Re:This phone is a 2 HAND device vs 1 HAND device
on
Apple iPhone Dissected
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· Score: 4, Informative
All phone functions can be carried out with one hand. (similar to how you handle an ipod with one hand.)
More advanced functions such as web browsing and browsing email are far easier with two hands (but if you can be bothered stretching your thumb around, then again you can do it one handed.)
It's silly to suggest that the iPhone is the only phone that benefits from two hands. (E.g. any phone that uses a stylus requires two hands on the go.) Since many phones do already require two hands to operate them, having a multi-touch display represents better efficiency of the hands (that is, it should speed you along a little bit, touch typing and gesture short cuts are good examples of this.)
Many reasons for keeping away from a giant mother chip vs chip division by their function:
1. Lots of proprietary chips from lots of vendors.
2. You lose greater economies of scale when engineering custom silicon. Instead of buying existing chips.
3. It's often easier to contain clock speeds and single-ended capacitance within the boundaries of a chip. Extra electronics is required to buffer the effects of clock/capacitance etc from other components. (I.E. Interference.)
4. If all the chips are together, then you can't upgrade anything in the next model.
5. Similar to point 4, if there is a fault, you can't flunk or swap out a chip on the assembly.
6. Various stability, heat and power savings by using a different chip for each function, e.g. h264 decoding will be on a different chip than the GSM functions.
MY absolute favourite security falsehoods are the various ways "researches" compare one system security to anothers
Such straight forward conclusions are impossible to make. Based on the following points.
- If many people are analysing code, you will find more bugs. If you don't review your code (or for example, don't have peer review - which closed source often lacks.) Then no bugs at all will be discovered.
- The existing number of unfound bugs is related to the number of discovered bugs. Well no not really: The number of found bugs is actually related to how long and how many researchers have been testing and actively looking for the bugs and second to that is how buggy the software is. I can assign a team of one researcher with no experience and they'll never find any bugs in the poorest of software.
- A difficult and obscure to exploit bug (one that requires a perfect storm of conditions) is as important as a bug that is easily exploitable(e.g. drive by downloads). Also with that: Bugs that bring down the whole system versus bugs that only fail a single service.(E.g. blue screen versus failing to display a JPG correctly.)
- Differences in reporting models: Total lack of transparency versus an open forum. E.g. Microsoft vs Linux reporting. You can only compare reporting from the same kind of reporting models. E.g. You can compare kHTML versus Mozilla (as they are both open and have similar review structures), but not Windows vs BSD (the dissimilar reviews allow misrepresentation via favourable skews and different classification paradigms.
There are quite a few misconceptions about what apple do as a company to help or harm the OSS industry. It's a combination of balancing their goals as a business that needs to innovate to stay profitable versus keeping good PR with the sprawling list of partners. An example of this is why apple chose kHTML to start with, they needed a small project they could take control of, mozilla was of sufficient popularity that apple would have very little control in directing it to suit their needs over time. kHTML and now webkit allow this. Also I personally feel it's good to have two mature open source web browsing engines, having one leads to pigeon holing over time (hence why mozilla is suffering a little bit of bloat in recent times.)
I don't agree that Apple are lacking in their support for open source - Apple run their projects as open source when available (you can't open source company secrets and as a result they don't open those older projects to the community). They also use open source throughout their operating system. (http://www.apple.com/opensource/) details some of their open source efforts in osx. Whether directed by apple or otherwise. Apple have also been disproportionately light on litigious affairs with open source vendors. Particularly important when you consider that the expose feature in OS X is actually patented by Apple. (Despite this many enjoy it in ubuntu and other xgl implementations.)
Turning a blind eye and only engaging in litigation where contracts with partners (usually the music industry) require them to do so is an often unrecognised merit to the company's management.
http://www.macosforge.org/ lists many of the bigger apple led open source projects.
Also including all the standards compliant browsers on the slide isn't a good idea for a whole world of obvious reasons. (It's not got much to do with a need for being in the limelight.. it was an apple developer conference, apple -is- in the limelight there.)
I think it's funny that FF are so upset by this. Now take it from Apple's perspective, you're drawing a graph to demonstrate the hopeful growth of your webbrowsers market share, do you:
1.) Identify the alternative, we download our own browser market, and evaporate this pie-segment in your presentation...or
2.) Target the only people who single-handedly used illegal tactics to make ruins of the web browser market leader (Microsoft's assult on netscape.).. or
3.) Attack the market share of one of your largest share holders with an already strained relationship (MS bought $150M in Apple stock, and killing Office for the mac will make a significant dent in Apple business sales.)
If you picked 2 or 3, then you're in the same paranoid boat that the Mozilla crew is in. (Note Mozilla also got mightly pissed off when Apple chose kHTML over Mozilla for the basis of webkit. So there is a bit of history there.)
For those that don't seem to be noticing what's going on, it's actually a push for standards and not a fight between open source web browsers. FF3 will have good standards adherence, as does Safari. Put together all the mozilla and webkit (thinking nokia & iphones here too) web browsers and you have a growing number of websites that can't afford to discount standards for a small percentage loss. It's a very real possibility that before the end of the next year 30% of browsers will be standards compliant. Then say goodbye to internet explorer only technologies, making web browsing universal and not platform dependent. (that is IE on Windows.)
"The insular Apple universe is a relatively gentle place, an Athenian utopia where Apple's occasional missteps are forgiven, all partake of the many blessings of citizenship, and everyone feels like they're part of an Apple-created golden age of lofty ideas and superior design." that phrase in particular is utter crap and an invention necessary to justify the argument
It's funny that the author clearly has no idea on Apple at all. In fact the Apple audience are known to be excessively vicious to the Apple company, suing it for the slightest of issues. E.g. Right now apple is getting sued because some users believe the pixels on their displays "sparkle" a little bit.
Apple have -never- been in some kind of tech utopia where it's audience has willingly blind sided all their mistakes. Geeze, people still wave newtons around at Jobs during keynotes in silent protest.
Also, while the blogger believes that no one is interested in safari.. it seems to be downloading it's pants off. (So it seems that people are even interested in just having a look, which is contrary to this impenetrable wall of windows browsers that they author conveys.) I think the author needs to get used to seeing safari around, especially once iPhones start browsing the web.
The best approach here is to report the sites like safari allows you to do(happy little bug button which has been stolen, much like the google search bar), then maybe when Safari is out of beta they will work.
Although I'd really say that safari is really about testing your widgets on the iPhone and to test your website on the other 5% of browsers out there. It just happens that it's also good for day-to-day browsing.
The author of the article is a bit confused, in the 2001 OS9 days macs were being run from powerpc chips. Sure PPC is great, but a games developer isn't going to hire a team of PPC gurus just to port to a small market. Now that macs are x86 at the core - developers can use their existing staff to produce the mac port. They just need to learn a bit about OSX, which is much less daunting than having to learn an entirely different chip architecture. (This is also a win for OpenGL as some developers are more likely to use OpenGL over Directx to speed up mac portability later on.)
An amazing amount of common sense in that post. I don't know if perhaps the Apple brand has become too mainstream thus leading too many people with partial understanding of their existing and up-coming products to chime in with nonsensical memes or inaccurate fact bashing. (Or the fact that the community loves to build em up just to rip em down.) But I'm noticing a very loud anti-Apple audience fueled by mostly insignificant issues. I can only think the bad karma started with the iPod battery problems. (While I don't believe it's reasonable to have to replace an iPod for a new battery, I do know that there are many services that will replace the iPod batteries, and in my own personal experience through a few iPods I have never experienced any issues with batteries. - But people who are problem free never speak up in outrage, so the iPod bashing was a self-selected movement.)
This SDK argument is a good example of this. The phone isn't even in a consumers hand and we're finding posts like Apple have been denying the tech community through years of closed platform abuse. Anyone who actually has any history with Apple recognise a few aspects about them which has made them a muchly appreciated company in the tech community. The most important aspect is that unlike a larger portion of the tech community - Apple almost always gives consumers what they demand: From somehow negotiating DRM free music to adding almost every sought after feature into OS X (even old ideas such as multiple desktops). Apple have a long history of giving consumers what they want. If consumers want a particular app for the iPhone(and it's voiced through emails/community) it'll happen. Apple gets most of it's cred from continuing development of their products and software after the sale. I can think of numerous applications that Apple have released for no charge, including much of the iLife suite(iTunes, iMovie & iPhoto started free, free instruments for Garage band), Safari(version 1), iChat, iCal, iPod feature updates including new codec support, YouTube for AppleTV, and i think even the dvd player in the 10.2 days. Plus a few more I can't remember off the top of my head
With Apple's success with the closed iPod they didn't foresee that there would be such a vocal outburst for an SDK so early into the piece. Yet already they have begun to address SDK issues, firstly by promoting the web standards nature of the iPhone (which is really where the trend for apps is right now. Also of note is that they promoted this at the first iPhone keynote, except they called these widgets.) Further down the track, we will no doubt see some incarnation of an SDK for the iPhone. However there are definitely revisioning issues they'll address before that happens. (As we're likely to see more than one model of iPhone, and I doubt they'll have an SDK ready until the 3G model is released in Europe.)
I'm not sure if it's a willingness to publish anything that contains the word "iPhone" or a legitimate interest in development. But unless you're interested in turning your iPhone into a wifi scanner. (Something probably best left to the laptop anyway since it's got a fair few more MHz to waste.) Then I'm finding the SDK really unnecessary. The iPhone isn't a computer replacement, it's got a lowly powered set of hardware which is ideal for a phone, but not for a complex application. If you want to develop strong apps for the road use a laptop.. If you want to develop referencing apps, lookup programs etc, then just use AJAX on the iPhone.
I don't think anyone is going to get an icon on the main screen for a long time. (I don't think it's necessary either.)
With all that said, I have seen some very fun hobbyist applications for mobile platforms (e.g. like the palm programmable remote.) However I think it's the hobbyists that will hack away at the iPhone (with knowledge that it's just OSX) and figure out how to make their own mini-apps anyway.
I see your viewpoint. Up until this point I've enjoyed smaller phones that are not convergence devices. I find most convergence devices don't do any of their individual tasks well enough to be a phone, a camera, a java games platform or a media player. Most of the brands still use very similar interfaces for all those features as they had with just the phone functionality, which is very confusing. I feel the apple device has some success here because hardware wise there is very little limitation to the interface, the device is a purely software platform (as we all know not even the keyboard is physical.) While I have only been able to see the publicly available reviews and videos of the device, it does seem like apple put a good effort in keeping enough quality in each of the features to ensure that it makes a good phone, a good ipod and a good internet device (the built in web browser has taken a page from the wii, and work via a zoom and pan mode.)
I feel there is a strong cross over between people who own high end ipods and people who have expensive phones. Apple is really trying to convert their cashed up video ipod audience into a new market. I think this market would appreciate the space saving of getting rid of their mobile phone, for a slightly taller ipod.
As one/.'er said about the Microsoft Surface "if only it fitted in my shirt pocket.."
I think you're being naive to think that it's hype alone which is fuelling this product launch. There is an actual demand for this kind of tech. Even Microsoft who gets hammered constantly on here, received huge praise for embracing touch interfaces. People want these devices, if you don't that's fine.. but you're going to be considered ignorant for thinking this is redundant technology. I for one have a specific hate for mobile phones today, they come across as utterly clueless to what is ease of use. I have no problem sitting there to learn their silly interfaces, I do have a problem for why they are evidently programmed lazily, excessively complicated to do simple actions, sluggish and with a status quo attitude. There has been minimal advancement in the mobile phone field. Even giant like nokia and sony just rehash their exact same interface across mobile phones. Crude evolutions from their decade old black and white devices. We have the tech now, it's about time a big player started making it widely available. (Unlike the LG Prada phone which, despite having a touch screen, seems to think that finger tips are 3px wide.)
I was thinking about this scenario too. Instead of taking the "lets sue them approach", it provides an easy way to alert the user that their computer is compromised.. sure once a song gets out with their name on it, it will be prolific. However this doesn't actually prove piracy, it just proves that some where along the chain someone got a hold of a song which you owned.. via a variety of methods (or they just spoofed your details.) Repeat offenders will be the ones to go after and alert that their behaviour is outside the ordinary realm of having your files swapped here and there.
Honestly speaking, if a person is accidently sharing their entire media catalogue, then informing them of this and giving instruction on how to stop it will be all that is needed to stop them accidently allowing this piracy. I think this will allow the music labels to be less aggressive in their approach, instead of just suing the poor sod who accidently shared his entire library for a month. The person can now be contacted over email and alerted that their system is compromised or letting it happen.
With that said, I don't see this being a huge issue because most people don't actually buy more than 1 or 2 albums on the iTunes store. (From Apple's own figures.)
Better still, your P2P client could strip them out and put in someone elses name and details.
Meanwhile this isn't actually a change from the current iTunes DRM music which also holds your details inside. I don't think people should be particularly worried, unless they have intentions to massively distribute the music they purchase - there isn't much of an issue of their name being inside their files. We all know the "professional" piracy types will strip this stuff out anyway.
Also Apple aren't suicidal, I doubt iTunes will prevent playback of music whose name doesn't match your own.
With all that said, I think this is a great compromise, you got your DRM free music, which you can move around all your devices. Now don't spoil it by proving some retarded music exec right by massively exploiting this new feature.
Storm in a teacup. Use of words such as "dangerous" and "critical" for sensationalism purposes. "Dangerous" is my computer's battery blowing up. Critical is a pacemaker failing.
I thought that too.. gmail lets you use it like a POP account, meaning it would at most emulate the exact same, not more, problems as any regular ISP email account.
Plus there is probably a chance that a portable email feature will turn up in the future, or at least some kind of linking to another gmail account.
I think this is Microsoft's strategy with linux/OSS users. It's when they hope people pay for license fee to an unknown list of patents. I recall IBM in it's darker days getting into quite a bit of trouble for this same racketeering ploy.
Although I congratulate Microsoft for catching up with the IT bubble business model as you see below: 1. Threaten IP lawsuit 2. ?? 3. Profit!
Think with a little effort they might get past the year 2000 in their business practices and actually start offering something new that people want.
My favourite part is when they describe online services.. seemingly ignorant that many internet-backends are running on linux.
Meanwhile I guess someone should tell IBM's that it's profitable linux business doesn't exist anymore, all that money they're rolling in: utter fantasy.
I can imagine how the conversation would go: Guy on Microsoft payroll: Hey have you heard the news? Free software is dead! It's not making us money, so it must be dead. I sent you an email about it yesterday!! IBM (while lighting a cigarette with a $100 bill): I think my spam guard ate it. We don't use outlook here.. so rubbish like that doesn't get through.
Everything seems difficult until you know how to do it. Science and physics are no exception, so if you can't understand it, then read the basis of the article, usually indicated somewhere in the wikipedia article due to it's ample sub-linking and reference points.
P.S There will always be someone who doesn't get it, and such to lower the standard to. Don't try to please everyone, as complicated physics is simply not for everyone. Definitely not for the Paris Hilton types of the world.
From the toshiba website: http://www.tacp.toshiba.com/hddvd/ (it's flash so goto products, choose the first product, then choose features and specs)
In small print at the bottom:
"...Firmware update may be required for some interactive features depending on content, which may also require an always-on broadband internet connection. Some features may require additional bandwidth. Some recordable media may not be supported..."
Then there is this ridiculous one:
"Because HD DVD is a new format that makes use of new technologies, certain disc, digitial connection and other compatibility and/or performance issues are possible. This may, in rare cases, included disc freezing while accessing certain disc features or functions, or certain parts of the disc not playing back or operating as fully intended."
Which is a deliberately confusing way of clearing the ground for when future purchases don't work, next they instruct you to call customer service and get a firmware patch. (We all know what this is about.)
When they're talking about features they aren't referring to extra clips or sound options, they're referring to the paramount feature: playing discs at all. It's advising that it's possible (extremely rare!) that your new discs won't play.
Their technical efforts only harm themselves, here's why I think so
When a consumer goes to buy a HD player, they expect that it'll be the same as the VHS player they bought in the 80s, or the DVD player they bought in the 90s. Which is you buy the player, then you get a tape or a disc of some sort, you put it into the player and you press play and it shows on your screen. Now when you buy a HD player there is all this stuff about plugging it into an internet connection and running an update on the device. Because some disks won't work until it's updated - all of this is counter intuitive, there is nothing about connecting your device to the internet which makes sense to a basic consumer, they think "I have the player, I have the disc, what gives?" they don't know why on earth the internet needs to be involved. Despite this being new and advanced technology it requires more work than the old technology, and all it delivers is more resolution; all of this effort for just a clearer picture and sound?
This might seem obvious, but it is not consumer friendly. Sure I bet you anyone on/. would think these steps are easy, but there are still lots of people out there who need help plugging in the cables from their player to their TV/Panel/etc. Who can't use a computer, write an email or even subscribe to an ISP.
This approach is only going to further harm the adoption of HD content. Especially when you combine this with the fact that the average consumer isn't going to care for the difference HD provides over DVD SD when all the hassle comes into play. (Remember in the 90s studios advertised that DVD was "HD", plus lots of consumers are running it on SD televisions were it's downscaled.)
It'll be a long time before we all have gorgeous panel displays which make DVD SD look like rubbish.
The consumer experience must be held above all else, otherwise the consumer will simply not buy it and the only HD players out there will be the ones shipped in PS3 and 360.
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More advanced functions such as web browsing and browsing email are far easier with two hands (but if you can be bothered stretching your thumb around, then again you can do it one handed.)
It's silly to suggest that the iPhone is the only phone that benefits from two hands. (E.g. any phone that uses a stylus requires two hands on the go.) Since many phones do already require two hands to operate them, having a multi-touch display represents better efficiency of the hands (that is, it should speed you along a little bit, touch typing and gesture short cuts are good examples of this.)
1. Lots of proprietary chips from lots of vendors.
2. You lose greater economies of scale when engineering custom silicon. Instead of buying existing chips.
3. It's often easier to contain clock speeds and single-ended capacitance within the boundaries of a chip. Extra electronics is required to buffer the effects of clock/capacitance etc from other components. (I.E. Interference.)
4. If all the chips are together, then you can't upgrade anything in the next model.
5. Similar to point 4, if there is a fault, you can't flunk or swap out a chip on the assembly.
6. Various stability, heat and power savings by using a different chip for each function, e.g. h264 decoding will be on a different chip than the GSM functions.
This assumes one thing: That all software is programmed with the same quality. It's only comparative intrinsically.
Such straight forward conclusions are impossible to make. Based on the following points.
- If many people are analysing code, you will find more bugs. If you don't review your code (or for example, don't have peer review - which closed source often lacks.) Then no bugs at all will be discovered.
- The existing number of unfound bugs is related to the number of discovered bugs. Well no not really: The number of found bugs is actually related to how long and how many researchers have been testing and actively looking for the bugs and second to that is how buggy the software is. I can assign a team of one researcher with no experience and they'll never find any bugs in the poorest of software.
- A difficult and obscure to exploit bug (one that requires a perfect storm of conditions) is as important as a bug that is easily exploitable(e.g. drive by downloads). Also with that: Bugs that bring down the whole system versus bugs that only fail a single service.(E.g. blue screen versus failing to display a JPG correctly.)
- Differences in reporting models: Total lack of transparency versus an open forum. E.g. Microsoft vs Linux reporting. You can only compare reporting from the same kind of reporting models. E.g. You can compare kHTML versus Mozilla (as they are both open and have similar review structures), but not Windows vs BSD (the dissimilar reviews allow misrepresentation via favourable skews and different classification paradigms.
I don't agree that Apple are lacking in their support for open source - Apple run their projects as open source when available (you can't open source company secrets and as a result they don't open those older projects to the community). They also use open source throughout their operating system. (http://www.apple.com/opensource/) details some of their open source efforts in osx. Whether directed by apple or otherwise. Apple have also been disproportionately light on litigious affairs with open source vendors. Particularly important when you consider that the expose feature in OS X is actually patented by Apple. (Despite this many enjoy it in ubuntu and other xgl implementations.)
Turning a blind eye and only engaging in litigation where contracts with partners (usually the music industry) require them to do so is an often unrecognised merit to the company's management.
http://www.macosforge.org/ lists many of the bigger apple led open source projects.
Also including all the standards compliant browsers on the slide isn't a good idea for a whole world of obvious reasons. (It's not got much to do with a need for being in the limelight.. it was an apple developer conference, apple -is- in the limelight there.)
1.) Identify the alternative, we download our own browser market, and evaporate this pie-segment in your presentation. ..or
2.) Target the only people who single-handedly used illegal tactics to make ruins of the web browser market leader (Microsoft's assult on netscape.) .. or
3.) Attack the market share of one of your largest share holders with an already strained relationship (MS bought $150M in Apple stock, and killing Office for the mac will make a significant dent in Apple business sales.)
If you picked 2 or 3, then you're in the same paranoid boat that the Mozilla crew is in. (Note Mozilla also got mightly pissed off when Apple chose kHTML over Mozilla for the basis of webkit. So there is a bit of history there.)
For those that don't seem to be noticing what's going on, it's actually a push for standards and not a fight between open source web browsers. FF3 will have good standards adherence, as does Safari. Put together all the mozilla and webkit (thinking nokia & iphones here too) web browsers and you have a growing number of websites that can't afford to discount standards for a small percentage loss. It's a very real possibility that before the end of the next year 30% of browsers will be standards compliant. Then say goodbye to internet explorer only technologies, making web browsing universal and not platform dependent. (that is IE on Windows.)
"The insular Apple universe is a relatively gentle place, an Athenian utopia where Apple's occasional missteps are forgiven, all partake of the many blessings of citizenship, and everyone feels like they're part of an Apple-created golden age of lofty ideas and superior design."
that phrase in particular is utter crap and an invention necessary to justify the argument
It's funny that the author clearly has no idea on Apple at all. In fact the Apple audience are known to be excessively vicious to the Apple company, suing it for the slightest of issues. E.g. Right now apple is getting sued because some users believe the pixels on their displays "sparkle" a little bit.
Apple have -never- been in some kind of tech utopia where it's audience has willingly blind sided all their mistakes. Geeze, people still wave newtons around at Jobs during keynotes in silent protest.
Also, while the blogger believes that no one is interested in safari.. it seems to be downloading it's pants off. (So it seems that people are even interested in just having a look, which is contrary to this impenetrable wall of windows browsers that they author conveys.)
I think the author needs to get used to seeing safari around, especially once iPhones start browsing the web.
That's camp as tits. roflmao.
Although I'd really say that safari is really about testing your widgets on the iPhone and to test your website on the other 5% of browsers out there. It just happens that it's also good for day-to-day browsing.
The author of the article is a bit confused, in the 2001 OS9 days macs were being run from powerpc chips. Sure PPC is great, but a games developer isn't going to hire a team of PPC gurus just to port to a small market. Now that macs are x86 at the core - developers can use their existing staff to produce the mac port. They just need to learn a bit about OSX, which is much less daunting than having to learn an entirely different chip architecture. (This is also a win for OpenGL as some developers are more likely to use OpenGL over Directx to speed up mac portability later on.)
This SDK argument is a good example of this. The phone isn't even in a consumers hand and we're finding posts like Apple have been denying the tech community through years of closed platform abuse. Anyone who actually has any history with Apple recognise a few aspects about them which has made them a muchly appreciated company in the tech community.
The most important aspect is that unlike a larger portion of the tech community - Apple almost always gives consumers what they demand: From somehow negotiating DRM free music to adding almost every sought after feature into OS X (even old ideas such as multiple desktops). Apple have a long history of giving consumers what they want. If consumers want a particular app for the iPhone(and it's voiced through emails/community) it'll happen. Apple gets most of it's cred from continuing development of their products and software after the sale. I can think of numerous applications that Apple have released for no charge, including much of the iLife suite(iTunes, iMovie & iPhoto started free, free instruments for Garage band), Safari(version 1), iChat, iCal, iPod feature updates including new codec support, YouTube for AppleTV, and i think even the dvd player in the 10.2 days. Plus a few more I can't remember off the top of my head
With Apple's success with the closed iPod they didn't foresee that there would be such a vocal outburst for an SDK so early into the piece. Yet already they have begun to address SDK issues, firstly by promoting the web standards nature of the iPhone (which is really where the trend for apps is right now. Also of note is that they promoted this at the first iPhone keynote, except they called these widgets.) Further down the track, we will no doubt see some incarnation of an SDK for the iPhone. However there are definitely revisioning issues they'll address before that happens. (As we're likely to see more than one model of iPhone, and I doubt they'll have an SDK ready until the 3G model is released in Europe.)
I've got a little TIP for you, get the POINT.
seriously though, I still boot into old boxes just to play these.
I'm not sure if it's a willingness to publish anything that contains the word "iPhone" or a legitimate interest in development. But unless you're interested in turning your iPhone into a wifi scanner. (Something probably best left to the laptop anyway since it's got a fair few more MHz to waste.) Then I'm finding the SDK really unnecessary. The iPhone isn't a computer replacement, it's got a lowly powered set of hardware which is ideal for a phone, but not for a complex application. If you want to develop strong apps for the road use a laptop.. If you want to develop referencing apps, lookup programs etc, then just use AJAX on the iPhone.
I don't think anyone is going to get an icon on the main screen for a long time. (I don't think it's necessary either.)
With all that said, I have seen some very fun hobbyist applications for mobile platforms (e.g. like the palm programmable remote.) However I think it's the hobbyists that will hack away at the iPhone (with knowledge that it's just OSX) and figure out how to make their own mini-apps anyway.
I feel there is a strong cross over between people who own high end ipods and people who have expensive phones. Apple is really trying to convert their cashed up video ipod audience into a new market. I think this market would appreciate the space saving of getting rid of their mobile phone, for a slightly taller ipod.
As one /.'er said about the Microsoft Surface "if only it fitted in my shirt pocket.."
I think you're being naive to think that it's hype alone which is fuelling this product launch. There is an actual demand for this kind of tech. Even Microsoft who gets hammered constantly on here, received huge praise for embracing touch interfaces. People want these devices, if you don't that's fine.. but you're going to be considered ignorant for thinking this is redundant technology. I for one have a specific hate for mobile phones today, they come across as utterly clueless to what is ease of use. I have no problem sitting there to learn their silly interfaces, I do have a problem for why they are evidently programmed lazily, excessively complicated to do simple actions, sluggish and with a status quo attitude. There has been minimal advancement in the mobile phone field. Even giant like nokia and sony just rehash their exact same interface across mobile phones. Crude evolutions from their decade old black and white devices. We have the tech now, it's about time a big player started making it widely available. (Unlike the LG Prada phone which, despite having a touch screen, seems to think that finger tips are 3px wide.)
Honestly speaking, if a person is accidently sharing their entire media catalogue, then informing them of this and giving instruction on how to stop it will be all that is needed to stop them accidently allowing this piracy. I think this will allow the music labels to be less aggressive in their approach, instead of just suing the poor sod who accidently shared his entire library for a month. The person can now be contacted over email and alerted that their system is compromised or letting it happen.
With that said, I don't see this being a huge issue because most people don't actually buy more than 1 or 2 albums on the iTunes store. (From Apple's own figures.)
Meanwhile this isn't actually a change from the current iTunes DRM music which also holds your details inside. I don't think people should be particularly worried, unless they have intentions to massively distribute the music they purchase - there isn't much of an issue of their name being inside their files. We all know the "professional" piracy types will strip this stuff out anyway.
Also Apple aren't suicidal, I doubt iTunes will prevent playback of music whose name doesn't match your own.
With all that said, I think this is a great compromise, you got your DRM free music, which you can move around all your devices. Now don't spoil it by proving some retarded music exec right by massively exploiting this new feature.
nah it's not that they sold a million units. they just sold 1.000000 It's just a significant figures thing.
Storm in a teacup. Use of words such as "dangerous" and "critical" for sensationalism purposes. "Dangerous" is my computer's battery blowing up. Critical is a pacemaker failing.
Plus there is probably a chance that a portable email feature will turn up in the future, or at least some kind of linking to another gmail account.
Although I congratulate Microsoft for catching up with the IT bubble business model as you see below:
1. Threaten IP lawsuit
2. ??
3. Profit!
Think with a little effort they might get past the year 2000 in their business practices and actually start offering something new that people want.
Meanwhile I guess someone should tell IBM's that it's profitable linux business doesn't exist anymore, all that money they're rolling in: utter fantasy.
I can imagine how the conversation would go:
Guy on Microsoft payroll: Hey have you heard the news? Free software is dead! It's not making us money, so it must be dead. I sent you an email about it yesterday!!
IBM (while lighting a cigarette with a $100 bill): I think my spam guard ate it. We don't use outlook here.. so rubbish like that doesn't get through.
Science and physics are no exception, so if you can't understand it, then read the basis of the article, usually indicated somewhere in the wikipedia article due to it's ample sub-linking and reference points.
P.S There will always be someone who doesn't get it, and such to lower the standard to. Don't try to please everyone, as complicated physics is simply not for everyone. Definitely not for the Paris Hilton types of the world.
In small print at the bottom: "...Firmware update may be required for some interactive features depending on content, which may also require an always-on broadband internet connection. Some features may require additional bandwidth. Some recordable media may not be supported..."
Then there is this ridiculous one:
"Because HD DVD is a new format that makes use of new technologies, certain disc, digitial connection and other compatibility and/or performance issues are possible. This may, in rare cases, included disc freezing while accessing certain disc features or functions, or certain parts of the disc not playing back or operating as fully intended."
Which is a deliberately confusing way of clearing the ground for when future purchases don't work, next they instruct you to call customer service and get a firmware patch. (We all know what this is about.)
When they're talking about features they aren't referring to extra clips or sound options, they're referring to the paramount feature: playing discs at all. It's advising that it's possible (extremely rare!) that your new discs won't play.
When a consumer goes to buy a HD player, they expect that it'll be the same as the VHS player they bought in the 80s, or the DVD player they bought in the 90s. Which is you buy the player, then you get a tape or a disc of some sort, you put it into the player and you press play and it shows on your screen. Now when you buy a HD player there is all this stuff about plugging it into an internet connection and running an update on the device. Because some disks won't work until it's updated - all of this is counter intuitive, there is nothing about connecting your device to the internet which makes sense to a basic consumer, they think "I have the player, I have the disc, what gives?" they don't know why on earth the internet needs to be involved. Despite this being new and advanced technology it requires more work than the old technology, and all it delivers is more resolution; all of this effort for just a clearer picture and sound?
This might seem obvious, but it is not consumer friendly. Sure I bet you anyone on /. would think these steps are easy, but there are still lots of people out there who need help plugging in the cables from their player to their TV/Panel/etc. Who can't use a computer, write an email or even subscribe to an ISP.
This approach is only going to further harm the adoption of HD content. Especially when you combine this with the fact that the average consumer isn't going to care for the difference HD provides over DVD SD when all the hassle comes into play. (Remember in the 90s studios advertised that DVD was "HD", plus lots of consumers are running it on SD televisions were it's downscaled.)
It'll be a long time before we all have gorgeous panel displays which make DVD SD look like rubbish.
The consumer experience must be held above all else, otherwise the consumer will simply not buy it and the only HD players out there will be the ones shipped in PS3 and 360.