Low-Income Users Latch On To iPhone 422
narramissic writes "The iPhone crowd is still dominated by affluent males between the ages of 18 and 35, but in a series of surveys ending in August, ComScore found that iPhone purchases grew fastest among people with annual household incomes between $25,000 and $50,000. The growth rate in this group was 48 percent, compared with just 16 percent among people with incomes above $100,000. And the down economy isn't going to turn this trend around, says ComScore Mobile analyst Jen Wu. 'I don't see there's going to be much of a slowdown, just because wireless devices are so much more of a necessity than they used to be,' Wu said."
In other iPhone news, an anonymous reader points out a NYTimes story about the rise in car-related applications and uses for the iPhone, which points out that programmers are just beginning to "appreciate just what can be done with an iPhone and other advanced cellphones that know where they are and just how quickly they are going someplace else." Another iPhone story mentions that "Opera's engineers have developed a version of Opera Mini that can run on an Apple iPhone, but Apple won't let the company release it because it competes with Apple's own Safari browser."
The high cost forced data plan + vioce plan is a.. (Score:4, Informative)
The high cost forced data plan + voice plan is a trun off me. I want to get S60 based phone running Symbian OS with WIFI and just use WIFI I have ATT DSL so I can use there hotspots for free as well as not being forced to use 1 app store I can get apps from any one with out the app lock in.
Re:Antitrust? (Score:4, Informative)
Antitrust lawsuit, anybody?
You can't have a successful antitrust suit against someone with a minuscule marketshare.
Re:Antitrust? (Score:4, Informative)
At least on Nokia's S60 (Symbian) devices you can run what ever you like.
Low income means a lot of things (Score:3, Informative)
I'm a first year graduate student in physics, and about 1/3 of my class have iPhones. We're definitely low-income -- Teaching Assistant pay is ~$14k/year.
Usually when the phrase "low income" comes up, people think poor people in the inner city or whatnot. Here, I bet low income mostly means students and the likes. I think owning an iPhone is silly on our pay, but at least we have decent future income potential (better than most low income people), so it may not really be beyond our means.
Re:Antitrust? (Score:5, Informative)
Usually, linksys routers such as yours are incapable of running a standard linux router distribution.
It's like saying, "It's antitrust that I can't run Safari on my VIC-20."
It's a technical limitation, not a political/strategic one... which is the case with Opera on the iPhone.
I'm glad I bought an Android phone. :)
That's Medium, Not Low, Income (Score:5, Informative)
$25-50,000 annual income isn't "low income". It's middle income, since real median income is about $25-50,000 [wikipedia.org].
Re:Opera on the iPhone (Score:3, Informative)
Android actually indeed, from the ground up, allows applications to advertise to the system that they are willing and able to handle and display certain forms of data, or publish that they will allow the user to do certain things. [techsociotech.com] When an application makes a request to have a certain data-type handled (like "open this web page"), the OS selects which of the installed apps that can will get to handle the request.
But this need not create a lot of complexity. The failure you are describing is a usability failure of cruft upon cruft of setting and defaults that were not properly constrained by good UI guidelines of where they should be found and how they should be set. Right now setting the default browser on most desktop OSes is a snap: just run the browser and it will ask "Do you want me to be the default?" and we're done. I think that if the OS has a good system for managing these settings -- and WinMo does not because it never cared -- this need not be such a nightmare.
What it will be nighmare for, though, is tech support "Wait, you have what dialer installed? You browser is which?" Still, there is so much power in having a controlled and OS-blessed way to chain little programs together, each adding their own value, from different creative individuals. Very UNIXy.
Re:No money? Just use a credit card! (Score:3, Informative)
I know a few in that last category. Our household just barely falls into the lower middle class category, but because we're careful we're on track to retire at the age of 55 (comfortably). Save your money people, live cheaply. You'll be very thankful for it later.
Recommended reading: "Rich Dad, Poor Dad"
Re:Antitrust? (Score:3, Informative)
Maybe I'm just drawing a blank, but MS has never actually prevented development, they just packaged things and integrated things to leverage the field significantly in their favor.
You really should read my entire post before replying... I said exactly that two paragraphs down:
But hey, at least Microsoft didn't stop Netscape from happening, they just competed unfairly. Apple is doing both...
Re:Antitrust? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:INTERIOR CROCODILE THEATRE (Score:3, Informative)
I carry both a Blackberry for work and an iPhone for personal use. My iPhone is the furthest thing from a status symbol -- it's my life in my pocket. My Blackberry is just an annoyance.
I consider them roughly equivalent for email, largely because the Blackberry makes up for the awkwardness of its interface by having powerful filtering options and copy and paste.
For absolutely any other kind of use, from calendar to notes to Web usage to games to RSS, the iPhone blows the Blackberry away. Its screen is bigger and easier to read, its UI allows me to look up information *way* faster, its WebKit-based browser is actually usable in the non-WAP world, and it has much better graphics performance for games.