Wireless customers do come and go. They are free to choose to be a CDMA or a GSM customer Yes, but switching carriers can mean paying a $175 termination fee, giving up such features as 7:00 nights or free in-network calling to their friends and family, losing reception at home or work, etc. Even non-geeks care about that kind of stuff.
While 120 M may be using CDMA right now, I doubt most of them care whether they use CDMA or GSM. Agreed, but they do care which carriers their handset of choice will work with. Those 120 million people have to pay up to $175 to terminate their contracts if they switch carriers, on top of the iPhone's already-hefty price. And if they picked their carrier based on something like customer service, network coverage, or knowing other people who are customers (so they can call them for free), they may not be willing to switch at all.
CDMA is mostly a US thing apparently. Indeed, mostly North American, though it gets some use in other countries as well.
Also, Verizon recently chose GSM for their new '4g' stuff. Well... I wouldn't say that, based on the info in those articles. They chose a technology that's supported by the GSM group, instead of the next revision of CDMA2000, but it's not the same GSM that's in use today by such carriers as AT&T; putting today's GSM chips in a phone won't prepare it to be used on this upcoming 4G network.
In fact, even UMTS (aka WCDMA, aka GSM's 3G) uses a CDMA-based air interface. The real loser is TDMA, the system for dividing the radio channels into timeslices that's used in GSM (and hardly anything else these days).
For that number to mean jack, fucking, shit, we would have to assume that both [CDMA] carriers would support the phone as AT&T is (Visual Voicemail for instance). Good, fucking, luck, with that. Well, it'll take more than luck to change the past: Apple did make a proposal to Verizon and they said no. I'm sure they're kicking themselves now.
Nevertheless, that number (120+ million CDMA customers) stands as evidence that if Apple wants to expand to other US carriers, there's more room to expand in the CDMA realm. Even if Visual Voicemail didn't work -- and AFAIK that's the only feature that needs network support -- people would still buy it.
Seriously, stop bitching because you chose any company but AT&T, and suddenly want an iPhone. You must not know me very well. My phone has everything I need, including a few things the iPhone is missing (like GPS, MMS, and 3G), and I got it with a contract for $50.
Personally, I have no interest in getting an iPhone. Maybe if they knocked another $250 off the price, I'd raise an eyebrow, but right now, it's only on my radar because of all the coverage it's gotten on sites like this one.
If you're targeting a world wide market, it's just common sense to go for GSM first. Agreed... but it's also just common sense to include 3G, especially when your selling points include a full-featured browser and YouTube. Apple's initial strategy seems to be a compromise that isn't particularly tailored for the US or world markets.
Oh come on, you have to admit that is hyperbole. Yes, they may have somewhat limited themselves in the US market by being limited to a few carriers but I'm sure they did the research and the amount of lost sales because of that didn't out weigh the world market (the majority of the world uses GSM, the US is strangely skewed towards cdma). Well, no, it's not hyperbole. Like I said, there are over 120 million CDMA customers in the US, and if Apple doesn't release a CDMA iPhone, they probably aren't going to get many of those customers.
But I agree that Apple probably took that into account. Perhaps they figured that developing the GSM version first would speed up their worldwide release, so they could sell enough units overseas to balance out the ones they aren't selling here.
I was once told by someone in the industry never to buy a CDMA version of a phone that was originally designed as a GSM phone. The reasoning being that often the other version was an afterthought and not as thoroughly tested. I'm sure Apple would've put plenty of testing into the GSM version if they'd developed a CDMA version first. After all, it is a much bigger market (worldwide).
Maybe at this point Apple is testing the market (worldwide) and will eventually approach the much smaller CDMA market if it seems financially viable. You can't really fault them for going for the bigger pot of fish first. Well, it remains to be seen how well they'll do outside the US. Failing to include HSDPA seems like a mistake in that regard, since EDGE is old news in Europe, and not a good way to showcase the mobile browser no matter where you are.
"Most?" I thought GSM took the majority share in the U.S. last year, and that it was still growing at a faster pace. Well, these are the numbers I've found:
Verizon (62 million) + Sprint (55 million) + Alltel (12 million) = 129 million for CDMA
AT&T (64 million) + T-Mobile (25 million) = 89 million for GSM
Perhaps I'm missing a few smaller carriers, but these are the major ones.
By focusing solely on GSM, they're locking themselves out of most of the US cell phone market - over 120 million customers.
Most cell phone manufacturers do make different versions for different countries. LG is perhaps best known around here for their Verizon phones (CDMA), but they also make GSM devices. Motorola makes both GSM and CDMA versions of the RAZR and many other models, as do Sanyo, Samsung, RIM, and Palm.
Sorry, but I am telling the truth. I saw it with my own eyes.
Athlon 64 X2 6000+ Asus M2A-VM 2 GB DDR-800 HIS Radeon x1950 Pro 256 MB
I doubt CPU speed is a factor in the difference, since mine only runs at the stock 3.0 GHz and theirs is apparently overclocked to 3.4. But notice that they didn't test any ATI cards, and their chosen 30 seconds of gameplay may well be some of the most complicated parts in the game. My score is only slightly higher than the 7900 GTX at 1280x1024, what's so hard to believe about that?
All right. Bioshock doesn't have a built-in benchmark, but with the default driver settings and the in-game settings on maximum, I get a solid 30+ fps through the whole demo, dipping down to 27 in a couple places, but also going up to 40-50 in some areas. With the drivers tweaked to highest quality (6x AA, 16x AF), I get 27-30 overall, minimum about 24, maximum about 43.
Appreciated, but are you able to do that at 1680 X 1050 resolution (the native resolution of my monitor) along with all the bells and whistles in bioshock (lighting, shadows, etc.) running at a smooth 60 frames per second (or hell, even solid and consistent 40 frames per second). I play at the native resolution of my monitor, which is 1280x1024. Your monitor only has 34% more pixels, so I still wouldn't expect you to need a video card that costs 160% more.
Also, I VERY VERY HIGHLY doubt you can play that game at said 1680 X 1050 resolution with FSAA and AF maxed (or even set halfway) and the game still be smooth. Sorry, gotta call bullshit on that one. I crank every in-game setting as high as it'll go, and the frame rate is still smooth -- I'll run a benchmark tonight. I haven't seen any slowdown in any game.
If there was no difference between a video card that costs a third as much (and runs slower, and has less onboard ram, and has a different design) then people wouldn't spend as much as they do. People spend that much because they're obsessed with having the very latest products, whether or not they get a significant boost in performance or quality... and/or because they're gullible and have more money than they know what to do with (see also: $50 HDMI cables). For example, my card doesn't do DX10, and I wouldn't doubt that a DX10 card with the same performance costs a lot more. But who cares? It still looks as good as any console.
The $400 dollar video card that I bought a few years ago (x800xt) doesn't even meet the minimum requirements for most games out there now. There's your problem... you spent $400 on a video card.
I spent $150 on a video card, about $350 on the rest of my system (I reused an old case and optical drives), and I can play new games (C&C 3, BioShock) at full settings.
In a couple years, maybe I'll have to buy another $150 video card, but so what? That's still cheaper than Xbox Live.
The iPhone is not a revolutionary gadget by any stretch of the imagination, but it IS usable. I know Slashdot has this collective grudge against shiny, usable UIs The Palm interface is quite usable too. It just doesn't have all the animations and gimmicks, so making calls with a Treo feels like using a phone or PDA, not like playing a game.
There's no "grudge" against good looks here -- only against trading features, freedom, and ownership for superficial glitter.
Oh yeah, [making calls is] like, totally a secondary feature anyway, I'm certainly not missing it. Well, the GP was apparently unaware that there are Palm phones, so I'll clue you in: there are. For around the same price as an iPhone, if not less, you can get a device that does essentially everything the iPhone does, including calls. It won't have all the lead-paint shininess of the iPhone's UI, but it won't make you jump through any hoops to unlock it or develop/install applications... in fact, it'll be designed from the ground up to allow you to install whatever you want.
What part of ownership do you not understand? Neither AT&T nor Apple own my iPhone, I do, in EVERY sense of the law. But not every sense of the word as it's commonly used on tech sites such as this one. Ownership is about more than just legal title... it's also about control.
Apple has chosen to cripple the device, I have chosen to un-cripple it. And then when the next firmware update comes out, they may choose to re-cripple it. Enjoy your arms race.
What's your suggestion to the single-parents who are working hard to keep things afloat? "Let your kids live a little." Or, "Find a job with a schedule that works with your Big Brother plans."
Even in your utopia, you can't expect that a friend with less strict/paranoid parents wouldn't just get the stuff for them. I remember when I was a kid I would come up with all sorts of schemes to do stuff I wasn't supposed to -- it's what kids do. Of course - so did I. And we turned out all right, didn't we?
If parents really want to keep this stuff out of their kids' hands, then they can get to know their kids' friends' parents and decide whether they trust them to enforce these house rules. If you don't trust little Billy's mom not to let your little Johnny rent Mortal Kombat, then don't let Johnny play at Billy's house.
Anyway, I wonder if you worked at a store, you would really sell a pornographic magazine or a bottle of vodka to a 13 y/o. Maybe if it were legal to do so. There's nothing illegal about selling video games to kids, though - even M-rated ones.
Do you honestly believe that parents should monitor their children 24h per day? Do you honestly believe that this is even possible for most families?
Because that's the alternative to having stores refuse to sell some games/porn/alcohol to minors. I honestly believe that parents should have to decide whether keeping those things out of their kids' hands is worth the hassle of keeping an eye on them. Parents who want their kids to have G-rated lives should pay the cost of enforcing that ideal out of their own time, instead of having it subsidized by the rest of society.
And yes, I do believe it's possible, although it might be inconvenient. You don't literally have to monitor your kid 24 hours a day to make sure he isn't playing video games. He spends 1/3 of the day at school and another 1/3 asleep, and while he's awake, you only need to check in every so often to know what he's spending his time on.
Quite good, perhaps, but for less money you can certainly get better performance out of Intel. As much as I have loved AMD for the last decade, Intel is completely eating their lunch at the moment and Phenom and Barcelona are not going to save them. Really? I built an Athlon 64 X2 6000+ system a few weeks ago and the comparable Intel chips seemed a lot more expensive. The Core 2 Duo E6700 seems to perform about 5-15% better, but costs nearly twice as much ($320 vs. $170 at Newegg).
Say what? Wanting certain games to require parental approval to be purchased does NOT make me lazy. Wanting store employees to do your job--the job of keeping "inappropriate" games out of your kid's hands--does, in fact, make you lazy. Sorry.
Just the opposite. It means I have to drive down to the game store to puchase the stupid thing instead of letting the kid do whatever he/she wants. No it doesn't. You could just as easily say "No M-rated games for you, son" and never leave the couch, safe in the knowledge that the guy making minimum wage down at the mall is doing your parenting for you.
It means I MUST DECIDE WHAT IS RIGHT, not you, not society, not the store. I MAKE THE CHOICE. You made the choice when you let him go to the game store on his own. Either keep an eye on him or don't; don't assume that everyone else has nothing better to do than help you enforce your house rules.
I also don't have a problem with certain types of games requiring an adult to purchase them. Again, it's not the store deciding if the kid gets the game or not. The parent will make the ultimate decision. Without the limitation, the parent doesn't get any say. Uh, sure they do. If you don't like your kids buying video games, don't let them go to the game store unattended. Keep an eye on them instead of expecting the rest of the world to enforce your house rules for you.
Oh, for you idiot teenagers with mod points today that will be modding me down as flamebait or a troll. Kiss my ass. You'll have kids one day. Your entire attitude will change. Just because your attitude changes doesn't mean your new attitude is any better than the old one. A sharp blow to the head will change your way of thinking too, but it won't be an improvement.
It seems to me that some people, after having kids, just become lazier and more self-centered, expecting the rest of the world to change to make their lives easier. Perhaps those people should've waited to have kids until they were better prepared to handle it on their own.
They don't disable the USB capabilities. Apparently you need to do a "seem edit" to be able to copy ringtones to the V3m (link), but it connects via USB and communicates with the PC just fine.
Even if the phone itself is capable of playing any old mp3 as a ringtone, Verizon specifically disables this so you have to buy ringtones through their service. Well, they don't make it easy, but you can still put your own ringtones on. All you have to do is get a USB cable for the phone and download BitPim, which can easily manage ringtones and/or directly edit the filesystem for most VZW phones.
If you don't want to do that, you can even email the ringtones to your phone (your 10 digit number @vzwpix.com), although MP3s will be converted to QCP in the process and lose some quality, and you'll be charged 25c for the message unless you have a picture messaging plan.
Time Warner in NC has DVR's that can record 2 channels at once. Yeah, Comcast has those too, but they suck. There's no replacement for a real TiVo.
Infared blasters? wha? It's a ridiculous little cable that has a 1/8" miniplug on one end and an infrared LED on the other, so the DVR can change channels on your cable box by pretending it's a remote. It's as slow as it is ugly... and that's when it works. If you happen to bump the cable box so that the blaster isn't lined up correctly, goodbye channel changing!
With my Comcast cable box, I can record two channels at once. [...] None of my recording say anything about Comcast on them. I was talking about using the Comcast cable box together with a third-party DVR (i.e. TiVo). Comcast's DVRs are crap, in my experience; no way in hell am I giving up my TiVo for one of those. The Comcast DVR has no multi-room viewing, no online features (remote scheduling and downloaded content), no way to copy shows to a PC (short of using a FireWire cable to record in real time), no suggestions or ratings, a flickery and poorly laid out UI, and laggy FF/rewind/pause controls.
TiVo can control a cable box, but that means dealing with the problems I mentioned: you have to connect it to the cable box with either infrared or a serial cable so it can change channels, and many boxes (like the one gathering dust in my bedroom) don't support serial. You can only record one thing at a time, because the cable box only has one video output and the TiVo only has one video input. And all the recordings will have banners on them, because it just records whatever comes out of the cable box.
Now, the menu system has Comcast crap all over it... Yet another reason not to get digital cable. I see enough advertisements on TV already, including banners that pop out noisily and take up half the screen. I don't need to see even more banners every time I press a button!
You do not have to pay for CableCARDs. The Cable company has to lease them to you at competitive prices relative to their set top boxes. So, in other words, you have to give them a certain amount of money each month (known as the "price") in order for them to lease you a CableCard. Where I come from, we call that "paying".
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In fact, even UMTS (aka WCDMA, aka GSM's 3G) uses a CDMA-based air interface. The real loser is TDMA, the system for dividing the radio channels into timeslices that's used in GSM (and hardly anything else these days).
Nevertheless, that number (120+ million CDMA customers) stands as evidence that if Apple wants to expand to other US carriers, there's more room to expand in the CDMA realm. Even if Visual Voicemail didn't work -- and AFAIK that's the only feature that needs network support -- people would still buy it. Seriously, stop bitching because you chose any company but AT&T, and suddenly want an iPhone. You must not know me very well. My phone has everything I need, including a few things the iPhone is missing (like GPS, MMS, and 3G), and I got it with a contract for $50.
Personally, I have no interest in getting an iPhone. Maybe if they knocked another $250 off the price, I'd raise an eyebrow, but right now, it's only on my radar because of all the coverage it's gotten on sites like this one.
But I agree that Apple probably took that into account. Perhaps they figured that developing the GSM version first would speed up their worldwide release, so they could sell enough units overseas to balance out the ones they aren't selling here. I was once told by someone in the industry never to buy a CDMA version of a phone that was originally designed as a GSM phone. The reasoning being that often the other version was an afterthought and not as thoroughly tested. I'm sure Apple would've put plenty of testing into the GSM version if they'd developed a CDMA version first. After all, it is a much bigger market (worldwide). Maybe at this point Apple is testing the market (worldwide) and will eventually approach the much smaller CDMA market if it seems financially viable. You can't really fault them for going for the bigger pot of fish first. Well, it remains to be seen how well they'll do outside the US. Failing to include HSDPA seems like a mistake in that regard, since EDGE is old news in Europe, and not a good way to showcase the mobile browser no matter where you are.
AT&T has about 64 million, which makes them the biggest, but not by much. Verizon has 62 million, and Sprint has 55 million.
Verizon (62 million) + Sprint (55 million) + Alltel (12 million) = 129 million for CDMA
AT&T (64 million) + T-Mobile (25 million) = 89 million for GSM
Perhaps I'm missing a few smaller carriers, but these are the major ones.
By focusing solely on GSM, they're locking themselves out of most of the US cell phone market - over 120 million customers.
Most cell phone manufacturers do make different versions for different countries. LG is perhaps best known around here for their Verizon phones (CDMA), but they also make GSM devices. Motorola makes both GSM and CDMA versions of the RAZR and many other models, as do Sanyo, Samsung, RIM, and Palm.
Sorry, but I am telling the truth. I saw it with my own eyes.
Athlon 64 X2 6000+
Asus M2A-VM
2 GB DDR-800
HIS Radeon x1950 Pro 256 MB
I doubt CPU speed is a factor in the difference, since mine only runs at the stock 3.0 GHz and theirs is apparently overclocked to 3.4. But notice that they didn't test any ATI cards, and their chosen 30 seconds of gameplay may well be some of the most complicated parts in the game. My score is only slightly higher than the 7900 GTX at 1280x1024, what's so hard to believe about that?
All right. Bioshock doesn't have a built-in benchmark, but with the default driver settings and the in-game settings on maximum, I get a solid 30+ fps through the whole demo, dipping down to 27 in a couple places, but also going up to 40-50 in some areas. With the drivers tweaked to highest quality (6x AA, 16x AF), I get 27-30 overall, minimum about 24, maximum about 43.
I spent $150 on a video card, about $350 on the rest of my system (I reused an old case and optical drives), and I can play new games (C&C 3, BioShock) at full settings.
In a couple years, maybe I'll have to buy another $150 video card, but so what? That's still cheaper than Xbox Live.
There's no "grudge" against good looks here -- only against trading features, freedom, and ownership for superficial glitter.
If parents really want to keep this stuff out of their kids' hands, then they can get to know their kids' friends' parents and decide whether they trust them to enforce these house rules. If you don't trust little Billy's mom not to let your little Johnny rent Mortal Kombat, then don't let Johnny play at Billy's house. Anyway, I wonder if you worked at a store, you would really sell a pornographic magazine or a bottle of vodka to a 13 y/o. Maybe if it were legal to do so. There's nothing illegal about selling video games to kids, though - even M-rated ones.
Do you honestly believe that this is even possible for most families?
Because that's the alternative to having stores refuse to sell some games/porn/alcohol to minors. I honestly believe that parents should have to decide whether keeping those things out of their kids' hands is worth the hassle of keeping an eye on them. Parents who want their kids to have G-rated lives should pay the cost of enforcing that ideal out of their own time, instead of having it subsidized by the rest of society.
And yes, I do believe it's possible, although it might be inconvenient. You don't literally have to monitor your kid 24 hours a day to make sure he isn't playing video games. He spends 1/3 of the day at school and another 1/3 asleep, and while he's awake, you only need to check in every so often to know what he's spending his time on.
It seems to me that some people, after having kids, just become lazier and more self-centered, expecting the rest of the world to change to make their lives easier. Perhaps those people should've waited to have kids until they were better prepared to handle it on their own.
They don't disable the USB capabilities. Apparently you need to do a "seem edit" to be able to copy ringtones to the V3m (link), but it connects via USB and communicates with the PC just fine.
If you don't want to do that, you can even email the ringtones to your phone (your 10 digit number @vzwpix.com), although MP3s will be converted to QCP in the process and lose some quality, and you'll be charged 25c for the message unless you have a picture messaging plan.
TiVo can control a cable box, but that means dealing with the problems I mentioned: you have to connect it to the cable box with either infrared or a serial cable so it can change channels, and many boxes (like the one gathering dust in my bedroom) don't support serial. You can only record one thing at a time, because the cable box only has one video output and the TiVo only has one video input. And all the recordings will have banners on them, because it just records whatever comes out of the cable box. Now, the menu system has Comcast crap all over it... Yet another reason not to get digital cable. I see enough advertisements on TV already, including banners that pop out noisily and take up half the screen. I don't need to see even more banners every time I press a button!