I want to be able to search within my browsing history, whether by archiving keywords associated with browses, the titles, or both. The ability to tag current pages and search by those would also be helpful.
Also, I want a bookmarking system with some smarts, i.e. that can categorize bookmarks itself. And of course I want to be able to search that, including any tags that I might have attached to a page. Think of del.icio.us, but without the privacy horrors.
After all, we often take a very strange path from one place to another on the Web, and the challenge of properly categorizing bookmarks makes it easy to skip doing it at all, especially since it's hard to sometimes remember where you put a bookmark.
The big difference I saw was that Toshiba tried to bribe the consumer directly with cheap players, while Sony went to Warner Bros.
Now that HD-DVD is out of the game, Blu-Ray players are going to be stuck at around $300 apiece for a long time instead of dropping down to the inevitable $100-$150 range to compete with HD-DVD. Sony would have to sell 2-2.7 million players at this higher price to recoup that $400 million through higher player prices, so I'm not sure I believe it at all.
Economics is in the eyes of the beholder, at least in the War on Drugs. The economical way to deal with the problem would be to buy the coca and opium crops from their home countries, sell the pure finished products in government stores, and tax the hell out of it, making it still 1/100th the price of the illegal version for guaranteed quality. Instead, we pump billions into the prison-industrial complex, and poor people subsidize bribes to law enforcement, and people pay the price of overdoses and adulterated product.
The expenditures to collect and test sewer water directly downstream of specific houses will be a nice windfall for public works unions, law enforcement, the legal profession, the test lab industry, and manufacturers of chemical analysis equipment. And of course, if it saves just one child from starting a meth habit, it's worth it, right?
The word from a developer at WWDC is that Apple hasn't yet produced a sandbox for the phone that can't crash it.
No surprise, seeing as the phone has taken QA resources away from Leopard -- stability is going to be the first priority for the product. After all, the first wave of users are more interested in making calls and using the device as a really cool iPod.
However, it's a pretty safe bet that the phone will have an SDK eventually. Processor-wise it's not that far removed from most BREW phones, and Apple's toolkits should target the device nicely when the time comes.
Believe me, lack of J2ME on the phone is a feature, not a shortcoming -- J2ME is very brittle, and support for most of the extensions that would make for a killer phone app is very uneven across handsets, so apps are very kludgy.
Everyone's treating this Safari/AJAX announcement as this big deal, but it's actually more access than anyone was really expecting out of the gate.
Apple doesn't seem to really 'get' the mobile market -- the thing that they've overlooked that at&t subscribers really care about is the availability of personalization content like wallpapers and ringtones for purchase. So far, Apple people have been saying that this is something they'll get to later. However, conventional wisdom in the mobile market is that most consumers buy personalization content the first couple of weeks they have the device.
None of these things are going to stop this device from selling well -- the price point might, but the technology in the phone is elegantly integrated, visually appealing, and easy to use. Those things in themselves are a killer app.
Here's an example: The 1930 US Census asked citizens to provide information about their ethnicity, information which of course could be used to better target governement services, but outside the original constitutional scope of the Census to determine how many voters were in each Congressional district for purposes of reapportionment.
This seemingly innocuous information, however, was not so harmless once WWII kicked in, as it was used to identify American-born citizens of Japanese (and to a lesser extent, German) descent for internment camps.
No matter how harmless the information, a Government agency acting in bad faith and ignoring the Constitution can use it for harmful purposes. Since our Government consists of the same sort of people it's watching, if all people are good, they don't need this personal information; if some segment of people are rotten, the government shouldn't have it, because they too will have a percentage of rotten people who will misuse it.
The privacy implicit in the original Constitution is there for a reason, because even the most innocent information can be either misinterpreted or misused.
... that you are looking at this device as a phone, rather than as a very advanced iPod that just happens to also have phone features.
The original iPods were very expensive, the first iPod with a color screen, the photo iPod, sold for $599. The video iPods also debuted at that high a price.
This device has 4 times the screen real estate, which will make iTunes video look great, and a novel UI. Not only that, but the photo features put the original photo iPods to shame. Having a photo iPod with a camera included is a big win. Add on top of that the normal iPod functionality of playing music, and the integration with iTunes to access video and audio podCasts.
It's a pretty compelling device right there, but it's also a wireless iPod that will let you browse the Internet.
And, it's a phone with a couple of fairly novel features, like visual voice mail.
Put all these things together with sufficient miniturization and build quality, and it's not that expensive a device. The current video iPods have gone down in price to $249 or $349, but started out more expensive. You're getting a lot of iPod for your money, and the phone for free. The build quality of the iPod and form factor made it inexplicably compelling for the price, so thinking about this device in that fashion will help explain why it's likely to be a big hit. It's the first iPod device that really justifies a $499 price tag, in my book.
The RIAA is really off base about piracy, when a major part of their decline is due to the demographic shift of the US population. The baby boomers are older, and have a disproportionate share of disposable income for entertainment. They tend to be less interested in video games, and not as interested in the fare which tends to dominate the movie theatres. In short, a wealthy group of people who grew up listening to music on the radio when there were fewer choices for their entertainment doller and inclined to choose it over most other forms of entertainment.
So, what does the music industry offer this huge group of potential consumers?
1) Music acts who have been marketed and chosen based on their appearance on videos rather than musical talent.
2) Music acts consisting of people who are 18 to 24 years old. 30 year old musicians? Hell, they don't even play those on VH-1 any more. Oddly enough, musicians like Joan Baez, Ry Cooder, and others who were big in the 60s, when these baby boomers first started listening to the radio, can't even get arrested in the music industry.
3) Music acts who are rehashing the same music baby boomers bought 30 years ago. Music trends are cyclical, and I've already got music from 3 discrete generations of bands that sound like the Stones.
4) An opportunity to re-buy our record collections yet again. It's bad enough that the RIAA complained when we wanted to tape our vinyl LPs so we could listen on portable devices and our cars. No, they wanted to sell us cassettes. Then CDs.
5) Reduced choice in an ever-expanding universe of choices. Catalogs are clogged with mediocre music, and the labels are simultaneously taking lots of things out of print. In the meantime, the digital world and business models like Amazon.com are trending towards the infinitely deep catalog, and the RIAA just doesn't get it. I understand that there isn't enough potential business to justify a CD re-pressing of the Fabulous Poodles record from 1980, that's probably at least $2000 in costs, plus the distribution, etc. However, encoding that record from the CD and distributing it digitally is probably less than $2 of labor. I guarantee they'd get a much higher return on investment than they get from letting it die.
One of the quiet successes of iTunes is its deep catalog of jazz, classical and baby-boomer-friendly acts. For someone like me who is technically quite capable of encoding music from my old collection, but far too busy to bother, 99 cents is a very fair deal for the one song I recall from an old album. I buy new music, too, but so much of what is pushed by the major labels is just not even aimed at me.
If the RIAA was actually courting customers rather than suing them, they would be much healthier. As it is, their pursuit of the shallow teen dollar is biting them in the ass as their audience continues to skew older. Meanwhile, the teens they are actively pursuing have a completely different outlook about their entertainment choices. Hell, who ever thought that a whole genre of music would ever appear based on cheesy videogame soundtracks from the 80s?
I agree that as a standalone phone device comparable to the offerings from Motorola, et al, an iPhone doesn't make sense. In the US market, no phone carrier is going to let Apple integrate their phone directly to iTMS -- the US carriers routinely cripple features in phones released here, and the Motorola ROKR and its ilk are sucky devices because the carriers want to keep their chokehold on selling downloadable content.
That said, Apple could be one of the few companies who could successfully launch an MVNO in the US market. If they become a virtual carrier, not only can they integrate iTunes with the phone in a seamless fashion, they can offer a widely expanded service combining.Mac, iTMS, and a whole range of services syncing messaging and data back and forth between the iPhone device and one's home computer, laptop, etc.
Imagine instead of buying ringtones for $2.99 and up for 30 seconds of some song, being able to just go into iTunes, pick a clip of your favorite song, and have it automatically Bluetoothed into the phone, and with no extra charge, since you already own the music. Home videos on the phone, or imported from your phone camera into iMovie. iPhoto libraries shared and syncd between your phone and home computer.
Apple has much of this infrastructure (billing systems for.Mac, customer service, financial processing for iTMS, and more) in place, and has shown how seamlessly they can integrate use of iTunes into other iLife apps as well as the OS -- it's this type of service that would make an iPhone a compelling device, regardless of what the phone would actually look like.
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And yet, on an iPad you'd just wipe the sprayed Coke off of the glass instead of having to replace your netbook keyboard. See, progress!
Also, I want a bookmarking system with some smarts, i.e. that can categorize bookmarks itself. And of course I want to be able to search that, including any tags that I might have attached to a page. Think of del.icio.us, but without the privacy horrors.
After all, we often take a very strange path from one place to another on the Web, and the challenge of properly categorizing bookmarks makes it easy to skip doing it at all, especially since it's hard to sometimes remember where you put a bookmark.
The big difference I saw was that Toshiba tried to bribe the consumer directly with cheap players, while Sony went to Warner Bros. Now that HD-DVD is out of the game, Blu-Ray players are going to be stuck at around $300 apiece for a long time instead of dropping down to the inevitable $100-$150 range to compete with HD-DVD. Sony would have to sell 2-2.7 million players at this higher price to recoup that $400 million through higher player prices, so I'm not sure I believe it at all.
Economics is in the eyes of the beholder, at least in the War on Drugs. The economical way to deal with the problem would be to buy the coca and opium crops from their home countries, sell the pure finished products in government stores, and tax the hell out of it, making it still 1/100th the price of the illegal version for guaranteed quality. Instead, we pump billions into the prison-industrial complex, and poor people subsidize bribes to law enforcement, and people pay the price of overdoses and adulterated product. The expenditures to collect and test sewer water directly downstream of specific houses will be a nice windfall for public works unions, law enforcement, the legal profession, the test lab industry, and manufacturers of chemical analysis equipment. And of course, if it saves just one child from starting a meth habit, it's worth it, right?
Depends on whether or not you have a real orgasm, I'd say.
The word from a developer at WWDC is that Apple hasn't yet produced a sandbox for the phone that can't crash it. No surprise, seeing as the phone has taken QA resources away from Leopard -- stability is going to be the first priority for the product. After all, the first wave of users are more interested in making calls and using the device as a really cool iPod. However, it's a pretty safe bet that the phone will have an SDK eventually. Processor-wise it's not that far removed from most BREW phones, and Apple's toolkits should target the device nicely when the time comes. Believe me, lack of J2ME on the phone is a feature, not a shortcoming -- J2ME is very brittle, and support for most of the extensions that would make for a killer phone app is very uneven across handsets, so apps are very kludgy. Everyone's treating this Safari/AJAX announcement as this big deal, but it's actually more access than anyone was really expecting out of the gate. Apple doesn't seem to really 'get' the mobile market -- the thing that they've overlooked that at&t subscribers really care about is the availability of personalization content like wallpapers and ringtones for purchase. So far, Apple people have been saying that this is something they'll get to later. However, conventional wisdom in the mobile market is that most consumers buy personalization content the first couple of weeks they have the device. None of these things are going to stop this device from selling well -- the price point might, but the technology in the phone is elegantly integrated, visually appealing, and easy to use. Those things in themselves are a killer app.
Here's an example: The 1930 US Census asked citizens to provide information about their ethnicity, information which of course could be used to better target governement services, but outside the original constitutional scope of the Census to determine how many voters were in each Congressional district for purposes of reapportionment. This seemingly innocuous information, however, was not so harmless once WWII kicked in, as it was used to identify American-born citizens of Japanese (and to a lesser extent, German) descent for internment camps. No matter how harmless the information, a Government agency acting in bad faith and ignoring the Constitution can use it for harmful purposes. Since our Government consists of the same sort of people it's watching, if all people are good, they don't need this personal information; if some segment of people are rotten, the government shouldn't have it, because they too will have a percentage of rotten people who will misuse it. The privacy implicit in the original Constitution is there for a reason, because even the most innocent information can be either misinterpreted or misused.
... that you are looking at this device as a phone, rather than as a very advanced iPod that just happens to also have phone features.
The original iPods were very expensive, the first iPod with a color screen, the photo iPod, sold for $599. The video iPods also debuted at that high a price.
This device has 4 times the screen real estate, which will make iTunes video look great, and a novel UI. Not only that, but the photo features put the original photo iPods to shame. Having a photo iPod with a camera included is a big win. Add on top of that the normal iPod functionality of playing music, and the integration with iTunes to access video and audio podCasts.
It's a pretty compelling device right there, but it's also a wireless iPod that will let you browse the Internet.
And, it's a phone with a couple of fairly novel features, like visual voice mail.
Put all these things together with sufficient miniturization and build quality, and it's not that expensive a device. The current video iPods have gone down in price to $249 or $349, but started out more expensive. You're getting a lot of iPod for your money, and the phone for free. The build quality of the iPod and form factor made it inexplicably compelling for the price, so thinking about this device in that fashion will help explain why it's likely to be a big hit. It's the first iPod device that really justifies a $499 price tag, in my book.
The RIAA is really off base about piracy, when a major part of their decline is due to the demographic shift of the US population. The baby boomers are older, and have a disproportionate share of disposable income for entertainment. They tend to be less interested in video games, and not as interested in the fare which tends to dominate the movie theatres. In short, a wealthy group of people who grew up listening to music on the radio when there were fewer choices for their entertainment doller and inclined to choose it over most other forms of entertainment.
So, what does the music industry offer this huge group of potential consumers?
1) Music acts who have been marketed and chosen based on their appearance on videos rather than musical talent.
2) Music acts consisting of people who are 18 to 24 years old. 30 year old musicians? Hell, they don't even play those on VH-1 any more. Oddly enough, musicians like Joan Baez, Ry Cooder, and others who were big in the 60s, when these baby boomers first started listening to the radio, can't even get arrested in the music industry.
3) Music acts who are rehashing the same music baby boomers bought 30 years ago. Music trends are cyclical, and I've already got music from 3 discrete generations of bands that sound like the Stones.
4) An opportunity to re-buy our record collections yet again. It's bad enough that the RIAA complained when we wanted to tape our vinyl LPs so we could listen on portable devices and our cars. No, they wanted to sell us cassettes. Then CDs.
5) Reduced choice in an ever-expanding universe of choices. Catalogs are clogged with mediocre music, and the labels are simultaneously taking lots of things out of print. In the meantime, the digital world and business models like Amazon.com are trending towards the infinitely deep catalog, and the RIAA just doesn't get it. I understand that there isn't enough potential business to justify a CD re-pressing of the Fabulous Poodles record from 1980, that's probably at least $2000 in costs, plus the distribution, etc. However, encoding that record from the CD and distributing it digitally is probably less than $2 of labor. I guarantee they'd get a much higher return on investment than they get from letting it die.
One of the quiet successes of iTunes is its deep catalog of jazz, classical and baby-boomer-friendly acts. For someone like me who is technically quite capable of encoding music from my old collection, but far too busy to bother, 99 cents is a very fair deal for the one song I recall from an old album. I buy new music, too, but so much of what is pushed by the major labels is just not even aimed at me.
If the RIAA was actually courting customers rather than suing them, they would be much healthier. As it is, their pursuit of the shallow teen dollar is biting them in the ass as their audience continues to skew older. Meanwhile, the teens they are actively pursuing have a completely different outlook about their entertainment choices. Hell, who ever thought that a whole genre of music would ever appear based on cheesy videogame soundtracks from the 80s?
Also, CinemaNow is owned at least in part by Lion's Gate, IIRC. MovieLink is a partnership between several studios as well.
I agree that as a standalone phone device comparable to the offerings from Motorola, et al, an iPhone doesn't make sense. In the US market, no phone carrier is going to let Apple integrate their phone directly to iTMS -- the US carriers routinely cripple features in phones released here, and the Motorola ROKR and its ilk are sucky devices because the carriers want to keep their chokehold on selling downloadable content.
.Mac, iTMS, and a whole range of services syncing messaging and data back and forth between the iPhone device and one's home computer, laptop, etc.
.Mac, customer service, financial processing for iTMS, and more) in place, and has shown how seamlessly they can integrate use of iTunes into other iLife apps as well as the OS -- it's this type of service that would make an iPhone a compelling device, regardless of what the phone would actually look like.
That said, Apple could be one of the few companies who could successfully launch an MVNO in the US market. If they become a virtual carrier, not only can they integrate iTunes with the phone in a seamless fashion, they can offer a widely expanded service combining
Imagine instead of buying ringtones for $2.99 and up for 30 seconds of some song, being able to just go into iTunes, pick a clip of your favorite song, and have it automatically Bluetoothed into the phone, and with no extra charge, since you already own the music. Home videos on the phone, or imported from your phone camera into iMovie. iPhoto libraries shared and syncd between your phone and home computer.
Apple has much of this infrastructure (billing systems for