instead it is just a custom application that uses Google Maps images/data. Similar programs are available for "normal" mobilephones as J2ME apps.
I guess I wasn't the only one totally underwhelmed by Steve's enthusiasm for this amazing innovation called Google Maps "on a phone!!! It's on a Phone!" I was using the J2ME version of Google Maps on my old Sprint Sanyo 8200 last year and it worked exactly the same as the version he showed, complete with satellite imagery... minus touch screen of course.
The Motorola SLVR L7 "with iTunes" I got from Cingular (via Best Buy for $35 vs. Cingular's $150 price) supports all of that stuff you've mentioned out of the box. I can upload and download sounds, images, videos, and applications to and from the phone via USB or Bluetooth quite easily. I can throw an MP3 up there in the audio directory and my phone will let me select it for use as a ringtone if I want. I can use my phone as a wireless Bluetooth modem via its DUN profile, etc.
The carriers that you're thinking of that restrict all that stuff are Verizon and Sprint (at least the Sprint phone I had), but the GSM providers here like T-Mobile and Cingular seem to be much more open about what you can do with your phones, which is why this iPhone restriction is so strikingly odd IMHO. It just seems natural that you could use third party apps on your horribly expensive iPhone, but they've really reduced the reasons I'd even be interested in it because I saw no instant messaging application for instance.
What if I want to use Jabber to my private Jabber server? What if I want to view and edit Microsoft Office documents? I saw no way to even view Word docs or Excel spreadsheets on this unlike the Blackberry. This is an overpriced toy, nothing more. Paris Hilton will have one and so will the other materialistic bubbleheads, but until it supports third party apps it couldn't lick a Blackberry or Treo's taint, much less be years ahead of it in functionality.
So that's it? The iPhone saved space by not having a plastic keyboard? Please tell me after two days after the keynote that's not the only advantage it actually has.
The Steve Jobs' Reality Distortion Field is already waning! Quick, someone leak some more mockups of the wide-screen video iPod and the new consumer-level $999 headless Mac Home system (basically a Mac Pro with a single Core 2 Duo in it instead of multiple Xeon processors)!
Steve lost my interest the moment he showed the phone was VERY expensive at $499 for the base model WITH a damn 2 year contract. You might as well get a Blackjack for $299 from an established cell phone manufacturer than worry about quality issues with a first generation iPhone. I think Apple has just introduced its first bomb product in a long time. The Cingular lock-in and the high price are going to make this one a non-starter unless they change something significant. Third-party apps would have been the only saving grace but he's scuttled that.
If Apple had been smart, they would have went to T-mobile (or Cingular) and worked with them to get a rate plan similar to the T-mobile branded Sidekick.
If Apple had been smart they would've released this as an unlocked phone and let you go get an SIM card from whichever provider you like best (which is basically either T-Mobile or Cingular in the USA for the GSM support). I just signed up for Cingular in December and I've been reasonably happy with their service, but their data plans and messaging nickel and dime you to death if you want to use them. They have no unlimited messaging plan and the unlimited Internet is $20/month. It's not even worth it with my slow Motorola SLVR though because it doesn't even support EDGE and the built-in WAP browser sucks balls. I'd love to try the iPhone out for awhile though presuming they didn't force a $40/month data plan down my throat for unlimited access, but alas, it looks like I won't even be able to purchase the phone since I'll only be 7 months into a 2 year contract. I wonder how much the phone will be for current subscribers... $1200?
Naw, just surprised Google is even still in business. They've definitely outlived the other search engines in terms of popularity. It amazes me that it still makes money selling advertising considering the advertising collapse years ago after the dot-bomb failures. How does Google stay in business by offering so much of their stuff for free?
How do you live the good life while unemployed? How are they going to make a living? What, all 100 of them are millionaires and set for life? I doubt that.
If Apple follows the trends and becomes a player in the phone market then I'd expect them to release the iPhone as the "Apple v768m" or some other innocuous brand name. Then the next model can be the Apple v295jk that is smaller and then the Apple 999z which will include a 20 gig flash drive and UMTS support.
Given the absurd numbers of rumours which abounded over the past few months, what is this "secret" of which you speak?
The secret is that the thing is actually still called the iPhone even though Cisco has a product with that name. Hopefully Apple will be changing the production name of the product once it is released like they did with iTV->Apple TV or I'd think they'd get sued for trademark infringement.
Have phone service prices actually been going down?
Of course not. Try finding a phone plan that costs $20 a month and has at least 100 minutes of talk time. I used to have that 10 years ago but I can't find anything that cheap anymore unless you go to prepaid plans and those are a bitch and a half to figure out. Way too complex for my mother-in-law to understand which is what I'm aiming the phone for. All she needs is a VERY simple handset with nothing special.. no cameras, SMS, Internet, color screens.. hell, preferably even analog service instead of digital because analog has superior signal.
The iPhone is a totally new device in almost every way. There's nothing else like it anywhere.
It's a phone with built-in calendar, Google maps, iTunes player, cell phone, etc. My Motorola SLVR that I bought last month when I signed up with Cingular for $35 does exactly the same thing this does minus the Wi-Fi and fancy screen.
Sony needs to drop the price of the 20GB PS3 down to a more reasonable $300 to compete or they're dead. One way would be to abandon the Blu-Ray player and make a PS3 version 2.0 that just uses a traditional DVD-ROM drive... or are Sony PS3 games on Blu-Ray discs? That would've been a colossal mistake if they're using Blu-Ray for games.
"Wow dude, you just got a new game! Put it in!" "Hmm its just an empty box...no CD...not even a manual...just...sand..." "Eih. Wait for the patch."
Reminds me of how Valve was selling Half-Life 2. "So, uhh.. I need this Steam thing to actually download the rest of the game to play and this CD is actually worthless unless I connect to Steam?"
I heartedly agree with you on that. I was dying to get a copy of this game and start playing it, but after a half hour of game play I felt like I got screwed out of $40. It's a good lesson in life... wait a few weeks or months before buying something to make sure you can read real-world user reviews of it. If I would've been patient I wouldn't have bought the game based on the crappy user reviews. The game seems too limiting in addition to the combat being too hard. There's only the Federation, Romulans, Klingons, and the Borg. WTF? Where are the Ferengi or the Cardassians or any number of other races that would've been around in at least the Next Generation and above?
Someone else said it in another post, but Star Trek 25th Anniversary Edition was the best Star Trek game I ever played. The graphics obviously sucked, but the puzzles and other challenges were very interesting. This Legacy game is nothing more than a space combat arcade game with Star Trek slapped on it. They could've just as easily used any other models and slapped a different name on the game and it would've still worked. Star Trek is about negotiating, not space combat. I thought there'd at least be some kind of away missions or SOMETHING in addition to just the arcade shoot 'em up style of game play, but I was severely disappointed.
Amen to that. I use noscript and I have lost count of how many sites fail completely or outright refuse to load if JS is disabled.
I love news sites that require you to turn on Javascript. I'll click on a link, the article will load and look absolutely fine and formatted just dandy for reading and then boom, a second or two later it'll redirect to some page saying "Javascript is required on this site" and won't even let me read the article. What on Earth would I need Javascript for in order to read TEXT on a page? The only thing I can think of is for them to handle their advertisements.
There has to be some way to force porn off the.com TLD.
It's pretty easy actually. All they have to do is make it against the terms of service for the.com registration and the next time registration comes around make everyone put up a $500 deposit on their.com domain registration as a bounty. If anyone reports a legitimate occurrence of pornography on that web site, they get the $500 bounty and your domain gets put into on-hold status until you've cleared away the offending content to the satisfaction of the registration authority and paid another $500 deposit. It'd be self-policing for the most part.
Its as if there's a whole new generation of people at Microsoft who don't give a shit.
But that's exactly what needed to be done! The "backwards compatibility" crap is why web sites still need special hacks to display their pages differently to IE 5 and IE 6 clients than modern browsers that actually follow the standards. These platforms were broken from the get-go but people coded their sites to embrace the broken functionality while many times ignoring the standards-compliant browsers!
Assuming you're broadcasting in standard def or below (320x240), you could get away with having simple DV cameras ($3k/each)
$3k for a video camera!? This isn't the 1980s anymore. My camcorder was $300 and it takes fantastic videos in that resolution and it's 4 years old. A $3k video camera better fluff your dick between shots for that kind of money.
Re:Not a resource they can download and process?
on
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Really? Firefox doesn't seem to have any problems downloading and processing it, and as I wasn't aware that Firefox or Gecko used voodoo magic
Took about 5 seconds to fully render that HEC on my 1.6 GHz Powerbook running Firefox. It could just be the time associated with downloading all that HTML though I guess. It definitely seems to not be friendly compared to a 30K JPEG of the same thing.
2/3rds of the gifts I bought this year were iPods and iTunes music gift cards.
If someone bought me an iTunes gift card I'd slap them in the head with it. Why not get them something useful like a Best Buy gift card so at least they can go pick up the CDs at the store instead of settling for the low-quality DRM-encumbered stuff that iTunes shackles you with in the form of their protected-AAC files? Don't get me wrong, I think some day online music sales will be the wave of the future, but until Apple starts selling their expensive tracks encoded in the Apple Lossless codec or FLAC they won't be seeing another dime of my money. It's fantastic that they let you burn a copy of YOUR music that you purchased to a regular audio CD, but the fact of the matter is that what you're burning is sub-CD-quality sound and yet costs the same as the CD would if you had bought it in the store. $10-$12 is the going rate for popular CDs in brick and mortar shops.
No different from record labels sending promos to music journalists, or game companies sending software to reviewers.
How is this "bribing?"
Sending them a 30-day trial of Vista to evaluate is one thing, sending them a very expensive laptop preloaded with Vista is quite another. It'd be like record labels sending journalists a free 80 gig iPod and stereo speakers with every new song they're promoting.
I'm no code jockey, but I always thought that Perl was meant for run-it-once type applications that handle things like text processing and database searching.
Well then you would be wrong. Perl can be used for anything. In fact, the hard core Perl coders write video games in Perl.
I think in the instances of cell phone location services, "GPS" is just a generic term for determining your location and has little to do with the actual array of military satellites in orbit. They probably just use triangulation with cell phone towers to determine your location. The technology to do this was invented long before the first GPS satellite was launched.
Middleground is bad. It doesn't distinguish you from your competitors.
That's not true at all. Being in the middle means that you're better than a Wii at graphics, performance, and probably have better games, and you're cheaper than a PS3. I *always* buy the middle of the road computer hardware when I'm upgrading because it offers the best balance of price and performance. For example, there's no way I'd pay $400 for a CPU when I know it'll be $150 within 6 months. The same goes for expensive graphics cards. The only people that buy the newest and most expensive things are people with too much disposable income and too little patience. I'll probably pick up a Wii... in 6 months if they drop the price. $250 is a little too much for what is essentially a console that belongs with the last generation. It's just a souped up Gamecube with a different controller whereas the PS3 and XBox360 are truly revolutionary advances in gaming technology.
There is room for advertising in-game and I would have thought it's fairly "no duh" that it won't work everywhere.
Well, advertisers aren't stupid obviously. They're not going to go insert advertisements into some first person shooter game.. that would just be silly. Imagine if you had a game like Battlefield 2 and you were running around and there were billboards for Coca Cola in the middle of the desert. How stupid would that be?
I use this password;#E4][££2&9a for everything.. Oops?
Damn, that is pretty secure. How the hell do you make those two little squiggly symbol things between the "[" and "2"? I wonder if I can make my password have that ASCII smiley face in it.
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I guess I wasn't the only one totally underwhelmed by Steve's enthusiasm for this amazing innovation called Google Maps "on a phone!!! It's on a Phone!" I was using the J2ME version of Google Maps on my old Sprint Sanyo 8200 last year and it worked exactly the same as the version he showed, complete with satellite imagery... minus touch screen of course.
The carriers that you're thinking of that restrict all that stuff are Verizon and Sprint (at least the Sprint phone I had), but the GSM providers here like T-Mobile and Cingular seem to be much more open about what you can do with your phones, which is why this iPhone restriction is so strikingly odd IMHO. It just seems natural that you could use third party apps on your horribly expensive iPhone, but they've really reduced the reasons I'd even be interested in it because I saw no instant messaging application for instance.
What if I want to use Jabber to my private Jabber server? What if I want to view and edit Microsoft Office documents? I saw no way to even view Word docs or Excel spreadsheets on this unlike the Blackberry. This is an overpriced toy, nothing more. Paris Hilton will have one and so will the other materialistic bubbleheads, but until it supports third party apps it couldn't lick a Blackberry or Treo's taint, much less be years ahead of it in functionality.
Steve lost my interest the moment he showed the phone was VERY expensive at $499 for the base model WITH a damn 2 year contract. You might as well get a Blackjack for $299 from an established cell phone manufacturer than worry about quality issues with a first generation iPhone. I think Apple has just introduced its first bomb product in a long time. The Cingular lock-in and the high price are going to make this one a non-starter unless they change something significant. Third-party apps would have been the only saving grace but he's scuttled that.
How do you live the good life while unemployed? How are they going to make a living? What, all 100 of them are millionaires and set for life? I doubt that.
If Apple follows the trends and becomes a player in the phone market then I'd expect them to release the iPhone as the "Apple v768m" or some other innocuous brand name. Then the next model can be the Apple v295jk that is smaller and then the Apple 999z which will include a 20 gig flash drive and UMTS support.
Sony needs to drop the price of the 20GB PS3 down to a more reasonable $300 to compete or they're dead. One way would be to abandon the Blu-Ray player and make a PS3 version 2.0 that just uses a traditional DVD-ROM drive... or are Sony PS3 games on Blu-Ray discs? That would've been a colossal mistake if they're using Blu-Ray for games.
Someone else said it in another post, but Star Trek 25th Anniversary Edition was the best Star Trek game I ever played. The graphics obviously sucked, but the puzzles and other challenges were very interesting. This Legacy game is nothing more than a space combat arcade game with Star Trek slapped on it. They could've just as easily used any other models and slapped a different name on the game and it would've still worked. Star Trek is about negotiating, not space combat. I thought there'd at least be some kind of away missions or SOMETHING in addition to just the arcade shoot 'em up style of game play, but I was severely disappointed.
If someone bought me an iTunes gift card I'd slap them in the head with it. Why not get them something useful like a Best Buy gift card so at least they can go pick up the CDs at the store instead of settling for the low-quality DRM-encumbered stuff that iTunes shackles you with in the form of their protected-AAC files? Don't get me wrong, I think some day online music sales will be the wave of the future, but until Apple starts selling their expensive tracks encoded in the Apple Lossless codec or FLAC they won't be seeing another dime of my money. It's fantastic that they let you burn a copy of YOUR music that you purchased to a regular audio CD, but the fact of the matter is that what you're burning is sub-CD-quality sound and yet costs the same as the CD would if you had bought it in the store. $10-$12 is the going rate for popular CDs in brick and mortar shops.
I think in the instances of cell phone location services, "GPS" is just a generic term for determining your location and has little to do with the actual array of military satellites in orbit. They probably just use triangulation with cell phone towers to determine your location. The technology to do this was invented long before the first GPS satellite was launched.