I was actually just about to start porting an SVG applet I wrote to IE, and was not looking forward to it. After about 10 minutes of fiddling with this google project I got it up and running in IE! Google probably saved me at least a few days of work this week, and probably quite a bit more in the future! Thank you google!
That's bullshit, I just developed an application in SVG because the devices it will be run on do not support flash, but they can run Firefox. It runs like a charm, and on an actual computer it runs faster than flash. SVG may seem to have been outdated, but perhaps that's just because the steam behind it ran out for a few years -untill now-. Safari, Firefox, and Opera each have very competent implementations of SVG, and the fact that you don't need to deal with a plug-in and can tightly integrate SVG with HTML/etc. gives it an easy advantage over Flash in my mind. If you say SVG doesn't matter, what do you think does? Flash???
That's BS, the Adobe SVG viewer is terrible. Perhaps at the time it was good, but now it still remains basically the only SVG plug-in for IE and I have yet to see it render any SVG properly other than the SVGs created by Adobe software.... Not to mention if you include a script in your SVG the Adobe plug-in will immediately lock up or just crash on loading.
If you subscribe to a service contract on most services they will subsidies the cost. I use Softbank (Japan), the cost of my phone in cash would be close to $900 if you converted to US currency, but it's completely free with my 2 year service contract (I have unlimited internet, cheap calling, and a variety of other services so averaging $450 a year is nothing). If I cancel the contract I pay the remainder. The same is true for the iPhone, I think I heard you get it for several hundred dollars in the US but without a service contract the device is outrageously expensive, no?
I never thought about it that much, but now that you mention it I know 3 people who have iPhones, and all 3 of them have separate phones (one has another phone on SoftBank, the other two have AU phones). We have an iPhone here in my office for development, but anybody is free to take it an use it as they please (the company pays for employee phone service anyway) - yet nobody has ever done more than take it with them to the coffee shop down the street and surfed the web or fidgeted with it. To us the device is simply a novelty, and I've personally yet to be able to use it efficiently as a communication device (mail on the iPhone in Japanese is obscenely difficult compared to traditional keypad entry). I've mentioned this before in a post above, but the lack of IC for things like digital train pass and digital wallet services is a big factor as well. I haven't purchased anything at a convenience store with cash in at least a year, I just use the IC on my phone (Edy or NaNa). Many vending machines support IC as well, not to mention entertainment centers etc. I have a feeling people keeping another phone in addition to the iPhone may have a lot to do with this as well - IC functionality if you start using it makes life a lot easier.
What cell phone other than the iPhone is even produced in the US?
Also, European cell phones are generally junk. Those Nokia phones are amazingly crappy.
I'm a Japanese mobile developer, and I have developed for a wide variety of Japanese handsets as well as the iPhone. The iPhone here was in a variety of ways inferior to national models, it had a poor camera and text is extremely hard to enter, not to mention it has no One-Seg TV tuner and no IC functionality for digital-wallet capabilities. The 3G was so unpopular for a while that Softbank basically had to start giving them away for free and offering a reduced price unlimited data plan - which made the handset popular enough they were able to clear out their stock. The 3Gs has a variety of features that produce less of a gap to how many Japanese like to use their phones, there is now video functionality etc. Also, the iPhone is quite powerful, the 3Gs having an nice high end ARM processor and a separate OpenGL ES 2.0 module. This allows for a variety of powerful applications, and make the iPhone a direct competitor to the Real3D POP-I standard phones and their architectures (such as the 930P with the UNIPHIER and 930SH with their ARM core and separate OpenGL ES module). Furthermore, from a development standpoint the iPhone has a pretty solid development environment whereas standard Japanese handsets use Mobile Java for cross-handset compatibility.
As a personal viewpoint, I don't see the 3Gs maintaining such a high lead for an extended period of time. Japanese consumers purchase phones based on the feature sets, and each handset has a variety of unique features: say a high quality digital camera, 3D display, highly integrated digital media player functions, fully waterproof and ultra-durable, etc. Once a phone comes out with a unique and attractive feature, the consumer base who are obtaining new handsets will begin purchasing those handsets instead of the iPhone. Personally I use the IC digital wallet features on my phone constantly, I convert videos for my children to watch into standard mp4 files (without iTunes) and my phone plays them very well, and I watch the news 3 or 4 days a week while I take a coffee or tea break in the afternoon regardless of where I am. I play games on my phone all the time, but the lack of buttons on the iPhone makes playing the kind games I like hard to play on the iPhone. It's that same lack of buttons and the terrible input system on the iPhone that makes writing e-mail, something I do many times each day, absolutely awful on the iPhone. So, despite the fact we have a 3Gs right here on the desk for development which, if I chose I could take with me and use whenever I wanted, I don't. To be perfectly honest the only thing I like about the iPhone is the fact the development environment is well put together, it isn't Mobile Java, and I don't need to worry about checking my application on a variety of handsets to make sure it works. The built in Safari browser is nice too, but as there are options like the Jig browser on normal handsets it's not really a deal breaker for me.
Many Japanese phones, including my own (the 930P http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoftBank_930P) run embedded real-time Linux. To find a phone that is running Linux, you simply need to check the MOAP type, MOAP(L) is Linux. Linux is not at all unpopular here, and we actually have several spin off distributions which are maintained within Japan. The other popular embedded RTOS here is iTRON, and there are actually implementations that allow iTRON and embedded Linux to inter-operate within the same device, often using Linux to provide the user interface and peripheral functions and a separate module with a separate core running all the core communication functions.
I find the rest of your commend generally uneducated and your stereotypes highly inaccurate.
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I was actually just about to start porting an SVG applet I wrote to IE, and was not looking forward to it. After about 10 minutes of fiddling with this google project I got it up and running in IE! Google probably saved me at least a few days of work this week, and probably quite a bit more in the future! Thank you google!
That's bullshit, I just developed an application in SVG because the devices it will be run on do not support flash, but they can run Firefox. It runs like a charm, and on an actual computer it runs faster than flash. SVG may seem to have been outdated, but perhaps that's just because the steam behind it ran out for a few years -untill now-. Safari, Firefox, and Opera each have very competent implementations of SVG, and the fact that you don't need to deal with a plug-in and can tightly integrate SVG with HTML/etc. gives it an easy advantage over Flash in my mind. If you say SVG doesn't matter, what do you think does? Flash???
That's BS, the Adobe SVG viewer is terrible. Perhaps at the time it was good, but now it still remains basically the only SVG plug-in for IE and I have yet to see it render any SVG properly other than the SVGs created by Adobe software.... Not to mention if you include a script in your SVG the Adobe plug-in will immediately lock up or just crash on loading.
If you subscribe to a service contract on most services they will subsidies the cost. I use Softbank (Japan), the cost of my phone in cash would be close to $900 if you converted to US currency, but it's completely free with my 2 year service contract (I have unlimited internet, cheap calling, and a variety of other services so averaging $450 a year is nothing). If I cancel the contract I pay the remainder. The same is true for the iPhone, I think I heard you get it for several hundred dollars in the US but without a service contract the device is outrageously expensive, no?
I never thought about it that much, but now that you mention it I know 3 people who have iPhones, and all 3 of them have separate phones (one has another phone on SoftBank, the other two have AU phones). We have an iPhone here in my office for development, but anybody is free to take it an use it as they please (the company pays for employee phone service anyway) - yet nobody has ever done more than take it with them to the coffee shop down the street and surfed the web or fidgeted with it. To us the device is simply a novelty, and I've personally yet to be able to use it efficiently as a communication device (mail on the iPhone in Japanese is obscenely difficult compared to traditional keypad entry). I've mentioned this before in a post above, but the lack of IC for things like digital train pass and digital wallet services is a big factor as well. I haven't purchased anything at a convenience store with cash in at least a year, I just use the IC on my phone (Edy or NaNa). Many vending machines support IC as well, not to mention entertainment centers etc. I have a feeling people keeping another phone in addition to the iPhone may have a lot to do with this as well - IC functionality if you start using it makes life a lot easier.
What cell phone other than the iPhone is even produced in the US? Also, European cell phones are generally junk. Those Nokia phones are amazingly crappy.
I'm a Japanese mobile developer, and I have developed for a wide variety of Japanese handsets as well as the iPhone. The iPhone here was in a variety of ways inferior to national models, it had a poor camera and text is extremely hard to enter, not to mention it has no One-Seg TV tuner and no IC functionality for digital-wallet capabilities. The 3G was so unpopular for a while that Softbank basically had to start giving them away for free and offering a reduced price unlimited data plan - which made the handset popular enough they were able to clear out their stock. The 3Gs has a variety of features that produce less of a gap to how many Japanese like to use their phones, there is now video functionality etc. Also, the iPhone is quite powerful, the 3Gs having an nice high end ARM processor and a separate OpenGL ES 2.0 module. This allows for a variety of powerful applications, and make the iPhone a direct competitor to the Real3D POP-I standard phones and their architectures (such as the 930P with the UNIPHIER and 930SH with their ARM core and separate OpenGL ES module). Furthermore, from a development standpoint the iPhone has a pretty solid development environment whereas standard Japanese handsets use Mobile Java for cross-handset compatibility. As a personal viewpoint, I don't see the 3Gs maintaining such a high lead for an extended period of time. Japanese consumers purchase phones based on the feature sets, and each handset has a variety of unique features: say a high quality digital camera, 3D display, highly integrated digital media player functions, fully waterproof and ultra-durable, etc. Once a phone comes out with a unique and attractive feature, the consumer base who are obtaining new handsets will begin purchasing those handsets instead of the iPhone. Personally I use the IC digital wallet features on my phone constantly, I convert videos for my children to watch into standard mp4 files (without iTunes) and my phone plays them very well, and I watch the news 3 or 4 days a week while I take a coffee or tea break in the afternoon regardless of where I am. I play games on my phone all the time, but the lack of buttons on the iPhone makes playing the kind games I like hard to play on the iPhone. It's that same lack of buttons and the terrible input system on the iPhone that makes writing e-mail, something I do many times each day, absolutely awful on the iPhone. So, despite the fact we have a 3Gs right here on the desk for development which, if I chose I could take with me and use whenever I wanted, I don't. To be perfectly honest the only thing I like about the iPhone is the fact the development environment is well put together, it isn't Mobile Java, and I don't need to worry about checking my application on a variety of handsets to make sure it works. The built in Safari browser is nice too, but as there are options like the Jig browser on normal handsets it's not really a deal breaker for me.
Many Japanese phones, including my own (the 930P http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoftBank_930P) run embedded real-time Linux. To find a phone that is running Linux, you simply need to check the MOAP type, MOAP(L) is Linux. Linux is not at all unpopular here, and we actually have several spin off distributions which are maintained within Japan. The other popular embedded RTOS here is iTRON, and there are actually implementations that allow iTRON and embedded Linux to inter-operate within the same device, often using Linux to provide the user interface and peripheral functions and a separate module with a separate core running all the core communication functions. I find the rest of your commend generally uneducated and your stereotypes highly inaccurate.