Courier helped make the iPad appear less interesting and less advanced than it is, this helped play a small role in the "iPad is lame" nerdfest, which is still active and is still benefitting Microsoft.
I think this is a key point. People get psychologically and emotionally locked into positions and they don't like to admit that they might be wrong. They don't even like to consider in their own heads that they might be wrong.
So Microsoft can release a video of the Courier and get some people saying, "I'm not getting an iPad. The iPad sucks. I'm going to wait for the Courier." They'll tell their friends and family and random people online, and when Microsoft drops the Courier, those people won't go back and tell everyone, "Oh, I was wrong, maybe the iPad isn't so bad." They'll say, "I'm not getting an iPad. The iPad sucks. I'm going to wait for... something else."
Yes, there's a difference between a "closed standard" and a "patent encumbered standard". H264 is an open standard brought to you by MPEG, the same group that gave you MPEG video and MP3 audio.
All of this stuff has patents on it. The question is, how are those patents being enforced?
Lots of Flash proponents claim that Flash needs to continue to be used for video on the web because otherwise the system will be fragmented between different different video codecs. If everyone is standardized behind one codec, it takes care of one of the big supposed objections to moving from Flash to HTML5.
Third is the perception that WebOS might not be around for long. Probably it being under the HP banner solves the last one.
I'd state this more generally: people don't trust Palm or the vision of its management. For a while Palm was the only real player in the PDA market, which they successfully transitioned into being a major player in the early smartphone market. And then... nothing.
I mean, yes, they developed new handsets on a regular basis, the new versions maybe being slightly thinner or having a better screen. They didn't update the OS significantly. They didn't make large improvements or add new features. They just kind of churned out the same uninspired products year after year.
Finally smartphones started making it into the consumer market, and Palm was late to the party. Around the time Apple was releasing the first iPhone, Palm was announcing the Foleo. Remember the Foleo? It's basically a screen and keyboard that you can connect to your phone and use as a really really really crappy computer. It's not a horrible idea, but they were never going to turn it into a good product. It was cancelled shortly after it was announced.
And so after all that, Palm looks like a company that was hot stuff a decade ago and now doesn't know which way is up. It's not necessarily the end of the world. Apple was roughly in the same boat about 10-15 years ago. Microsoft was looking pretty retarded when Vista was released. But nobody buys tech products from a company that doesn't know which way is up. You want to know that the company will have a steady release of new products and a stable upgrade path. You don't want to lock yourself into a 2 year obligation without a reasonable belief that there will be support from application vendors and accessory vendors, or at least from the original manufacturer.
First the summary tells me that Android phones don't already support Flash, and now you tell me that Flash is a "piece of shit"?
I thought Flash was some kind of perfect standard for video and it was already supported on every platform in existence. After all, that's why everyone is so pissed at Apple for failing to support Flash, right? The only reason any device might not support Flash right now is if the manufacturer is evil?
Of course, it's got to use a lot of CPU cycles on the server side to do this at any sort of scale, built into a browser. But I guess if you are making enough money off your browser, then cool.
That depends on whether they're really "transcoding". Most Flash these days is H264 anyway, so it might just be doing something to bypass Flash and give the device access to the video stream. Of course, most sites are going to start doing this anyway (giving HTML5-capable browsers the ability to bypass Flash and go straight to the video), but this might work as an interim solution.
It may not have all the functionality, but it works pretty well as a web browser. I've been using it on my iPhone, so maybe I have some understanding of what Opera Mini is and is not...? (Opera itself refers to the program as a "browser")
Either way, the app violated Apple's "duplicate functionality" rule and Opera expected it to be rejected, which is why they publicized their submission to iTunes. Apple approved it, which might mean that Apple is not going to enforce that rule anymore (or at least not enforce it strictly).
I read the Adobe engineer's explanation of the problem a while back, where they originally tried to blame Apple for the problem. However, most of the complaints boiled down to "we use Carbon instead of Cocoa, and Carbon isn't as good." Of course, Carbon is the depreciated API that Apple has been asking Adobe to stop using for some time now. So really Adobe's complaint is "We can't be bothered to code our applications to use the correct API."
And of course, that only really explains why Flash doesn't have any hardware acceleration. It does not explain why Flash crashes constantly.
I cannot for the life of me understand why Android and Palm phones debut on 2nd class carriers
I can think of two possible reasons. First, T-Mobile and Sprint may have paid for the exclusivity. Second, Verizon might have wanted to use their position to require design concessions. Part of the reason Apple went to AT&T instead of Verizon is that Verizon (allegedly) wanted to hobble the iPhones capabilities and cover the thing with Verizon branding.
Off the topic a bit, don't Palm own BeOS? HP could do something with that too... It's just a thought
Oh hell, I would love for that to be the reason. I don't know if Palm still owns BeOS, and I don't really care to romanticize the awesomeness of BeOS, but someone really needs to compete with Apple.
What I mean is, right now you have a bunch of OEMs selling generic boxes which run Windows. They each may try to throw in a little of their own secret sauce into Windows, but it's basically still just running Windows, and Windows has its advantages but it also has its share of problems.
Meanwhile Apple is *not* an OEM, nor are they an operating system vendor. They're a systems integrator-- which is to say, they sell a complete platform. Part of the reason they can provide such a nice user experience is because they can exercise a fair amount of control over both the hardware and software. In general, I think it's a winning formula. Unfortunately, no one is really competing with Apple in that market.
I would love to see HP or Dell or someone take a stab at it. Providing some hidden option on your website to buy a computer with Ubuntu pre-installed doesn't really cut it. You could use Linux, but I want at least one of these companies to have a serious team of developers and designers devoted toward customizing their own Linux distribution to be optimized for their hardware, providing the best user experience possible.
I think if you can get a couple more hardware manufacturers playing in this market, we might see some real improvement in personal computers. If HP were buying Palm to attempt this sort of thing using a BeOS base, it would be a good sign.
Well AFAIK KHTML didn't have support for HTML5 and CSS3 when Apple forked it. Apple has worked with others to push standards forward, so I think it's enough to recognize Apple as a standards proponent on the web.
And you can't really complain about a fork. If the KHTML people didn't want to allow their project to be forked, then they should have used a different license.
I know that some people here will jump all over his assertion, and accuse him of lying. But let me tell you, I think it's true.
I'm sure it's true. I've done various levels of Mac support over the past 10 years or so, and though I don't have stats, I have a hell of a lot of anecdotal evidence. In the past few years, most of the application crashes and slowdowns (beachballs of death) that I've run into have been browser related, and it seems to be caused by Flash every single time. Recently Apple started sandboxing Flash and now Safari itself doesn't crash, but Flash still crashes. Flash also crashes Chrome and Firefox, so it's not just a Safari problem.
Given what evidence is available, I don't see any reason to doubt Jobs on this one.
It's possible, but the next day you'll get an announcement, "Apple is proud to present iDesign, which compliments their iWork and iLife products." If my migration from MS Office 2004 to iWork '09 is any indication, I'd gladly drop Photoshop for an Apple competitor.
I don't understand this. I mean, I understand why you want to run another browser, but I don't understand how restricting the iPhones browser choices is inconsistent with embracing an open web
Well Apple has seemed to change direction in allowing Opera, whereas before they claimed they would reject browsers and mail applications and any other app which replicated functionality already built into the phone.
I agree that it's a bad policy, but maybe they're rolling that policy back? Of course, really you'd want them to allow you to install any damned thing you want without going through their app store, but I think that's a ways off.
Yeah, I don't think Jobs is a hypocrite for citing Flash's proprietary nature as a reason not to support it. First, though Apple sells closed-source software and they've locked down the iPhone platform, they have supported open protocols and open file formats. As you say, "apps can be proprietary, web standards should not be."
Beyond that, I also see another less judgmental issue: Apple may put their own proprietary software on their products, but it is their own proprietary software. It seems reasonable that proprietary developers wouldn't particularly want to be reliant on another proprietary developer which they have no control over. If Apple supports the Flash plugin and Flash apps, then suddenly the future of their platform is (to some degree) reliant on Adobe to do a good job in developing the Flash plugin and keeping the Flash framework in sync with Apple's development of the iPhone OS.
That's not a problem with FOSS, which would theoretically allow Apple to create their own fork in a worst-case scenario.
They designed a pretty decent phone, but the iPhone is not the be-all-end-all of smart-phone technology. There was a point when the features of the iPhone made it somewhat unique. That moment has passed.
To be fair, they didn't just make a "pretty decent phone". Their entrance into the mobile phone industry was the creation of a phone that everyone else spent the following 3 years trying to copy. Now Android phones are catching up, and there are some advantages to having an iPhone and some advantages to having an Android phone.
Apple's brilliance is in marketing.
Well they do have a brilliance in marketing, but part of marketing is finding a market and developing a product to meet that market. Real marketing isn't just "convincing people". Apple's brilliance in marketing was understanding how to create a smartphone that appealed to the consumer class instead of just the corporate drones and gadget jockeys. Before that, they showed marketing brilliance in building the iPod, and understanding that people would pounce on an MP3 player that was painless to use even if it had no wireless, less space than a nomad, and was lame.
But Apple's real brilliance is in their design. Come on, don't pretend that's not true. You can say that you don't care whether your computers and electronics are nice looking and pleasant to use, but I don't think you can honestly deny that Apple's products are nice looking and pleasant to use.
You want to watch video on a site that doesn't do special encoding for you phone? Apple says "Too f-ing bad. You don't need that anyway."
... eh... Not quite fair. Most phones have some limitations in their video playback capabilities. The difference that gets people hot and bothered is that Apple won't support Flash. It's not even that they won't play Flash-formatted video files, since Flash plays H264 files anyway. The problem is that Apple won't support a separate embedded media player that has been developed by a rather unfriendly company. Flash is less standard than the MP4 files that Apple supports.
So it's not exactly that Apple requires "special encoding", but that they don't support a particular whacky and traditionally unstable and inefficient 3rd party media player.
You want to run apps in the background? Apple says "Too f-ing bad. You don't need that anyway."
Again, probably not quite fair. They've been working to provide developers with methods to give access to background-running capabilities while still making efficient use of system resources.
You want an app for hardcore pornography? Apple says "Too f-ing bad. You don't need that anyway."
Yeah, I guess that's fair. On the other hand, they aren't blocking your access to hardcore porn. They're just refusing to distribute pornography applications. There are things that bother me about their controlling application distribution, but this isn't it.
This analogy makes me think you're missing the point. If the iPhone were a car, you wouldn't be allowed to open the hood, change your own oil, pump your own gas, or change the tires.
Well if the iPhone were a car, you also wouldn't have much reason to open the hood except to change the battery. For the most part, there isn't any mechanical maintenance needed for the iPhone, so the analogy doesn't quite track. I'd say it's more like a car where the manufacturer doesn't support you turning your car into a lowrider, putting on a custom spoiler, or hacking your in-dash GPS system to run an NES emulator-- they can't quite stop you from doing those things, but they'll make it difficult and and it'll void your warranty.
It's not even that. It's "A website implemented some UI changes which make its content more open and available to a wider range of devices, including several popular mobile devices."
I agree. I liked Iron Man, and I think there are a few reasons it got such acclaim, but one of the major reasons was that expectations were low. I know I wasn't expecting it to be good, and low expectations lead to being pleasantly surprised. I think a lot of people were even more pleasantly surprised since, relative to Batman/Superman/Spiderman, Iron Man was downright obscure stuff.
Sorry, I know someone here will get mad at the claim that Iron Man is obscure. Maybe he's your favorite superhero ever, but my parents and even my friends and siblings hadn't heard of him before the movie. They knew Spiderman, they knew the Hulk, but they didn't know who Iron Man was. So you had a decent percentage of the movie-going population walked into a superhero movie about some superhero they'd never heard of, and it was actually pretty good. If Superman Returns had been equally good, people still would have complained.
Not only was the acting good, but it quickly went through the origin story in a way that felt organic. The stereotype of first-time superhero movies is that they spend half the movie going through a plodding/annoying origin story in a way that feels brutally forced, and then break from that to an entirely different story about the "main villain". As I recall, Iron Man somehow managed to sidestep the issue and made it feel like you were watching a coherent story, which was helpful.
Still, if you ask me, the Batman movies are almost in a different genre than the rest of these superhero movies. They're more like a cross between a superhero movie and a gritty independent crime thriller.
Malicious modding. Some people throw a hissy fit when their FUD is debunked. It doesn't matter if the FUD is anti-Microsoft, anti-Apple, anti-Google, or anti-something-else. People who like the FUD don't like hearing that it's BS, and people who really love FUD are often petty and malicious.
Just because IE was free doesn't mean they didn't make *any* money from it. Even the earliest versions of IE came with pre-installed bookmarks to companies who paid for placement.
Huh. iPhone is the leader? I think maybe you should try explaining that to RIM. Their 40+% marketshare might disagree.
There are different measures of who is "leading", and market share is one. There's also sales, mind share, and actual innovation (who is actually leading the trends of what phones will be in the future).
I'll let other people argue about who is leading in which measure.
T-Mobile and Sprint use different kinds of networks
Even T-Mobile and AT&T, which are both GSM, use different frequencies for 3G data. So if you want to buy a Nexus One, you have to buy the AT&T version or the T-Mobile version. You can't just buy one and use it on the other network without penalty.
I haven't watched it through again to answer your question, but I think I remember him sending SMS messages and implying that he could use the 3G network.
Slashdot Mirror
Courier helped make the iPad appear less interesting and less advanced than it is, this helped play a small role in the "iPad is lame" nerdfest, which is still active and is still benefitting Microsoft.
I think this is a key point. People get psychologically and emotionally locked into positions and they don't like to admit that they might be wrong. They don't even like to consider in their own heads that they might be wrong.
So Microsoft can release a video of the Courier and get some people saying, "I'm not getting an iPad. The iPad sucks. I'm going to wait for the Courier." They'll tell their friends and family and random people online, and when Microsoft drops the Courier, those people won't go back and tell everyone, "Oh, I was wrong, maybe the iPad isn't so bad." They'll say, "I'm not getting an iPad. The iPad sucks. I'm going to wait for... something else."
Yes, there's a difference between a "closed standard" and a "patent encumbered standard". H264 is an open standard brought to you by MPEG, the same group that gave you MPEG video and MP3 audio.
All of this stuff has patents on it. The question is, how are those patents being enforced?
Lots of Flash proponents claim that Flash needs to continue to be used for video on the web because otherwise the system will be fragmented between different different video codecs. If everyone is standardized behind one codec, it takes care of one of the big supposed objections to moving from Flash to HTML5.
Third is the perception that WebOS might not be around for long. Probably it being under the HP banner solves the last one.
I'd state this more generally: people don't trust Palm or the vision of its management. For a while Palm was the only real player in the PDA market, which they successfully transitioned into being a major player in the early smartphone market. And then... nothing.
I mean, yes, they developed new handsets on a regular basis, the new versions maybe being slightly thinner or having a better screen. They didn't update the OS significantly. They didn't make large improvements or add new features. They just kind of churned out the same uninspired products year after year.
Finally smartphones started making it into the consumer market, and Palm was late to the party. Around the time Apple was releasing the first iPhone, Palm was announcing the Foleo. Remember the Foleo? It's basically a screen and keyboard that you can connect to your phone and use as a really really really crappy computer. It's not a horrible idea, but they were never going to turn it into a good product. It was cancelled shortly after it was announced.
And so after all that, Palm looks like a company that was hot stuff a decade ago and now doesn't know which way is up. It's not necessarily the end of the world. Apple was roughly in the same boat about 10-15 years ago. Microsoft was looking pretty retarded when Vista was released. But nobody buys tech products from a company that doesn't know which way is up. You want to know that the company will have a steady release of new products and a stable upgrade path. You don't want to lock yourself into a 2 year obligation without a reasonable belief that there will be support from application vendors and accessory vendors, or at least from the original manufacturer.
but... but.... I'm shocked!
First the summary tells me that Android phones don't already support Flash, and now you tell me that Flash is a "piece of shit"?
I thought Flash was some kind of perfect standard for video and it was already supported on every platform in existence. After all, that's why everyone is so pissed at Apple for failing to support Flash, right? The only reason any device might not support Flash right now is if the manufacturer is evil?
Of course, it's got to use a lot of CPU cycles on the server side to do this at any sort of scale, built into a browser. But I guess if you are making enough money off your browser, then cool.
That depends on whether they're really "transcoding". Most Flash these days is H264 anyway, so it might just be doing something to bypass Flash and give the device access to the video stream. Of course, most sites are going to start doing this anyway (giving HTML5-capable browsers the ability to bypass Flash and go straight to the video), but this might work as an interim solution.
It may not have all the functionality, but it works pretty well as a web browser. I've been using it on my iPhone, so maybe I have some understanding of what Opera Mini is and is not...? (Opera itself refers to the program as a "browser")
Either way, the app violated Apple's "duplicate functionality" rule and Opera expected it to be rejected, which is why they publicized their submission to iTunes. Apple approved it, which might mean that Apple is not going to enforce that rule anymore (or at least not enforce it strictly).
I read the Adobe engineer's explanation of the problem a while back, where they originally tried to blame Apple for the problem. However, most of the complaints boiled down to "we use Carbon instead of Cocoa, and Carbon isn't as good." Of course, Carbon is the depreciated API that Apple has been asking Adobe to stop using for some time now. So really Adobe's complaint is "We can't be bothered to code our applications to use the correct API."
And of course, that only really explains why Flash doesn't have any hardware acceleration. It does not explain why Flash crashes constantly.
I cannot for the life of me understand why Android and Palm phones debut on 2nd class carriers
I can think of two possible reasons. First, T-Mobile and Sprint may have paid for the exclusivity. Second, Verizon might have wanted to use their position to require design concessions. Part of the reason Apple went to AT&T instead of Verizon is that Verizon (allegedly) wanted to hobble the iPhones capabilities and cover the thing with Verizon branding.
Off the topic a bit, don't Palm own BeOS? HP could do something with that too... It's just a thought
Oh hell, I would love for that to be the reason. I don't know if Palm still owns BeOS, and I don't really care to romanticize the awesomeness of BeOS, but someone really needs to compete with Apple.
What I mean is, right now you have a bunch of OEMs selling generic boxes which run Windows. They each may try to throw in a little of their own secret sauce into Windows, but it's basically still just running Windows, and Windows has its advantages but it also has its share of problems.
Meanwhile Apple is *not* an OEM, nor are they an operating system vendor. They're a systems integrator-- which is to say, they sell a complete platform. Part of the reason they can provide such a nice user experience is because they can exercise a fair amount of control over both the hardware and software. In general, I think it's a winning formula. Unfortunately, no one is really competing with Apple in that market.
I would love to see HP or Dell or someone take a stab at it. Providing some hidden option on your website to buy a computer with Ubuntu pre-installed doesn't really cut it. You could use Linux, but I want at least one of these companies to have a serious team of developers and designers devoted toward customizing their own Linux distribution to be optimized for their hardware, providing the best user experience possible.
I think if you can get a couple more hardware manufacturers playing in this market, we might see some real improvement in personal computers. If HP were buying Palm to attempt this sort of thing using a BeOS base, it would be a good sign.
Well AFAIK KHTML didn't have support for HTML5 and CSS3 when Apple forked it. Apple has worked with others to push standards forward, so I think it's enough to recognize Apple as a standards proponent on the web.
And you can't really complain about a fork. If the KHTML people didn't want to allow their project to be forked, then they should have used a different license.
I know that some people here will jump all over his assertion, and accuse him of lying. But let me tell you, I think it's true.
I'm sure it's true. I've done various levels of Mac support over the past 10 years or so, and though I don't have stats, I have a hell of a lot of anecdotal evidence. In the past few years, most of the application crashes and slowdowns (beachballs of death) that I've run into have been browser related, and it seems to be caused by Flash every single time. Recently Apple started sandboxing Flash and now Safari itself doesn't crash, but Flash still crashes. Flash also crashes Chrome and Firefox, so it's not just a Safari problem.
Given what evidence is available, I don't see any reason to doubt Jobs on this one.
It's possible, but the next day you'll get an announcement, "Apple is proud to present iDesign, which compliments their iWork and iLife products." If my migration from MS Office 2004 to iWork '09 is any indication, I'd gladly drop Photoshop for an Apple competitor.
I don't understand this. I mean, I understand why you want to run another browser, but I don't understand how restricting the iPhones browser choices is inconsistent with embracing an open web
Well Apple has seemed to change direction in allowing Opera, whereas before they claimed they would reject browsers and mail applications and any other app which replicated functionality already built into the phone.
I agree that it's a bad policy, but maybe they're rolling that policy back? Of course, really you'd want them to allow you to install any damned thing you want without going through their app store, but I think that's a ways off.
Yeah, I don't think Jobs is a hypocrite for citing Flash's proprietary nature as a reason not to support it. First, though Apple sells closed-source software and they've locked down the iPhone platform, they have supported open protocols and open file formats. As you say, "apps can be proprietary, web standards should not be."
Beyond that, I also see another less judgmental issue: Apple may put their own proprietary software on their products, but it is their own proprietary software. It seems reasonable that proprietary developers wouldn't particularly want to be reliant on another proprietary developer which they have no control over. If Apple supports the Flash plugin and Flash apps, then suddenly the future of their platform is (to some degree) reliant on Adobe to do a good job in developing the Flash plugin and keeping the Flash framework in sync with Apple's development of the iPhone OS.
That's not a problem with FOSS, which would theoretically allow Apple to create their own fork in a worst-case scenario.
They designed a pretty decent phone, but the iPhone is not the be-all-end-all of smart-phone technology. There was a point when the features of the iPhone made it somewhat unique. That moment has passed.
To be fair, they didn't just make a "pretty decent phone". Their entrance into the mobile phone industry was the creation of a phone that everyone else spent the following 3 years trying to copy. Now Android phones are catching up, and there are some advantages to having an iPhone and some advantages to having an Android phone.
Apple's brilliance is in marketing.
Well they do have a brilliance in marketing, but part of marketing is finding a market and developing a product to meet that market. Real marketing isn't just "convincing people". Apple's brilliance in marketing was understanding how to create a smartphone that appealed to the consumer class instead of just the corporate drones and gadget jockeys. Before that, they showed marketing brilliance in building the iPod, and understanding that people would pounce on an MP3 player that was painless to use even if it had no wireless, less space than a nomad, and was lame.
But Apple's real brilliance is in their design. Come on, don't pretend that's not true. You can say that you don't care whether your computers and electronics are nice looking and pleasant to use, but I don't think you can honestly deny that Apple's products are nice looking and pleasant to use.
You want to watch video on a site that doesn't do special encoding for you phone? Apple says "Too f-ing bad. You don't need that anyway."
... eh... Not quite fair. Most phones have some limitations in their video playback capabilities. The difference that gets people hot and bothered is that Apple won't support Flash. It's not even that they won't play Flash-formatted video files, since Flash plays H264 files anyway. The problem is that Apple won't support a separate embedded media player that has been developed by a rather unfriendly company. Flash is less standard than the MP4 files that Apple supports.
So it's not exactly that Apple requires "special encoding", but that they don't support a particular whacky and traditionally unstable and inefficient 3rd party media player.
You want to run apps in the background? Apple says "Too f-ing bad. You don't need that anyway."
Again, probably not quite fair. They've been working to provide developers with methods to give access to background-running capabilities while still making efficient use of system resources.
You want an app for hardcore pornography? Apple says "Too f-ing bad. You don't need that anyway."
Yeah, I guess that's fair. On the other hand, they aren't blocking your access to hardcore porn. They're just refusing to distribute pornography applications. There are things that bother me about their controlling application distribution, but this isn't it.
This analogy makes me think you're missing the point. If the iPhone were a car, you wouldn't be allowed to open the hood, change your own oil, pump your own gas, or change the tires.
Well if the iPhone were a car, you also wouldn't have much reason to open the hood except to change the battery. For the most part, there isn't any mechanical maintenance needed for the iPhone, so the analogy doesn't quite track. I'd say it's more like a car where the manufacturer doesn't support you turning your car into a lowrider, putting on a custom spoiler, or hacking your in-dash GPS system to run an NES emulator-- they can't quite stop you from doing those things, but they'll make it difficult and and it'll void your warranty.
It's not even that. It's "A website implemented some UI changes which make its content more open and available to a wider range of devices, including several popular mobile devices."
The summary is just snarky flamebait.
I agree. I liked Iron Man, and I think there are a few reasons it got such acclaim, but one of the major reasons was that expectations were low. I know I wasn't expecting it to be good, and low expectations lead to being pleasantly surprised. I think a lot of people were even more pleasantly surprised since, relative to Batman/Superman/Spiderman, Iron Man was downright obscure stuff.
Sorry, I know someone here will get mad at the claim that Iron Man is obscure. Maybe he's your favorite superhero ever, but my parents and even my friends and siblings hadn't heard of him before the movie. They knew Spiderman, they knew the Hulk, but they didn't know who Iron Man was. So you had a decent percentage of the movie-going population walked into a superhero movie about some superhero they'd never heard of, and it was actually pretty good. If Superman Returns had been equally good, people still would have complained.
Not only was the acting good, but it quickly went through the origin story in a way that felt organic. The stereotype of first-time superhero movies is that they spend half the movie going through a plodding/annoying origin story in a way that feels brutally forced, and then break from that to an entirely different story about the "main villain". As I recall, Iron Man somehow managed to sidestep the issue and made it feel like you were watching a coherent story, which was helpful.
Still, if you ask me, the Batman movies are almost in a different genre than the rest of these superhero movies. They're more like a cross between a superhero movie and a gritty independent crime thriller.
Malicious modding. Some people throw a hissy fit when their FUD is debunked. It doesn't matter if the FUD is anti-Microsoft, anti-Apple, anti-Google, or anti-something-else. People who like the FUD don't like hearing that it's BS, and people who really love FUD are often petty and malicious.
Just because IE was free doesn't mean they didn't make *any* money from it. Even the earliest versions of IE came with pre-installed bookmarks to companies who paid for placement.
How much did they lose on Xbox in the beginning?
Are they making money on the XBox now? I thought that had been pushed off by all the defective units.
Huh. iPhone is the leader? I think maybe you should try explaining that to RIM. Their 40+% marketshare might disagree.
There are different measures of who is "leading", and market share is one. There's also sales, mind share, and actual innovation (who is actually leading the trends of what phones will be in the future).
I'll let other people argue about who is leading in which measure.
T-Mobile and Sprint use different kinds of networks
Even T-Mobile and AT&T, which are both GSM, use different frequencies for 3G data. So if you want to buy a Nexus One, you have to buy the AT&T version or the T-Mobile version. You can't just buy one and use it on the other network without penalty.
Video here.
I haven't watched it through again to answer your question, but I think I remember him sending SMS messages and implying that he could use the 3G network.
If you doubt this, I dare you to install android on your mobile phone.
Wasn't there a story recently about a guy who successfully installed Android on his iPhone? Or did that guy have special proprietary knowledge?