Second-gen iPhone Confirmed? 186
gadgetopia writes "ITWire is reporting that the Taiwanese manufacturer Quanta has seemingly confirmed a second generation of the Apple iPhone. Another report referenced by the article suggests the new model could come with a different case design. 'Quanta and Apple already enjoy a strong relationship, with Quanta building both MacBooks and iPods for Apple to sell worldwide, although Foxconn (Hon Hai Precision Industry) is reported to be building the first batch of iPhones due to arrive in the US market by the end of June. Reports suggest Quanta has received an order for 5 million iPhones which are to be shipped in September ... Presumably this could entail a 3G or even 3.5G HSDPA iPhone for European markets due to get the iPhone by the end of the year, or even the addition of more memory - imagine a 16Gb or even 32Gb iPhone, unlikely though those will be this year mainly due to the high cost of 16 or 32Gb of flash memory.'"
Can we please get out the next OS first! (Score:4, Insightful)
European Release or Minor Rev? (Score:4, Insightful)
Wait a minute... (Score:5, Insightful)
There are so many things wrong with this "story" I don't know where to begin. I think one of two things is happening here:
1) As someone above mentioned, this is a widescreen iPod (which has been rumored in the past to be released in September), not a new iPhone. Remember, both revisions of the Nano were announced in September as well. Or more likely,
2) There is absolutely nothing to this rumor at all.
Re:How about voice dialing and better battery (Score:4, Insightful)
It will suck for the first couple months, and a few innocents will have to die to ensure the safety of the species, but I think we've figured out a way to rid society of yuppies and soccer moms who think they are so damn important that they need to speak on the phone while driving a 5000lb weapon.
Of course, their vehicles are twice as heavy as those around them because they feel they are entitled to the safety afforded to their status, and that if it means they are twice as likely to kill an innocent, they've earned this.
About two years ago, I was answering a phone call, and missed a redlight and nearly creamed someone. They pulled over to the side completely freaked out. I pulled back, even though it wasn't an accident and appologized saying I had absolutely no excuse and told them if they felt the need to call the police because of my wreckless driving, so be it, I'd wait. She said that she would have seen me if she hadn't been on the phone and said she was never going to drive while on the phone again either.
Guess what? Two years later, and still won't answer the phone while driving. Pull the fuck over jackass. You'll be five minutes late. And yes, I was a fucking jackass too (and now an overly moralistic one to boot).
I hope they make it so inconvenient to use the phone while driving that yuppies just naturally kill themselves off. No voice dialing for me...its the act of using these things that make them dangerous. Taking your eye off the road only makes it slightly more.
Re:Can we please get out the next OS first! (Score:2, Insightful)
always one complainer (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Can we please get out the next OS first! (Score:5, Insightful)
2) Your view of what's useful and what's a gimmick for a phone is bizarre. Most mobiles are pretty shit at their core job of making and receiving calls -- it's a major PITA trying to merge two calls for example -- getting this kind of feature really really right is what counts. Visual voicemail, to take another example, is a step-change improvement in vmx management. Plenty of business users will be very keen to get their hands on those features, although whether they'll be able to or not will generally depend on factors beyond their control.
Confirmed? (Score:5, Insightful)
How can you use 'confirmed' with a question mark? It's either confirmed or it's a rumour. The word 'confirmed' is not intended to be ambiguous. In this case, it is definitely not confirmed.
Re:Can we please get out the next OS first! (Score:5, Insightful)
The software on most phones is appaling, no attention is paid to user experience. They are not built by people who understand how to put together a good UI or a robust and appropriate interface for a mobile device - and I can't imagine they've gone through any sort of meaningful usability testing.
Smart phones are showcase of poorly designed software, with inconsistent behaviour, over complicated and badly organised system settings and unresponsive, sluggish and often unstable user interfaces - that are typically only half-implimented. This only started to be really visible once phones started getting complicated (as it's easy to make a simple system, like the early Nokia UI, easy to use).
I'm sure my last 4 or 5 phones will technically have a lot more features than the Apple Phone when it comes out - I've got 5 year old phones that I'm sure will be able to claim a richer feature set - but in the same way I've had other, more 'powerful' MP3 players than my iPod, if the user experience is right, that's more important to me. I'd rather have a smaller subset of features that just work really well, rather than bunch of confusing settings and overly complicated menus and options that insist on getting in the way rather than just behaving in a simple, minimalist manner and doing what I'm actually likely to WANT it to do.
I hope that in demonstrating how to get software right (which I have every confidence Apple will do - given their track record with things like the Newton) manufacturers will learn and develop similarly user-experience focused platforms with a similar level of polish. But I doubt it, after all they didn't learn from the Newton and the development of Palm OS has been royally screwed up.
As much as I don't want to sound like a fanboy, it's actually depressing how good the the UI on the Newton was when I think that no PDA or smartphone I've owned or even heard of since (and that must be about 20) has even been HALF as good. Sony were making some great hardware till they halted Clie development (the PEG-TH55 is still an awesome peice of kit, several years on) and the latest Nokia Smartphone range is interesting (I've got an E61 ATM), and the Sharp Zarus PDA range is really nifty too, but without good software, the hardware is just wasted.
Re:Confirmation (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Can we please get out the next OS first! (Score:3, Insightful)
You seem to be ragging on OS X and its users just because it doesn't do what _you_ want it to. If it doesn't meet your needs, that's fine, but it's no reason to be an ass.
Personally, I'm a unix geek, and I've been a happy PowerBook owner since late 2005. It works great as a desktop that "just works" + a unix command line environment, which is precisely what many of us are after. If you need to do heavy lifting that really _needs_ a typical *nix environment, OS X helpfully provides OpenSSH right in the default install. Login to your Linux box and go nuts.
And if you just don't like Macs, that's fine, too. But your reasons for insulting OS X and its users are specious at best.
Re:Confirmed? (Score:4, Insightful)
one more fix for the mac zealots (Score:1, Insightful)
No Feedback? (Score:3, Insightful)
How can you design a 2nd generation model when there is zero consumer feedback to base it on?! Apple has always partially relied on consumers' criticism to initiate a design iteration, and justly so. Especially for a market that Apple is newly entering - does the phone capture good signal in different environments, is the price point good, do batteries blow up, is there something blatantly simple that they missed - these only come out after widespread usage (not intra-company circulation). It could be that the first design had flaws that Apple already noticed but are going ahead with it in order to keep the June date - that doesn't undermine the logic of waiting for feedback of customers as well before placing an order with Quanta.
This is most definitely not a II gen iPhone. I would go with this being either a European/3G version or a widescreen iPod, assuming that news is true and not another fake email.
Re:Can we please get out the next OS first! (Score:5, Insightful)
Could you elaborate on this? Please be specific. I write and deploy software to Unix (Linux, BSD, and occasionally Solaris) for a living, and I develop on a MacBook. It has served me very well, and I've found no areas in which it's really "fucked over" to reduce functionality. Well, I guess the lack of Gentoo-style start/stop scripts threw me for a bit, but that's not a global Unix thing.
Re:the Mom test (Score:5, Insightful)