You said "numbers from NPD, and it is now quite clear that you are full of shit and never had access to the (for pay only) NPD report. Microsoft did indeed lower their estimates from 3 million to 2.5 million, and then they missed their shipment estimates by more than half anyway.
Quite honestly, we don't know enough about the device yet to make any informed commentary. We're going to have to deal with six months of analysts talking out of their ass about it, and Apple fanboys/haters blathering on about how wonderful/awful it is without more than a basic overview of its functionality and no hands on UI experience. The 'specs' from Apple are a joke, and don't reveal the most basic of needed information. The details of the restrictions that will be placed on the device by Cingular are completely unknown. Until those things are known, it could go in any direction.
Anybody who talks about what is going to happen with the iPhone in certain terms at this point is an idiot.
You can't really have a quality camera phone. Not with dinky little lenses. The best CMOS sensor in the world is crippled when coupled with an itty bitty lens.
That depends on your definition of 'quality'. You can certainly have a phone that takes pictures of the same quality as the "credit-card sized" point and shoot cameras that are so popular these days. You're not going to take many incredible photographs with such a device, but it would be very useful. Doubly so if the phone's connectivity meant the photos were saved to your hard drive back home/at the office instantly. I have yet to see a phon-cam of this quality though.
If there's enough of a market for the cameraless model, I'm sure they'll offer it. It sounds like you wouldn't be able to bring this particular phone to work anyway though, and I'm guessing that most other workers that can't bring a camera are in the same situation.
Adding an HDMI port and harddrive capacity, while keeping the price the same, would ONLY compete with Sony, as it would only interest die-hard videophyles.
Implementation of such a hardware change would have started many months ago. Back when Nintendo still didn't register on Microsoft's radar.
The incentives to add HDMI (which costs a pretty penny, mind you)
It's only expensive because of the DRM, and I believe HDCP is already implemented inside the graphics chip for the 360 anyway... This means that the signals are already available, and all that was missing was the jack (and perhaps drivers). Dispite what high end AV equipment and cable vendors would like you to believe, HDMI is less expensive to implement than Component or S-Video because you don't need a RAMDAC.
the huge subsidies for each PS3 sale were not made for the sake of game sales alone. If they were, the PS3 would be better priced at $400. If Blu-Ray fails, Sony will have trouble recouping the cost of their massive PS3 subsidy.
I don't buy this. BluRay drives won't be expensive to produce for very long. Within a 18 months, BluRay readers will be in the $40-$50 range just like DVD drives were 18 months after they were released at $500 (Yes, BluRay drives only cost $500... That's for a burner). Sony would have been stupid not to put a blue laser player in the PS3, because the high subsidy will only be a subsidy at all for a small portion of the life of the system. They aren't going to be selling the system at a loss forever. Microsoft had a tougher decision on the matter since they shipped a year earlier, but for Sony it was a no brainer.
We are witnessing the death of Sony as we know it. With any luck they will rise again as the company they were in the 80s.
If it means they cede the gaming market to Microsoft, then I certainly hope not. Microsoft doesn't depend on gaming revenue, and never will. They just want leverage to get DRM royalties on every piece of media ever sold or downloaded until the end of time. That is the only reason the Xbox exists. Competition is good. Hopefully nobody loses the console war so badly that they exit the market.
If you compare only day 1, you're right. If you compare the first six weeks, you're wrong.
Microsoft didn't hit 1,000,000 in sales until the end of February. Sony hit 1,000,000 at the end of December. The 360 launched earlier in the year than the PS3 did.
Sure you can, we have been able to buy liquor on sundays for about 2 or 3 years now.
Only near state borders, and around the holidays....
What always gets me in New York is how insulted the liquor store owners get if you ask them if they have beer. It's always something like "What do we look like, a grocery store?"
Sony was counting on the PS3 to drive Blu-Ray into homes. Incorporating Blu-Ray into the PS3 was the primary reason Sony was having in getting their product to market.
Yes, but driving Blu-Ray into homes won't guarantee it's success. Look at how many people had DiVX capable DVD players, and that still failed horribly.
If Blu-Ray fails, it will be because of a lack of market penetration.
Here I think you are wrong. I think that Blu-Ray could fail for plenty of other reasons, and I think that the most likely reasons would be the introduction of a third, better format, the DRM of Blu-Ray being utterly and completely defeated, or a merger of the two formats. Any of those things could happen even if the PS3 sells as many units as the PS2 did.
Why are people who passionately claim to understand relativity incapable of comprehending the description of an event and the perception of that event from a third, unrelated frame of reference? Reconsider your definition of "already happened". Regardless of frame of reference, there are events that can no longer be altered, therefore they have already occurred, whether you can observe them yet or not.
Word is that they plan to add an HDMI port and a larger hard drive and keep the price the same instead of dropping the price.
Perhaps the current high end 360 will become the "core" though? Include a game like Nintendo does? Who knows. However you slice it, don't expect the price to change, only what comes in the box.
Oh how quickly people forget. Remember the 360 launch? It sucked. Hard. The sales pace made the PS3 look like a champ.
Am I saying this means Sony is going to win? No. But it is way too early to call this. What I will say though, is that if Microsoft writes off Sony at this point, Sony is going to eat their lunch and Microsoft will end up in third place again. Sony has far too much in terms of resources to be written off this early in the game. Microsoft isn't used to playing with people its own size.
Wait a year, then we'll have a reasonable idea of who might win.
Also, I think your point #1 is wrong. The PS3 is supposed to be what plows HD-DVD into the ground. They're not counting on Blu-Ray to make the PS3 successful. It's the other way around. Blu-Ray can fail without the PS3 failing.
Don't have sympathy for the voters in MA. They *asked* for this. The state has a progressive rep, but it's only for token issues. The gay marriage thing could still go either way. You can't buy alcohol on the weekend... Hell, a recent ballot question for selling wine in grocery stores was shot down. The voters here only care about stereotypical "issues" that haven't been an issue in the state in decades, and recently, the letter next to the candidate's name on the ballot.
The square format is new to WM5 and AFAIK the Pocket PC platform was a fixed resolution. [...] There are no versions of Pocket PC that allow for a square aspect ratio.
So 240x240 isn't square, but 320x320 is? Give me a break.
Also: PocketPC even back to when it was WinCE was *not* fixed resolution. It supported at least 320x240, 320x480, 640x480, and 720x480. I've personally never used it at resolutions other than those four, but I have personal experience with those four resolutions (Which represent 3 different aspect ratios).
WM5 brought in many different resolutions. This has made the developers lives a bit of a pain and a lot of old software needed updating to cope with the new ratios.
So your assertion is that the resolution needed to be reduced because of exceedingly poor software design that neglected the lessons of 30 years of graphical interfaces, and not because of the the licensing thing? Sorry, but I have a hard time buying that. Even Microsoft doesn't write code that crappy. It also doesn't explain why they were able to adapt it to 240x240, but not 320x320. It would have been the same amount of work to pick the higher resolution... Surely it would have been less work than changing the hardware.
What is your motivation for blind defense of the Windows Mobile platform anyway?
Not a troll, this is the new hip gadget for yuppies. It won't cut it, imho, for business use because no matter how many times Jobs says it, you really do need a keyboard.
Direct quote from the CEO of the company I currently work for: "Did you see Apple's new phone? As soon as those come out, I'm getting one"
It's also mac-centric, and thereby incompatible with most MS-house stuff (i.e. outlook).
For starters, they said it was iTunes based, so there should be no difference working with it on the mac or on a PC. It also says it has exchange support. The real question is whether it will do push e-mail without Yahoo! being involved. That will be the make-or-break feature for business use.
For me, if you can load apps onto it like you can a PalmOS Treo, I'll buy one. If it's all for-pay through the carrier then there isn't a chance in hell I'll ever own one.
It's not his fault. They don't teach programmers how to implement stateful software without a RDBMS anymore. It's too hard for the teachers and the students. You'd have to teach parsing, and all sorts of other theoretical computer science. Why do that when you can just learn SQL?
I wish they had a keyboard and display adapter for when you want to type lots of stuff into it
Don't current iPods have S-Video out for displaying photos on TVs?
Anyway, it's got Bluetooth, and runs OSX, so you will be able to use a bluetooth keyboard with it.
I'd love to know what the CPU is too. They're all intel friendly these days, otherwise I'd guess an embedded PPC. Intel just divested of the best product they had for this type of device when they sold xScale to Marvell, but this device was almost certainly under development before the deal. That means it probably has a 333Mhz xscale processor in it.
Also, if you can install any software you want on it (and I assume you can), it'll edit documents on release day even if it is by third party app.
I'm talking about compared to non-Windows Mobile devices, not compared to older Microsoft units.
For example, the Treo 700w (The windows mobile model) is identical to the Treo 700p (the PalmOS model) in every way, except that the 'p' has a 320x320 display, and the 'w' has a 240x240 display. Why? Because if you want more than 240x240, you have to license PocketPC instead of Windows Mobile for the device you are selling. The restrictions may be less strict for devices without a touch screen.
For me, Sprint customer service is just good enough for me to be able to tolerate it given the price. For the services I use, I'd pay twice as much on any other carrier, so I'm willing to put up with a certain level of crap. I am considering switching though, because I bought a new house, and Sprint doesn't work there.
Is that because everybody you know works at the same place you do? I'll make a bet with you that less than 10% of american workers have camera phone restrictions. Are you in?
Digital SLR cameras, however, are useless for 90% of everybody. A quality camera phone would be an excellent "adult" device. Who knows if the camera in the iPhone is any good though...
If it's an iPod too, you wouldn't be able to bring it in to work anyway. Or do you work for one of those moronic places that lets you bring USB storage devices in, but not cameras?
On the tech specs page it doesn't mention expansion (but it doesn't mention lot of other things too, like CPU and such), but the picture shows a slot in the side. Perhaps for a flash card?
Or the Apple iPhone that is just like the 50 or so Windows Mobile phones that have been on the market for the last what 3 years.
Sounds like somebody has never used a Windows Mobile smartphone.
Besides, Windows Mobile is intentionally crippled to not be this cool. It has a screen resolution limit, supposedly to differentiate itself from PocketPC.
They are playing catch up, but it's not like they had very far to go.
Slashdot Mirror
You said "numbers from NPD, and it is now quite clear that you are full of shit and never had access to the (for pay only) NPD report. Microsoft did indeed lower their estimates from 3 million to 2.5 million, and then they missed their shipment estimates by more than half anyway.
a unch-sales.png.
There is a graph of the actual NPD data here: http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v293/fotox/us-l
Enjoy.
Quite honestly, we don't know enough about the device yet to make any informed commentary. We're going to have to deal with six months of analysts talking out of their ass about it, and Apple fanboys/haters blathering on about how wonderful/awful it is without more than a basic overview of its functionality and no hands on UI experience. The 'specs' from Apple are a joke, and don't reveal the most basic of needed information. The details of the restrictions that will be placed on the device by Cingular are completely unknown. Until those things are known, it could go in any direction.
Anybody who talks about what is going to happen with the iPhone in certain terms at this point is an idiot.
1) We can. It's just not necessarly economic to pull it out.
Should read:
1) We can. It's just that the technology to do so is the same as the technology to make bombs, so it is politically unpopular to do it.
You can't really have a quality camera phone. Not with dinky little lenses. The best CMOS sensor in the world is crippled when coupled with an itty bitty lens.
That depends on your definition of 'quality'. You can certainly have a phone that takes pictures of the same quality as the "credit-card sized" point and shoot cameras that are so popular these days. You're not going to take many incredible photographs with such a device, but it would be very useful. Doubly so if the phone's connectivity meant the photos were saved to your hard drive back home/at the office instantly. I have yet to see a phon-cam of this quality though.
If there's enough of a market for the cameraless model, I'm sure they'll offer it. It sounds like you wouldn't be able to bring this particular phone to work anyway though, and I'm guessing that most other workers that can't bring a camera are in the same situation.
Adding an HDMI port and harddrive capacity, while keeping the price the same, would ONLY compete with Sony, as it would only interest die-hard videophyles.
Implementation of such a hardware change would have started many months ago. Back when Nintendo still didn't register on Microsoft's radar.
The incentives to add HDMI (which costs a pretty penny, mind you)
It's only expensive because of the DRM, and I believe HDCP is already implemented inside the graphics chip for the 360 anyway... This means that the signals are already available, and all that was missing was the jack (and perhaps drivers). Dispite what high end AV equipment and cable vendors would like you to believe, HDMI is less expensive to implement than Component or S-Video because you don't need a RAMDAC.
the huge subsidies for each PS3 sale were not made for the sake of game sales alone. If they were, the PS3 would be better priced at $400. If Blu-Ray fails, Sony will have trouble recouping the cost of their massive PS3 subsidy.
I don't buy this. BluRay drives won't be expensive to produce for very long. Within a 18 months, BluRay readers will be in the $40-$50 range just like DVD drives were 18 months after they were released at $500 (Yes, BluRay drives only cost $500... That's for a burner). Sony would have been stupid not to put a blue laser player in the PS3, because the high subsidy will only be a subsidy at all for a small portion of the life of the system. They aren't going to be selling the system at a loss forever. Microsoft had a tougher decision on the matter since they shipped a year earlier, but for Sony it was a no brainer.
We are witnessing the death of Sony as we know it. With any luck they will rise again as the company they were in the 80s.
If it means they cede the gaming market to Microsoft, then I certainly hope not. Microsoft doesn't depend on gaming revenue, and never will. They just want leverage to get DRM royalties on every piece of media ever sold or downloaded until the end of time. That is the only reason the Xbox exists. Competition is good. Hopefully nobody loses the console war so badly that they exit the market.
(Disclaimer: I own neither a PS3 nor an Xbox 360)
Link please? The report I have says they didn't even ship a million units until February.
If you compare only day 1, you're right. If you compare the first six weeks, you're wrong.
Microsoft didn't hit 1,000,000 in sales until the end of February. Sony hit 1,000,000 at the end of December. The 360 launched earlier in the year than the PS3 did.
Sure you can, we have been able to buy liquor on sundays for about 2 or 3 years now.
Only near state borders, and around the holidays....
What always gets me in New York is how insulted the liquor store owners get if you ask them if they have beer. It's always something like "What do we look like, a grocery store?"
Sony was counting on the PS3 to drive Blu-Ray into homes. Incorporating Blu-Ray into the PS3 was the primary reason Sony was having in getting their product to market.
Yes, but driving Blu-Ray into homes won't guarantee it's success. Look at how many people had DiVX capable DVD players, and that still failed horribly.
If Blu-Ray fails, it will be because of a lack of market penetration.
Here I think you are wrong. I think that Blu-Ray could fail for plenty of other reasons, and I think that the most likely reasons would be the introduction of a third, better format, the DRM of Blu-Ray being utterly and completely defeated, or a merger of the two formats. Any of those things could happen even if the PS3 sells as many units as the PS2 did.
Why are people who passionately claim to understand relativity incapable of comprehending the description of an event and the perception of that event from a third, unrelated frame of reference? Reconsider your definition of "already happened". Regardless of frame of reference, there are events that can no longer be altered, therefore they have already occurred, whether you can observe them yet or not.
Word is that they plan to add an HDMI port and a larger hard drive and keep the price the same instead of dropping the price.
Perhaps the current high end 360 will become the "core" though? Include a game like Nintendo does? Who knows. However you slice it, don't expect the price to change, only what comes in the box.
Oh how quickly people forget. Remember the 360 launch? It sucked. Hard. The sales pace made the PS3 look like a champ.
Am I saying this means Sony is going to win? No. But it is way too early to call this. What I will say though, is that if Microsoft writes off Sony at this point, Sony is going to eat their lunch and Microsoft will end up in third place again. Sony has far too much in terms of resources to be written off this early in the game. Microsoft isn't used to playing with people its own size.
Wait a year, then we'll have a reasonable idea of who might win.
Also, I think your point #1 is wrong. The PS3 is supposed to be what plows HD-DVD into the ground. They're not counting on Blu-Ray to make the PS3 successful. It's the other way around. Blu-Ray can fail without the PS3 failing.
Don't have sympathy for the voters in MA. They *asked* for this. The state has a progressive rep, but it's only for token issues. The gay marriage thing could still go either way. You can't buy alcohol on the weekend... Hell, a recent ballot question for selling wine in grocery stores was shot down. The voters here only care about stereotypical "issues" that haven't been an issue in the state in decades, and recently, the letter next to the candidate's name on the ballot.
The square format is new to WM5 and AFAIK the Pocket PC platform was a fixed resolution. [...] There are no versions of Pocket PC that allow for a square aspect ratio.
So 240x240 isn't square, but 320x320 is? Give me a break.
Also: PocketPC even back to when it was WinCE was *not* fixed resolution. It supported at least 320x240, 320x480, 640x480, and 720x480. I've personally never used it at resolutions other than those four, but I have personal experience with those four resolutions (Which represent 3 different aspect ratios).
WM5 brought in many different resolutions. This has made the developers lives a bit of a pain and a lot of old software needed updating to cope with the new ratios.
So your assertion is that the resolution needed to be reduced because of exceedingly poor software design that neglected the lessons of 30 years of graphical interfaces, and not because of the the licensing thing? Sorry, but I have a hard time buying that. Even Microsoft doesn't write code that crappy. It also doesn't explain why they were able to adapt it to 240x240, but not 320x320. It would have been the same amount of work to pick the higher resolution... Surely it would have been less work than changing the hardware.
What is your motivation for blind defense of the Windows Mobile platform anyway?
Not a troll, this is the new hip gadget for yuppies. It won't cut it, imho, for business use because no matter how many times Jobs says it, you really do need a keyboard.
Direct quote from the CEO of the company I currently work for: "Did you see Apple's new phone? As soon as those come out, I'm getting one"
It's also mac-centric, and thereby incompatible with most MS-house stuff (i.e. outlook).
For starters, they said it was iTunes based, so there should be no difference working with it on the mac or on a PC. It also says it has exchange support. The real question is whether it will do push e-mail without Yahoo! being involved. That will be the make-or-break feature for business use.
For me, if you can load apps onto it like you can a PalmOS Treo, I'll buy one. If it's all for-pay through the carrier then there isn't a chance in hell I'll ever own one.
It's not his fault. They don't teach programmers how to implement stateful software without a RDBMS anymore. It's too hard for the teachers and the students. You'd have to teach parsing, and all sorts of other theoretical computer science. Why do that when you can just learn SQL?
I wish they had a keyboard and display adapter for when you want to type lots of stuff into it
Don't current iPods have S-Video out for displaying photos on TVs?
Anyway, it's got Bluetooth, and runs OSX, so you will be able to use a bluetooth keyboard with it.
I'd love to know what the CPU is too. They're all intel friendly these days, otherwise I'd guess an embedded PPC. Intel just divested of the best product they had for this type of device when they sold xScale to Marvell, but this device was almost certainly under development before the deal. That means it probably has a 333Mhz xscale processor in it.
Also, if you can install any software you want on it (and I assume you can), it'll edit documents on release day even if it is by third party app.
I'm talking about compared to non-Windows Mobile devices, not compared to older Microsoft units.
For example, the Treo 700w (The windows mobile model) is identical to the Treo 700p (the PalmOS model) in every way, except that the 'p' has a 320x320 display, and the 'w' has a 240x240 display. Why? Because if you want more than 240x240, you have to license PocketPC instead of Windows Mobile for the device you are selling. The restrictions may be less strict for devices without a touch screen.
You can't take a camera phone into some cinemas now.
Yes you can. You just can't use it in there. Very few theaters make you check your phone at the door.
For me, Sprint customer service is just good enough for me to be able to tolerate it given the price. For the services I use, I'd pay twice as much on any other carrier, so I'm willing to put up with a certain level of crap. I am considering switching though, because I bought a new house, and Sprint doesn't work there.
Is that because everybody you know works at the same place you do? I'll make a bet with you that less than 10% of american workers have camera phone restrictions. Are you in?
Digital SLR cameras, however, are useless for 90% of everybody. A quality camera phone would be an excellent "adult" device. Who knows if the camera in the iPhone is any good though...
If it's an iPod too, you wouldn't be able to bring it in to work anyway. Or do you work for one of those moronic places that lets you bring USB storage devices in, but not cameras?
On the tech specs page it doesn't mention expansion (but it doesn't mention lot of other things too, like CPU and such), but the picture shows a slot in the side. Perhaps for a flash card?
On my Sprint Treo, the unlimited data is $15.
$30 is unreasonable.
Or the Apple iPhone that is just like the 50 or so Windows Mobile phones that have been on the market for the last what 3 years.
Sounds like somebody has never used a Windows Mobile smartphone.
Besides, Windows Mobile is intentionally crippled to not be this cool. It has a screen resolution limit, supposedly to differentiate itself from PocketPC.
They are playing catch up, but it's not like they had very far to go.