Apple To Face Challenge At WWDC 264
Amanda Callahan writes to tell us that Apple's upcoming WWDC could be quite a test for the Cupertino powerhouse. They will most likely be missing Steve Jobs for star-power and have extremely high expectations to meet in order to maintain their edge. Thankfully it looks like Jobs will be rejoining Apple later this month with a good prognosis after facing severe health issues. "The competition is now catching up. Palm, Google, Microsoft, Nokia and Research in Motion, maker of the BlackBerry, are all at varying stages of developing and introducing their own iPhone-like devices and software, along with easily accessible stores for the small programs known as applications, or apps, that run on those devices. In some cases, those companies are releasing a greater variety of phones, on more wireless carriers around the world, than Apple. To maintain its advantage, Apple must preserve the impression that it is far ahead of rivals when it comes to the capabilities and the 'cool' factor of its devices."
Amazing insight from Mr Genius (Score:5, Funny)
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along with easily accessible stores for the small programs known as applications, or apps, that run on those devices
Do these run on those hand held thingamygigs? Called 'Phones'?
News reporter reading level (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Amazing insight from Mr Genius (Score:5, Insightful)
"Amazing insight from Mr Genius"
"If they start making products people don't want, and start losing users, then Apple's strategy will run into problems," said Benjamin Reitzes, an analyst at Barclays Capital.
Microsoft
To be fair, everyone seems to hate the company and have nothing but bitter contempt for all of their products... but Microsoft is indeed doing OK.
Re:Amazing insight from Mr Genius (Score:5, Insightful)
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iPod batteries as profit??? What a stupid, stupid argument. We have five iPods in our house, and we've NEVER replaced a single battery. We have a 2nd generation iPod up to the current Nano. Even IF these batteries ever die, the new iPods are compelling enough over their 3-5 year old counterparts to just buy a new one. There are more battery replacement services out there than Zune owners, so even when your granny's iPod battery dies, she'll have no problem getting a battery swapped.
User freedom? Has i
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"Catching up" is the key phrase (Score:3, Insightful)
"the competition is now catching up"
Assuming they've kept their edge, that statement is the key: They lead, they don't follow. That's why the competition are catching up to them, and not the reverse. Provided they keep doing that, there is little room for error to occur
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The Blackberry Storm's haptic feedback was the major feature that sold me on it. I was a staunch non-supporter of touch screens simply because I got no feedback about what I was doing. For this reason I think apple has now lost pace (hardware-wise, at least).
Re:"Catching up" is the key phrase (Score:4, Interesting)
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True enough. If I were doing anything more intense (typing-wise) than cranking out the occasional text I would revert to my keyboard loving ways, but for the time being I'm enjoying the extra screen real estate. Different strokes for different folks, I suppose.
Re:"Catching up" is the key phrase (Score:4, Interesting)
And yet the Storm 2 doesn't have that clicky screen. It actually seems that most people didn't like what RIM called SurePress on the Storm.
I have never used it but like everything some people love it and some people hate it.
Re:"Catching up" is the key phrase (Score:5, Insightful)
If you're one of those text-while-you-drive people, tactile feedback is a must -- it's impossible to touch-type reliably on the iPhone (you can do it, just expect some gibberish).
I swear if I ever see you in public I will kick you straight in the balls (assuming you have them). If you text while you drive you should be summarily dismembered while still alive and fed to demons in the farthest depths of hell.
Hang up your god damn phone and drive you stupid piece of shit!
Re:"Catching up" is the key phrase (Score:5, Funny)
Good God, man. Stop beating about the bush and tell us how you really feel!
(I see you prefer the "pansy" approach - I'd probably favour something a bit more severe.)
seriously (Score:3, Funny)
It's even harder to drive while texting as it is to drive while talking on the phone! Talking takes one hand and texting usually takes two. You can't drive with two hands on a cell phone; what the hell are you going to hold your beer with?
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You're doing it all wrong. The beer goes on the back of her head.
Re:"Catching up" is the key phrase (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:"Catching up" is the key phrase (Score:4, Insightful)
"the competition is now catching up"
Assuming they've kept their edge, that statement is the key: They lead, they don't follow. That's why the competition are catching up to them, and not the reverse. Provided they keep doing that, there is little room for error to occur
That's an amazingly arrogant attitude that Apple would do well to not share. Apple may have the edge in ease of use, but they never had an edge in anything else. If the competition can catch up on designing good user interfaces before Apple can catch up on hardware and features, there is actually very much room for error.
I get that the UI is most important for many, but it's lame to ignore everything else.
Re:"Catching up" is the key phrase (Score:5, Insightful)
You're right, but you're missing the piece that a lot of people don't see. Creating good software is hard. Cramming a new piece of hardware into a piece of plastic is the easy part. Designing an interface that makes that piece of hardware more useful can be a lot harder.
That's the only reason why a computer company was able to walk right into the phone market, and on their first try create something that all those old phone manufacturers are now rushing to catch up to. I'm willing to bet that Apple's employees overall spent way more time getting the software right than they did deciding what hardware to put into the iPhone.
And then the app store is a whole other beast. Apple had a lot of experience from the iTMS, they had a ton of infrastructure in place, and they even already had end-user software in place to tie it all together. Most of their competitors have to build similar systems from scratch. They've got a good example to follow now, but they've still got plenty to figure out.
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To maintain its advantage, Apple must preserve the impression that it is far ahead of rivals
This statement was thrown in there seemingly at random. Why can't Apple just be the best, most usable platform? And why can't it rely on a billion downloaded applications that only run on its platform as some lock-in? Not that I'm *not* advocating Apple continuing to innovate, but why do they have to be held to a higher standard than everyone else?
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why do they have to be held to a higher standard than everyone else?
Apple's entire marketing and business model are based on their products being better. Some companies base their businesses on having good products at cheap prices. Apple doesn't do that and if consumers don't have the opinion that Apple has far superior products then Apple will have to redesign their entire business model. Mercedes Benz had this problem when they decided to over expand their product portfolio. They were known for producing high quality "german engineered" cars that were significantly be
Re:"Catching up" is the key phrase (Score:4, Insightful)
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Uh-oh, they're catching up! Someone tell Apple! (Score:5, Insightful)
So the competition has millions of devices in user's hands, a unified and attractive app store, and an established ecosystem?
(And that's even ignoring the music juggernaut on the other side of the coin.)
Which competition is even close to this kind of market?
Not trolling, not flaming, just asking.
Seems like everyone nowadays is granted a writing/analyst position if they can predict the fall of apple, or gloat about the upcoming features coming from microsoft.
(I'm also not saying that competition is bad, just that Apple right now doesn't face any coherent competition. Take Palm Pre as an example... Different hardware models (for sprint and verizon networks), crashy app store, lack of apps, web-based apps, lack of actual customers, and worst of all, predicted shortages at introduction. WhoTF decided it would be a good idea to have that kind of a release against the upcoming iPhone v3?)
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It's pretty important to have different hardware when you're working with two different types of radio networks. Apple can't be on both CDMA networks and GSM networks with just the one phone. Companies with both GSM and CDMA phones can have phones on both types of networks.
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just that Apple right now doesn't face any coherent competition
You are apparently really just speaking of two of Apple's "products" though: iPhone and Music.
Great. What about hardware, operating systems/software...? I would think the idea behind predicting Apple's downfall is really just counting how many of their eggs are in one basket, and how close others are at taking that basket.
OTOH, I'm not a fan of "Apple stinks" or "Apple is going down hill fast now that Jobs is gone" comments, either. I also generally dislike the idea that Apple's iPhone is the greatest th
Re:Uh-oh, they're catching up! Someone tell Apple! (Score:5, Informative)
As for the Palm Pre, it hasn't achieved anything yet, much less established itself as an iPhone-killer, but it's a little premature to write it off due to lack of apps or lack of actual customers. It hasn't even been released yet! Most reviews have been very favorable and put it at least in the same class as the iPhone, which is a big step from where we've been for the last couple of years.
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From my MBA economics teacher, in today's information economy, a firm now has approximately two years to have market power, then the sheer number of other players in the market will destroy the first-runner's ability to lead. There are too many competators that can hire their own programmers and make their own hardware, competing products are bound to arrive.
So, Apple has two choices: innovate or cut costs. What will the iPhone+ be able to do that the current one can't do... err, it already does music, ca
Re:Uh-oh, they're catching up! Someone tell Apple! (Score:4, Insightful)
Where's the "iPod killer"? Who's displacing Skype? Where's the auction site competing with eBay? Who's coming up to challenge Google, Craigslist, Amazon, Facebook? Some of these companies have been at the top of the heap for over a decade, with no serious competitor in sight.
Many of these folks are leaders because of the network effect of their services - something programmers and hardware can't change.
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Re:Uh-oh, they're catching up! Someone tell Apple! (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah in my MBA program they just taught that you need to achieve sustainable competitive advantage, and you make strategic and tactical decisions to achieve that. You pick niches with high barriers to entry, or you find ways to establish high barriers to entry. Intellectual property, brand equity, channel development, etc. are all ways to get sustainable competitive advantage.
Every industry is somewhat different as regards what options exist for doing that.
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I certainly can appreciate the pure business mindset, but I can never understand it. As a technologist, it is unnatural for me to try and create high barriers for entry to anything. A bit irrelevant to the topic at hand, but your statement made me remember that i will always be a terrible businessman.
Anyways, Apple has a nice market penetration and mindshare, but the market is far too diverse and the competition way too strong for them to be complacent in any way. The iphone's absolute #1 advantage is the a
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Skype and Vonage are direct competitors, Google, Yahoo and MS are direct competitors. Craigslist is a direct competitor to Ebay.. Facebook, Myspace LinkedIn are direct competitors. Amazon is a tough one because they aggregate independant e-tailers.Most of these services dont have any REAL brand loyalty beyond familiarity. Being the mo
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Google, Yahoo and MS are direct competitors.
And nobody is saying lets Yahoo that. Yahoo and MS might be around but Google dominates that market and has for a long time. They don't have an impenetrable product but until somebody steps up they'll maintain their market dominance beyond that MBA profs magical 2 year limit. The same goes with the iPod, despite all the howling from the /. crowd about product inferiority Apple has managed to maintain it's dominance of the market for quite a long time and it doesn't seem that anyone is coming in to take t
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Where's the "iPod killer"? Who's displacing Skype? Where's the auction site competing with eBay? Who's coming up to challenge Google, Craigslist, Amazon, Facebook? Some of these companies have been at the top of the heap for over a decade, with no serious competitor in sight.
I would say you're right on all of those except for Skype. And Skype is facing competition from Google which you already had on your list, so no biggie. I would say that the GP is missing the fact that Apple has the possibility to innovate beyond cutting costs. Nobody had thought of (or at least producing) a phone like the iPhone until Apple did it. Innovations are innovative because nobody thought of them beforehand and I'm hoping to see something spectacular (beyond cut & paste, for the love of Go
Re:Uh-oh, they're catching up! Someone tell Apple! (Score:5, Informative)
How can you possibly misspell QWERTY? It's spelled correctly on the damn keyboard.
Re:Uh-oh, they're catching up! Someone tell Apple! (Score:5, Funny)
Well, he *is* an MBA student.
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How can you possibly misspell QWERTY? It's spelled correctly on the damn keyboard.
They must be typing on an iPhone
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Well... they can always run with the 40,000 applications in the App Store. A rather significant head start on the 12 demo non-native applications Pre is currently showing in their app "store" (you can't buy anything yet). Even beats out the 25,000 or so Windows Mobile apps Microsoft touts as aving.
Plus they have the whole game-integration thing going with the iPod Touch.
Plus binding all of those apps to a larger "pad" media/game/reading device.
And there's that patent that just popped up on middle-of-the-cal
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I don't think anyone's predicting the fall of Apple, but rather just stating the obvious.
People have been predicting the fall of Apple since at least the late '80s. Apple: Proudly going out of business for over 25 years. (or is it 30 years by now) Eventually the pundits will be right and then they can say, "I told you so"
There was a little bit in the 90's where most of those pundits probably felt pretty snarky.
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Without trolling, or flaming, here is my answer:
On February 3rd, 1637, everyone just woke up. And the price of tulips went down the toilet, and everyone looked around and said "why did I pay more than a tulip's weight in gold for this? It's just a flower".
Someday, everyone will just wake up. They will put down the ipods, and pick up pennywhistles, guitars, and harmonicas again. That's just how fads work. Tulips and iPhones will still exist, but they won't be fetish objects to otherwise normal people an
Re:Uh-oh, they're catching up! Someone tell Apple! (Score:5, Insightful)
Except that emotional baggage isn't what sells iPhones. It's primarily function and utility.
I am, of course, referring to easy-to-use function and utility. I can use my iPhone for pretty much any of its intended purposes quickly and without hassling with the interface. That wasn't true of the last phone I had: it did quite a few things, but it never seemed worth figuring out how.
The iPhone does a whole lot of things simply and intuitively. That means it has more effective functionality, for a great many people, than phones that are theoretically more capable. Moreover, the iPhone is a lot more fun to use.
This doesn't mean the iPhone is unstoppable. It does mean that an iPhone killer is going to have to be easy and fun to use, and not just laden with functionality and a manual that's more text than the average American reads in a year. It does mean that any iPhone killer is going to be mocked by Slashdot as being lame, of course. Many Slashdotters are quick to label anything they don't immediately understand as irrational and unpredictable.
Nor do I think people are going to discard their iPods in favor of guitars. People have wanted recorded music since it became available (with the player piano, say). People are going to keep iPods or whatever gets popular instead, and quite a few people are still going to learn to play the guitar, because that fulfills a slightly different need. (And my wife still won't let me practice the nose flute in the house.)
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no sane person thinks $100 a month is a reasonable price for phone service, but they buy iPhones anyway.
Maybe that's because I only spend $75 a month. Considering what data plans used to cost the iPhone really isn't that expensive. Now, as competition increases the unlimited date rates aren't nearly as impressive as they were 2-3 years ago.
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WhoTF decided it would be a good idea to have that kind of a release against the upcoming iPhone v3?)
Hence the name "Pre"mature.
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Not trolling, not flaming, just asking.
If that is the case, why is your next paragraph a bunch of retarded wharrgarbl?
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Yes Blackberry has millions of devices in the hands of users. They now have an app store. I will go with that ecosystem thing.
Palm and RIM have a lot of experience with Smartphones so yes I would say they are catching up. Android has a lot of developer love but right now in the US is limited to T-Mobile.
Also Verizon and Sprint are both CDMA networks so no issues. I think Apple will finally have a fight on it's hands with the Palm Pre. It doesn't just have web apps it uses javascript but that isn't just for
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Which competition is even close to this kind of market?
Microsoft maybe, though their problems with getting a good vertical product are endemic, excepting perhaps the Xbox, but is that yet profitable?
Amazon, but they seem to be happy leaving personal computing, email, contacts, mobile media on the table. But Amazon seems to be much better equipped to roll out a vertical than MS, even if it hasn't demonstrated the complete wherewithal in the hardware department to pull off a media/comm device. Love my Kindle though.
As Gruber pointed out the other day, the main
iPod market take over repeat (Score:3, Funny)
According to reports, Apple will have a slew of iPhones from 4GB all the way up to 32GB.
The data/rate plans will most likely also change.
Apple is going to corner the smartphone market from the top down, like they did with the iPod.
In fact to top things off even further, I bet they spun off Rubenstein and Co to make the "Pre" to appeal to the more RIM business type crowd who see's the iPhone as just a toy, not a tool.
The fact that the Pre id's itself as a "Apple iPod" to iTunes for synching may mean Apple is turning a blind eye or somehow involved with Pre.
Oh yea, prepare for a market assault by Apple.
Short RIM.
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Right. Just as soon as the iphone gets push email, a keyboard, real management features, and real security. Here are the blackberry certifications [blackberry.com]. Who has audited the iphone? Nobody, because it has no security.
Come Monday I'll think you'll find most of this will be addressed.
Look for a complete end-to-end solution involving iPhone and Mac OS X Server 10.6 (Snow Leopard) at a price point no one else will be able to come close to; eg. no more per seat licenses, bu-bye Microsoft Exchange. Everything else will fall into place shortly thereafter. Push email, management, security and certification, all of it and maybe even other things that the others haven't thought of yet.
As for a keyboard. Apple will never make a ve
Maintain the impression they're ahead? (Score:4, Insightful)
If their competition is rushing to follow what Apple's doing by making iPhone-like devices, then it's more than just an impression that they're ahead.
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If the competition is designing new iPhone like devices, they are moving backwards. iPhones were outdated when they appeared, and are even more outdated now.
If anything the competition is learning from Apple marketing, and is getting better at branding and promoting their mobile devices.
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30" OLED displays (Score:4, Interesting)
Despite being a "developers" conference, I'm calling it. 30" OLED displays. You heard it here first.
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Apple would seriously like to make new displays higher density, like over 150 PPI, as to coincide with finally shipping resolution indepence in OS X. Just imagine the amount of gloating ;) and in all fairness, it would be deserved - it would look damn good.
But RI has proved to be quite a challenge, and any progress made would be interesting to see at WWDC.
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Re:30" OLED displays (Score:5, Funny)
Kinda big for a phone
But thanks to the Apple Patented Reality Distortion Field, this 30" OLED display only requires the same space as the current generation iPhone's screen!
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But thanks to the Apple Patented Reality Distortion Field, this 30" OLED display only requires the same space as the current generation iPhone's screen!
But thanks to the Naysayers Open Source version of teh Reality Distortion field, Apple's 30" OLED display is 100% useless to 100% of the world because it doesn't have an analog VGA port.
PIM tools (Score:5, Informative)
I'm hoping for better PIM tools. I'm currently using an iPhone at work (I can pick any device so I change regularly) and having spent a lot of time with Windows Mobile I'm missing a lot of its basic functionality. For example with the iPhone I cannot:
Now to be fair, I'm probably limited by the fact I use Outlook on the desktop and have no desire to use MS Push (who wants work emails arriving on a weekend?) or send all my data to Google's services - but some of this is pretty basic that even Palm had in when they were king of the world and pushing out black and white V series products.
If they put all that in, then I'd never need to go back to Windows Mobile. Fingers crossed.
Well I can give you one (Score:4, Insightful)
Search the whole device for something. There is a wedding coming up in the next couple of months. Only way to find it? Hunt for it manually.
That's coming. There will be a whole new search device page coming in OS 3.0. This was explained in the developer preview meeting they had back in march. You can download the video from Apple.com. Unfortunately that's the only thing on your list that was explained in any detail in this developer preview.
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Fortunately, my only appointments are "Arrive at work" and "Leave work," and I rarely forget either of those.. especially that last one.
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I'm hoping for better PIM tools. I'm currently using an iPhone at work (I can pick any device so I change regularly) and having spent a lot of time with Windows Mobile I'm missing a lot of its basic functionality. For example with the iPhone I cannot:
I also use my iPhone for work and find its PIM tools lacking. What's worse is Apple has apaprently decided to go with data stores that are not accessible to other software apps; so iambic / CESD / et.al. need to create new data files if they want to create an iPhone app. That probably means no push synch, which would make those apps useless for me.
Of course, that's in keeping with Apple's insistence on total control of parts of teh user experience; which while useful in maintaining the end user experience
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Palm:
1) open (clamshell) phone
2) press "Calendar" button
3) use fingernail to click on the timeslot
4) use Graffiti to enter text
5) close phone
Apple:
1) turn phone on
2) slide to unlock, passcode if bey
Apple's is losing its margins (Score:3, Insightful)
Apple is about profit margin. [forbes.com] Apple has enjoyed much higher profit margins than its competitors. That's starting to slip as iPhone and iPod prices come down, and the cheaper competitors get better.
Apple's reaction so far has been to raise iTunes prices. Something better than that will have to be done next.
What price drops??? (Score:3, Insightful)
That's starting to slip as iPhone and iPod prices come down
Ummmmm excuse me? Which iPhone or iPod price drops are you talking about? Since the iPhone was out last year it's been $199 for 8 GB and $299 for 16 GB. I can go to the store right now and see the exact same price.
Apple's reaction so far has been to raise iTunes prices
iTunes prices did not increase. They adopted a variable price method so popular songs could be more expensive during their popular period while less downloaded songs could be cheap
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That's starting to slip as iPhone and iPod prices come down
It's not Apples MO to drop prices. Rather, they introduce new models and keep the prices level.
Apple's reaction so far has been to raise iTunes prices.
The changed prices in the iTMS has been a reaction to nothing other than the fact that this was a demand posed by the record companies in exchange for them allowing Apple to provide DRM-free versions of their entire catalogues.
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The ones that are all about volume.
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"what company isn't all about profit margin?"
Economic theory states that in an ideal capitalist system, all industries' profit margins will approach 0. They will make enough money to pay off their costs, employees, research, etc, but nothing else. This is because if company A is making a high profit, company B will come in with a competing product/service and undercut them.
Of course, this isn't entirely true because of several factors, like: barriers to entry (as Palm has proven, spending 100s of millions o
Heh... (Score:5, Insightful)
"Palm, Google, Microsoft, Nokia and Research in Motion, maker of the BlackBerry, are all at varying stages of developing and introducing their own iPhone-like devices."
So Apple, as a newcomer to the industry, is now making others in the same space play catch up to them. Real competition is a good thing. Definitely Palm, MS, Nokia and RIM had more than enough time and expertise to make a iPhone like device before Apple did, yet they didn't. So now they get to play catch up. I hope they do create real iPhone killers, because it then puts Apple on the spot to improve.
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Time != Expertise/"Innovation"/Good Design. :)
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Definitely true. Palm should have had an iPhone, 2 years before iPhone. Instead they gave up much of their touch-screen real estate to a chicklet keyboard, and other established advantages, to build a blackberry clone. Big mistake on their part.
Making something like an iPhone that relies entirely on a touch screen means having a software stack that supports it. Once Palm had already made the big mistake of going with a more or less unchanged PalmOS for the Treo, replacing Grafiti with a qwerty pad was prob
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By "iPhone-like devices," they usually mean "thing with no actual keyboard." I don't want one like that. I like physical keys. Because they actually work. You've always been able to get apps by searching around a bit for Windows Mobile based phones, and probably for others as well, so the App Store idea is just collecting and monetizing them. Frankly, an iPhone isn't that special, beyond the large touch-screen. Everything about it had been done before in one manner or another. Apple just gathered it in to o
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I like physical keys. Because they actually work.
Except that physical keys can physically break, too.
You've always been able to get apps by searching around a bit for Windows Mobile based phones, and probably for others as well, so the App Store idea is just collecting and monetizing them.
Nah, you've always been able to pay for apps for Win Mobile. So, it's not about monetizing. The biggest problem I found when looking for Win Mobile apps was that it even if you did manage to find the ad-filled webpage that had the file, there was generally no way to distinguish, say, two SSH clients from one another, so you just have to install them both and hope that one of them doesn't fuck up your phone.
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"How about we start getting phones with a good vibrate feature so that I can feel it while it's on my belt?"
Now be honest here. Is that REALLY why you want a better vibrator????
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So Apple, as a newcomer to the industry, is now making others in the same space play catch up to them.
Right, and I think that's why the news media is demanding (wrongly) that Apple blows the door of the hinges at WWDC. They saw Apple go from nothing to an industry leader (in the mobile industry) in the space of a year or two, and they're thinking to themselves, "How can Apple keep that pace up?! They're definitely going to falter!" Bu the truth is Apple doesn't need to keep that pace up. All they have to do is release solid updates that will fix some of the problems people have with their products, thro
A crippled phone imho (Score:3, Insightful)
Multitasking, a memory card reader and installing non apple approved apps.
Features that apple COULD implement tomorrow, but won't.
That's why I'm rockin' android and will never buy an iphone in its current crippled state.
A real shame, as the device definetly has potential. It's not about hating apple, it's about hating that locked down feeling. That is probably not an issue for most people out there, but for me they are dealbreakers.
Re:A crippled phone imho (Score:5, Insightful)
Multitasking, a memory card reader and installing non apple approved apps.
So you would be willing to sacrifice stability, security of your data? If you don't care about stability and the risk for malware, you can always jailbreak your phone and install that kind of crap yourself. A memory card reader? So I take it that you don't use picture software like Picassa or iPhoto to organize your photos? You are aware that the iPhone has 8-16 and potentially 32 GB of storage in the new models built in?
Features that apple COULD implement tomorrow, but won't.
They won't because they are interested in serving the majority of customer's needs rather than serving niche concerns at the expense of security and stability as well as battery life.
That's why I'm rockin' android and will never buy an iphone in its current crippled state.
A real shame, as the device definetly has potential. It's not about hating apple, it's about hating that locked down feeling. That is probably not an issue for most people out there, but for me they are dealbreakers.
Good for you. Have fun with your device of your choice but you should realize that your expectations are part of a small niche and most people just want a device that works well on a consistent basis.
Event sold out for months... (Score:2)
Comment removed (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Cool. (Score:4, Insightful)
A lot of people will weigh the cool factor quite heavily when buying a $200 (not $600) device. For that matter, a lot of people weigh the cool factor extremely heavily when buying cars, which are significantly more pricey than $200. Its why Apple has managed to dominate the market with a functionally inferior (in terms of feature set) MP3 player (and many would argue the same about the phone).
Re:Cool. (Score:4, Insightful)
Its why Apple has managed to dominate the market with a functionally inferior (in terms of feature set) MP3 player (and many would argue the same about the phone).
Perhaps the device itself is functionally inferior (in the event you have things other than MP3s, AACs, or Apple Losslesseses), but due to its exposure, compatibility made my decision for me. As in, for effectively any modern make of car stereo, I can find some way to directly interface my iPod to it. Not through some line-in hack or other "just spit audio out the car speakers" method, but through some interface wherein I can keep the iPod itself stuffed in my glove box (negating the "cool" factor if nobody sees it) and control tracks and such from the radio's front panel. Anything else, I'd have to keep the player out in the open, make sure it's not going to fall all over the place, and fumble for it rather than the radio if I want to skip a track.
The same goes for a whole horde of other "iPod compatible" devices (countertop radios, alarm clocks, etc); they all go through the docking interface, allowing them to control playback in addition to playing the music, and not resulting in a line-in hack that just drags out another redundant set of buttons.
I've seen it said before on Slashdot: If the rest of the MP3 player market would get together and make a single, unified interface and protocol like the iPod's docking cable that allowed control and audio output without having to care who made the device, what model it is, etc, etc, THEN Apple would be on the run. But as it stands now, you have the iPod and you have a bajillion other viciously incompatible MP3 players. Will I be able to get an interface cable for my three-year-old Kenwood car stereo for a Zen? What model Zen? How about a Zune? The no-name piece of junk that came free with my Dell? Who knows? But I can Google "Kenwood iPod adapter" and quickly figure out what MP3 player I'm picking up without hassles or guessing.
Make no mistake, I'd rather have a cheaper MP3 player available to me, but for compatibility's sake, I'm sticking with my iPod.
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I don't disagree with anything you said, but part of the reason it became so ubiquitous was because of the "cool" factor. iPods tended to be more expensive and less functional than other players', but they had better aesthetics and a simpler (some would argue better, but I preferred the iRiver to the iPod) user interface.
And of course, I'm making this post from the perspective of an iPod/iPhone user. I use it for many of the same reasons you do (and because I happen to use iTunes for my music).
Re:Cool. (Score:4, Informative)
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If you're using the car's radio to control the iPod then what is the point in having the iPod in the first place? Why not just make cars with built-in MP3 players and 160GB SSDs for storage? Add WiFi to the radio so you can sync the songs between your car and home PC while it sits in the garage overnight. The only thing halfway "cool" about iPods were they had a pretty decent user interface, although the requirement to use iTunes to sync your music over instead of just drag and dropping music into a musi
But $600 is probably closer (Score:2)
Sure it's only $200 out the door, but I think that also commits you to 24 * 30 = 720 of data plan charges over and above what you are already paying for line rental. The incremental cost of AT&T providing data service just isn't that high, so some of that money is surely subsidizing the phone.
Personally i find the TCO of our two androids quite manageable, but I think our car payment and mortgage are the only higher monthly expenses.
There's a LOT of room to reduce the total cost, and I think the low end
Re:Jobs Health (Score:5, Funny)
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hes been hard at work on a new iPancreas, which will not only produce insulin but will transmit blood sugar levels to his iPhone via bluetooth
If that is what it takes to get full bluetooth support on my iPhone I hope that Steve's other organs fail also.
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No you don't. Not in Canada, anyway. They evaluate what treatment has the best success rate vs. the type of cancer you have, yes, which means you won't always be given the bleeding edge treatment, because if one has an 80% remission rate, why go for the treatment with no track record?
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You're not from the US, are you?
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What Will Dickheads Conceive? IDK.
"I do koalas"? WTF?
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If Apple does not release a new version of the iPhone at this conference, or soon there after I think it will be a mistake.
Define "soon."
Actually, Apple is at the top of the heap and people will consider waiting on them. So imagine this scenario:
WWDC. Apple gives it's song-and-dance about iPhone OS 3.0. Basically, the same one they gave back in March. They reiterate that it will be shipping "This Summer." Of course, they have lots of sessions at WWDC about iPhone OS 3.0. Various rumor sites insist that it will be July, then August, then September. Finally, around September 21st, Apple gives the press the word that they'l