Phone service isn't any cheaper if you already own the phone. You might as well take the subsidy, since there's only one carrier the phone works with anyway.
The iPhone ties you to an expensive plan that you probably don't need. Without that, you can switch plans as you like and even get prepaid, usually a much cheaper option. And in some places, you now actually get a discount for the same plan if you don't get a phone.
Caused them to come into existence with an emphasis on user experience
You got your history backwards. Palm and Danger preceded iPhone by years. Danger in particular had a stellar user experience: you took the thing out the box and it just worked and synced automatically. Android was bought by Google in 2005, two years before the iPhone release.
The problem is that it also turns color when you don't dunk it in water.
And where is this going to end? Is the device going to keep a permanent record of its GPS coordinates and accelerometer readings? Is Apple going to start recording all the sounds around the phone to make sure that it wasn't used in the commission of a crime?
It's a win-win as far as industry is concerned: you have to replace your equipment, you have to buy all your movies again, they get to control the content in perpetuity in violation of copyright law, and they can threaten you with lawsuits for obscene awards and even win. And since it's collusion within an oligopoly, you have nowhere else to go. And it's all legal (after bribing politicians sufficiently well). Why wouldn't they like it?
And the 16GB version was invalid because... oh yes, you simply cherry picked the most expensive thing possible.
It wasn't being offered on the site where I went. Another site offers it for EU 800 = $1080. An unlocked HTC Tattoo or Samsung I7500 will set you back a mere EU 220 in Europe. Add a 16GB microSD card for EU 35.
Even if the iPhone were a nicer phone, it's not worth 3x the money.
Or of course there's the simple fact that you discount the value in buying a subsidized phone when you have to have mobile phone service anyway...
You pay for it either directly or through excessively high phone charges; your pick.
And with that, I leave you to your delusions while I sit in a world that contains the Nexus, Droid, "Windows 7 Series" and iPhone.
I don't see what the iPhone has to do with these other phone platforms. Oh, wait, I do: iPhone copied liberally from them (in the case of Android, its prior versions, Palm and Danger). But, as always, all Apple cared about was a pretty exterior, which is why Android and Windows have nice, modern software platforms, while iPhone still runs Objective-C.
The article leaves out quite a bit of the history of digital paint programs. This article contains a good summary (although it also leaves out yet other work).
Just out of curiosity, what did you think was $1200 unlocked? That was quite amusing.
That's the unlocked price in Europe for a 32G 3GS (where you can actually buy it unlocked): EU 900 = $1200.
However what is far more amusing, is how your statements will all look in a year or so... sort of like the guys who thought fire was a bad idea because the caves got too smokey.
You're still laboring under the assumption that shipping one widget on one device and not on another represents some kind of deep technical advancement. That's ridiculous.
Despite the buzz it has generated, Apple's iPhone has not advanced mobile phone technology in any significant way. The real innovators have been Danger, Android, and Palm. Danger and Palm is where much of the iPhone design comes from and Apple will slowly copy more of their features like managed code, intents, and web-based development if they prove to work well in practice.
The mathematics of PageRank go back a century. There have been many different applications since then, including to hypertext and the web. From Wikipedia:
PageRank has been influenced by citation analysis, early developed by Eugene Garfield in the 1950s at the University of Pennsylvania, and by Hyper Search, developed by Massimo Marchiori at the University of Padua (Google's founders cite Garfield's and Marchiori's works in their original paper[5]).
As such, the algorithm wasn't new, but Google was the first to build a working, large-scale search engine around it.
So why clutter the conceptual space (that is the harm right there)? It's just more you have to wade through when thinking of GUI's for smaller devices vs. larger ones.
So instead every iPhone OS book is going to be cluttered up with little side-boxes "[!] this widget only exists on iPad"?
Every iPhone programmer has to ignore about 95% of the iPhone APIs when writing any particular application because they just don't need it. Not using a couple more widgets isn't going to make any difference.
Continue to live your life in blissful ignorance while the world moves on past you
With what? A souped-up NeXTStep, a $1200 unlocked device, low res screen, and 1% market share. I'm shaking in my boots, I tell you.
Apple inherited those from the desktop UI; that doesn't mean that they are working for phones.
Fact is that Apple chose to limit screen sizes and geometries, because Apple (unlike "epic idiots" like you) understands that small screen devices don't scale particularly well.
Apple's choice was the correct one. What is so stupid is that Apple fanboys like you are trying to have it both ways.
It is a different approach than the other devices makers are taking, which is the traditional approach of supplying the same frameworks no matter the device size (i.e. Android tablets still use exactly the same Android GUI frameworks the smaller devices use).
Why have two different versions? If some GUI elements don't work on small screens, programmers don't have to use them; no harm done. It can even be documented in the programming guidelines which widgets are recommended on which size.
Is that intellectually too taxing for iPhone programmers? Don't iPhone programmers test their GUIs?
How exactly are the existing tools "not mature"? Remember these inherit not just from behaviors that were around since OS X 10.1, but even to some extent from NeXT before that!
NeXT was a desktop operating system, and so is OSX. So, iPhone inherited resizing functionality in the toolkit, but it was never adapted to small screens or phones. Hence, iPhone has resizing, but Apple isn't enabling it because it probably wouldn't really work well for users.
Cheap shot and ill-deserved I would say given the deliberation I have given the topic along with lending expertise to the discussion.
It's not a cheap shot at all; Apple is point-for-point in the same situation as other manufacturers, but you're trying to spin it like Apple reinvented phone UIs from the ground up.
Mr. Microsoft Program Manager, here's a piece of advice for you: Windows would be a lot more secure and a lot easier and more pleasant to use if you fixed your shallow bugs first. Trust me, there are so many of them, you'll be busy for years to come. Once you have those under control, they talk to us about deep bugs and program correctness and what Linux can do better, OK?
Oh, and of course Apple's path shows planning. I mean, Apple isn't stupid, they know what it takes to get a platform to market quickly. If they had spent another couple of years trying to get iPhone to work on different screen sizes, they would have missed the market. That doesn't change anything I said: Apple has been following the same path as other mobile OS platforms and they'll end up with the same mess on their hands in the long term.
Apple inherited some resizing capabilities from their desktop platform, but they were fully aware that it wasn't mature enough for small screen devices, so they stuck to a single size. So, parts of their software support arbitrary sizes, parts work via rescaling, and others are specific to a couple of pre-defined sizes in their product palette (since they only have two devices, that's not really rocket science).
Really, it's exactly the same as other mobile platforms. Android has 320x480 and 480x800 (with a little extra on the Droid), although Android scales fairly well to larger screens as well.
Aren't you getting dizzy with all your Apple spin?
In different words, Apple is following the same trajectory as previous mobile platforms: start off with a single screen size and a whole bunch of simple assumptions, and then try to patch things up as additional demands become apparent.
That's a great way of getting into the market, but it's a bad long term strategy. If you want to see where that kind of attitude leads, look at the last years of MacOS before it expired.
Mobile operators don't fight "fragmentation", what they fight is their loss of control. With Android and iPhone, the era of operator-controlled feature phones is coming to an end even in the US. They don't want to become the dumb pipes and commodity service that by all rights they should become.
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Really? Where do you get a free iPhone?
Phone service isn't any cheaper if you already own the phone. You might as well take the subsidy, since there's only one carrier the phone works with anyway.
The iPhone ties you to an expensive plan that you probably don't need. Without that, you can switch plans as you like and even get prepaid, usually a much cheaper option. And in some places, you now actually get a discount for the same plan if you don't get a phone.
Caused them to come into existence with an emphasis on user experience
You got your history backwards. Palm and Danger preceded iPhone by years. Danger in particular had a stellar user experience: you took the thing out the box and it just worked and synced automatically. Android was bought by Google in 2005, two years before the iPhone release.
The problem is that it also turns color when you don't dunk it in water.
And where is this going to end? Is the device going to keep a permanent record of its GPS coordinates and accelerometer readings? Is Apple going to start recording all the sounds around the phone to make sure that it wasn't used in the commission of a crime?
It's a win-win as far as industry is concerned: you have to replace your equipment, you have to buy all your movies again, they get to control the content in perpetuity in violation of copyright law, and they can threaten you with lawsuits for obscene awards and even win. And since it's collusion within an oligopoly, you have nowhere else to go. And it's all legal (after bribing politicians sufficiently well). Why wouldn't they like it?
My god, it's the Crushinator.
Sarah Palin will not have sex with you.
That's a relief.
Why don't you get a different phone, one that actually has a decent mail client?
Companies like Google buy small companies mainly for the people. Think of it as a big hiring bonus.
I suspect other than that, reMail simply didn't figure in any of their business plans.
And the 16GB version was invalid because... oh yes, you simply cherry picked the most expensive thing possible.
It wasn't being offered on the site where I went. Another site offers it for EU 800 = $1080. An unlocked HTC Tattoo or Samsung I7500 will set you back a mere EU 220 in Europe. Add a 16GB microSD card for EU 35.
Even if the iPhone were a nicer phone, it's not worth 3x the money.
Or of course there's the simple fact that you discount the value in buying a subsidized phone when you have to have mobile phone service anyway...
You pay for it either directly or through excessively high phone charges; your pick.
And with that, I leave you to your delusions while I sit in a world that contains the Nexus, Droid, "Windows 7 Series" and iPhone.
I don't see what the iPhone has to do with these other phone platforms. Oh, wait, I do: iPhone copied liberally from them (in the case of Android, its prior versions, Palm and Danger). But, as always, all Apple cared about was a pretty exterior, which is why Android and Windows have nice, modern software platforms, while iPhone still runs Objective-C.
Here's another interesting discussion of prior art:
SIGGRAPH
The article leaves out quite a bit of the history of digital paint programs. This article contains a good summary (although it also leaves out yet other work).
Like porridge, privacy has to be just right: neither too much nor too little of it is good.
Just out of curiosity, what did you think was $1200 unlocked? That was quite amusing.
That's the unlocked price in Europe for a 32G 3GS (where you can actually buy it unlocked): EU 900 = $1200.
However what is far more amusing, is how your statements will all look in a year or so... sort of like the guys who thought fire was a bad idea because the caves got too smokey.
You're still laboring under the assumption that shipping one widget on one device and not on another represents some kind of deep technical advancement. That's ridiculous.
Despite the buzz it has generated, Apple's iPhone has not advanced mobile phone technology in any significant way. The real innovators have been Danger, Android, and Palm. Danger and Palm is where much of the iPhone design comes from and Apple will slowly copy more of their features like managed code, intents, and web-based development if they prove to work well in practice.
The mathematics of PageRank go back a century. There have been many different applications since then, including to hypertext and the web. From Wikipedia:
As such, the algorithm wasn't new, but Google was the first to build a working, large-scale search engine around it.
So why clutter the conceptual space (that is the harm right there)? It's just more you have to wade through when thinking of GUI's for smaller devices vs. larger ones.
So instead every iPhone OS book is going to be cluttered up with little side-boxes "[!] this widget only exists on iPad"?
Every iPhone programmer has to ignore about 95% of the iPhone APIs when writing any particular application because they just don't need it. Not using a couple more widgets isn't going to make any difference.
Continue to live your life in blissful ignorance while the world moves on past you
With what? A souped-up NeXTStep, a $1200 unlocked device, low res screen, and 1% market share. I'm shaking in my boots, I tell you.
Apple inherited those from the desktop UI; that doesn't mean that they are working for phones.
Fact is that Apple chose to limit screen sizes and geometries, because Apple (unlike "epic idiots" like you) understands that small screen devices don't scale particularly well.
Apple's choice was the correct one. What is so stupid is that Apple fanboys like you are trying to have it both ways.
Get FlashBlock or NoScript to turn off flash altogether.
Get BetterPrivacy to automatically delete Flash cookies on exit; it seems to work well.
It is a different approach than the other devices makers are taking, which is the traditional approach of supplying the same frameworks no matter the device size (i.e. Android tablets still use exactly the same Android GUI frameworks the smaller devices use).
Why have two different versions? If some GUI elements don't work on small screens, programmers don't have to use them; no harm done. It can even be documented in the programming guidelines which widgets are recommended on which size.
Is that intellectually too taxing for iPhone programmers? Don't iPhone programmers test their GUIs?
How exactly are the existing tools "not mature"? Remember these inherit not just from behaviors that were around since OS X 10.1, but even to some extent from NeXT before that!
NeXT was a desktop operating system, and so is OSX. So, iPhone inherited resizing functionality in the toolkit, but it was never adapted to small screens or phones. Hence, iPhone has resizing, but Apple isn't enabling it because it probably wouldn't really work well for users.
Cheap shot and ill-deserved I would say given the deliberation I have given the topic along with lending expertise to the discussion.
It's not a cheap shot at all; Apple is point-for-point in the same situation as other manufacturers, but you're trying to spin it like Apple reinvented phone UIs from the ground up.
Mr. Microsoft Program Manager, here's a piece of advice for you: Windows would be a lot more secure and a lot easier and more pleasant to use if you fixed your shallow bugs first. Trust me, there are so many of them, you'll be busy for years to come. Once you have those under control, they talk to us about deep bugs and program correctness and what Linux can do better, OK?
Oh, and of course Apple's path shows planning. I mean, Apple isn't stupid, they know what it takes to get a platform to market quickly. If they had spent another couple of years trying to get iPhone to work on different screen sizes, they would have missed the market. That doesn't change anything I said: Apple has been following the same path as other mobile OS platforms and they'll end up with the same mess on their hands in the long term.
Apple inherited some resizing capabilities from their desktop platform, but they were fully aware that it wasn't mature enough for small screen devices, so they stuck to a single size. So, parts of their software support arbitrary sizes, parts work via rescaling, and others are specific to a couple of pre-defined sizes in their product palette (since they only have two devices, that's not really rocket science).
Really, it's exactly the same as other mobile platforms. Android has 320x480 and 480x800 (with a little extra on the Droid), although Android scales fairly well to larger screens as well.
Aren't you getting dizzy with all your Apple spin?
In different words, Apple is following the same trajectory as previous mobile platforms: start off with a single screen size and a whole bunch of simple assumptions, and then try to patch things up as additional demands become apparent.
That's a great way of getting into the market, but it's a bad long term strategy. If you want to see where that kind of attitude leads, look at the last years of MacOS before it expired.
Mobile operators don't fight "fragmentation", what they fight is their loss of control. With Android and iPhone, the era of operator-controlled feature phones is coming to an end even in the US. They don't want to become the dumb pipes and commodity service that by all rights they should become.
Legally, it is OK if you plagiarize JK Rowling since there is no law against plagiarism.
You should, however, not violate her copyright, since there are laws against copyright violation.
Copyright violation != plagiarism.