Say what you will about Steve Jobs, one of the smartest things he did when he first returned to Apple was slash the product line down to a few simple categories. There's nothing I hate more than trying to compare laptops from Dell or HP. Someone at each of those companies needs to watch this.
Once again: Score: -1, factually incorrect. (Or at least, "not aware of all the facts.") He did NOT have to "pay apple to keep using software he had already paid for". He could have just continued using the original version of the app. This is like complaining that you "have" to upgrade to OS X 10.5 because you "have" to upgrade from Adobe CS5 to CS5. Even if Adobe would give out free upgrades from CS4 to CS5, that doesn't mean Apple would be required to do the same. And it has been known since DAY 1 that iPod touch OS upgrades would be paid-for, unlike iPhone OS upgrades. (This just recently changed and iPod touch upgrades are now free.)
I think Android's popularity might have more to do with it being available on more devices, including much cheaper devices.
Bingo. You can now get Android phones that are just a few months old for free and you can get them on all major carriers. If Android weren't now doing well in sales that would be surprising. I'd love to visit a parallel universe where a 6-month-old iPhone can be had for free on any carrier and look at the numbers.
I believe it was primarily their choice of a minimal utilitarian design that made people flock to Google, and the quality of the search results, good as they were, was a distant secondary factor among typical users.
I remember it the exact opposite way. Their search results were an order of magnitude better than anyone else's. Back then I had a two part search strategy: first, try Yahoo. They were usually pretty good but if it was an unusual term there might be very few results. If that happened, I'd go to AltaVista, which would produce tens of thousands of results no matter what you searched for (like they did nothing more than a plain text search, and maybe even an 'OR' one at that) and if I got lucky I'd find the answer before I got tired of clicking through pages.
Then along came Google and they were known for good results, period. PageRank worked fantastically well back when "SEO" was nothing more than long page titles and META tags. That's why they created and publicized the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button--if was their way of saying "We're so good, we'll bet that what you want is first result"--like the Russian Roulette of searching. I remember hearing over and over how you could search for Coke or Stanford or Ford and click "I'm Feeling Lucky" and wind up at the company's/school's/whatever's site.
The fact that Google had a clean page was just a bonus, though the fast-loading front page was also nice back when most of us were on dialup. Back in January 1999 (shortly after Google launched) it actually had quite a few links (compared to today) and the Portal Wars had not really yet begun. (I imagine they started, in fact, due to the fact that Google was kicking their ass in search.*) They had plenty of links on their page but a) it was still relatively clean and b) most of those were for browsing their hierarchy. Yahoo's only had three graphics on their page in this sample.
> I recall reading that they would like to remove the "I'm feeling lucky" > button (because no one uses it), but they can't. Users simply can't > handle large changes.
Well that's an easy one to handle. Just remove it gradually. Every week, take off 1 letter.
I'm Feeling Lucky I'm Feeling Luck I'm Feeling Luc I'm Feeling Lu I'm Feeling L etc.
In just a few short months the button will be worn down to a nub and can then be safely removed without causing stress for users.
Though I like to think it was due in part to the image I uploaded once I found there was no way to get rid of it.:-)
I did learn that you could go to "Editor's Picks" and scroll and the last one (hard to see, natch) which was "white" but then the text was still shadow-y which I think looked kinda cool on the logo but it made the small text almost impossible to read. (Not that I read the small text on the page, but it's annoying to have unreadable text visible.)
Maybe their next innovation will be background images on the search results pages. How cool would that be?!?!?
Looking at the "striking examples" I have to ask, does anyone other than 14-year-old gamers build computers anymore? Whatever happened to six flat sides? A basic cube-ish design is inexpensive to manufacture, easy to open up and get into, minimizes wasted space (are any of your components curvy? no? then your case shouldn't be either!) and you can easily lay it down, stand it up, or put things on top of it. I can understand no one wanting to put together a gallery of beige boxes but it would have been nice to see at least one clean example.
Wow. Nothing personal but I can't imagine how you've been nodded up... TWICE. What do you need to pay in the future? What has Apple announced they would do along these lines? You buy an iPad today and it will function as it does forever without ever talking to Apple again. Please specify exactly what functionality will get turned off if you don't send Apple money above and beyond the initial purchase price.
Considering that the JooJoo's manufacturer is likely to go out of business before the warranty expires on the first tablet they shipped, I'd go so far as to say that the iPad is a much safer investment.
Was the summary tl;dr for you? And for everyone who modded you up?
Although the security vulnerability was confined to AT&T servers, Apple bears responsibility for ensuring the privacy of its users, who must provide the company with their email addresses to activate their iPads. [emphasis added]
Or maybe I just wrote in kind of a hurry, moved things back and forth, and didn't get around to changing one instance of his name to a pronoun since this is just a forum and not a dissertation. Mainly, I was just replying because the comment was +5 and Slashdot doesn't have a "-1, factually incorrect" mod. In other words, duty called.:-)
For the record: I loved Little Brother, couldn't even finish Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, thought Makers was pretty good, and thought Overclocked had some good bits but mostly wasn't that great. As for his general Internet writings: some good, some bad, some I totally agree with, some where I think he's way off. In other words, about like everyone else.
He may not credit Tim (or the masturbation guy) every single time he utters those words but he has indeed credited him:
For me -- for pretty much every writer -- the big problem isn't piracy, it's obscurity (thanks to Tim O'Reilly for this great aphorism).
But hey, don't let facts get in the way of slagging Cory. Do you realize how long it would take for Cory, or anyone, to talk if they had to cite the origin of every single thought they're expressing?
Another question with a non-obvious answer: you're going on a 100 mile trip. You drive the first 50 miles at 30mph. How fast do you have to drive for the rest of the trip to average 60mph the whole way?
How long after the iPhone came out before competitors had similar feature sets? iPhone first demoed: January 2007 HTC G1/Dream w/ Android OS released: October 2008 (21 months later, 320x480 screen) BlackBerry Storm released: November 2008 (22 months later, 320x480 screen) Palm Pre first demoed: January 2009 (24 months later, 320x480 screen)
How long is the product development cycle for a smartphone, starting from zero? Looks like about two years? They all had the hardware laying around and a bunch of engineers and coders on staff, they just had to arrange the pieces into something that looked like an iPhone and write a new UI and some apps.
I never said they "invented" the smartphone market. I said they defined the modern smartphone featureset. Watch the iPhone's introduction. Steve Jobs spends a good chunk of time talking about the differences between the iPhone and other major smartphones. I guarantee you every other manufacturer started planning iPhone act-alikes that afternoon. No other smartphone looked like that, no other smartphone had nearly as good of a browser.
I'm not trolling, I was being sincere. I will dissect your phones one by one. Note that names and models vary, names vary and are from this page.
MDA II - 240x320 screen, same as many.
MDAII (I assume you meant III)- 320x240
MDA vairo - 320x240
MDA Amino - 640x480 - more than iPhone but still traditional 4:3
vairo II - 320x240
wing - 320x240
kiaser - 320x240
magician - 320x240
touch diamond - 640x480, and it came out after the iPhone.
Thanks for helping me prove my point.
"Palm pretty much defined the screen size for smart devices." The HUMAN palm, you mean. Of course the size is "pretty much" defined by the size of the hand and the technology available at the time. PDAs ranged from 160x160 (early Palm, yes I had one) to 640x480 (Dell Axim, among others; yes, I had one of those too) but NO ONE (AFAIK) made a screen that was 320x480 and within two years AFTER the iPhone's introduction we saw screens of that EXACT size from Palm, and BlackBerry, and your beloved HTC. Coincidence? If the iPhone was not being copied then why didn't we see more 640x480 phones being introduced in its wake? Hell, that's TWICE as many pixels as an iPhone and 640x480 handheld screens have been readily available for YEARS.
It might seem like a small difference buy you're missing my point. 352x416 is not the same as 320x480--besides being smaller, its aspect ratio is the almost-square 1.18:1 rather than the widescreen 320x480. ALL THREE of the phones I listed had screens EXACTLY the same resolution as the iPhone's in the first two years AFTER it was introduced. I'm not saying Apple had the first screen ever at that resolution or higher, I'm saying that no one else ever had a screen with those pixel dimensions and then all of a sudden EVERYONE did. They very much are trendsetters, just as when they were when they introduced the first widescreen laptop (the PowerBook G4) in 2001.
I myself had a Dell Axim X50v PDA in late 2006 at 640x480 (conventional 4:3 screen) which was double the iPhone's but the system UI (Windows mobile) was much, much worse so it wasn't a net benefit. What's the best thing to do with a gorgeous screen like that? Look at pictures! But the damn thing didn't even come with a decent photo viewing app. (Text, also, looked great at 200dpi.) Also, all mobile browsers, including Opera, sucked at the time. You can't even TRY to compare the capabilities of Opera in 2007 with Safari on the iPhone the same year.
And keyboards are a personal preference. I've had three phones with hardware keyboards (Nokia 6800, 6820, and a BlackBerry from work) and I vastly prefer soft keyboards (Apple's or Android's).
Anyone except the most rabid Apple hater will admit that Apple single-handedly defined the modern smartphone featureset, the main characteristics of which are a ~3.5" touch display at 320x480 and a very good web browser. Look at what was introduced AFTER the iPhone: the Palm Pre, HTC Dream, and BlackBerry Storm. Hmm, notice any similarities in the specs of those devices?
Right--just the same way that the iPod, once it started dominating the market, never got more features or space upgrades. Oh, wait...
I'll be honest: I'm happy with today's announcements but they are, for the most part, evolutionary--EXACTLY the kind of thing that would happen every year no matter how much competition there is or isn't. I'm sure the heat from the Android camp helps ensure that Apple keeps moving but to say that "none" of this would have happened is pretty far off. No sense mentioning that the initial release of an Android device was released almost two years after the iPhone was introduced--January 1997 -> October 2008--and that Apple revved the iPhone and its OS during that time--that is, BEFORE any competition EVEN EXISTED.
But sure, let's give Google all the credit for keeping things going.
I thought by "appointment" he meant "I need to be in my living room at 10pm on Wednesdays to watch South Park."
As for Hulu, given a choice between the two, I'd still rather have cable or satellite with ALL the channels and a PVR over Hulu with its relatively limited selection.
Now Kolakowski is trying to argue that because 'technically' she is routing her calls through Colorado from outside the state that her robodials are actually legal.
I guess she skipped the day in law school when they covered "the letter of the law vs. the spirit of the law."
I haven't watched 'traditional' television since I discovered hulu.com and bought a computer to drive my HDTV. I can't believe I used to be willing to make an appointment to watch a TV show.
If "making an appointment" is your definition of "traditional" television, then I haven't watched "traditional" television in the decade I've owned my TiVo.
Slashdot Mirror
Dell also sells the Hybrid for, um, some reason.
Say what you will about Steve Jobs, one of the smartest things he did when he first returned to Apple was slash the product line down to a few simple categories. There's nothing I hate more than trying to compare laptops from Dell or HP. Someone at each of those companies needs to watch this.
Right up there with those assholes at Domain Registry of America.
Once again: Score: -1, factually incorrect. (Or at least, "not aware of all the facts.") He did NOT have to "pay apple to keep using software he had already paid for". He could have just continued using the original version of the app. This is like complaining that you "have" to upgrade to OS X 10.5 because you "have" to upgrade from Adobe CS5 to CS5. Even if Adobe would give out free upgrades from CS4 to CS5, that doesn't mean Apple would be required to do the same. And it has been known since DAY 1 that iPod touch OS upgrades would be paid-for, unlike iPhone OS upgrades. (This just recently changed and iPod touch upgrades are now free.)
I think Android's popularity might have more to do with it being available on more devices, including much cheaper devices.
Bingo. You can now get Android phones that are just a few months old for free and you can get them on all major carriers. If Android weren't now doing well in sales that would be surprising. I'd love to visit a parallel universe where a 6-month-old iPhone can be had for free on any carrier and look at the numbers.
I believe it was primarily their choice of a minimal utilitarian design that made people flock to Google, and the quality of the search results, good as they were, was a distant secondary factor among typical users.
I remember it the exact opposite way. Their search results were an order of magnitude better than anyone else's. Back then I had a two part search strategy: first, try Yahoo. They were usually pretty good but if it was an unusual term there might be very few results. If that happened, I'd go to AltaVista, which would produce tens of thousands of results no matter what you searched for (like they did nothing more than a plain text search, and maybe even an 'OR' one at that) and if I got lucky I'd find the answer before I got tired of clicking through pages.
Then along came Google and they were known for good results, period. PageRank worked fantastically well back when "SEO" was nothing more than long page titles and META tags. That's why they created and publicized the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button--if was their way of saying "We're so good, we'll bet that what you want is first result"--like the Russian Roulette of searching. I remember hearing over and over how you could search for Coke or Stanford or Ford and click "I'm Feeling Lucky" and wind up at the company's/school's/whatever's site.
The fact that Google had a clean page was just a bonus, though the fast-loading front page was also nice back when most of us were on dialup. Back in January 1999 (shortly after Google launched) it actually had quite a few links (compared to today) and the Portal Wars had not really yet begun. (I imagine they started, in fact, due to the fact that Google was kicking their ass in search.*) They had plenty of links on their page but a) it was still relatively clean and b) most of those were for browsing their hierarchy. Yahoo's only had three graphics on their page in this sample.
http://web.archive.org/web/19990117053926/http://yahoo.com/ :-)
http://web.archive.org/web/19990117032727/http://www.google.com/ Ha--Google itself was "Beta" back then.
I come up with 10,482 bytes for Google and 18,720 bytes for Yahoo. That would be about 2 seconds vs. 4 seconds at 56k.
* In June 1999, Yahoo started using Google to power their search results. That's how good they were. That lasted until Feb. 2004.
> I recall reading that they would like to remove the "I'm feeling lucky"
> button (because no one uses it), but they can't. Users simply can't
> handle large changes.
Well that's an easy one to handle. Just remove it gradually. Every week, take off 1 letter.
I'm Feeling Lucky
I'm Feeling Luck
I'm Feeling Luc
I'm Feeling Lu
I'm Feeling L
etc.
In just a few short months the button will be worn down to a nub and can then be safely removed without causing stress for users.
Though I like to think it was due in part to the image I uploaded once I found there was no way to get rid of it. :-)
I did learn that you could go to "Editor's Picks" and scroll and the last one (hard to see, natch) which was "white" but then the text was still shadow-y which I think looked kinda cool on the logo but it made the small text almost impossible to read. (Not that I read the small text on the page, but it's annoying to have unreadable text visible.)
Maybe their next innovation will be background images on the search results pages. How cool would that be?!?!?
Looking at the "striking examples" I have to ask, does anyone other than 14-year-old gamers build computers anymore? Whatever happened to six flat sides? A basic cube-ish design is inexpensive to manufacture, easy to open up and get into, minimizes wasted space (are any of your components curvy? no? then your case shouldn't be either!) and you can easily lay it down, stand it up, or put things on top of it. I can understand no one wanting to put together a gallery of beige boxes but it would have been nice to see at least one clean example.
Wow. Nothing personal but I can't imagine how you've been nodded up... TWICE. What do you need to pay in the future? What has Apple announced they would do along these lines? You buy an iPad today and it will function as it does forever without ever talking to Apple again. Please specify exactly what functionality will get turned off if you don't send Apple money above and beyond the initial purchase price.
Considering that the JooJoo's manufacturer is likely to go out of business before the warranty expires on the first tablet they shipped, I'd go so far as to say that the iPad is a much safer investment.
Was the summary tl;dr for you? And for everyone who modded you up?
Although the security vulnerability was confined to AT&T servers, Apple bears responsibility for ensuring the privacy of its users, who must provide the company with their email addresses to activate their iPads. [emphasis added]
The JooJoo and the iPad are both $499. How is the JooJoo "way cheaper"?
Or maybe I just wrote in kind of a hurry, moved things back and forth, and didn't get around to changing one instance of his name to a pronoun since this is just a forum and not a dissertation. Mainly, I was just replying because the comment was +5 and Slashdot doesn't have a "-1, factually incorrect" mod. In other words, duty called. :-)
For the record: I loved Little Brother, couldn't even finish Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, thought Makers was pretty good, and thought Overclocked had some good bits but mostly wasn't that great. As for his general Internet writings: some good, some bad, some I totally agree with, some where I think he's way off. In other words, about like everyone else.
He may not credit Tim (or the masturbation guy) every single time he utters those words but he has indeed credited him:
For me -- for pretty much every writer -- the big problem isn't piracy, it's obscurity (thanks to Tim O'Reilly for this great aphorism).
But hey, don't let facts get in the way of slagging Cory. Do you realize how long it would take for Cory, or anyone, to talk if they had to cite the origin of every single thought they're expressing?
Another question with a non-obvious answer: you're going on a 100 mile trip. You drive the first 50 miles at 30mph. How fast do you have to drive for the rest of the trip to average 60mph the whole way?
Were any of them phones?
Also, the Clie runs Palm OS but it's a Sony product.
Again, 320x240, but thanks for trying. http://www.gsmarena.com/o2_xda_ii-697.php
How long after the iPhone came out before competitors had similar feature sets?
iPhone first demoed: January 2007
HTC G1/Dream w/ Android OS released: October 2008 (21 months later, 320x480 screen)
BlackBerry Storm released: November 2008 (22 months later, 320x480 screen)
Palm Pre first demoed: January 2009 (24 months later, 320x480 screen)
How long is the product development cycle for a smartphone, starting from zero?
Looks like about two years? They all had the hardware laying around and a bunch of engineers and coders on staff, they just had to arrange the pieces into something that looked like an iPhone and write a new UI and some apps.
I never said they "invented" the smartphone market. I said they defined the modern smartphone featureset . Watch the iPhone's introduction. Steve Jobs spends a good chunk of time talking about the differences between the iPhone and other major smartphones. I guarantee you every other manufacturer started planning iPhone act-alikes that afternoon. No other smartphone looked like that, no other smartphone had nearly as good of a browser.
I'm not trolling, I was being sincere. I will dissect your phones one by one. Note that names and models vary, names vary and are from this page.
Thanks for helping me prove my point.
"Palm pretty much defined the screen size for smart devices." The HUMAN palm, you mean. Of course the size is "pretty much" defined by the size of the hand and the technology available at the time. PDAs ranged from 160x160 (early Palm, yes I had one) to 640x480 (Dell Axim, among others; yes, I had one of those too) but NO ONE (AFAIK) made a screen that was 320x480 and within two years AFTER the iPhone's introduction we saw screens of that EXACT size from Palm, and BlackBerry, and your beloved HTC. Coincidence? If the iPhone was not being copied then why didn't we see more 640x480 phones being introduced in its wake? Hell, that's TWICE as many pixels as an iPhone and 640x480 handheld screens have been readily available for YEARS.
It might seem like a small difference buy you're missing my point. 352x416 is not the same as 320x480--besides being smaller, its aspect ratio is the almost-square 1.18:1 rather than the widescreen 320x480. ALL THREE of the phones I listed had screens EXACTLY the same resolution as the iPhone's in the first two years AFTER it was introduced. I'm not saying Apple had the first screen ever at that resolution or higher, I'm saying that no one else ever had a screen with those pixel dimensions and then all of a sudden EVERYONE did. They very much are trendsetters, just as when they were when they introduced the first widescreen laptop (the PowerBook G4) in 2001.
I myself had a Dell Axim X50v PDA in late 2006 at 640x480 (conventional 4:3 screen) which was double the iPhone's but the system UI (Windows mobile) was much, much worse so it wasn't a net benefit. What's the best thing to do with a gorgeous screen like that? Look at pictures! But the damn thing didn't even come with a decent photo viewing app. (Text, also, looked great at 200dpi.) Also, all mobile browsers, including Opera, sucked at the time. You can't even TRY to compare the capabilities of Opera in 2007 with Safari on the iPhone the same year.
And keyboards are a personal preference. I've had three phones with hardware keyboards (Nokia 6800, 6820, and a BlackBerry from work) and I vastly prefer soft keyboards (Apple's or Android's).
Anyone except the most rabid Apple hater will admit that Apple single-handedly defined the modern smartphone featureset, the main characteristics of which are a ~3.5" touch display at 320x480 and a very good web browser. Look at what was introduced AFTER the iPhone: the Palm Pre, HTC Dream, and BlackBerry Storm. Hmm, notice any similarities in the specs of those devices?
Right--just the same way that the iPod, once it started dominating the market, never got more features or space upgrades. Oh, wait...
I'll be honest: I'm happy with today's announcements but they are, for the most part, evolutionary--EXACTLY the kind of thing that would happen every year no matter how much competition there is or isn't. I'm sure the heat from the Android camp helps ensure that Apple keeps moving but to say that "none" of this would have happened is pretty far off. No sense mentioning that the initial release of an Android device was released almost two years after the iPhone was introduced--January 1997 -> October 2008--and that Apple revved the iPhone and its OS during that time--that is, BEFORE any competition EVEN EXISTED.
But sure, let's give Google all the credit for keeping things going.
I thought by "appointment" he meant "I need to be in my living room at 10pm on Wednesdays to watch South Park."
As for Hulu, given a choice between the two, I'd still rather have cable or satellite with ALL the channels and a PVR over Hulu with its relatively limited selection.
Now Kolakowski is trying to argue that because 'technically' she is routing her calls through Colorado from outside the state that her robodials are actually legal.
I guess she skipped the day in law school when they covered "the letter of the law vs. the spirit of the law."
I haven't watched 'traditional' television since I discovered hulu.com and bought a computer to drive my HDTV. I can't believe I used to be willing to make an appointment to watch a TV show.
If "making an appointment" is your definition of "traditional" television, then I haven't watched "traditional" television in the decade I've owned my TiVo.
I agree that it's big for a cell phone, but configure it for use as a house phone and I'd be all over it.