I think the time will come where a smartphone will not be the new toy but more utilitarian, and people will not be willing to pay twice for one as for another that offers the same basic functionality, like a voice-only cell phone today.
When that happens, Apple's current iPhone business will be much smaller than it is today. Apple is not in the business of selling anything at rock-bottom margins. Look at the laptop market. Apple is doing good money selling overpriced laptops, but they do not own the market, just the high end of it. Right now, they are trying to hold on to their ownership of the smartphone market, and that is not going to happen. In a few years, they may own the high-end of it, or be out of it altogether.
But I am confident that by then, they will have found another cow to milk.
I am not sure which phone or Android version you are refering to, but my Droid Razr came with Gingerbread and I had it for about a month before it was upgraded to ICS and I never had to reboot the phone other than for the OS upgrade.
It did reboot a couple of time when the battery ran out (duh), but the phone never ever locked or froze, or lost signal strength. It has been rock solid and I have had it for about 3 months now.
Add another anecdotal evidence: I replaced my old Blackberry with a Moto Droid Razr (since upgraded to ICS) the same week I was sent overseas with a work iPhone 4S.
I learned to use both phones at the same time, with little previous experience with either.
I found the iPhone easier to setup and to use doing relatively simple things, like all the things Apple thought you might want to do. It helped that my son has a 4S and helped me setting things up. I did not have such help with the Razr.
However, aside from the gorgeous Razr display compared to the smallish iPhone's display, after a couple of week, I was just very happy that I chose the Razr as my personal phone.
Yes, the iPhone is simpler to use (in many but not all regards), which makes a difference for the first few days.
Then the limitations of the "one button" interface become aggravating.
Regardless of what you want to do, the only action you have available on the phone is to press that button.
With Android, the menu buttons just give the user (and the developers) many more options. I use the Back and Menu buttons all the time.
Also, the 4.3" screen of the Razr is really larger enough that it is considerably more convenient, from watching movies and pictures to navigating web pages.
I was thinking that if the company offered me to keep the iPhone 4S, I would save the monthly Verizon charge, but even for that, I am not sure I would take it.
I cannot see myself downgrading to an iPhone any time soon.
It's not just video and Netflix. The mail app on both Android and iOS is terribly inefficient.
I have 6 email accounts synchronized, 3 of them see significant traffic (60 to 100 msg/day). I have the same email accounts and amount of traffic on my Android phone as I did on my Blackberry 2 months ago.
On the Blackberry, my total data usage (including a little bit of web browsing, obviously not much considering how much of a pain that was on that platform) was about 30MB/month.
I briefly used an iPhone 4S and now I have a Motorola Droid Razr and for both of them, data usage (for email only) exceeds 100MB/month, for the same email accounts and roughly the same amount of email traffic.
The email handling for both iOS and Android is considerably less efficient than for the Blackberry.
At the moment, email represents the largest data usage on my phone, yet I do use the phone to browse the web (read news mainly) maybe an hour/day.
I believe the free tethering only applies to 4G traffic for now because the 4G spectrum was auctioned under the condition that tethering be free. That is not the case for 3G spectrum.
Of course, if you have a newer phone, that will not be a problem, but users with 3G only phone may still have to pay to tether.
I am with you with regard to keeping the old plan. I upgraded two phones just before the deadline, and the new phones are 4G capable, so hopefully I will be good for a while.
Another reason to upgrade to 4G even if you happen to be happy with 3G now is that carriers are probably going to reduce 3G capacity as more users migrate to 4G and pretty soon, 3G traffic will be slow and spotty just like what happened to 2G when 3G came about. When that is complete, 4G traffic may be using old 3G spectrum, and the tethering fee will probably come back. That's going to be a mess for everyone involved.
My phone (Droid Razr) was just updated to 4.0 from 2.3 and to be honest, while I like the new OS, the phone was fine with 2.3. Most of the changes I noticed are cosmetic.
There was no killer feature missing, except maybe the fact that now the GSM hardware is available, so I can take my phone overseas instead of having to take the company's iPhone.
However, it appears that there is now no way to turn off LTE, so while before with 2.3 it was possible to turn off LTE and save battery life (a very practical option if you only need email and will be out of charging range for a while), with 4.0 that is no longer an option.
All in all, 4.0 is a good upgrade but not a must have for most people.
These types of agreements do not matter. When you step into an airport, shopping mall, or any kind of place that most of us would think as public, you waive those rights.
These rights only apply in the middle of nowhere, where they are safe to practice.
'The only real reason to introduce a Microsoft-branded tablet is because Microsoft couldn't get anyone else to make a Windows RT tablet.' No reaction yet from Microsoft's system OEM customers that it will now be competing with."
You have to make up your mind. Either MS could not find anybody to make an RT tablet, or they will have competitors in the RT tab;let market. It cannot be both.
I am no fan of Microsoft, but I tend to like them better when they are the underdog. It seems it brings the better out of them.
I have developed a few apps in VB 6.0. They work just fine, but it has become difficult to support and install them under Windows 7. They are not commercial products, just used to support development and test of embedded systems via the serial port. They actually started life as QuickBasic 4.5 apps, then were upgraded to VB for DOS, then to VB 6.0. The "basic" functionality of these apps has not changed much, just the fancy UI stuff has been updated, and TCP/IP support was added.
Facing the fact that VB 6.0 will not be usable beyond W7 (until this recent announcement), I have been looking at what platform I should move these apps to.
VB.NET was briefly on the radar screen, but it quickly became obvious that it would be a very painful avenue, the conversion process would be just about as hard as if I went with a completely different language.
Ideally, I would like an open source alternative with a reasonable likelihood of still being here 5 years from now, and it is a tough choice.
Extending the life of VB 6.0 will delay the point where I have to make that choice.
Congress has increased the duration of copyright to 75 years because companies with deep pockets bought the politicians they needed for that. What makes you think they would allow to change it back to 5 years? Are they crazy? Have they lost their money and influence? Are politicians actually looking at what's good for the country rather than their next reelection campaign?
The supreme court has made it clear that we went from "one man, one vote" to "one dollar, one vote". I do not see that changing any time soon either.
While it is tempting to imagine being able to make such changes, since it would never ever EVER pass, what is the point of the exercise?
There are too many things that we *could* possibly fix with a focused effort, why waste time and energy with something that simply will not happen?
Those high precision users are those who had a voice in the end and successfully shut LS down, but LS would have interfered with all the less expensive applications of GPS, like E911 and other small, cost sensitive portable applications where you cannot afford the size of the filter and additional electronics necessary to offset the loss due to the better filter.
Those users were not as vocal, or they were not listened to, but if LS had succeeded, a lot of these GPS applications would have gone down too, not just the high precision timing and location services.
In addition, they wanted to bully their way through the process using influence and connections.
In sum, they thought they were very smart. So much for that.
In the end, the people who got screwed are the investors who followed them blindly, or knowingly. Those were guilty of stupidity or greed, respectively. Either way they have what they deserve.
The idiots who were running the show already got paid. They will now go on to their next venture, using this *success* as a reference.
I am in the same boat. After replacing the DVD players with Blu-Ray players, they are now unused and I find other forms of entertainment.
I guess a warning would not be so bad if I could skip it like I did with the good old tapes. I get so particularly irritated when the studios have the guts of preventing me from skipping over the stupid warnings.
Some people believe that success can be derived from annoying your customers. I thought we were beyond that. Apparently not.
Aside from analytical thinking, I see evidence of God every day, from the mindless crimes you read about in the newspaper to the Fukushima tsunami. This evidence is as plain as can be and certainly makes me a believer that if there is a God, I certainly don't want to be anywhere him.
I have certainly read uncontested reports of people who acted as true servants of God being summarily executed, and that either does not make me want to be part of this.
I have found that engineers tend to be less devout than the average population, which would support that post, since most engineers are trained to and routinely have to exercise analytical thinking every day.
Yeah, I feel so much better knowing that Facebook (replace with your favorite government agency) has no intention to misuse a stupid law for profit or advantage.
The problem is that most Management/Finance/Marketing types see engineering as a cost center. They know that somehow they need engineers but they do not perceive their services as valuable, just as an expense. Engineers cannot be done soon enough, and on top of that, they seldom meet the budgets and schedules that have been defined by... you guessed it, finance and marketing. Therefore, they represent an expense instead of value to the company.
Unlike marketing, finance, operations, which is where people can boast of making money or saving the company's money, therefore that is where the bonuses go.
This is not necessarily the case everywhere, but it is the prevalent attitude.
My average latency on Cox is around 34 mS, with a worst case over all of last month of 125 mS for a very brief period. The peak was so brief, it did not even record on the chart.
Embarq is on DSL and they should do much better than that. Particularly they should *consistently* do better than that.
It's time for another ISP. I had Embarq for phone service until I realized how much I was overpaying for substandard service. Even cancelling the service was a stressful experience. A month after cancelling and being told I would get a partial refund, I received another bill instead of a refund.
The difference between giving money to someone without expecting anything in return (political contribution) and giving money to someone while expecting something in return (which is usually considered to be bribery, even though it may not meet the legal definition of bribery) is entirely contained in the expectation of the gifter. Therefore, to an external observer, they are indistinguishable.
You can spend a lot of time trying to come up with a structure that makes sense, for the data you have now. I doubt you will succeed considering the variety of data and users you have to serve, and it will only waste time.
Even if you came up with something that will work fine today, it will require a lot of maintenance and probably have to be changed regularly to keep up with the new type of data you will need tomorrow.
I have had to deal with such problems under different environments, and what I found is that organization is much less important than a good search tool.
Make the search tool easy to access and use, and make it work, and people will come to use it by default.
Make sure your tool creates a list of failed hits and sort it by occurrence, and you know what to work on next.
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When that happens, Apple's current iPhone business will be much smaller than it is today. Apple is not in the business of selling anything at rock-bottom margins. Look at the laptop market. Apple is doing good money selling overpriced laptops, but they do not own the market, just the high end of it. Right now, they are trying to hold on to their ownership of the smartphone market, and that is not going to happen. In a few years, they may own the high-end of it, or be out of it altogether.
But I am confident that by then, they will have found another cow to milk.
The 4S is a nice phone, but money aside, I am much happier with the Razr.
It did reboot a couple of time when the battery ran out (duh), but the phone never ever locked or froze, or lost signal strength. It has been rock solid and I have had it for about 3 months now.
Add another anecdotal evidence: I replaced my old Blackberry with a Moto Droid Razr (since upgraded to ICS) the same week I was sent overseas with a work iPhone 4S. I learned to use both phones at the same time, with little previous experience with either. I found the iPhone easier to setup and to use doing relatively simple things, like all the things Apple thought you might want to do. It helped that my son has a 4S and helped me setting things up. I did not have such help with the Razr.
However, aside from the gorgeous Razr display compared to the smallish iPhone's display, after a couple of week, I was just very happy that I chose the Razr as my personal phone.
Yes, the iPhone is simpler to use (in many but not all regards), which makes a difference for the first few days.
Then the limitations of the "one button" interface become aggravating.
Regardless of what you want to do, the only action you have available on the phone is to press that button.
With Android, the menu buttons just give the user (and the developers) many more options. I use the Back and Menu buttons all the time.
Also, the 4.3" screen of the Razr is really larger enough that it is considerably more convenient, from watching movies and pictures to navigating web pages.
I was thinking that if the company offered me to keep the iPhone 4S, I would save the monthly Verizon charge, but even for that, I am not sure I would take it.
I cannot see myself downgrading to an iPhone any time soon.
I have 6 email accounts synchronized, 3 of them see significant traffic (60 to 100 msg/day). I have the same email accounts and amount of traffic on my Android phone as I did on my Blackberry 2 months ago.
On the Blackberry, my total data usage (including a little bit of web browsing, obviously not much considering how much of a pain that was on that platform) was about 30MB/month.
I briefly used an iPhone 4S and now I have a Motorola Droid Razr and for both of them, data usage (for email only) exceeds 100MB/month, for the same email accounts and roughly the same amount of email traffic.
The email handling for both iOS and Android is considerably less efficient than for the Blackberry.
At the moment, email represents the largest data usage on my phone, yet I do use the phone to browse the web (read news mainly) maybe an hour/day.
Of course, if you have a newer phone, that will not be a problem, but users with 3G only phone may still have to pay to tether.
I am with you with regard to keeping the old plan. I upgraded two phones just before the deadline, and the new phones are 4G capable, so hopefully I will be good for a while.
Another reason to upgrade to 4G even if you happen to be happy with 3G now is that carriers are probably going to reduce 3G capacity as more users migrate to 4G and pretty soon, 3G traffic will be slow and spotty just like what happened to 2G when 3G came about. When that is complete, 4G traffic may be using old 3G spectrum, and the tethering fee will probably come back. That's going to be a mess for everyone involved.
There was no killer feature missing, except maybe the fact that now the GSM hardware is available, so I can take my phone overseas instead of having to take the company's iPhone.
However, it appears that there is now no way to turn off LTE, so while before with 2.3 it was possible to turn off LTE and save battery life (a very practical option if you only need email and will be out of charging range for a while), with 4.0 that is no longer an option.
All in all, 4.0 is a good upgrade but not a must have for most people.
I fully expect England to have pioneered the practice. They seem to be at the forefront of elimination of privacy.
These rights only apply in the middle of nowhere, where they are safe to practice.
You have to make up your mind. Either MS could not find anybody to make an RT tablet, or they will have competitors in the RT tab;let market. It cannot be both.
I am no fan of Microsoft, but I tend to like them better when they are the underdog. It seems it brings the better out of them.
VB.NET was briefly on the radar screen, but it quickly became obvious that it would be a very painful avenue, the conversion process would be just about as hard as if I went with a completely different language.
Ideally, I would like an open source alternative with a reasonable likelihood of still being here 5 years from now, and it is a tough choice.
Extending the life of VB 6.0 will delay the point where I have to make that choice.
The supreme court has made it clear that we went from "one man, one vote" to "one dollar, one vote". I do not see that changing any time soon either.
While it is tempting to imagine being able to make such changes, since it would never ever EVER pass, what is the point of the exercise?
There are too many things that we *could* possibly fix with a focused effort, why waste time and energy with something that simply will not happen?
Those users were not as vocal, or they were not listened to, but if LS had succeeded, a lot of these GPS applications would have gone down too, not just the high precision timing and location services.
In sum, they thought they were very smart. So much for that.
In the end, the people who got screwed are the investors who followed them blindly, or knowingly. Those were guilty of stupidity or greed, respectively. Either way they have what they deserve.
The idiots who were running the show already got paid. They will now go on to their next venture, using this *success* as a reference.
Reminds me of the gentleman's club beyond the iron curtain 30 years ago that was not doing any business.
The government was asking the manager how come?
The manager responded: "I don't know, I have the best girls, all party members for at least 40 years."
I guess a warning would not be so bad if I could skip it like I did with the good old tapes. I get so particularly irritated when the studios have the guts of preventing me from skipping over the stupid warnings.
Some people believe that success can be derived from annoying your customers. I thought we were beyond that. Apparently not.
Aside from analytical thinking, I see evidence of God every day, from the mindless crimes you read about in the newspaper to the Fukushima tsunami. This evidence is as plain as can be and certainly makes me a believer that if there is a God, I certainly don't want to be anywhere him. I have certainly read uncontested reports of people who acted as true servants of God being summarily executed, and that either does not make me want to be part of this.
Not sure where you work, or what kind of engineers you work with, but in about 40 years in engineering, that definitely has not been my observation.
I have found that engineers tend to be less devout than the average population, which would support that post, since most engineers are trained to and routinely have to exercise analytical thinking every day.
Yeah, I feel so much better knowing that Facebook (replace with your favorite government agency) has no intention to misuse a stupid law for profit or advantage.
Unlike marketing, finance, operations, which is where people can boast of making money or saving the company's money, therefore that is where the bonuses go.
This is not necessarily the case everywhere, but it is the prevalent attitude.
See pic: http://www.ko4bb.com/Cox_Latency_Feb_2012.png
Embarq is on DSL and they should do much better than that. Particularly they should *consistently* do better than that.
It's time for another ISP. I had Embarq for phone service until I realized how much I was overpaying for substandard service. Even cancelling the service was a stressful experience. A month after cancelling and being told I would get a partial refund, I received another bill instead of a refund.
The difference between giving money to someone without expecting anything in return (political contribution) and giving money to someone while expecting something in return (which is usually considered to be bribery, even though it may not meet the legal definition of bribery) is entirely contained in the expectation of the gifter. Therefore, to an external observer, they are indistinguishable.
Even if you came up with something that will work fine today, it will require a lot of maintenance and probably have to be changed regularly to keep up with the new type of data you will need tomorrow.
I have had to deal with such problems under different environments, and what I found is that organization is much less important than a good search tool.
Make the search tool easy to access and use, and make it work, and people will come to use it by default.
Make sure your tool creates a list of failed hits and sort it by occurrence, and you know what to work on next.
Sorry, I forgot... They will have their own ape-store(tm)