I’ve updated the site to work better on mobile devices. It’s using the most excellent WordPress plugin called WordPress Mobile Edition by Alex King. The part that I like the best is that if you’re using a touch screen device such as an iPhone or BlackBerry Storm (like I have), it’s touch screen friendly. I like it!
Tag Archive for 'iphone'
One of the more incredulous things to be postulated in the wake of the announcement of the iPhone 3G was this tidbit from CNet columnist Don Reisinger:
And although the BlackBerry has led the way, Steve Jobs just dealt a decisive blow that will not only force RIM to capitulate, but could see the end of the BlackBerry line altogether.
Um, say what? That sounds like the delusions of an Apple fanboy to the extreme. Let’s think this through logically.
First of all, there are a lot of companies that have made significant investment in BlackBerry technology, having purchased hundreds (if not thousands) of devices, lines of service for all of those devices, BES licensing, and all of the infrastructure that goes with all of that. If there is one truism about large corporations, it’s that they don’t take to change well. Switching from a BlackBerry to iPhone platform means huge changes to be made, and that also means a very large expenditure of money would have to be laid out for new devices, new lines of service, cancellation fees for existing lines of service, etc. If your existing platform isn’t broken, how do you go about proposing to the folks who sign the checks that you want to lay out hundreds of thousands of dollars for this new technology? It’s a hard sell, especially in today’s economy.
Secondly, while Apple is proposing their new ability to have applications on the iPhone, the delivery mechanism won’t work for most business. While there is over-the-air downloading via the new App store for personal apps and games and the like, enterprise level apps can only be installed via iTunes. Did anyone bother to tell Apple that iTunes is probably application non grata #1 for most corporate IT departments? This isn’t like the BES, which has the ability to push apps wirelessly from within the environment, or the packaging of apps in a binary format that both BlackBerry and Windows Mobile environments use?
Lastly, and this is probably more of a personal gripe, the on screen typing thing for the iPhone seems useless to me to do more than real quick SMS messaging or entering a URL, etc. Once you start working with a BlackBerry keyboard, you realize it’s not that hard to thumb out an essay on the BlackBerry keyboard. Hell, I can even putter away quite quickly on my Pearl’s compressed keyboard using SureType. How in the hell are people who are relying on one of these devices to do super heavy email loads going to last with that touch screen keyboard? I think not.
Thirdly, while they’re not on the same level with the user experience, give RIM credit for trying to beef up consumer level features on the BlackBerry. Any recent BB can play music now, and the forthcoming BlackBerry Bold is really amping up multimedia features and ease of use. No, it won’t kill the iPhone, but it’s a convincing piece of equipment anyway.
All in all, the iPhone remains a top notch consumer device. It does what it does extremely well. I won’t switch to it because of the carrier that’s involved, but that’s just my thing. When you put it all together, though, I don’t think we’re looking at a BlackBerry killer. Not in the least bit at all.
I didn’t really do much looking into the details of the $100 Apple was giving back to iPhone early adopters back when I tacked the note onto my post about the iPhone, but I did want to chime in on this a bit.
First of all, you have to give Steve Jobs credit for turning around on this whole thing so quickly. In his USA Today interview, Jobs took a pretty unapologetic stance on the iPhone price cut, but did turn around and act contrite about it fairly quickly. That includes an open letter to the iPhone early adopter community posted on the Apple website. That’s great, and as expected, a good deal of the Apple community is now mollified that Jobs is the grand and benevolent master of all things technology, but let’s look at this objectively.
Sure, Jobs is giving back early adopters $100, but there’s two things to remember in it. First of all, it’s not even enough to bridge the gap to cover what people who waited a couple of months are now paying for the phone. That’s to be expected, I suppose, given things, and something is better than nothing. Still, people who bought the iPhone in the past like two weeks can still get price matched on it and get their $200 back.
The second, and far more important, thing is that the $100 Jobs is handing out? It’s coming in the form of store credit. Wow, that’s being generous, Steve! Way to go there! So basically, Jobs is taking the obvious dissatisfaction of his early adopters and working to turn it around into more Apple sales. This is thinking different? If I was one of those idiots that waited on line for hours for an iPhone (and, that’s what I think of those people, honestly), I think I’d feel more stabbed in the back that the company was trying to make even more sales off of mollifying me. Luckily for Jobs and Apple of course, this gesture restored the reality distortion field to 100% operating efficiency, so there’s nothing to worry about, and that might be the saddest fact of all.
Technorati Tags: apple, iphone, steve jobs, reality distortion field
So amongst the hullabaloo of yesterday’s big iPod releases comes a glaring chink in the famous Steve Jobs Reality Distortion field. That chink (maybe a growing crack?) came during another one of Jobs’ famous “one more thing…” segments of his presentation, when he announced that after only two months of being in the market, he was dropping the price of the 8GB iPhone by a whopping $200. The noise you just heard was the groan of thousands of people who now feel totally shafted for standing in line for hours upon hours to purchase an 8GB iPhone on launch day for almost $600 and now, only two months after launch, 25% cheaper.
First of all, you have to agree with Jobs, who in a USA Today interview, unapologetically stated that “that’s what happens in technology,” because he’s right. You have to be cutthroat to stay ahead of your competitors. Sure the iPhone is popular, but you’re never going to move past the Apple Fanboy early adapter leagues by keeping the thing so expensive. Such is the way of life.
The thing that’s interesting to me is that this really proves how deep the reality distortion field goes. People are seemingly shocked, shocked I say, that Jobs and Apple could put the screws to them like this. If this was Microsoft doing it, the Apple heads would not have blinked. Welcome to life outside of the Reality Distortion Field, my Apple brethren, and smell the real life.
Update: In the time since I started writing this, Jobs backtracked and said he will give out a $100 rebate to all iPhone owners. Guess even he isn’t immune from the forces of market capitalism.
Let me just say that looking at the hype surrounding the launch of the iPhone, there is no doubt whatsoever that Steve Jobs has the Reality Distortion Field working better than ever. Every official review of the iPhone seems to be really glowing. People lined up for hours (or days) at Apple and AT&T stores to get one (even big city mayors got in on the hype). The iPhone is Apple’s hottest selling product ever. You know the drill. But seriously, isn’t the iPhone just a lot of iHype?
Let’s begin where we need to begin. I understand Apple’s choice of AT&T (nee. Cingular) for its choice of wireless partner. This is Apple we’re talking about, and you know they would want total unmitigated control of all facets of the iPhone, including the interface, third party applications, and, most importantly, streams of revenue. This is not to be unexpected. Apple built the iPod on the concept of a vertically integrated business model (where the hardware, the software, and the online service to purchase music for the device all come from Apple), so you would expect that they’d want the same sort of model for the iPhone. Something tells me that Cingular was the only carrier willing to play ball on this matter. Both of the major US 3G carriers (Verizon and Sprint) have worked very aggressively to build a business model that relies on selling not only the phone and the service, but extra services and micropayment items such as ring tones, video, Verizon’s Navigator, and now even television on the mobile phone. To further this end, they take whatever cell phone models that they wish to sell and install their own operating systems onto them that cripple certain features (like Verizon famously crippling the OBEX profile for Bluetooth so people can’t transfer ringtones from phone to phone) and basically funnel you into spending money on services like Verizon’s Get It Now, or the Sprint Music Store. That would be a small clash.
Incidentally, I’m surprised we didn’t see over-the-air purchasing capability from the iTunes Store. Maybe that’s planned for a future release, but that would have been a truly “killer” feature at launch (since the iTunes Store has so much more music available than a lot of other music stores, and since they’ve also started selling DRM-free music), but I digress.
The problem, of course, is that they went with a 2.5G network (EDGE) instead of the newer 3G network (HSPDA). While I suppose that this is a side effect of the fact that Cingular didn’t have much of an HSPDA network at the time that the iPhone was in development, but that is a major downer. If you’re hyping data-based services as a major selling point of this device, you want to sell the fast data network with it as well. I can see this leading to some major consternation among early adapters, or we will see more and more people put off buying the device until it has faster network support.
I fail to see what’s really revolutionary about the device. Sure, it has a nifty interface, but after a while, I think the lack of tactile support will irk a lot of people. Early reports already indicate a steeper than normal learning curve to use the on screen keyboard. Beyond that, it feels like there’s a lot of glitz, and not a lot of substance. The thing doesn’t do a lot of things that cheaper (even the freebie) cell phones can, like MMS messaging. Basically, you can take a picture with the integrated camera on the phone, but you can’t text the picture to anyone. That’s kind of dumb. Sure, you can email it, but if you want to send it to your friend’s phone, you’d have to know their clunky texting email address (like 212551212@vzwtext.com or 2125551212@mobile.att.com or something). Plus, the sheer fact that you can’t add third party apps (other than some weird web interface apps) is going to frustrate many. Plus, although the iPhone promises to bring forth a better browser experience by bundling a more full featured browser onboard, the fact that it won’t support Java or Flash makes half of the web still inaccessible via mobile. The YouTube support that’s included seems half-assed and added mostly to appease people who were mad about the lack of Flash or Java. Doing basic tasks like making a phone call apparently takes a number of clicks. Plus, the memory is not expandable and the battery is only replaceable by paying Apple $85 (and there’s no Apple Care plan like there is for the iPod or any Macintosh systems). All of these things combined with the fact Apple won’t work out all of the bugs until at least the next iteration of the device, make this seem a lot more like iHype than iPhone.
The only thing that’s really revolutionary about this new device is that Steve Jobs has managed to convince the world that the iPhone is the best thing in cell phones since sliced bread. I honestly wonder how he keeps managing to do that.
Technorati Tags: apple, iphone, steve jobs, at&t, verizon, sprint
