAM and a 520MHZ CPU, they also will be screaming along in terms of speed for general processing tasks.
The issue is, finding any of these phones from a carrier. Once in a while a few of them end up on the big companies offerings, but far too often, they have to be purchased separately.
Prepaid (or Pay As You Go) WiFi. Starbucks takes cash last time I checked. Good luck getting p2p working, but with enough relays and tunneling, I am sure it can be done.
Until even the POTS started going digital, land lines where analog. "Bandwidth equivalences" be damned, analog sounds better to the human ear. Even analog noise sounds better than digital noise!
watch as VOIP comes to the iphone, and at&t panic and attempt to protect those juicy profits by dropping all that free data on your 3 year contract and legal hijinix ensues
Of course if AT&T offloaded most of their customer's traffic to the public infrastructure Internet... bleck. Because surfing the web isn't slow enough!
Seriously though, cellular quality sucks as it is. VoIP sucks even more. Land lines sound crystal clear in comparison... On the rare occasions when I use one, I am always surprised by the quality! Actually hearing every word that someone says, not having the background noise on the other side fade in and out to save bandwidth... Who the HELL made the decision to move everything over to digital?
Cell phones each have a unique identifier. Unless you have a prepaid account and paid for your iPhone with cash, this unique identifier is easily traced to your credit card + billing address.
I've heard this claim, but I think it's part of the "battery mythology" -- that delightful set of whacky, misguided beliefs you'll hear about batteries.
For once, this is not wacky.
Lithion Ion batteries lose capacity at a rate which is proportional to how charged they are. Leave a laptop plugged into the wall and running for 2 years with its battery pack in, and you will end up with a throughly dead battery pack.
There is an awesome chart right here that explained why I went through 2 packs so quickly. I ignornatly thought that keeping my battery "topped off" would be best for it. Wrong!
Some higher end laptops will come with either a software or hardware solution for preventing the battery from being charged too much. One model I saw prompted the user asking if they were going to leave the laptop plugged in for an extended period of time. While we can all guess exactly how well that went, the theory is sound.
What if: The bug fix impacts a feature that millions of customers are using?
What if: The bug fix requires the modification of really complex code that touches dozens (or more) of other parts of the system?
What if: The bug fix changes the internal behavior of Windows in a way that shouldn't be a problem, but a particular piece of 3rd party software that millions of customers rely on breaks after the fix is applied?
Wireless networks are insanely awesome. My University had them, and the convinenece is incredible. To the best of my knowledge, my University's network never had a problem with microwave ovens knocking people off. Well, if your laptop is sitting on top of the microwave while it is going, then maybe, but that is your problem.:-D
Get enough APs setup, and don't try to browse the network next to an old crusty minimally shielded microwave oven, and things should go just fine.
Did you make sure to mark all spam as such? Also, I am willing to bet that the single marking of a spam message as non-spam has a larger affect than marking many spam messages as spam. (Hey, if someone wants spam, give it to them!:-D
GMail's spam filters are over 99.9% perfect after about a week of training from the user. I still occasionally check my spam folder, heck, yesterday a message was put in Spam that shouldn't have been, the first such occurrence in over a year. Although when I first signed up it happened quite a bit more often.
In comparison, when I last used hotmail (admittedly, quite a few years ago), they let lots of spam through, but regularly blocked emails I wanted to read. Hotmail even blocked emails from Microsoft! Game testing, so yes, I did want to receive those. I would add the sender to my safe senders list each time, but when ever a different email address was used to send out the invitation, oops...
I have had an exact opposite experience with T-Mobile. In my apartment, I had a weak signal. Called them up, they apologized and sent a guy out to check the signal strength in my neighborhood! Customer service told me that if I had still had any problems with signal, to call them back and they would take further steps to resolve it. Ultimately I gave up because, well, it wasn't T-Mobile's fault that 1/2 my apartment was underground.:-D
And, again, the POSIX spec contains a lot more than just the kernel interface, and includes commentary and design rationales.
And the.NET API includes variable names of more than one character!:-D
Ultimatly though, both are rather nice APIs to code against. Even ignoring GUI work, both are much nicer to use than (aside from.NET) most of Window's other APIs.
So, are you going to write a significant Windows app with only MSCORLIB.DLL and the "assemblies that begin with the word System"? I'll quote someone else: "Once you are done writing all the libraries you need to do any real work for a project of any significance, then tell me what the documentation story looks like."
Hey now. Don't get me wrong, I love developing for POSIX, but MS has far more under System.* than POSIX has all together.
The comparison was also between the.NET api printed on 3x5 note cards, and between POSIX printed 8.5x11 paper (double or single sided?)
Oh, and the programming paradigms are vastly different as well. Add a proper exception handling system and a hierarchy of exceptions, written in C, as well as the thousand other niceties of modern programming that.NET provides through its libraries (and through language support as well, of course) and then tell me how much more documentation is needed.
Intellisense is needed yes, but for ickier parts of the POSIX api, tabbed terminals with MAN pages open is needed.
No support for my vid card, oops, everything runs like a snail, FireFox takes forever to render makes, I have to wait while dragging windows around.
Yah so my video card is old (2004? Who could imagine such an ancient time!) and embedded, so it will likely never get support. But until I get a new computer (with a video card that does work under Linux!) I won't really be having that good of a user experience.
This is one issue that Linux really has to face. Given the right HW support, yes, it flies. Unsupported device? Heh. Poor user.
I use the Google Toolbar instead which, while not as good as Office, works well enough.
Hah, now I will argue that point!
I frequently have to go back and use Google instead of MS Word's spell checker because Word's spell checker cannot fix my spelling, where as Google does an excellent job! The only unfortunate part is that for web searches, Google's spell checking is purely statistical, if a majority (or even just a "large number") of people spell the word incorrectly, Google corrects to that incorrect spelling of the word.
I do not think the Google Toolbar has this problem though.
Anyway, I love Google's spell checker, and before FF2 I considered it a real killer app for the web browser, but unfortunatly, the damn thing leaks memory like a sieve, at least when I used it last, they hadn't updated it for almost a year, and it/really/ needed updating!
When in FF1.5 I am stuck using spellcheck.net.
Anyway I chose to go though, proper spelling is important, and having a spell checker integrated into the browser makes me look just a little bit less stupid online!:)
I can almost use Linux daily thanks to this strategy being dominent in the open source community. Unfortunatly, graphics card drivers do not work for ANY of the machines I own, and the overall system responsiveness in general of my Linux installs is so slow... I am hoping I have reduced this down to GFX drivers, but hey, who knows?
Whatever it is, there is a horrible noticable lag in FF on Linux, and with OOo, well, heh, I can sit back and sing a tune while waiting for a button click to register. Mind you, this is on a light-weight Linux distro (Currently PuppyLinux), the big guys like SuSE are much worse.
That being said, I have used some very snappy Linux installs before, just not on any of my machines!
Oh, and Open Office is a huge flaming pile of crap, but that is a separate topic.
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I would argue that Windows Mobile more fits that bill. My current phone has NetHack, a telnet client, a real keyboard, and can run any of three(+) web browsers.
E17 has been making regular releases for the last 2 years.
Try it today.
Looks pretty, has all you need to run a desktop Media players, etc.
Hey, wait, that is a great idea! Lets call the Widgets applications, and rename Konqueror->"The Desktop" and... ah, damnit. Back to square 1. :-D
I disagree.
I think that one of the most revolutionary end-user paradigm shifts that Microsoft ever did was to compiler Internet Explorer and Windows Explorer into one.
Think about it. The Internet, a seamless extension of your desktop. Why shift between the two? When broadband first came out, everything clicked into place, and I understood the eloquence of having IE and Explorer as one. Pick a window, type a website, get my data. Hit back. On my hard drive again.
Konqueror accomplishes this to even a greater extent. KDE has horrible UI in so many places, but they got one thing (more or less) right. Konqueror goes out of its way to integrate all the various file management techniques into one.
SFTP, ick, under Windows, have to load up some separate program to manage it.[1] In KDE, nope. It is just an extension of my computer. Not even an extension, except for the latency, it IS my computer. Files and web sites sharing tabs, why not?
I also loved having tabbed file browsing. I (just) missed out on the Dual Pane file manager craze, but tabbed file managers are a good substitute.
KDE sucks in a thousand other small (medium sized, and large) ways. Heck in of itself Konqueror has at least half a dozen UI issues that can be spotted within the first 5 minutes of using it. But do not claim that it is not very "Unix" like.
It is very Unix like. Files are files, a file is a file is a file. Does it really matter where it resides?
[1]Actually 2 commerical programs exist that allow the user to mount SFTP and SCP connections as drives. They still suck compared to FISH though.
Wow, it almost looks as good as Enlightenment!
:-D
I bet it is a lot slower though!
I seriously wish that E17 had more devs on it.
The update is therefore technically delivered by the "user", the corporation. Blackberries differ in that the owner is typically a company. Companies can send out messages to all their employees who have one: "Be sure to have your Blackberry phone in an area where you receive good reception between 9:00am and 9:30am this coming Monday, we will be rolling out an update."
Especially since Blackberries are so closely tied to corporations internal networks, weighing the costs of bricking a device versus exposure of sensitive data will almost always come down in favor of protecting the data and maybe having a small chance of killing a few phones.
The iPhone (and most cell phones for that matter) are not intended for corporate use. As such, the data that they deal with is typically not sensitive[1], and phone updates can wait until the user is able to safely tether the device.
Also it becomes a UI issue. iPhone = Good UI. Disrupting the user from making calls for some random update is not a good practice. Blackberry = Good Corporate Citizen. Security first.
[1]On the same scale that corporate data is. There are even federal laws that deal with the consequences for allowing a foreign competitor to acquire proprietary information due to lack of proper security practices.
Firmware Updates are done tethered for good reasons. Typically modern cell phones support limited over the air (OTA) updates, but firmware updates fall outside those bounds.
The reasons? If anything goes wrong, the phone is effectively dead. The firmware[1] is the first thing that a phone loads when it is booted. If anything goes wrong during a firmware update and the firmware becomes corrupted, the phone cannot even boot. This means that you cannot even try to re-apply the same update (or revert to a previous firmware version), or do anything else for that matter!
Firmware typically cannot be patched in place while the phone is running, in other words, it is not a background task.
To recap, for a firmware update to take place, the phone has to go into a special mode, 100% complete the update, and if anything fails in a non-controlled manner, you have what is essentially a dead device.
An OTA update would make the phone spontaneously go into a special "sorry you cannot make calls your phone is being updated right now" mode (violating numerous human interface guidelines right there), and many user's first reaction would be to turn the phone off and then on again.
Which would, of course, kill the phone.
Doh.
Tethered updates are typically user initiated, and when done, are accompanied by large (possibly flashing) text telling the user not to turn off or disconnect their device. The user is informed of both the steps entailed in the process, and how to avoid the inherit dangers of firmware flashing.
Human interface guidelines achieved! Well, more or less, most firmware flashing apps are not exactly user friendly, but I have not seen Apple's take on it.
[1] ROM, etc. ROMs in phones are often times not actually read only. Thus the term firmware.
That is the most awesome graph ever.
I don't know if the data is any good, but I'll definitely be quoting it!
Seriously. 640x480 screen, 2MP+, broadband internet. FM radio? Hah, stream MP3s from your home PC!
Yah they cost starting at $300+ w/o a contract. The problem is that the only way to get the really sexy Windows Mobile phones is without a contract, because so few carriers offer them!
Heck, we have had sexy phones available here for years now!
Link time:
o2 XDA
I-Mate JasJar
The I-Mate ultimates are also coming out soon, and they are some awesome phones. With 128MB of RAM and a 520MHZ CPU, they also will be screaming along in terms of speed for general processing tasks.
Ultimate 7150
Ultimate 7150
Anybody want an 8GB HD with their phone? Try the HTC Advantage X7500
The issue is, finding any of these phones from a carrier. Once in a while a few of them end up on the big companies offerings, but far too often, they have to be purchased separately.
Unsecured WiFi.
Prepaid (or Pay As You Go) WiFi. Starbucks takes cash last time I checked. Good luck getting p2p working, but with enough relays and tunneling, I am sure it can be done.
Until even the POTS started going digital, land lines where analog. "Bandwidth equivalences" be damned, analog sounds better to the human ear. Even analog noise sounds better than digital noise!
Of course if AT&T offloaded most of their customer's traffic to the public infrastructure Internet... bleck. Because surfing the web isn't slow enough!
Seriously though, cellular quality sucks as it is. VoIP sucks even more. Land lines sound crystal clear in comparison... On the rare occasions when I use one, I am always surprised by the quality! Actually hearing every word that someone says, not having the background noise on the other side fade in and out to save bandwidth... Who the HELL made the decision to move everything over to digital?
Oh yah, we all did.
Cell phones each have a unique identifier. Unless you have a prepaid account and paid for your iPhone with cash, this unique identifier is easily traced to your credit card + billing address.
Thus, you win the Worst Pirating Idea EVER award.
For once, this is not wacky.
Lithion Ion batteries lose capacity at a rate which is proportional to how charged they are. Leave a laptop plugged into the wall and running for 2 years with its battery pack in, and you will end up with a throughly dead battery pack.
There is an awesome chart right here that explained why I went through 2 packs so quickly. I ignornatly thought that keeping my battery "topped off" would be best for it. Wrong!
Some higher end laptops will come with either a software or hardware solution for preventing the battery from being charged too much. One model I saw prompted the user asking if they were going to leave the laptop plugged in for an extended period of time. While we can all guess exactly how well that went, the theory is sound.
You are right, it sure as hell is.
What if: The bug fix impacts a feature that millions of customers are using?
What if: The bug fix requires the modification of really complex code that touches dozens (or more) of other parts of the system?
What if: The bug fix changes the internal behavior of Windows in a way that shouldn't be a problem, but a particular piece of 3rd party software that millions of customers rely on breaks after the fix is applied?
Quite a few what ifs.
...
:-D
Wireless networks are insanely awesome. My University had them, and the convinenece is incredible. To the best of my knowledge, my University's network never had a problem with microwave ovens knocking people off. Well, if your laptop is sitting on top of the microwave while it is going, then maybe, but that is your problem.
Get enough APs setup, and don't try to browse the network next to an old crusty minimally shielded microwave oven, and things should go just fine.
UW had to give in so easily why now...?
Did you make sure to mark all spam as such? Also, I am willing to bet that the single marking of a spam message as non-spam has a larger affect than marking many spam messages as spam. (Hey, if someone wants spam, give it to them! :-D
GMail's spam filters are over 99.9% perfect after about a week of training from the user. I still occasionally check my spam folder, heck, yesterday a message was put in Spam that shouldn't have been, the first such occurrence in over a year. Although when I first signed up it happened quite a bit more often.
In comparison, when I last used hotmail (admittedly, quite a few years ago), they let lots of spam through, but regularly blocked emails I wanted to read. Hotmail even blocked emails from Microsoft! Game testing, so yes, I did want to receive those. I would add the sender to my safe senders list each time, but when ever a different email address was used to send out the invitation, oops...
Wow, dude, that sucks.
:-D
I have had an exact opposite experience with T-Mobile. In my apartment, I had a weak signal. Called them up, they apologized and sent a guy out to check the signal strength in my neighborhood! Customer service told me that if I had still had any problems with signal, to call them back and they would take further steps to resolve it. Ultimately I gave up because, well, it wasn't T-Mobile's fault that 1/2 my apartment was underground.
And the
Ultimatly though, both are rather nice APIs to code against. Even ignoring GUI work, both are much nicer to use than (aside from
Hey now. Don't get me wrong, I love developing for POSIX, but MS has far more under System.* than POSIX has all together.
The comparison was also between the
Oh, and the programming paradigms are vastly different as well. Add a proper exception handling system and a hierarchy of exceptions, written in C, as well as the thousand other niceties of modern programming that
Intellisense is needed yes, but for ickier parts of the POSIX api, tabbed terminals with MAN pages open is needed.
No support for my vid card, oops, everything runs like a snail, FireFox takes forever to render makes, I have to wait while dragging windows around.
Yah so my video card is old (2004? Who could imagine such an ancient time!) and embedded, so it will likely never get support. But until I get a new computer (with a video card that does work under Linux!) I won't really be having that good of a user experience.
This is one issue that Linux really has to face. Given the right HW support, yes, it flies. Unsupported device? Heh. Poor user.
Hah, now I will argue that point!
I frequently have to go back and use Google instead of MS Word's spell checker because Word's spell checker cannot fix my spelling, where as Google does an excellent job! The only unfortunate part is that for web searches, Google's spell checking is purely statistical, if a majority (or even just a "large number") of people spell the word incorrectly, Google corrects to that incorrect spelling of the word.
I do not think the Google Toolbar has this problem though.
Anyway, I love Google's spell checker, and before FF2 I considered it a real killer app for the web browser, but unfortunatly, the damn thing leaks memory like a sieve, at least when I used it last, they hadn't updated it for almost a year, and it
When in FF1.5 I am stuck using spellcheck.net.
Anyway I chose to go though, proper spelling is important, and having a spell checker integrated into the browser makes me look just a little bit less stupid online!
I can almost use Linux daily thanks to this strategy being dominent in the open source community. Unfortunatly, graphics card drivers do not work for ANY of the machines I own, and the overall system responsiveness in general of my Linux installs is so slow... I am hoping I have reduced this down to GFX drivers, but hey, who knows?
Whatever it is, there is a horrible noticable lag in FF on Linux, and with OOo, well, heh, I can sit back and sing a tune while waiting for a button click to register. Mind you, this is on a light-weight Linux distro (Currently PuppyLinux), the big guys like SuSE are much worse.
That being said, I have used some very snappy Linux installs before, just not on any of my machines!
Oh, and Open Office is a huge flaming pile of crap, but that is a separate topic.