But it wasn't Facebook vs X-Factor. Facebook was the primary (though not only) medium through which this was organised, but Facebook themselves didn't start it (or indeed involve themselves in anyway).
Yes, there is the wider point that I dislike the walled garden approach of sites like Facebook. But that doesn't mean people should shun tools where they might be useful. And I acknowledge that this sort of thing is one of the things that Facebook is very good for.
(As soon as I saw this article, I knew that the tired anti-Facebook groupthink that people have here on Slashdot would dominate. If Facebook hadn't been involved, everyone would be amused by it, not hating it.)
Is that you, Alanis? And yep, I won't do what people tell you - I'll start by not listening to you.
This "argument" is no better than telling a RATM fan to "breathe", and then saying "haha you're doing what I told you" when they breathe. Funny perhaps for a second, but it isn't actually an argument.
Clearly the song isn't about not doing anything that someone else says. By that logic, people could just as much say they were responding to people who told them not to buy RATM. And surely, if people don't do what they are told, aren't they just doing what the song told them to? So by doing what they're told, they're not doing what the song told them to. It's obviously paradoxical. Not to mention the point that liking a song doesn't mean you should do everything that's in the lyrics, which is also ludicrous.
The song is about anti-authoritarianism (something that is a common theme on Slashdot). This obviously doesn't mean that individuals can't work together for a common cause.
Let's try the same argument against Slashot: "Hah, they're always complaining about the Government bringing in new laws telling them what to do, but when someone tells them to run Linux, they then do that! The irony!"
So if you buy anything, it's only because you were told to? I hope you don't own any possessions then.
The thing you're missing is that if you decide you can't do anything just because someone else did it, you're just as much a fool as someone who only does what they're told to. How about do what the rest of us do (including those who bought RATM because they wanted X Factor off the top spot), and do what you want, whether or not someone else does it?
PS - please keep posting to Slashdot. Now, if you post to Slashdot, you're obviously a sheep because you're just doing what you were told to, and failing to think for yourself, right?
it is worth mentioning that Rage Against the Machine are signed to the SAME record label as the X-Factor dude and this 'contest' simply pushed the sales of both singles through the roof thereby lining the pockets of Simon Cowell and Sony BMG!
No it is not worth mentioning:
1. It's not an anti-Sony campaign, anti-capitalism, anti-establishment or whatever other straw men you want to invent. The only thing in common with people's aim was stopping X Factor getting to number 1
2. They are not signed to the same label - they are signed to different labels, which in turn are owned by Sony. Big deal. If I saw a Playstation or DVD player that I wanted, I wouldn't go "OMG I can't they're owned by Sony".
3. Simon Cowell does not benefit. For heaven's sake, lets have a reality check here - Sony are a billion dollar multinational company. Simon may be rich, but let's get a sense of persepctive here. He does not and could not own them (he might have shares perhaps, but they're a public company - anyone can buy shares). Not to mention that Sony originated in Japan. I've seen this kind of clueless claim in the UK tabloids and elsewhere, but I'd hoped for a bit more thought on somewhere like Slashdot...
And there is the further question as to whether or not it is more 'anti-establishment' being told what to buy by some a TV offering or some grassroots facebook campaign
Leaving aside the anti-establishment straw man, how on earth does being anti-establishment mean people can't work together for a common cause? By that logic, no one could ever start a revolution unless they all worked individually and never gave suggestions to other people.
But with supermarkets, you'd expect it to be more focused on the country. E.g., a UK programme talking about supermarkets would only mention Tesco, Sainsbury etc, and you wouldn't expect to hear a mention of Wal-mart.
But imagine a UK programme talking about the latest in computer technology, and then focusing solely on Acorn Archimedes and RISCOS as if that's all that existed? Wouldn't you think that a bit bizarre? Now imagine those stories getting pasted all around the Internet. That's how it looks to us with all these nothing-but-Iphone stories.
And your example is flawed anyway, because Wal-mart does operate in Europe, just under a different brandname (Asda in the UK). So they would get a mention in my hypothetical UK programme.
Hear hear. I was thinking - an article written as if Apple and Google are the only phone companies? And believes the myth that the Iphone is a "runaway hit"? (Actual market share figures disagree.)
TFA only mentions Symbian briefly, dismissing them as you say, on the grounds that they are losing share. Well yes - at 40% market share, I'd expect over time that to lower as other companies enter. That doesn't mean Apple are remotely near overtaking them. And anyhow, even if they want to focus on the newcomers - where on earth are RIM/Blackberry, who are also ahead of Apple?
It talks about "Version 1" of 3G - but my old 3G feature phone from 2005 had full unrestricted access to the Internet (including tethering). I do agree that ultimately, phone companies need to transform themselves into mobile Internet providors, but it's clear that we're heading in that direction anyway, and I don't see why Apple are so special in this. Indeed, I hope Apple don't play a strong part of this - if they become dominant, then our 2019 mobile Internet, even if it's an open Internet, will only be available on a locked down platform where all software needs Apple approval to run. How is that an improvement?
I agree it doesn't make sense to always restricting the market to only smartphones. It's not just that they're a minority of the market, but it's also so ill-defined. Anyone: why was my old 3G phone that could do Internet and run any applications a non-smartphone, yet Apple's original Iphone, which didn't have 3G, can only run Apple-approved applications, and didn't even support basic features like copy/paste, considered a smartphone? More generally, give me a definition that includes the Iphone, but doesn't include most "feature" phones?
It's not just Nokia - Samsung, LG, Motorola are all companies that have bigger market share, yet you hardly ever hear about them.
It's intended for non-smartphones, basically so you can browse the web on normal phones' tiny screens, or use a Google Maps app.
Not relevant to your point, but as an aside note that many of the dirt cheap "non-smart" phones selling today have full size touchscreens (as one random example, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_S3650 ) - indeed, this is yet another reason why the "feature" versus "smart" distinction doesn't really mean much and is rather abitrary (except for Apple fans wanting to inflate the Iphone's market share by looking at a smaller segment).
I agree, although just to add - I'd say that regular "feature" phones are still mini-computers, just not as high end: they have Internet access, they can run apps (indeed this was true long before the Iphone came along), and today they even have touchscreens. It's debatable that the Iphone counts as a smartphone, since it can't do things like multitasking - most of the "Look at what the Iphone can do" are things ordinary phones can do (e.g., Internet access).
My first smartphone is a Nokia 5800 - but I realise it's not the first phone on the planet to do the wonderful things it does (and I also see it as a natural evolutionary improvement from my earlier non-"smart" Motorola V980 - to me, the big jump was from "dumb" phones to feature/smart phones).
I get the feeling that for a lot of people, the Iphone isn't just their first smartphone, but their first non-dumb phone altogether - so they're amazed that they can do email and access the Internet, completely oblivious that this has been the norm for years. An obvious example would be Apple fans who never saw the point of a non-dumb phone, but then get one because it's Apple.
One of the classic pro-Iphone tricks - redefine "success" to mean something other than success, and instead mean "here's why I prefer it". If you prefer it for that reason, good for you, but that doesn't make it "the most successful single smartphone out right now"!
And your claim is incorrect anyway - e.g., all Nokia's phones run the Symbian platform, which is just as must commonality than that shared between the various different Iphone models.
These are Apple's two largest competitors in the smartphone space. Everyone else barely registers.
Marketshare for mobile phones runs something like Nokia, Samsung, LG, Motorola, RIM... then Apple. In fact, if you really want to make that argument, then to be blunt, at a few per cent, it's Apple who barely register.
iPhone introduction put the smartphone front and center into the mainstream and turned a business device into a consumer one. Prior to the iPhone's introduction smartphones were used by enterprise and a tiny group of geeks.
Nonsense - Internet enabled phones that could run apps were around, and used by consumers, years before the Iphone appeared. The Iphone had, and still has relatively, small market share - there was no sudden jump. Even in the high end, people are buying far more from companies like Nokia than from Apple.
Indeed the complete opposite is true - it's only on "geek" places like this that people think the Iphone is the only phone around.
Nokia, RIM, Palm, Microsoft, Google - all of them followed up with their own responses to capitalize on the trend.
Oh please - "apps" were around long before Apple.
For better or worse, iPhone completely changed the mobile industry.
How?
Applications and stores already existed. Decent games already existed. Updates existed. "Twoo usability" is a no true scotsman fallacy.
Well my Nokia 5800 works with a mobile network just like an Internet network. As does my mobile 3G USB dongle, come to that. No contracts, no strings, with either of them. So your excuse for Apple's locked down phone doesn't really work, and I don't see any problem with Google doing things the way that the vast majority of the mobile market already does things. I'd much rather the mobile networks be like the Internet works in general, and not to end up as being Apple's locked down vision.
Except Apple have a few per cent market share - so actually, by your logic, people prefer more open solutions.
Believe it or not, there's more (far more) to the mobile phone market than Apple and Google. Nokia, Samsung, LG, Motorola, RIM. But you wouldn't know it from reading Slashdot.
Any PAYG phone with WiFi that isn't the locked down Iphone should do you fine. E.g., my Nokia 5800 I got on PAYG does those things fine (admittedly I've yet to try Skype over WiFi, but I've seen applications that claim to do this).
And not that any PAYG phone full stop satisfy 3 and 4 - they all support "apps" (well, apart from the cheapest dumb phones), usually via Java.
Yeah, it did work on Java - 2 billion Java phones that are all compatible. Just because Slashdot decides to focus on a phone with just a few percent market share, that decided to drop Java support instead taking us back to the dark old days when every platform needed its own version, doesn't change the reality of what every other phone on the market can do. Who cares if Apple roll over or not.
So they are only doing well in an arbitrarily defined very small subset of the market, that's been defined to include them, and a small number of other phones, when actually most of the Japanese market are off buying other things to do the same thing.
Why not take it further, Apple fans? Just define the market to be the Iphone, and then you can say how Apple have 100% market share!:)
and "feature" phones(still more or less inflexible, you get what the manufacturer and the carrier give you; but they give you all kinds of bells and whistles.
But all feature phones can run any app you like. They use Java rather than native code - but then I don't see why that's a bad thing, surely a common standard is good (and doesn't Android take the same approach, IIRC?) Meanwhile, look how locked down the Iphone is - you can only run apps that the manufacturer approve. So I don't think this is a good way to draw a distinction between smart and feature phones, especially if you want to claim that the Iphone is a smartphone...
What they missed, though, is that the smartphone is a fundamentally superior model, by virtue of being overwhelmingly more flexible and powerful than the fixed function phones, even if they happened to have a fairly large number of fixed functions.
What you're missing is that those feature phones still adopt this same model of an Internet-connected computer, and in no way are their functions fixed. My now ancient 2005 Motorola V980 that was my old function allowed me to install whatever apps I liked. My new Nokia 5800 is miles better yes - but there's no qualitative difference; it's rather the improvement of 4 years of advancement (and paying a higher price too). Just as a computer of today is is way better than one of 4 years ago, but no one would claim that they fall into different categories.
The big jump was between dumb phones, and feature/smart phones. It's there that you saw the leap from a phone that could only be a phone with maybe WAP, and fixed functions, to what was basically a handheld computer, allowing Internet access, applications, and running an OS. In the old days, we simply had dumb phones and smart phones. But since then, people had introduced this odd idea of "feature" phone, even though the feature phones are smart phones by the old definition. The only real difference is that "smart" phone seems to be reserved for phones that are high end - which isn't a hard definition, it tells us nothing about their features, and their capabilities change over time. The Iphone is only a smartphone by this definition because it's expensive.
And anyhow, even if we look at the devices labelled "smartphones", there were still plenty that also had the features that the Iphone missed. The criticisms were valid.
The iPhone was in the interesting position of being (arguably) the first "smartphone" well executed enough(and running on powerful enough hardware) to outcompete the far less flexible, but far more mature, "featurephone" segment for a large number of people.
What sort of ill-defined criterion is this? Do you have a citation? The Iphone is still a minority phone in the market, so what you say isn't true, it hasn't outcompeted feature phones on sales at all. If you mean to say it's selling better than earlier smartphones - well that's true of all smartphones - as time's gone on, their sales have increased. Nothing special about Apple.
And finally, please give me a definition of smartphone that includes the Iphone, but doesn't include these "feature" phones?
Except it's not "so popular" everywhere else - market share is a few percent.
The flaw in this article is that it's restricted it to the arbitrary ill-defined of "smartphone" which is assumed to include the Iphone, but not the vast range of "feature" phones that can still do Internet, run apps, and so on. If you took a stricter definition of phones - e.g., one that could run any 3rd party apps (as opposed to only those approved by the company), can multitask with 3rd party apps, has a real keyboard etc, then the Iphone is not a smartphone. If you take a definition broad enough to include it, then you include most feature phones.
So what's the Iphone's real market share in Japan?
Another point - presumably before this, another phone would have had the largest share in this ill-defined category. Note how we didn't get a story about that?
This story is as laughable as that one we had when the Iphone was the best selling phone in one random country for one month (right after the release of a new Iphone model). Note how since then, we've never had any articles for any month, for any country, of what the best selling phone is? Even though clearly you could have a story for every country, every single month, for some reason it's only notable when it's the Iphone. (So the fact that the Iphone has only been best selling for one month, in only one country, is surely quite bad...)
Today I bought myself a Nokia 5800. Great phone and at a decent price - but from reading Slashdot, I'd never even known it exists. News for nerds? Not anymore - I rely on the mainstream press now to find out news about the market leaders in this area.
But it's the Christians who believe it as a matter of faith. The rest of us recognise that perhaps knowing exactly what happened over 2,000 years ago is going to have uncertainties.
And Quake's art isn't under a free licence, so if we're comparing the art, it's no longer true to argue "there's no point because there's already something just as good under GPL".
There is another problem with your view... insofar that it treads dangerously close to representing something else. Here, I'll paraphrase your quote and show you how it would parse:
Not in the slightest bit analogous. You might as well reduce it to "You don't need a PhD to talk about getting first post on Slashdot". Clearly no one is suggesting PhDs to discuss everything - that's a straw man. The claim was that you do need to know quite a bit about climate change if you're going to discuss it.
Einstein had a PhD. And he published papers. He didn't go up to scientists, whine about why they are wrong, whilst completely failing to propose scientific theories or publish scientific papers explaining it.
And how do you think we should plan? Perhaps by *gasp* looking at models of how climate may change, and trying to work out how to prevent, minimise or survive these changes?
It is not the people who talk about climate change who say we should do nothing - on the contrary, to me it's the "There's nothing to worry about" people who seem more keen to plan nothing.
Slashdot Mirror
But it wasn't Facebook vs X-Factor. Facebook was the primary (though not only) medium through which this was organised, but Facebook themselves didn't start it (or indeed involve themselves in anyway).
Yes, there is the wider point that I dislike the walled garden approach of sites like Facebook. But that doesn't mean people should shun tools where they might be useful. And I acknowledge that this sort of thing is one of the things that Facebook is very good for.
(As soon as I saw this article, I knew that the tired anti-Facebook groupthink that people have here on Slashdot would dominate. If Facebook hadn't been involved, everyone would be amused by it, not hating it.)
Is that you, Alanis? And yep, I won't do what people tell you - I'll start by not listening to you.
This "argument" is no better than telling a RATM fan to "breathe", and then saying "haha you're doing what I told you" when they breathe. Funny perhaps for a second, but it isn't actually an argument.
Clearly the song isn't about not doing anything that someone else says. By that logic, people could just as much say they were responding to people who told them not to buy RATM. And surely, if people don't do what they are told, aren't they just doing what the song told them to? So by doing what they're told, they're not doing what the song told them to. It's obviously paradoxical. Not to mention the point that liking a song doesn't mean you should do everything that's in the lyrics, which is also ludicrous.
The song is about anti-authoritarianism (something that is a common theme on Slashdot). This obviously doesn't mean that individuals can't work together for a common cause.
Let's try the same argument against Slashot: "Hah, they're always complaining about the Government bringing in new laws telling them what to do, but when someone tells them to run Linux, they then do that! The irony!"
So if you buy anything, it's only because you were told to? I hope you don't own any possessions then.
The thing you're missing is that if you decide you can't do anything just because someone else did it, you're just as much a fool as someone who only does what they're told to. How about do what the rest of us do (including those who bought RATM because they wanted X Factor off the top spot), and do what you want, whether or not someone else does it?
PS - please keep posting to Slashdot. Now, if you post to Slashdot, you're obviously a sheep because you're just doing what you were told to, and failing to think for yourself, right?
it is worth mentioning that Rage Against the Machine are signed to the SAME record label as the X-Factor dude and this 'contest' simply pushed the sales of both singles through the roof thereby lining the pockets of Simon Cowell and Sony BMG!
No it is not worth mentioning:
1. It's not an anti-Sony campaign, anti-capitalism, anti-establishment or whatever other straw men you want to invent. The only thing in common with people's aim was stopping X Factor getting to number 1
2. They are not signed to the same label - they are signed to different labels, which in turn are owned by Sony. Big deal. If I saw a Playstation or DVD player that I wanted, I wouldn't go "OMG I can't they're owned by Sony".
3. Simon Cowell does not benefit. For heaven's sake, lets have a reality check here - Sony are a billion dollar multinational company. Simon may be rich, but let's get a sense of persepctive here. He does not and could not own them (he might have shares perhaps, but they're a public company - anyone can buy shares). Not to mention that Sony originated in Japan. I've seen this kind of clueless claim in the UK tabloids and elsewhere, but I'd hoped for a bit more thought on somewhere like Slashdot...
And there is the further question as to whether or not it is more 'anti-establishment' being told what to buy by some a TV offering or some grassroots facebook campaign
Leaving aside the anti-establishment straw man, how on earth does being anti-establishment mean people can't work together for a common cause? By that logic, no one could ever start a revolution unless they all worked individually and never gave suggestions to other people.
But with supermarkets, you'd expect it to be more focused on the country. E.g., a UK programme talking about supermarkets would only mention Tesco, Sainsbury etc, and you wouldn't expect to hear a mention of Wal-mart.
But imagine a UK programme talking about the latest in computer technology, and then focusing solely on Acorn Archimedes and RISCOS as if that's all that existed? Wouldn't you think that a bit bizarre? Now imagine those stories getting pasted all around the Internet. That's how it looks to us with all these nothing-but-Iphone stories.
And your example is flawed anyway, because Wal-mart does operate in Europe, just under a different brandname (Asda in the UK). So they would get a mention in my hypothetical UK programme.
Hear hear. I was thinking - an article written as if Apple and Google are the only phone companies? And believes the myth that the Iphone is a "runaway hit"? (Actual market share figures disagree.)
TFA only mentions Symbian briefly, dismissing them as you say, on the grounds that they are losing share. Well yes - at 40% market share, I'd expect over time that to lower as other companies enter. That doesn't mean Apple are remotely near overtaking them. And anyhow, even if they want to focus on the newcomers - where on earth are RIM/Blackberry, who are also ahead of Apple?
It talks about "Version 1" of 3G - but my old 3G feature phone from 2005 had full unrestricted access to the Internet (including tethering). I do agree that ultimately, phone companies need to transform themselves into mobile Internet providors, but it's clear that we're heading in that direction anyway, and I don't see why Apple are so special in this. Indeed, I hope Apple don't play a strong part of this - if they become dominant, then our 2019 mobile Internet, even if it's an open Internet, will only be available on a locked down platform where all software needs Apple approval to run. How is that an improvement?
I agree it doesn't make sense to always restricting the market to only smartphones. It's not just that they're a minority of the market, but it's also so ill-defined. Anyone: why was my old 3G phone that could do Internet and run any applications a non-smartphone, yet Apple's original Iphone, which didn't have 3G, can only run Apple-approved applications, and didn't even support basic features like copy/paste, considered a smartphone? More generally, give me a definition that includes the Iphone, but doesn't include most "feature" phones?
It's not just Nokia - Samsung, LG, Motorola are all companies that have bigger market share, yet you hardly ever hear about them.
It's intended for non-smartphones, basically so you can browse the web on normal phones' tiny screens, or use a Google Maps app.
Not relevant to your point, but as an aside note that many of the dirt cheap "non-smart" phones selling today have full size touchscreens (as one random example, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_S3650 ) - indeed, this is yet another reason why the "feature" versus "smart" distinction doesn't really mean much and is rather abitrary (except for Apple fans wanting to inflate the Iphone's market share by looking at a smaller segment).
I agree, although just to add - I'd say that regular "feature" phones are still mini-computers, just not as high end: they have Internet access, they can run apps (indeed this was true long before the Iphone came along), and today they even have touchscreens. It's debatable that the Iphone counts as a smartphone, since it can't do things like multitasking - most of the "Look at what the Iphone can do" are things ordinary phones can do (e.g., Internet access).
My first smartphone is a Nokia 5800 - but I realise it's not the first phone on the planet to do the wonderful things it does (and I also see it as a natural evolutionary improvement from my earlier non-"smart" Motorola V980 - to me, the big jump was from "dumb" phones to feature/smart phones).
I get the feeling that for a lot of people, the Iphone isn't just their first smartphone, but their first non-dumb phone altogether - so they're amazed that they can do email and access the Internet, completely oblivious that this has been the norm for years. An obvious example would be Apple fans who never saw the point of a non-dumb phone, but then get one because it's Apple.
And where on earth are Nokia on that chart?
Any survey that uses a definition of "smartphone" that includes Apple, but ignores the biggest smartphone maker in the world, is simply nonsense.
One of the classic pro-Iphone tricks - redefine "success" to mean something other than success, and instead mean "here's why I prefer it". If you prefer it for that reason, good for you, but that doesn't make it "the most successful single smartphone out right now"!
And your claim is incorrect anyway - e.g., all Nokia's phones run the Symbian platform, which is just as must commonality than that shared between the various different Iphone models.
These are Apple's two largest competitors in the smartphone space. Everyone else barely registers.
Marketshare for mobile phones runs something like Nokia, Samsung, LG, Motorola, RIM ... then Apple. In fact, if you really want to make that argument, then to be blunt, at a few per cent, it's Apple who barely register.
You really believe that? Let's see the link.
Even this pro-Iphone article shows Apple at 0.9% for a few months ago.
iPhone introduction put the smartphone front and center into the mainstream and turned a business device into a consumer one. Prior to the iPhone's introduction smartphones were used by enterprise and a tiny group of geeks.
Nonsense - Internet enabled phones that could run apps were around, and used by consumers, years before the Iphone appeared. The Iphone had, and still has relatively, small market share - there was no sudden jump. Even in the high end, people are buying far more from companies like Nokia than from Apple.
Indeed the complete opposite is true - it's only on "geek" places like this that people think the Iphone is the only phone around.
Nokia, RIM, Palm, Microsoft, Google - all of them followed up with their own responses to capitalize on the trend.
Oh please - "apps" were around long before Apple.
For better or worse, iPhone completely changed the mobile industry.
How?
Applications and stores already existed. Decent games already existed. Updates existed. "Twoo usability" is a no true scotsman fallacy.
Well my Nokia 5800 works with a mobile network just like an Internet network. As does my mobile 3G USB dongle, come to that. No contracts, no strings, with either of them. So your excuse for Apple's locked down phone doesn't really work, and I don't see any problem with Google doing things the way that the vast majority of the mobile market already does things. I'd much rather the mobile networks be like the Internet works in general, and not to end up as being Apple's locked down vision.
Except Apple have a few per cent market share - so actually, by your logic, people prefer more open solutions.
Believe it or not, there's more (far more) to the mobile phone market than Apple and Google. Nokia, Samsung, LG, Motorola, RIM. But you wouldn't know it from reading Slashdot.
What on earth is a "post-iPhone world"? Seriously - the mobile phone market, let alone the rest of the world, doesn't revolve around the Iphone.
Any PAYG phone with WiFi that isn't the locked down Iphone should do you fine. E.g., my Nokia 5800 I got on PAYG does those things fine (admittedly I've yet to try Skype over WiFi, but I've seen applications that claim to do this).
And not that any PAYG phone full stop satisfy 3 and 4 - they all support "apps" (well, apart from the cheapest dumb phones), usually via Java.
Yeah, it did work on Java - 2 billion Java phones that are all compatible. Just because Slashdot decides to focus on a phone with just a few percent market share, that decided to drop Java support instead taking us back to the dark old days when every platform needed its own version, doesn't change the reality of what every other phone on the market can do. Who cares if Apple roll over or not.
Ha - thanks for that, as I suspected.
So they are only doing well in an arbitrarily defined very small subset of the market, that's been defined to include them, and a small number of other phones, when actually most of the Japanese market are off buying other things to do the same thing.
Why not take it further, Apple fans? Just define the market to be the Iphone, and then you can say how Apple have 100% market share! :)
and "feature" phones(still more or less inflexible, you get what the manufacturer and the carrier give you; but they give you all kinds of bells and whistles.
But all feature phones can run any app you like. They use Java rather than native code - but then I don't see why that's a bad thing, surely a common standard is good (and doesn't Android take the same approach, IIRC?) Meanwhile, look how locked down the Iphone is - you can only run apps that the manufacturer approve. So I don't think this is a good way to draw a distinction between smart and feature phones, especially if you want to claim that the Iphone is a smartphone...
What they missed, though, is that the smartphone is a fundamentally superior model, by virtue of being overwhelmingly more flexible and powerful than the fixed function phones, even if they happened to have a fairly large number of fixed functions.
What you're missing is that those feature phones still adopt this same model of an Internet-connected computer, and in no way are their functions fixed. My now ancient 2005 Motorola V980 that was my old function allowed me to install whatever apps I liked. My new Nokia 5800 is miles better yes - but there's no qualitative difference; it's rather the improvement of 4 years of advancement (and paying a higher price too). Just as a computer of today is is way better than one of 4 years ago, but no one would claim that they fall into different categories.
The big jump was between dumb phones, and feature/smart phones. It's there that you saw the leap from a phone that could only be a phone with maybe WAP, and fixed functions, to what was basically a handheld computer, allowing Internet access, applications, and running an OS. In the old days, we simply had dumb phones and smart phones. But since then, people had introduced this odd idea of "feature" phone, even though the feature phones are smart phones by the old definition. The only real difference is that "smart" phone seems to be reserved for phones that are high end - which isn't a hard definition, it tells us nothing about their features, and their capabilities change over time. The Iphone is only a smartphone by this definition because it's expensive.
And anyhow, even if we look at the devices labelled "smartphones", there were still plenty that also had the features that the Iphone missed. The criticisms were valid.
The iPhone was in the interesting position of being (arguably) the first "smartphone" well executed enough(and running on powerful enough hardware) to outcompete the far less flexible, but far more mature, "featurephone" segment for a large number of people.
What sort of ill-defined criterion is this? Do you have a citation? The Iphone is still a minority phone in the market, so what you say isn't true, it hasn't outcompeted feature phones on sales at all. If you mean to say it's selling better than earlier smartphones - well that's true of all smartphones - as time's gone on, their sales have increased. Nothing special about Apple.
And finally, please give me a definition of smartphone that includes the Iphone, but doesn't include these "feature" phones?
Except it's not "so popular" everywhere else - market share is a few percent.
The flaw in this article is that it's restricted it to the arbitrary ill-defined of "smartphone" which is assumed to include the Iphone, but not the vast range of "feature" phones that can still do Internet, run apps, and so on. If you took a stricter definition of phones - e.g., one that could run any 3rd party apps (as opposed to only those approved by the company), can multitask with 3rd party apps, has a real keyboard etc, then the Iphone is not a smartphone. If you take a definition broad enough to include it, then you include most feature phones.
So what's the Iphone's real market share in Japan?
Another point - presumably before this, another phone would have had the largest share in this ill-defined category. Note how we didn't get a story about that?
This story is as laughable as that one we had when the Iphone was the best selling phone in one random country for one month (right after the release of a new Iphone model). Note how since then, we've never had any articles for any month, for any country, of what the best selling phone is? Even though clearly you could have a story for every country, every single month, for some reason it's only notable when it's the Iphone. (So the fact that the Iphone has only been best selling for one month, in only one country, is surely quite bad...)
Today I bought myself a Nokia 5800. Great phone and at a decent price - but from reading Slashdot, I'd never even known it exists. News for nerds? Not anymore - I rely on the mainstream press now to find out news about the market leaders in this area.
Right, so where's the link?
But it's the Christians who believe it as a matter of faith. The rest of us recognise that perhaps knowing exactly what happened over 2,000 years ago is going to have uncertainties.
And Quake's art isn't under a free licence, so if we're comparing the art, it's no longer true to argue "there's no point because there's already something just as good under GPL".
There is another problem with your view... insofar that it treads dangerously close to representing something else. Here, I'll paraphrase your quote and show you how it would parse:
Not in the slightest bit analogous. You might as well reduce it to "You don't need a PhD to talk about getting first post on Slashdot". Clearly no one is suggesting PhDs to discuss everything - that's a straw man. The claim was that you do need to know quite a bit about climate change if you're going to discuss it.
Einstein had a PhD. And he published papers. He didn't go up to scientists, whine about why they are wrong, whilst completely failing to propose scientific theories or publish scientific papers explaining it.
And how do you think we should plan? Perhaps by *gasp* looking at models of how climate may change, and trying to work out how to prevent, minimise or survive these changes?
It is not the people who talk about climate change who say we should do nothing - on the contrary, to me it's the "There's nothing to worry about" people who seem more keen to plan nothing.