Murray: What do you got? Oscar Madison: I got, uh, brown sandwiches and, uh, green sandwiches. Which one do you want? Murray: What's the green? Oscar Madison: It's either very new cheese or very old meat. Murray: I'll take the brown.
This is something that Apple should easily be able to address should it decide to do so. Since the iPhone is running some version of Mac OS X, it should be more than possible for Apple to port the speech recognition engine already present in the full version running on Macs. The real question is whether it's something that could be addressed as a simple software upgrade, or whether it needs more processor power than the first generation iPhone hardware offers.
The elements of capacitive touchscreens (like the iPhone's) do not require direct contact, and are thus not on the protective lens over all embedded LCD displays, i.e., those in a product and not a raw module. The electrodes are typically laid down on either the front surface of the actual front glass of the display in a fashion no different than that for the circuitry on the rear (inside) of the front glass, or on a separate intermediate layer between the display front glass and the protective lens. The only way you're going to break a capacitive touchscreen is if you first break or remove the protective lens and then damage the surface of the display below it, or kill the sensing circuit with either a conductive liquid (shorting) or an electrostatic discharge that finds a path through the housing (gaps, ungrounded or insufficiently grounded metal, etc.).
Cell phone RF engineers hate external modules with a passion. It's bad enough trying to meet all the RF requirements (company internal, trade association, federal (SAR), carrier, etc.) today with a fixed housing design. Anything that has to hang on the outside of the phone just increases the complexity of the problem, because now the phone has to operate in n different physical configurations instead of just one (a candy-bar phone) or two (clam-shell, slider) with specific accessories (data cable, charger cable, wired headset) attached.
Now, if it can be internally modular -- like your standard desktop PC -- that's another story, because then everything can sit inside one, fixed Faraday cage like they do today.
I wouldn't necessarily say most of these are impossible, just very impractical to use and very expensive to design and engineer for any level of reliability. Which pretty much makes them impossible from a financial (R.O.I.) standpoint.
The official announcement many of us have already received is Firefox updating itself with the new release. Not much point in keeping it quiet if the Mozilla folks have already released it!
Don't confuse the standard Motorola UI with the OS it's running on, because Motorola is presently using something like three or four different operating systems running on several different cell phone chipsets. Supporting a common UI is akin to the work Apple has done porting Mac OS X to Intel. And you wonder why Motorola is so slow to change it?
Making an iTunes app that integrated into the existing OS wasn't as trivial as it sounds. Quote, "They had to deal with situations iTunes hadn't been designed for, like how to handle a text message and what to do when a call comes in while music is playing." RTF Wired article.
I'm sure Motorola would be happy to sell the phone to every carrier under the sun, since they're Motorola's real customers, not you and I (though we are the end users). The real question is, what carrier thinks its customer base (you and I again) will buy the phone?
If you were on AT&T or Cingular's old TDMA network, and are now on their GSM network, you're comparing apples and oranges. What is a well-covered, legacy TDMA area may still be a fringe GSM area as they continue to build out the system. The only way to make this a valid comparison would be if you were on the same network originally.
I'm well aware of that. I work in the cell phone industry, and we're still juggling the merits of including USB-To-Go support in our products (complicated -- google for Verizon and Motorola V710 Bluetooth discussions to get an idea, but it's not a hardware issue). But including USB-To-Go in the iPod Photo (which is already a USB 2.0 client device) with PictBridge support to pull the photos directly off a digital camera would seem to be a no-brainer. No extra hardware needed except a (relatively -- iPod connector on one end) standard cable. No problem with yet another memory card format showing up later.
I'll have to keep an eye out for a tear-down of the new unit. Who knows? Maybe the hardware's already capable of it, and Apple just needs to update the iPod Photo's OS.
Which format card reader would you put in? Compact flash? MMC/SD/Mini SD/TransFlash (last two with adapters)? Memory stick? xD? All of these are in common use in digital cameras (or camera phones, in the case of TransFlash), leaving Apple with three choices:
Put readers for all of them in, and grow the iPod photo even further (already noted that it's thicker than the 4G iPod)
Build multiple versions of the iPod photo, each with a different card reader to minimize size impact, but complicating manufacture, inventory, and marketing (40GB/SD, 60GB/xD, 40GB/Memory stick, etc.)
Leave the card reader out to keep things simple (and less expensive to manufacture and support), and let third parties fill in the gap with an external device -- possibly like a revised version of the existing Belkin card reader I'm not surprised Apple chose #3. Now, why Apple didn't design the iPod photo to download photos directly from a digital camera via a USB 2.0 cable, that's another question entirely...
Question: what products -- especially "high-tech" products -- from a century ago would you want to use today on a regular basis, given the alternatives? Not their decendents, e.g., modern jet aircraft, hybrid power-plant automobiles, digital cameras, etc., but the ones actually built a century ago? I suspect the list will be a rather short one, including buildings, furniture, typewriters (multipart forms, you know) and artwork/antiques.
My point is, planned obsolesence or no, technology does continue to advance, and it makes very little sense to design some products to endure more than a few years in normal use. Those "well-built" analog cell phones from just a few years ago will be nice paperweights in another couple of years when the carriers start phasing out their analog service.
A refridgerator is nothing. Most pieces of consumer-grade electronics (minus portable MP3 player hard disks, from what I've seen) are tested down to at least -10C, and often more. Your average refridgerator is around +4C.
Incorrect. There are a number of single-chip GPS solutions (here, (here, and article here), that are being integrated into GSM phones. There have been substantial problems reaching the FCC E911 requirements using only EOTD (Enhanced Observed Time Difference). And then there's the problem of those areas serviced by only a single cell, where the best location estimate only narrows the position down to an arc up to several miles long with radius x in one sector of the cell. Like long stretches of rural interstates, for example.
That's not to say that GPS-based solutions aren't without their problems. Picking up a GPS signal indoors in a steel-framed building is a substantial challenge, even with assisted GPS (where the cell system itself provides additional timing information to improved signal acquisition).
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Murray: What do you got?
Oscar Madison: I got, uh, brown sandwiches and, uh, green sandwiches. Which one do you want?
Murray: What's the green?
Oscar Madison: It's either very new cheese or very old meat.
Murray: I'll take the brown.
This is something that Apple should easily be able to address should it decide to do so. Since the iPhone is running some version of Mac OS X, it should be more than possible for Apple to port the speech recognition engine already present in the full version running on Macs. The real question is whether it's something that could be addressed as a simple software upgrade, or whether it needs more processor power than the first generation iPhone hardware offers.
The elements of capacitive touchscreens (like the iPhone's) do not require direct contact, and are thus not on the protective lens over all embedded LCD displays, i.e., those in a product and not a raw module. The electrodes are typically laid down on either the front surface of the actual front glass of the display in a fashion no different than that for the circuitry on the rear (inside) of the front glass, or on a separate intermediate layer between the display front glass and the protective lens. The only way you're going to break a capacitive touchscreen is if you first break or remove the protective lens and then damage the surface of the display below it, or kill the sensing circuit with either a conductive liquid (shorting) or an electrostatic discharge that finds a path through the housing (gaps, ungrounded or insufficiently grounded metal, etc.).
Slashdot has ads? Oh, wait. I'm using Firefox with AdBlock Plus installed. Let me fire up IE...
AAAAARGH! My eyes!
Cell phone RF engineers hate external modules with a passion. It's bad enough trying to meet all the RF requirements (company internal, trade association, federal (SAR), carrier, etc.) today with a fixed housing design. Anything that has to hang on the outside of the phone just increases the complexity of the problem, because now the phone has to operate in n different physical configurations instead of just one (a candy-bar phone) or two (clam-shell, slider) with specific accessories (data cable, charger cable, wired headset) attached. Now, if it can be internally modular -- like your standard desktop PC -- that's another story, because then everything can sit inside one, fixed Faraday cage like they do today.
I wouldn't necessarily say most of these are impossible, just very impractical to use and very expensive to design and engineer for any level of reliability. Which pretty much makes them impossible from a financial (R.O.I.) standpoint.
The official announcement many of us have already received is Firefox updating itself with the new release. Not much point in keeping it quiet if the Mozilla folks have already released it!
Don't confuse the standard Motorola UI with the OS it's running on, because Motorola is presently using something like three or four different operating systems running on several different cell phone chipsets. Supporting a common UI is akin to the work Apple has done porting Mac OS X to Intel. And you wonder why Motorola is so slow to change it?
Making an iTunes app that integrated into the existing OS wasn't as trivial as it sounds. Quote, "They had to deal with situations iTunes hadn't been designed for, like how to handle a text message and what to do when a call comes in while music is playing." RTF Wired article.
I'm sure Motorola would be happy to sell the phone to every carrier under the sun, since they're Motorola's real customers, not you and I (though we are the end users). The real question is, what carrier thinks its customer base (you and I again) will buy the phone?
If you were on AT&T or Cingular's old TDMA network, and are now on their GSM network, you're comparing apples and oranges. What is a well-covered, legacy TDMA area may still be a fringe GSM area as they continue to build out the system. The only way to make this a valid comparison would be if you were on the same network originally.
I'm well aware of that. I work in the cell phone industry, and we're still juggling the merits of including USB-To-Go support in our products (complicated -- google for Verizon and Motorola V710 Bluetooth discussions to get an idea, but it's not a hardware issue). But including USB-To-Go in the iPod Photo (which is already a USB 2.0 client device) with PictBridge support to pull the photos directly off a digital camera would seem to be a no-brainer. No extra hardware needed except a (relatively -- iPod connector on one end) standard cable. No problem with yet another memory card format showing up later.
I'll have to keep an eye out for a tear-down of the new unit. Who knows? Maybe the hardware's already capable of it, and Apple just needs to update the iPod Photo's OS.
If the reader was modular, you could put it in a dock -- third party opportunity again.
Put readers for all of them in, and grow the iPod photo even further (already noted that it's thicker than the 4G iPod)
Build multiple versions of the iPod photo, each with a different card reader to minimize size impact, but complicating manufacture, inventory, and marketing (40GB/SD, 60GB/xD, 40GB/Memory stick, etc.)
Leave the card reader out to keep things simple (and less expensive to manufacture and support), and let third parties fill in the gap with an external device -- possibly like a revised version of the existing Belkin card reader
I'm not surprised Apple chose #3. Now, why Apple didn't design the iPod photo to download photos directly from a digital camera via a USB 2.0 cable, that's another question entirely...
The iPod's already usable as a portable hard disk drive -- you just have to configure it.
Game Boy, my foot -- in my time, we had Mattel Electronic Football, and we liked it! Durn young whippersnappers!
Your wish may about to granted.
Question: what products -- especially "high-tech" products -- from a century ago would you want to use today on a regular basis, given the alternatives? Not their decendents, e.g., modern jet aircraft, hybrid power-plant automobiles, digital cameras, etc., but the ones actually built a century ago? I suspect the list will be a rather short one, including buildings, furniture, typewriters (multipart forms, you know) and artwork/antiques.
My point is, planned obsolesence or no, technology does continue to advance, and it makes very little sense to design some products to endure more than a few years in normal use. Those "well-built" analog cell phones from just a few years ago will be nice paperweights in another couple of years when the carriers start phasing out their analog service.
A refridgerator is nothing. Most pieces of consumer-grade electronics (minus portable MP3 player hard disks, from what I've seen) are tested down to at least -10C, and often more. Your average refridgerator is around +4C.
Incorrect. There are a number of single-chip GPS solutions (here, (here, and article here), that are being integrated into GSM phones. There have been substantial problems reaching the FCC E911 requirements using only EOTD (Enhanced Observed Time Difference). And then there's the problem of those areas serviced by only a single cell, where the best location estimate only narrows the position down to an arc up to several miles long with radius x in one sector of the cell. Like long stretches of rural interstates, for example.
That's not to say that GPS-based solutions aren't without their problems. Picking up a GPS signal indoors in a steel-framed building is a substantial challenge, even with assisted GPS (where the cell system itself provides additional timing information to improved signal acquisition).