I've been playing with video using Microsoft Portrait on my Sprint Mogul (HTC Hermes, a PocketPC phone) for a while now. It works pretty well. Skype has better sound quality, but Skype for Mobile doesn't seem to be doing video yet.
The Neandertals had their chance. They blew it. We invented culture, then metaphor and then real minds. And then we ate every Neandertal. End of story.
Apple probably had SOME kind of SDK/third party development planned all along. But the iPhone's OS is still a wildly moving target, and it's not appropriate to have an SDK before things have calmed down with the OS APIs, frameworks, etc.
That's probably true, but Apple today in terms of basic R&D and also implementation muscle is a mere shadow of its former self. Although Amelio had also been doing is own layoffs, one of the earliest and most consistent things Jobs did to set up his impressive string of profitable quarters despite declining sales was to aggressively curtail entire divisions and lay off most of the "wonks" and a huge chunk of the d2d devs to cut costs. That has repercussions today. Look at how unfinished so many of the apps in the iPhone were, and the lack of integration. Apple simply doesn't have enough resources to simultaneously develop well-documented and functional APIs at a fast enough pace for OSX, the ipods, and now the iphone.
There may still be software out there that enables this (not sure, since I don't really care), but iTunes on its own does not.
Media Center has enabled unconstrained internet sharing for years. It can do either library sharing, or server-client streaming. What's really cool is that it can do bandwidth-specific transcoding when feeding the clients - I've used it to stream audio over an AOL dialup (quality was AMish). It also lets me copy the same tracks between the ipods, the irivers, and the PSP. It's like itunes for grown ups.
Maybe with iphone 2 you won't have to sponge off random wifis for a consistent, nonlocal signal. Also, bit hard to use Google Maps on the phone if you're driving and relying on wifi.
Further information, running Opera Mobile 8.65 on my Sprint Mogul (HTC Hermes) for redhat.com:
EVDO 9 seconds
1xRTT 28 seconds
802.11g 2 seconds
I just ran a speedtest from DSLReports, and it says my EVDO is currently running at 600 Kbps with 350 ms latency. That's bad. However, I have tethered this phone to a notebook and used it to download bittorrents and for video conferencing, and gotten speed tests up to 1.3Mbps, so I suspect that the phone's 400 MHz CPU is the limiting factor here.
Ever try to use an EVDO RevA device over 60 mph? Works just as if it were stationary.
This is true. EVDO is annoying because like EDGE it won't do net connects during voice chats. So you can't, for instance, chat on a voice line and use Google Maps (unless you're on Wifi). But there's a way around it. I did a cross-US drive a while back. Used the Windows Mobile phone (Sprint Mogul AKA HTC Hermes) to run Skype and chat a lot while also grabbing network data. Worked great. Even managed to get some crappy quality chats in the middle of the Utah and Nevada deserts. When EVDO is working (ie, >=1Mbps), you can even do video conferencing using something like Windows Portrait.
This was true for the DOS shells, but not for NT. NT's evolution under Dave Cutler was designed as a pretty close workalike of VMS, and was originally a microkernal design. In some senses, then, it could be argued that NT's foundations are around a decade later than OSX's BSD core, but I don't place much faith in rating an OS by its recency,or lack thereof.
Maybe the reason Pogue was so quick to retract is that he was unlikely to get any paid cruises or book deals from a 3rd-tier discount telephone operator. Unlike the moolah stemming from, for instance, a fellatrice-like relationship with Apple. Mossberg or Levy wouldn't have made that mistake - they're old enough to work the Apple line almost exclusively.
Try Opera Mini on that phone, it renders well and the websites look just like their bigscreen versions... it does all that iphoney zooming stuff. But for screens this small, I am always thinking: why websites? Install an RSS reader, go for full text enclosures, and read content the way you want it formatted!
You could skip all this pointless cat'n'mouse cracker wankery by just using a real smart phone (Symbian/Windows/Palm) where installing pretty much any application you want take a couple of clicks, and there are more SDKs for it than you can shake many sticks at.,
So instead of spending a little on an excellent browser for your expensive phone, you'd rather go buy a new phone? Presumably, another expensive one. Yes, I can see how that makes sense, oh yes.
people bought clones because they were less expensive than the real thing.
Some did, but I recall that some people were buying some of the higher-end clones because they offered some advanced dual- and quad-CPU options (for example, DayStar Digital) that were unavailable or under-spec'd by Apple at that time. In many case, they were paying the same or more for these than extant retail for Apple kit.
Under Jobs, Apple resorted to several strategies to squelch the Mac cloners. One cunning method was to rebrand OS 7.7 as OS 8, thereby voiding existing pricing deals and enabling Apple to reset terms that were more punitive. In the case of Power Computing, Apple paid $100m to buy the company outright, including all its IP, and thus shut down one of the more prominent cloners. Apple also got PC's impressive direct ordering system modelled on Gateway/Dell , which enabled it to build out its apple.com sales channel.
go to sources such as macweek *during* the negotiations, describing the problems. The summaries afterwards are the mythology we live with today.
I've looked online, and the nearest I can find to a MacWeek archive is this. I can't find any of these negotiations you mention. Cringely/Stephens said in 1997 that:
Which seems to back up your assertion. But if this is true, and at least some cloners were willing to pay Jobs' super-increased tax, where are they now and why did they not continue? Was the tax priced deliberately high enough effectively to kill the contracts without appearing to be the primary party backing out of a relationship entered into in good faith?
This is repeated as often as it is untrue. Apple did *not* discontinue or cancel the licensing program.
Please provide me with some references. I'd love to learn more about this because it sounds as though, if it were never cancelled, that third-party manufacturers could today license and sell Macintosh-compatible hardware? Sweet... and amazing that in all that time, nobody was willing to pay the increased licence fees. Given OSX's recent marketshare bump, that would seem attractive to some players. Here are some contrary references that I found:
and finally, a goodie from 1997, worrying that with the rumours of Jobs taking over at Apple, that 3rd-party licences for OS8 would not be forthcoming...
during the years when Apple practiced lock-in most thoroughly, they were the least successful.
How do you define "successful"? In 1980, when Apple went public, it was the single largest hardware manufacturer of PCs by marketshare (variously estimated at between 15% and 40% depending on how you defined it. When the Jobsian closed-Mac launched, Ap-ple was was still one of the largest by volume. The rejection of the Jobs Mac and Apple's neglect of the Apple ][ business led to a decline in marketshare, but the introduction of the expandable Mac II and Sculley's closed system strategy actually increased Apple's marketshare until Mac marketshare peaked between 1992 and 1994 with something around 15%. Since then it dwindled consistently, suffering some of its sharpest drops at the start of Jobs' reign when he pursued his scorched earth policy of discontinuing 3rd-party hardware licensing and laying off most of the R&D and sales channels. The lows were around 1.5% when the Power CPU strategy was reaching its end, and the increase since then has been impressive by Apple's standards but minor by actual industry standards.
My Windows Phone (Sprint Mogul/HTC Titan) runs Skype well. At $30/month for unlimited data (plus voice) pushing 1.5 Mbps, the quality is as good as Skype can be (ie, okay but not great). Skype Mobile doesn't do video calls, however, for that I use Microsoft Portrait. Intalling each of these programs simply involved downloading the installers and clicking. That's it. For a "closed" system, the Windows phones sure do have a lot of software and dev kits readily available that extends their functionality.
I don't like it one bit, but with not much tweaking, it would seem to me an iPod touch could be rigged to run a service like skype. WiFi or not, it would still be an incredible thing to have, essentially it would be a WiFi iPhone.. or. WiFiPhone.
My Windows Phone (Sprint Mogul) runs Skype well. At $30/month for unlimited data (plus voice) pushing 1.5 Mbps, the quality is as good as Skype can be (ie, okay but not great). Skype Mobile doesn't do video calls, however, for that I use Microsoft Portrait.
To make Apple take into account third-party hackery is just silly.
Aside from illegal monopoly practices, one of the ways Microsoft came from behind and grew so much faster and larger than Apple in the 80s and 90s was that it did actually spend a great deal of time futzing with DOS and Windows to attempting to ensure that as much of the "third-party hackery" extant would work on new releases. There are literally hundreds of thousands of lines of codes and exception and compatibility reg values in Windows there for no other reason than to get decades-old, badly programmed applications to run successfully.
So it is possible, if a company has a long-term vision of encouraging a wide userbase, of coding to deal with third-party hackery without disabling it or destroying the hardware.
How is the ATT plan a "concession" when the data rate is so slow and the actual price so high?
For Comparison, my $30/month Sprint plan gets me 1.5 Mbps download and around half that for upload. It can tether to PC or router and is unlimited (last month I downloaded several GB of torrents using the phone). I also get unlimited texts and 500 minutes (plus the usual weekend/night buffet). I actually tend not to use so many telco minutes because the Windows phone runs Skype.
Anyway, I looked at ATT's plans and they are all 2x-3x similar plans with other crriers with faster data rates.
Nope. And it's quite hard to consider it a downside given what I am missing.
Yes, because what really counts when watching video is the codec it supports, not the actual content available. "Don't mind the story, but check out that edge!"
Ignoring, of course, that I hear that Flash 9 now also encapsulates H.264 (or am I mistaken?). Ignoring also, of course, the constellation of new video sites that specialise in higher-quality, higher-bandwidth offerings that youtube does. But you're in luck, some of them (though it's only a minority for now) do offer mp4 as an option so you're not totally locked out of the real world.
I notice you've abandoned your fixation on Google Maps. Maybe because it's the only mapping tool you have. Where are your geocaching utils, something like Memory-Map Navigator with topographic map flythroughs, or GPS-enabled astronomy programs, to simulate the night sky above you and show you what you are looking at ("AstroNavigator"), etc? Finally, if a handheld doesn't have something like "Math Tablet" then it's just a toy.
You quickly moved from substance to abuse, which is tragic, though understandable because your initial position was so weak.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been playing with video using Microsoft Portrait on my Sprint Mogul (HTC Hermes, a PocketPC phone) for a while now. It works pretty well. Skype has better sound quality, but Skype for Mobile doesn't seem to be doing video yet.
The Neandertals had their chance. They blew it. We invented culture, then metaphor and then real minds. And then we ate every Neandertal. End of story.
p.s. tastes like chicken!
Apple probably had SOME kind of SDK/third party development planned all along. But the iPhone's OS is still a wildly moving target, and it's not appropriate to have an SDK before things have calmed down with the OS APIs, frameworks, etc.
That's probably true, but Apple today in terms of basic R&D and also implementation muscle is a mere shadow of its former self. Although Amelio had also been doing is own layoffs, one of the earliest and most consistent things Jobs did to set up his impressive string of profitable quarters despite declining sales was to aggressively curtail entire divisions and lay off most of the "wonks" and a huge chunk of the d2d devs to cut costs. That has repercussions today. Look at how unfinished so many of the apps in the iPhone were, and the lack of integration. Apple simply doesn't have enough resources to simultaneously develop well-documented and functional APIs at a fast enough pace for OSX, the ipods, and now the iphone.
There may still be software out there that enables this (not sure, since I don't really care), but iTunes on its own does not.
Media Center has enabled unconstrained internet sharing for years. It can do either library sharing, or server-client streaming. What's really cool is that it can do bandwidth-specific transcoding when feeding the clients - I've used it to stream audio over an AOL dialup (quality was AMish). It also lets me copy the same tracks between the ipods, the irivers, and the PSP. It's like itunes for grown ups.
Maybe with iphone 2 you won't have to sponge off random wifis for a consistent, nonlocal signal. Also, bit hard to use Google Maps on the phone if you're driving and relying on wifi.
Further information, running Opera Mobile 8.65 on my Sprint Mogul (HTC Hermes) for redhat.com:
EVDO
9 seconds
1xRTT
28 seconds
802.11g
2 seconds
I just ran a speedtest from DSLReports, and it says my EVDO is currently running at 600 Kbps with 350 ms latency. That's bad. However, I have tethered this phone to a notebook and used it to download bittorrents and for video conferencing, and gotten speed tests up to 1.3Mbps, so I suspect that the phone's 400 MHz CPU is the limiting factor here.
Ever try to use an EVDO RevA device over 60 mph? Works just as if it were stationary.
This is true. EVDO is annoying because like EDGE it won't do net connects during voice chats. So you can't, for instance, chat on a voice line and use Google Maps (unless you're on Wifi). But there's a way around it. I did a cross-US drive a while back. Used the Windows Mobile phone (Sprint Mogul AKA HTC Hermes) to run Skype and chat a lot while also grabbing network data. Worked great. Even managed to get some crappy quality chats in the middle of the Utah and Nevada deserts. When EVDO is working (ie, >=1Mbps), you can even do video conferencing using something like Windows Portrait.
Which means for those of us with "other" types of players, the iTunes Music Store is completely useless.
Rockbox plays AAC.
Expose - Xerox "Rooms" (1985), AmigaOS WorkBench (1985), swm (1990)
.MAC - Online disk, email, backup, ecards and ratings were all extant by 1998.
Dashboard - Borland Sidekick (1984)
Spotlight - Lotus Magellan (1989), ISYS:Desktop (1989), dtSearch Desktop (1991), Enfish Find (2002), Copernic (2004), Google Desktop Search (2004)
Windows was born as a single user OS
This was true for the DOS shells, but not for NT. NT's evolution under Dave Cutler was designed as a pretty close workalike of VMS, and was originally a microkernal design. In some senses, then, it could be argued that NT's foundations are around a decade later than OSX's BSD core, but I don't place much faith in rating an OS by its recency,or lack thereof.
So far this sounds like Yahoo Go, maybe with an RSS aggregator built-in as well.
Maybe the reason Pogue was so quick to retract is that he was unlikely to get any paid cruises or book deals from a 3rd-tier discount telephone operator. Unlike the moolah stemming from, for instance, a fellatrice-like relationship with Apple. Mossberg or Levy wouldn't have made that mistake - they're old enough to work the Apple line almost exclusively.
Try Opera Mini on that phone, it renders well and the websites look just like their bigscreen versions... it does all that iphoney zooming stuff. But for screens this small, I am always thinking: why websites? Install an RSS reader, go for full text enclosures, and read content the way you want it formatted!
You could skip all this pointless cat'n'mouse cracker wankery by just using a real smart phone (Symbian/Windows/Palm) where installing pretty much any application you want take a couple of clicks, and there are more SDKs for it than you can shake many sticks at.,
So instead of spending a little on an excellent browser for your expensive phone, you'd rather go buy a new phone? Presumably, another expensive one. Yes, I can see how that makes sense, oh yes.
people bought clones because they were less expensive than the real thing.
Some did, but I recall that some people were buying some of the higher-end clones because they offered some advanced dual- and quad-CPU options (for example, DayStar Digital) that were unavailable or under-spec'd by Apple at that time. In many case, they were paying the same or more for these than extant retail for Apple kit.
I found a short clip of Jobs exerting the Reality Distortion Field wrt clone licences. Jobs derides their value, but this says they were a 7.25% royalty... low, but not "$50", assuming an average of $2,000 retail for every Power Computing machine, some 50,000 generating $100m in sales.
All in all Jobs' attitude presented quite a change from Apple's earlier I Think We're A Clone Now enthusiasm. Here's another vintage video, a news extract describing Apple's short-lived experiment with Macintosh licensing.
Under Jobs, Apple resorted to several strategies to squelch the Mac cloners. One cunning method was to rebrand OS 7.7 as OS 8, thereby voiding existing pricing deals and enabling Apple to reset terms that were more punitive. In the case of Power Computing, Apple paid $100m to buy the company outright, including all its IP, and thus shut down one of the more prominent cloners. Apple also got PC's impressive direct ordering system modelled on Gateway/Dell , which enabled it to build out its apple.com sales channel.
I've looked online, and the nearest I can find to a MacWeek archive is this. I can't find any of these negotiations you mention. Cringely/Stephens said in 1997 that:
Which seems to back up your assertion. But if this is true, and at least some cloners were willing to pay Jobs' super-increased tax, where are they now and why did they not continue? Was the tax priced deliberately high enough effectively to kill the contracts without appearing to be the primary party backing out of a relationship entered into in good faith?
Please provide me with some references. I'd love to learn more about this because it sounds as though, if it were never cancelled, that third-party manufacturers could today license and sell Macintosh-compatible hardware? Sweet... and amazing that in all that time, nobody was willing to pay the increased licence fees. Given OSX's recent marketshare bump, that would seem attractive to some players. Here are some contrary references that I found:
and finally, a goodie from 1997, worrying that with the rumours of Jobs taking over at Apple, that 3rd-party licences for OS8 would not be forthcoming...
during the years when Apple practiced lock-in most thoroughly, they were the least successful.
How do you define "successful"? In 1980, when Apple went public, it was the single largest hardware manufacturer of PCs by marketshare (variously estimated at between 15% and 40% depending on how you defined it. When the Jobsian closed-Mac launched, Ap-ple was was still one of the largest by volume. The rejection of the Jobs Mac and Apple's neglect of the Apple ][ business led to a decline in marketshare, but the introduction of the expandable Mac II and Sculley's closed system strategy actually increased Apple's marketshare until Mac marketshare peaked between 1992 and 1994 with something around 15%. Since then it dwindled consistently, suffering some of its sharpest drops at the start of Jobs' reign when he pursued his scorched earth policy of discontinuing 3rd-party hardware licensing and laying off most of the R&D and sales channels. The lows were around 1.5% when the Power CPU strategy was reaching its end, and the increase since then has been impressive by Apple's standards but minor by actual industry standards.
do VoiP apps exist for these other phones?
My Windows Phone (Sprint Mogul/HTC Titan) runs Skype well. At $30/month for unlimited data (plus voice) pushing 1.5 Mbps, the quality is as good as Skype can be (ie, okay but not great). Skype Mobile doesn't do video calls, however, for that I use Microsoft Portrait. Intalling each of these programs simply involved downloading the installers and clicking. That's it. For a "closed" system, the Windows phones sure do have a lot of software and dev kits readily available that extends their functionality.
I don't like it one bit, but with not much tweaking, it would seem to me an iPod touch could be rigged to run a service like skype. WiFi or not, it would still be an incredible thing to have, essentially it would be a WiFi iPhone.. or. WiFiPhone.
My Windows Phone (Sprint Mogul) runs Skype well. At $30/month for unlimited data (plus voice) pushing 1.5 Mbps, the quality is as good as Skype can be (ie, okay but not great). Skype Mobile doesn't do video calls, however, for that I use Microsoft Portrait.
To make Apple take into account third-party hackery is just silly.
Aside from illegal monopoly practices, one of the ways Microsoft came from behind and grew so much faster and larger than Apple in the 80s and 90s was that it did actually spend a great deal of time futzing with DOS and Windows to attempting to ensure that as much of the "third-party hackery" extant would work on new releases. There are literally hundreds of thousands of lines of codes and exception and compatibility reg values in Windows there for no other reason than to get decades-old, badly programmed applications to run successfully.
So it is possible, if a company has a long-term vision of encouraging a wide userbase, of coding to deal with third-party hackery without disabling it or destroying the hardware.
Don't break our wands
Symbian, Palm and Windows phones have literally hundreds of varieties of wands. I am sure you could find one there that would suit you.
How is the ATT plan a "concession" when the data rate is so slow and the actual price so high?
For Comparison, my $30/month Sprint plan gets me 1.5 Mbps download and around half that for upload. It can tether to PC or router and is unlimited (last month I downloaded several GB of torrents using the phone). I also get unlimited texts and 500 minutes (plus the usual weekend/night buffet). I actually tend not to use so many telco minutes because the Windows phone runs Skype.
Anyway, I looked at ATT's plans and they are all 2x-3x similar plans with other crriers with faster data rates.
Nope. And it's quite hard to consider it a downside given what I am missing.
Yes, because what really counts when watching video is the codec it supports, not the actual content available. "Don't mind the story, but check out that edge!"
Ignoring, of course, that I hear that Flash 9 now also encapsulates H.264 (or am I mistaken?). Ignoring also, of course, the constellation of new video sites that specialise in higher-quality, higher-bandwidth offerings that youtube does. But you're in luck, some of them (though it's only a minority for now) do offer mp4 as an option so you're not totally locked out of the real world.
I notice you've abandoned your fixation on Google Maps. Maybe because it's the only mapping tool you have. Where are your geocaching utils, something like Memory-Map Navigator with topographic map flythroughs, or GPS-enabled astronomy programs, to simulate the night sky above you and show you what you are looking at ("AstroNavigator"), etc? Finally, if a handheld doesn't have something like "Math Tablet" then it's just a toy.
You quickly moved from substance to abuse, which is tragic, though understandable because your initial position was so weak.