the iPhone is using a custom connection to the server, not the web client which only ever sends out flash encoded files.
Oh yes, I forgot, the iphone cant actually play Flash, can it? That's what, like 90% of the new video content on the net these days? How splendid for you! No wonder you're so focussed on youtube. I've personally tested the iphone's video codec supports and it blows. Despite what ADC *says* are the supported MIME types, the server/codec combinations are finicky and extremely fragile. Which really cripples universal RSS enclosures. And I saw some crashing of Safari during loads following certain UI operations. The templated QUicktime Pro combos work best, which makes me think that Apple really only tested that combo out and ran out of hours for the others.
You already admitted you have ot "turn on" your WiFi signal.
No, the point is that usually I don't *need* to. I get stable IPs, no firewalls, better security, and better connections while mobile.
KHTML, Darwin, GCC updates for Objectsive C, I could go Yawn and Yawn.
Beads and worthless trinkets for some of the more easily gulled natives.
We already established you were an idiot.
I love the way fervent Apple people quickly descend into a disparagement of the intelligence of people who "just don't get it". It's very much 'I love beautiful objects. I love creating them. Negative people upset me' writ large. I bet you're itching to say something like "cluetrain", or "empowerment" next, aren't you? Symbian is challenging to program but has worked well over the decades since basically the Psion invented the PDA to enable an impressive breadth of software choices - Symbian runs, what, like 70% of the world's smartphones? OSX is already looking a little crufty... give it another 10 years and get back to me. In any case, given current iphone sales it'll take, what, a century to shift as many units as Symbian. Good luck with that!
I already explained this, way way back. YouTube quality on the iPhone over WiFi is better than the web version. What you cannot grasp is that the web version (using the flash encoder) is a totally different source than the h.264 stream the iPhone gets.
My phone plays back H.264 quite fine, and my browser spoofs user agents for sites that don't immediately serve up content in the way I want. Also, I like grabbing some media that's marked as "stream only", so UA spoofing and packet sniffing works great here. But thanks for asking. Actually, I don't really understand why there's so much focus on youtube, when Google seems to have less restrictions on bandwidth and length on video.google.
Meanwhile I'm using a faster network than you are 99% of the time.
I doubt you've measured that percentage. In any case, what does wifi get you for general internet access... unless you are running bittorrent on your phone? I have, occasionally, and when I feel I need more speed I use wifi. Or to take it one step further, when I have a lot of data I want to copy to the phone, I plug in the USB and upload directly. Or the ultimate, when I want to fill a few 4GB memory cards with several thousand of my favourite ebooks or shows, I pop them in the card reader, upload, then pop them in the phone.
if you had ever bothered to look there are quite a lot.
Really? How many programs has Apple officially "blessed" as suitable for general iphone deployment? Let me count...
I wasn't wrong once - I guess you can't even count right.
Truly, your Macolyte skills are impressive! Read your earlier posts - in your eagerness to explain how much better a touchscreen driven Google Maps was on iphone, you apparently failed to recognise, over several exchanges, that there's an ARM-compiled touchscreen program as well. Missing it once I could understand, missing it several times lets me know that you're just not seriously listening.
I am a "UNIX People"
No, you're obviously quite attached to a self-image of yourself as an Apple defender. Apple uses GNU/Linux and BSD and other OSS and basically gives back nothing worthwhile. But this enables it to recruit potentially valuable fanatics away from the OSS camp and into its shiny playpen. Ever get the feeling you've been had?
technological dinosaurs that have wandering into Microsoft's mental swamp
Oh dear, my dear dear friend. If anything, I'm more of a fan of Symbian. I was publishing critical Microsoft pieces way back when you were obviously wearing diapers. The fact that your screed descends quickly to such a binary framing of the debate that everyone with opinions different from yours must be a "Microsoft" head is telling. It exposes the deep-rooted insecurity of many of the more fanatical fringe of Apple zealots. By choosing to invest so much of their personality and identity in the consumption of a rather pretty brand of commodity electronics, such people engender a shallowness in their worldview that can only be compensated, or acknowledge, by attacks on an ugly "other". Apple's marketing people really know how to push those buttons to get free effort.
And if I play it in a common WiFi zone that I am in 90% of my day, I get a better quality video than you do visiting the web page.
If you are using wifi and I am using 3G at 1.5 Mbps, and we are both downloading a video at 500 Kbps, how are you getting "better quality"? In actuality, I am probably downloading videos from my home server over Orb or VLC and getting far better results than anything available at youtube.
Have fun in the wifi reservation. Maybe when the next iphone has 3G you'll come out to play?
Apple has constrained said gesture to domains it makes perfect sense in then.
Also helps that there's so few blessed programs!.
I know mine
You haven't admitted to any yet, despite being wrong about Google Maps on ARM three times (yes, I was counting). If your goal is to start measuring UI experience then, unless you're very much older than you seem, you're going to lose. But you, that's too much like cock boxing, so I don't think I'll engage. Finally, I note that you are peculiarly intransigent and apparently completely devoid of a humour bone, a personality trait I've seen repeated again and again in a certain demographic of Apple people since the 1970s.
Why are you so obsessed with grandmothers? I find your fascination with my grandmother... disturbing.
you are held back from by not using an iPhone to access content on a mobile.
Actually, you're still not getting it. I go to the "real" YouTube, I click a video, it plays back. What is the problem here? How are you missing this? How many times do you need it explained? How can I make it clearer to you? My "grainy" comment was based on the fact that, if you use an iphone outside of your little wifi bubble, the quality of the converted downloads is crap. I note that all the Apple shops demo the iphone only on wifi because, let's face it, the 2G is a buzz killer. Come to think of it, I have a suspicion that my phone plays back more video codecs than yours, unless you've been busy compiling a lot of them.
I gesture and zoom in or out to arbitrary degrees in as much time
I've used it, and while it's a neat trick, it's pretty slow to update, and while you may like the *idea* of arbitrarily enlarging and shrinking your maps using a rather imprecise finger-wiggling, I personally like actually quickly getting a view that frames my goal, and then scrolling if required around. But the crux of the argument is that the iphone Google Maps UI is *still* zooming in discrete steps between set magnification levels... whatever about a little interpolation blur. Howeverm, the iphone's use of taps to scroll in fundamentally replicates the ARM UI. You could decide to use multi-touch here but, in general, given its application domain, would one not overwhelmingly prefer single-finger operation for in-car use (a primary domain)? It's cognitively easier with one finger to just point while I keep the other on the wheel! And it's still damn slow to scroll over 2G. I know you're going to say "wifi" again here but really, how many people have wifi in the car?
This brings up an interesting point about the limited grammar of continuous motion gestural interfaces. I recall doing some work on these in the early 90s, comparing productivity to interfaces driven by discrete, constrained actions. In general, there was a limited grammar to gestures that didn't easily scale past narrowly defined task domains. MS has the same problem with the Surface interface... great for the demo apps, not so easy to extend across the board. And I note that the iphone's Maps application actually uses a slightly different grammar than the "standard" UI gestures (what's up with Maps' 2-finger zoom-out thing anyway, I find it impressive that Apple broke its own UI guidelines so quickly).
It'll probably take another decade or so before we nail down an optimal, consensus set, much as the mouse went through several generations of development in the 70s and early 80s. And even then, it's not going to be a panacea, just an easier or quicker way to accomplish a few specific tasks. Much like a voice interface, or a jogwheel, or a message wheel, or all the other little tricks that our handhelds and PCs have been picking up. Often these don't last.
When I was a nipper we were all looking forward to using light pens, just as soon as they became available cheaply. But they never really did, and then the mouse came along, and people preferred horizontal over vertical interaction surfaces. The future doesn't always turn out the way you think. Just because it looked cool in Johnny Mnemonic and Minority Report, the future will probably not be 100% continuous gesture... and the issue of why that is is a deep problem in HCI.
You've used the iPhone for how long again?
It really bugs you when someone doesn't drink the Kool Aid, doesn't it?
That's fair enough. I do think that crowing, today, about the iphone having 8GB of memory is a little silly, when next year 8GB of flash will probably cost around $40 and people with current phones *and* memory slots can ust buy a card and pop it in.
Memory cards really extend the useful life of a handheld. I have an old Archos Ondio, a 2002-era flash player that is useful because it runhs the OSS Rockbox and is great for recording. Anyway, when it was released it came with a whopping 128MB of RAM. It now happily supports 4GB via its built-in memory slot and I still get useful work out of it. I can't remember if Apple had Nanos out then, but with their lack of a slot, people are basically stuck with whatever they get and, to upgrade, they need to junk their current and re-buy. Which is, of course, exactly what Apple wants.
Actually, I think you are underestimating the abilities of people, and overestimating the difficulty of bookmarking. It's not that hard. People have been bookmarking porno sites for the better part of 20 years now, and it seems to be working out ok.
What a shame then you are forced to live with a cap on teh quality of your videos us iPhone owners can so easily surpass, and that you feel so afraid of using WiFi you have to actually "turn it on" to use it. How quaint! Using a real phone you just leave it on, drift between WiFi clouds, and still get great battery life.
What cap is this? Who said there was a cap? I can stream SD DIVX from my home server to a client through the phone connection. That's pretty impressive. I think you are misunderstanding me. It's not that I don't want to turn on Wifi, it's that I don't *need* to. With 3G. When you leave your schoolyard or your cubicle, decent wifi is not always as available. You can't be seriously suggesting that if we take two phones, one with Wifi + 3G, and one with Wifi + crappyG, that you would prefer the latter? Unlike your apparently limitless land of effortless wifi clouds, I live in the real world, where wifi is discontinuous, spotty, and frequently encrypted. 3G just works out for better consistent coverage. Plus, I like to run some servers on my phone, and maintaining a consistent IP is important. Hopping from one AP to another would bugger that, *and* they tend to have varying IP filters.
great map interaction involves equally seemless zooming in and out
I tap a single finger once to zoom. How much more seamless can it be? Seriously?
I can't imagine why several people I know ditched the 8525 that they used heavily and started using the iPhone.
Maybe they like the pretty colours? After all, your sample must be uniformly representative, right?
It's great you have many options for substandard mapping solutions, but I'd rather take the best one even if there's only one.
How do you know it's "the best" when you apparently have never used the others?
Visual voicemail seems harder, if only because you have to keep track of the mailbox usage state to keep the display in sync
VV is not that hard to do well, and it doesn't necessitate carrier cooperation. Google does visual voicemail through GrandCentral. It's been around for ages, both from GC and from others. The beauty of GC is that it works on any phone, sending one or both of a text message with the visual voicemail, or aggregating all messages within a single web page that you hit with any phone browser by simply bookmarking m.grandcentral.com. So it's cross platform, and cross-carrier, with no device lock-in. It's no big deal. Of course, you do really need a proper 3G bandwidth on your phone, so that when you click/select the message, it plays back instantly. Given the ease of programming on Windows CE/Symbian devices though, I can see someone someone easily rigging up an on-device cache. The fact they have not seems to indicate that the networks these phones are deployed within are robust enough to support "instant" message playback.
What about the fact that unlocked GSM phones anywhere near the class of the iPhone are ridiculously expensive?
"Classy" unlocked phones are not as expensive as you think. Also, given the amount of hardware features that the iphone lacks, it's more apt to describe it as a simple playback media phone than a "smart" phone. Compare it to unlocked chocolate- or helio-calibre devices.
Visual Voicemail, and all the tight integration that requires enormous amounts of backend cooperation with the carrier partner
VV is not that hard to do well, and it doesn't necessitate carrier cooperation. Google does visual voicemail through GrandCentral. It's been around for ages, both from GC and from others. The beauty of GC is that it works on any phone, sending one or both of a text message with the visual voicemail, or aggregating all messages within a single web page that you hit with any phone browser by simply bookmarking m.grandcentral.com. So it's cross platform, and cross-carrier, with no device lock-in. It's no big deal. Of course, you do really need a proper 3G bandwidth on your phone, so that when you click/select the message, it plays back instantly. Given the ease of programming on Windows CE/Symbian devices though, I can see someone someone easily rigging up an on-device cache. The fact they have not seems to indicate that the networks these phones are deployed within are robust enough to support "instant" message playback.
Visual voicemail, for example, is a great enhancement to the tired "call in to pick up your saved messages" strategy everyone has been using since day 1.
Google does visual voicemail through GrandCentral. It's been around for ages, both from GC and from others. The beauty of GC is that it works on any phone, sending one or both of a text message with the visual voicemail, or aggregating all messages within a single web page that you hit with any phone browser by simply bookmarking m.grandcentral.com. So it's cross platform, and cross-carrier, with no device lock-in. It's no big deal. Of course, you do really need a proper 3G bandwidth on your phone, so that when you click/select the message, it plays back instantly. Given the ease of programming on Windows CE/Symbian devices though, I can see someone someone easily rigging up an on-device cache. The fact they have not seems to indicate that the networks these phones are deployed within are robust enough to support "instant" message playback.
One of the iPhones most appealing characteristics for me is how accommodating its been for developers of 3rd party applications.
Accommodating? Really? I see an extraordinary amount of effort being expended for miniscule results. If you use another platform, Symbian or Windows CE, you immediately enhance your application ease of development and installation by at least several hundred.
I just checked, and last month I downloaded and installed (usually with a single click) more than forty programs for my Windows phone, including MS Portrait (a video phone app), various ebook readers, emulators, vxUtils, a packet snarfer and a WEP cracker, Google Maps, a "touch" contacts UI app, several new screen input UIs, a threaded SMS program to enhance conversations, Flash, a mind mapping program, GMail, several new UI skins, a universal remote for the infrared, a backup program, an encrypted data wallet, Doom, and pacman.
I want visual voice mail too
Google does visual voicemail through GrandCentral. It's been around for ages, both from GC and from others. The beauty of GC is that it works on any phone, sending one or both of a text message with the visual voicemail, or aggregating all messages within a single web page that you hit with any phone browser by simply bookmarking m.grandcentral.com. So it's cross platform, and cross-carrier. It's no big deal.
I get that the feature is great, and I'd love to have it myself.
Google does visual voicemail through GrandCentral. It's been around for ages, both from GC and from others. The beauty of GC is that it works on any phone, sending one or both of a text message with the visual voicemail, or aggregating all messages within a single web page that you hit with any phone browser by simply bookmarking m.grandcentral.com. So it's cross platform, and cross-carrier. It's no big deal. Of course, you do really need a proper 3G bandwidth on your phone, so that when you click/select the message, it plays back instantly.
If phones were unlocked then they would be used on other carriers without Visual Voice mail.
Google does visual voicemail through GrandCentral. It's been around for ages, both from GC and from others. The beauty of GC is that it works on any phone, sending one or both of a text message with the visual voicemail, or aggregating all messages within a single web page that you hit with any phone browser by simply bookmarking m.grandcentral.com. So it's cross platform, and cross-carrier. It's no big deal.
Please point out to me the place in the U.S. where it's easy to buy an unlocked phone and take it from carrier to carrier, cause I'd like to live there.
I got a T-Mobile phone a few years ago in New York. Was travelling to Europe. Called T-Mobile CSR, asked them to unlock it. They did so, took all of two minutes for them to text me an unlock code. Swapped in a few PAYG SIMs, worked great. I was within my first month or two of a two-year contract.
Did you actually read the blog in its entirety? He was given full credit for the full amount.
So every time I get billed $3K by AT&T and Apple, I'll need to blog it, get global exposure, and whine on the phone about it to get a special dispensation for my bill to be reduced. Great, sign me up for that plan!
Earlier: Google does visual voicemail through GrandCentral. It's been around for ages, both from GC and from others, and it's simply not that difficult to do, or novel. The beauty of GC's web/SMS approach is that it works on any phone, sending one or both of a text message with the visual voicemail, or aggregating them all on a single web page that you can hit with any phone browser. So it's cross platform. I still can't see why it's such a big deal on apple's phone.
Yes, you're right, bookmarking m.grandcentral.com on the phone is *hard*. You know, like math. Or email. How will old people ever cope?
by noting it's grainy you must not have access to the WiFi version of YouTube the iPhone offers
No, I was noting that the OTA youtube designed for EDGE has very low bandwidth, making all the videos look basically like Amiga animations from 1987 or so. And unless you hang out in Starbucks all day that's what most iphone people will get.
When I go to Youtube (or use Orb to stream my media from my home server), my phone actually does 1.5 Mbps/800Kbps up/down on typical use over 3G. So I rarely, if ever, turn on my Wifi. Basically, I use it only in basements or suchlike. Always-on 3G means that you're not twiddling as you hop from one AP to another, not draining your battery wifi style, and it works when you are outdriving on the highway.
using the web based version of google maps would not be nearly as nice as the multitouch version of google maps. It's nice that you can do so, but it's just not nearly as fluid to use.
I think you are a little unaware of how many good applications are available on more open phone platforms. The Google Maps I use on my Mogul is a native ARM implementation on Windows CE. It's touchscreen aware, I just drag my finger to scroll and zoom. I can bookmark destinations, call up traffic reports, switch views, and so on. I can also trigger it using the voice UI by simply saying "Maps!" - which is great when driving, believe me. Additionally, while I haven't used it, there's a new ARM-native Windows Live maps that's actually getting better reviews than Google's rather old offering in this space. Outside the Apple firewall, market competition drives product enhancement, not the whims of Herr Jobs.
exclusivity in exchange for visual voice mail is plausible.
Here: Google does visual voicemail through GrandCentral. It's been around for ages, both from GC and from others. The beauty of GC is that it works on any phone, sending one or both of a text message with the visual voicemail, or aggregating them all on a single web page that you hit with any phone browser. So it's cross platform. I still can't see why it's such a big deal on apple's phone. ANd yes, my phone also natively runs Google Maps, and streams Youtube fine (both Apple's bandwidth-reduced grainy, limited availability version, and the full Youtube website selection).
cell phones are pretty much fixed when you buy them... Apple says that want to do something more like a desktop computer: They want to keep adding new functionality.
I just checked, and last month I downloaded and installed (usually with a single click) more than forty programs for my Windows phone, including MS Portrait (a video phone app), various ebook readers, emulators, vxUtils, a packet snarfer and a WEP cracker, Google Maps, a "touch" contacts UI app, several new screen input UIs, a threaded SMS program to enhance conversations, Flash, a mind mapping program, GMail, several new UI skins, a universal remote for the infrared, a backup program, an encrypted data wallet, Doom, and pacman.
Yeah, I guess my phone really is pretty much fixed.
You can clearly see why Bill is envious of such loyalty, and he does seem quite often wishful in the products Microsoft makes that they would have such loyal followers.
Where do you get such an insight into Gates's psyche? From where I sit, he came from behind two decades ago. Remember at one time Apple was the world's largest PC manufacturer *and* OS provider. Simply put, when people thought of "personal computer", they thought "Apple". MS managed to grab that market, and while Jobs is certainly not hurting for cash, Gates's wealth is on a scale that dwarfs Jobs. So much so, in fact, that the spare change Gates donated to the Melinda and Bill Gates Foundation is saving millions of lives (and in future hundreds of millions) of lives throughout the world.
I have yet to see a single life saved by an ipod.
I never thought I'd write something in favour of Bill Gates (back in the mind-90s I wrote one of the first MS antitrust articles in the Euro press) but your absurdly weird fannish comment drove me to it!
Apple wanted new features that do not exist today (like Visual Voicemail)
Google does visual voicemail through GrandCentral. It's been around for ages, both from GC and from others. The beauty of GC is that it works on any phone, sending one or both of a text message with the visual voicemail, or aggregating them all on a single web page that you hit with any phone browser. So it's cross platform. I still can't see why it's such a big deal on apple's phone. ANd yes, my phone also natively runs Google Maps, and streams Youtube fine (both Apple's bandwidth-reduced grainy, limited availability version, and the full Youtube website selection).
Slashdot Mirror
the iPhone is using a custom connection to the server, not the web client which only ever sends out flash encoded files.
Oh yes, I forgot, the iphone cant actually play Flash, can it? That's what, like 90% of the new video content on the net these days? How splendid for you! No wonder you're so focussed on youtube. I've personally tested the iphone's video codec supports and it blows. Despite what ADC *says* are the supported MIME types, the server/codec combinations are finicky and extremely fragile. Which really cripples universal RSS enclosures. And I saw some crashing of Safari during loads following certain UI operations. The templated QUicktime Pro combos work best, which makes me think that Apple really only tested that combo out and ran out of hours for the others.
You already admitted you have ot "turn on" your WiFi signal.
No, the point is that usually I don't *need* to. I get stable IPs, no firewalls, better security, and better connections while mobile.
KHTML, Darwin, GCC updates for Objectsive C, I could go Yawn and Yawn.
Beads and worthless trinkets for some of the more easily gulled natives.
We already established you were an idiot.
I love the way fervent Apple people quickly descend into a disparagement of the intelligence of people who "just don't get it". It's very much 'I love beautiful objects. I love creating them. Negative people upset me' writ large. I bet you're itching to say something like "cluetrain", or "empowerment" next, aren't you? Symbian is challenging to program but has worked well over the decades since basically the Psion invented the PDA to enable an impressive breadth of software choices - Symbian runs, what, like 70% of the world's smartphones? OSX is already looking a little crufty... give it another 10 years and get back to me. In any case, given current iphone sales it'll take, what, a century to shift as many units as Symbian. Good luck with that!
I already explained this, way way back. YouTube quality on the iPhone over WiFi is better than the web version. What you cannot grasp is that the web version (using the flash encoder) is a totally different source than the h.264 stream the iPhone gets.
My phone plays back H.264 quite fine, and my browser spoofs user agents for sites that don't immediately serve up content in the way I want. Also, I like grabbing some media that's marked as "stream only", so UA spoofing and packet sniffing works great here. But thanks for asking. Actually, I don't really understand why there's so much focus on youtube, when Google seems to have less restrictions on bandwidth and length on video.google.
Meanwhile I'm using a faster network than you are 99% of the time.
I doubt you've measured that percentage. In any case, what does wifi get you for general internet access... unless you are running bittorrent on your phone? I have, occasionally, and when I feel I need more speed I use wifi. Or to take it one step further, when I have a lot of data I want to copy to the phone, I plug in the USB and upload directly. Or the ultimate, when I want to fill a few 4GB memory cards with several thousand of my favourite ebooks or shows, I pop them in the card reader, upload, then pop them in the phone.
if you had ever bothered to look there are quite a lot.
Really? How many programs has Apple officially "blessed" as suitable for general iphone deployment? Let me count...
I wasn't wrong once - I guess you can't even count right.
Truly, your Macolyte skills are impressive! Read your earlier posts - in your eagerness to explain how much better a touchscreen driven Google Maps was on iphone, you apparently failed to recognise, over several exchanges, that there's an ARM-compiled touchscreen program as well. Missing it once I could understand, missing it several times lets me know that you're just not seriously listening.
I am a "UNIX People"
No, you're obviously quite attached to a self-image of yourself as an Apple defender. Apple uses GNU/Linux and BSD and other OSS and basically gives back nothing worthwhile. But this enables it to recruit potentially valuable fanatics away from the OSS camp and into its shiny playpen. Ever get the feeling you've been had?
technological dinosaurs that have wandering into Microsoft's mental swamp
Oh dear, my dear dear friend. If anything, I'm more of a fan of Symbian. I was publishing critical Microsoft pieces way back when you were obviously wearing diapers. The fact that your screed descends quickly to such a binary framing of the debate that everyone with opinions different from yours must be a "Microsoft" head is telling. It exposes the deep-rooted insecurity of many of the more fanatical fringe of Apple zealots. By choosing to invest so much of their personality and identity in the consumption of a rather pretty brand of commodity electronics, such people engender a shallowness in their worldview that can only be compensated, or acknowledge, by attacks on an ugly "other". Apple's marketing people really know how to push those buttons to get free effort.
The ugly is that it requires a new phone number.
You mean you *don't* have several numbers? One for business/banks, one for spammers/telemarketers, and one or two for friends and family?
my evil unlocked iPhone works perfectly on T-Mobile - without Visual Voice Mail
Use Google/GrandCentral's visual voicemail. Without 3G it won't be as fluid as it could be, but it's cross platform and carrier-agnostic.
And if I play it in a common WiFi zone that I am in 90% of my day, I get a better quality video than you do visiting the web page.
If you are using wifi and I am using 3G at 1.5 Mbps, and we are both downloading a video at 500 Kbps, how are you getting "better quality"? In actuality, I am probably downloading videos from my home server over Orb or VLC and getting far better results than anything available at youtube.
Have fun in the wifi reservation. Maybe when the next iphone has 3G you'll come out to play?
Apple has constrained said gesture to domains it makes perfect sense in then.
Also helps that there's so few blessed programs!.
I know mine
You haven't admitted to any yet, despite being wrong about Google Maps on ARM three times (yes, I was counting). If your goal is to start measuring UI experience then, unless you're very much older than you seem, you're going to lose. But you, that's too much like cock boxing, so I don't think I'll engage. Finally, I note that you are peculiarly intransigent and apparently completely devoid of a humour bone, a personality trait I've seen repeated again and again in a certain demographic of Apple people since the 1970s.
Why are you so obsessed with grandmothers? I find your fascination with my grandmother... disturbing.
you are held back from by not using an iPhone to access content on a mobile.
Actually, you're still not getting it. I go to the "real" YouTube, I click a video, it plays back. What is the problem here? How are you missing this? How many times do you need it explained? How can I make it clearer to you? My "grainy" comment was based on the fact that, if you use an iphone outside of your little wifi bubble, the quality of the converted downloads is crap. I note that all the Apple shops demo the iphone only on wifi because, let's face it, the 2G is a buzz killer. Come to think of it, I have a suspicion that my phone plays back more video codecs than yours, unless you've been busy compiling a lot of them.
I gesture and zoom in or out to arbitrary degrees in as much time
I've used it, and while it's a neat trick, it's pretty slow to update, and while you may like the *idea* of arbitrarily enlarging and shrinking your maps using a rather imprecise finger-wiggling, I personally like actually quickly getting a view that frames my goal, and then scrolling if required around. But the crux of the argument is that the iphone Google Maps UI is *still* zooming in discrete steps between set magnification levels... whatever about a little interpolation blur. Howeverm, the iphone's use of taps to scroll in fundamentally replicates the ARM UI. You could decide to use multi-touch here but, in general, given its application domain, would one not overwhelmingly prefer single-finger operation for in-car use (a primary domain)? It's cognitively easier with one finger to just point while I keep the other on the wheel! And it's still damn slow to scroll over 2G. I know you're going to say "wifi" again here but really, how many people have wifi in the car?
This brings up an interesting point about the limited grammar of continuous motion gestural interfaces. I recall doing some work on these in the early 90s, comparing productivity to interfaces driven by discrete, constrained actions. In general, there was a limited grammar to gestures that didn't easily scale past narrowly defined task domains. MS has the same problem with the Surface interface... great for the demo apps, not so easy to extend across the board. And I note that the iphone's Maps application actually uses a slightly different grammar than the "standard" UI gestures (what's up with Maps' 2-finger zoom-out thing anyway, I find it impressive that Apple broke its own UI guidelines so quickly).
It'll probably take another decade or so before we nail down an optimal, consensus set, much as the mouse went through several generations of development in the 70s and early 80s. And even then, it's not going to be a panacea, just an easier or quicker way to accomplish a few specific tasks. Much like a voice interface, or a jogwheel, or a message wheel, or all the other little tricks that our handhelds and PCs have been picking up. Often these don't last.
When I was a nipper we were all looking forward to using light pens, just as soon as they became available cheaply. But they never really did, and then the mouse came along, and people preferred horizontal over vertical interaction surfaces. The future doesn't always turn out the way you think. Just because it looked cool in Johnny Mnemonic and Minority Report, the future will probably not be 100% continuous gesture... and the issue of why that is is a deep problem in HCI.
You've used the iPhone for how long again?
It really bugs you when someone doesn't drink the Kool Aid, doesn't it?
I listed a few
That's fair enough. I do think that crowing, today, about the iphone having 8GB of memory is a little silly, when next year 8GB of flash will probably cost around $40 and people with current phones *and* memory slots can ust buy a card and pop it in.
Memory cards really extend the useful life of a handheld. I have an old Archos Ondio, a 2002-era flash player that is useful because it runhs the OSS Rockbox and is great for recording. Anyway, when it was released it came with a whopping 128MB of RAM. It now happily supports 4GB via its built-in memory slot and I still get useful work out of it. I can't remember if Apple had Nanos out then, but with their lack of a slot, people are basically stuck with whatever they get and, to upgrade, they need to junk their current and re-buy. Which is, of course, exactly what Apple wants.
I asked if she did.
She was eaten by bears, you insensitive clod!
Actually, I think you are underestimating the abilities of people, and overestimating the difficulty of bookmarking. It's not that hard. People have been bookmarking porno sites for the better part of 20 years now, and it seems to be working out ok.
What a shame then you are forced to live with a cap on teh quality of your videos us iPhone owners can so easily surpass, and that you feel so afraid of using WiFi you have to actually "turn it on" to use it. How quaint! Using a real phone you just leave it on, drift between WiFi clouds, and still get great battery life.
What cap is this? Who said there was a cap? I can stream SD DIVX from my home server to a client through the phone connection. That's pretty impressive. I think you are misunderstanding me. It's not that I don't want to turn on Wifi, it's that I don't *need* to. With 3G. When you leave your schoolyard or your cubicle, decent wifi is not always as available. You can't be seriously suggesting that if we take two phones, one with Wifi + 3G, and one with Wifi + crappyG, that you would prefer the latter? Unlike your apparently limitless land of effortless wifi clouds, I live in the real world, where wifi is discontinuous, spotty, and frequently encrypted. 3G just works out for better consistent coverage. Plus, I like to run some servers on my phone, and maintaining a consistent IP is important. Hopping from one AP to another would bugger that, *and* they tend to have varying IP filters.
great map interaction involves equally seemless zooming in and out
I tap a single finger once to zoom. How much more seamless can it be? Seriously?
I can't imagine why several people I know ditched the 8525 that they used heavily and started using the iPhone.
Maybe they like the pretty colours? After all, your sample must be uniformly representative, right?
It's great you have many options for substandard mapping solutions, but I'd rather take the best one even if there's only one.
How do you know it's "the best" when you apparently have never used the others?
Visual voicemail seems harder, if only because you have to keep track of the mailbox usage state to keep the display in sync
VV is not that hard to do well, and it doesn't necessitate carrier cooperation. Google does visual voicemail through GrandCentral. It's been around for ages, both from GC and from others. The beauty of GC is that it works on any phone, sending one or both of a text message with the visual voicemail, or aggregating all messages within a single web page that you hit with any phone browser by simply bookmarking m.grandcentral.com. So it's cross platform, and cross-carrier, with no device lock-in. It's no big deal. Of course, you do really need a proper 3G bandwidth on your phone, so that when you click/select the message, it plays back instantly. Given the ease of programming on Windows CE/Symbian devices though, I can see someone someone easily rigging up an on-device cache. The fact they have not seems to indicate that the networks these phones are deployed within are robust enough to support "instant" message playback.
What about the fact that unlocked GSM phones anywhere near the class of the iPhone are ridiculously expensive?
"Classy" unlocked phones are not as expensive as you think. Also, given the amount of hardware features that the iphone lacks, it's more apt to describe it as a simple playback media phone than a "smart" phone. Compare it to unlocked chocolate- or helio-calibre devices.
Visual Voicemail, and all the tight integration that requires enormous amounts of backend cooperation with the carrier partner
VV is not that hard to do well, and it doesn't necessitate carrier cooperation. Google does visual voicemail through GrandCentral. It's been around for ages, both from GC and from others. The beauty of GC is that it works on any phone, sending one or both of a text message with the visual voicemail, or aggregating all messages within a single web page that you hit with any phone browser by simply bookmarking m.grandcentral.com. So it's cross platform, and cross-carrier, with no device lock-in. It's no big deal. Of course, you do really need a proper 3G bandwidth on your phone, so that when you click/select the message, it plays back instantly. Given the ease of programming on Windows CE/Symbian devices though, I can see someone someone easily rigging up an on-device cache. The fact they have not seems to indicate that the networks these phones are deployed within are robust enough to support "instant" message playback.
If you have "proper" 3G and unlimited data. See above.
Visual voicemail, for example, is a great enhancement to the tired "call in to pick up your saved messages" strategy everyone has been using since day 1.
Google does visual voicemail through GrandCentral. It's been around for ages, both from GC and from others. The beauty of GC is that it works on any phone, sending one or both of a text message with the visual voicemail, or aggregating all messages within a single web page that you hit with any phone browser by simply bookmarking m.grandcentral.com. So it's cross platform, and cross-carrier, with no device lock-in. It's no big deal. Of course, you do really need a proper 3G bandwidth on your phone, so that when you click/select the message, it plays back instantly. Given the ease of programming on Windows CE/Symbian devices though, I can see someone someone easily rigging up an on-device cache. The fact they have not seems to indicate that the networks these phones are deployed within are robust enough to support "instant" message playback.
One of the iPhones most appealing characteristics for me is how accommodating its been for developers of 3rd party applications.
Accommodating? Really? I see an extraordinary amount of effort being expended for miniscule results. If you use another platform, Symbian or Windows CE, you immediately enhance your application ease of development and installation by at least several hundred.
I just checked, and last month I downloaded and installed (usually with a single click) more than forty programs for my Windows phone, including MS Portrait (a video phone app), various ebook readers, emulators, vxUtils, a packet snarfer and a WEP cracker, Google Maps, a "touch" contacts UI app, several new screen input UIs, a threaded SMS program to enhance conversations, Flash, a mind mapping program, GMail, several new UI skins, a universal remote for the infrared, a backup program, an encrypted data wallet, Doom, and pacman.
I want visual voice mail too
Google does visual voicemail through GrandCentral. It's been around for ages, both from GC and from others. The beauty of GC is that it works on any phone, sending one or both of a text message with the visual voicemail, or aggregating all messages within a single web page that you hit with any phone browser by simply bookmarking m.grandcentral.com. So it's cross platform, and cross-carrier. It's no big deal.
I get that the feature is great, and I'd love to have it myself.
Google does visual voicemail through GrandCentral. It's been around for ages, both from GC and from others. The beauty of GC is that it works on any phone, sending one or both of a text message with the visual voicemail, or aggregating all messages within a single web page that you hit with any phone browser by simply bookmarking m.grandcentral.com. So it's cross platform, and cross-carrier. It's no big deal. Of course, you do really need a proper 3G bandwidth on your phone, so that when you click/select the message, it plays back instantly.
If phones were unlocked then they would be used on other carriers without Visual Voice mail.
Google does visual voicemail through GrandCentral. It's been around for ages, both from GC and from others. The beauty of GC is that it works on any phone, sending one or both of a text message with the visual voicemail, or aggregating all messages within a single web page that you hit with any phone browser by simply bookmarking m.grandcentral.com. So it's cross platform, and cross-carrier. It's no big deal.
Please point out to me the place in the U.S. where it's easy to buy an unlocked phone and take it from carrier to carrier, cause I'd like to live there.
I got a T-Mobile phone a few years ago in New York. Was travelling to Europe. Called T-Mobile CSR, asked them to unlock it. They did so, took all of two minutes for them to text me an unlock code. Swapped in a few PAYG SIMs, worked great. I was within my first month or two of a two-year contract.
Did you actually read the blog in its entirety? He was given full credit for the full amount.
So every time I get billed $3K by AT&T and Apple, I'll need to blog it, get global exposure, and whine on the phone about it to get a special dispensation for my bill to be reduced. Great, sign me up for that plan!
add features like VVM (which rocketh)
Earlier: Google does visual voicemail through GrandCentral. It's been around for ages, both from GC and from others, and it's simply not that difficult to do, or novel. The beauty of GC's web/SMS approach is that it works on any phone, sending one or both of a text message with the visual voicemail, or aggregating them all on a single web page that you can hit with any phone browser. So it's cross platform. I still can't see why it's such a big deal on apple's phone.
Does your mom use the GC setup?
Yes, you're right, bookmarking m.grandcentral.com on the phone is *hard*. You know, like math. Or email. How will old people ever cope?
by noting it's grainy you must not have access to the WiFi version of YouTube the iPhone offers
No, I was noting that the OTA youtube designed for EDGE has very low bandwidth, making all the videos look basically like Amiga animations from 1987 or so. And unless you hang out in Starbucks all day that's what most iphone people will get.
When I go to Youtube (or use Orb to stream my media from my home server), my phone actually does 1.5 Mbps/800Kbps up/down on typical use over 3G. So I rarely, if ever, turn on my Wifi. Basically, I use it only in basements or suchlike. Always-on 3G means that you're not twiddling as you hop from one AP to another, not draining your battery wifi style, and it works when you are outdriving on the highway.
using the web based version of google maps would not be nearly as nice as the multitouch version of google maps. It's nice that you can do so, but it's just not nearly as fluid to use.
I think you are a little unaware of how many good applications are available on more open phone platforms. The Google Maps I use on my Mogul is a native ARM implementation on Windows CE. It's touchscreen aware, I just drag my finger to scroll and zoom. I can bookmark destinations, call up traffic reports, switch views, and so on. I can also trigger it using the voice UI by simply saying "Maps!" - which is great when driving, believe me. Additionally, while I haven't used it, there's a new ARM-native Windows Live maps that's actually getting better reviews than Google's rather old offering in this space. Outside the Apple firewall, market competition drives product enhancement, not the whims of Herr Jobs.
exclusivity in exchange for visual voice mail is plausible.
Here: Google does visual voicemail through GrandCentral. It's been around for ages, both from GC and from others. The beauty of GC is that it works on any phone, sending one or both of a text message with the visual voicemail, or aggregating them all on a single web page that you hit with any phone browser. So it's cross platform. I still can't see why it's such a big deal on apple's phone. ANd yes, my phone also natively runs Google Maps, and streams Youtube fine (both Apple's bandwidth-reduced grainy, limited availability version, and the full Youtube website selection).
Apple took a risk with the iphone by releasing an expensive device with extra features that not everyone would consider essential.
Apple took a risk with the iphone by releasing an expensive device lacking features that most people would consider essential.
There, fixed that for you.
cell phones are pretty much fixed when you buy them ... Apple says that want to do something more like a desktop computer: They want to keep adding new functionality.
I just checked, and last month I downloaded and installed (usually with a single click) more than forty programs for my Windows phone, including MS Portrait (a video phone app), various ebook readers, emulators, vxUtils, a packet snarfer and a WEP cracker, Google Maps, a "touch" contacts UI app, several new screen input UIs, a threaded SMS program to enhance conversations, Flash, a mind mapping program, GMail, several new UI skins, a universal remote for the infrared, a backup program, an encrypted data wallet, Doom, and pacman.
Yeah, I guess my phone really is pretty much fixed.
You can clearly see why Bill is envious of such loyalty, and he does seem quite often wishful in the products Microsoft makes that they would have such loyal followers.
Where do you get such an insight into Gates's psyche? From where I sit, he came from behind two decades ago. Remember at one time Apple was the world's largest PC manufacturer *and* OS provider. Simply put, when people thought of "personal computer", they thought "Apple". MS managed to grab that market, and while Jobs is certainly not hurting for cash, Gates's wealth is on a scale that dwarfs Jobs. So much so, in fact, that the spare change Gates donated to the Melinda and Bill Gates Foundation is saving millions of lives (and in future hundreds of millions) of lives throughout the world.
I have yet to see a single life saved by an ipod.
I never thought I'd write something in favour of Bill Gates (back in the mind-90s I wrote one of the first MS antitrust articles in the Euro press) but your absurdly weird fannish comment drove me to it!
Apple wanted new features that do not exist today (like Visual Voicemail)
Google does visual voicemail through GrandCentral. It's been around for ages, both from GC and from others. The beauty of GC is that it works on any phone, sending one or both of a text message with the visual voicemail, or aggregating them all on a single web page that you hit with any phone browser. So it's cross platform. I still can't see why it's such a big deal on apple's phone. ANd yes, my phone also natively runs Google Maps, and streams Youtube fine (both Apple's bandwidth-reduced grainy, limited availability version, and the full Youtube website selection).