Depending which iPhone rumor you believe, the 3G version of iPhone has either been delayed or already landed on U.S. shores and is on its way to being announced at Apple’s WWDC in San Francisco next month. The interest in the 3G version of the iPhone has been building since AT&T executives “accidentally” talked about it at various events.
But whether it’s a new 2G model or a super-fast 3G, there is one thing that’s for sure: The new iPhone has Global Positioning System (GPS) built into it, thanks to legal requirements put in place by the FCC. The company supplying the GPS to iPhone is going to be a big winner in this space; according to my sources, the contract has been nailed down by Broadcom, a relatively new entrant into the GPS market. The Irvine, Calif.-based chip company had acquired Global Locate in July 2007 for $143 million in cash and $80 million in incentives. In the past such a deal would have gone to someone like SIRF, which is in a bit of pain these days.
A recent report in Popular Mechanics outlines some of Apple’s GPS moves. Last year, Google’s Marissa Meyer told us that the Google Maps usage from iPhone was off the charts. Now imagine that Maps feature married to the built-in GPS; the combo could give location based services a big massive boost. Pelago, an LBS social service has already received $15 million in funding for its iPhone application.
Such applications could drive the demand for iPhones, which in turn could be a pretty good thing for Broadcom. I do wonder what impact it will have on standalone devices and if it will catalyze change and new innovation in that market.
Related Links:
I love the new GPS feature. It should make it a ton more accurate than the iPhone 1.0.
I wonder if it will be able to run the new Google Earth API that just came out for embedding on blogs, websites, etc?
I’ve been playing with the Google Maps API and this is the best I could come up with so far, but I look forward to tinkering with their new Earth API:
http://teletagg.com/index.php/locations
Instead of imagining, you could just get one of the many Windows Mobile devices that has had built in GPS for years. They also come with this amazing feature called “copy/paste”. So far I’ve seen that the new iphone is going to add 3G functionality (although no explanation of why such an obvious feature was left off in the first place) and GPS. What about the tons of other missing features?
As for wondering “what impact it will have on standalone devices and if it will catalyze change and new innovation in that market”.. get real. A phone (that has a very small percentage of the total mobile market share) is not going to have any noticeable effect on standalone devices other than a few fanbois that will somehow rig it up in their car as a tiny, slow GPS. As for innovation, Apple is the one trying to catch up so releasing a feature that others have had for years isn’t going to spawn anything other than questions of why it took them so long.
The windows platform you talk of is crap and has been crap for a long time now. Apple will succeed in getting it to the hands of allot of people something Microsoft has not done except for a few techies. I have worked for HP for 12 + years in the Tech field and only a few of us use the WM devices because of all of the problems they have.. lock-ups, crap software, ect. Your anger towards Apple is so out of place. I’ve used Macs for under a year now and I am happy as hell to finally get on a platform that I don’t have to reboot multiple times a day. The iPhone is great, it is coming to the masses… something like I said Microsoft has NOT done with their WM platform. This is Apples first phone and NOT the last, they will improve every year something the WM has not done. Apple came out with an amazing product, something no one else has done before or should I say DONE RIGHT!!!! Good luck with your WM devices, I have noticed all of the great features the iphone has is starting to show up in the software the WM devices run, I wonder why…
Where did you hear that rumor The street.com? There has been many reports of Broadcom sweeping every chip in the iPhone. The Wifi, Bluetooth, FM, GPS, and 3g chipset system on a chip. These rumors must have been made by someone with loads of Broadcom call options. Sirf still seems the best bet. It has the most robust roadmap on the software side. I can imagine coy Jobs threatening Sirf with Global Locate to get a better price but Sirf is much more concentrated on the consumer experience and the carriers love them.
Are the GPS chips the same chips used by SkyCaddie? This is a golf accessory that give you yardage in a golf course. If it is possible, would it not be cool to have this on a phone that has GPS capabilities? Why is it not available yet on phones? I would be cool not to have to carry two gadgets at the golf course. I don’t care what who’s phone has this capability, I will but it.
“But whether it’s a new 2G model or a super-fast 3G”
I’m sorry but any blogger/writer that includes this quote in an article about an Iphone has no creditability in my book. Have you been living in a cave? A GPS chip is a foregone conclusion but the jury is still out on the 3G chip? Please, before you write articles like this do your research.
@robarmy: Have you ever used a WM device? Care to elaborate on why it’s “crap”? There are many, many millions more WM devices than there are iphones so it’s flat out wrong to say MS has only put it in the hands of “a few techies”. My WM device doesn’t ever lock up and unlike the iphone, has millions of choices for 3rd party software. Crap software to me is when you’re handset maker tells you what apps you can run and if they don’t have an app you need then you’re out of luck.
I didn’t mention any anger towards Apple, but if you’re going to bring it up my XP laptop at work works perfectly with no reboots. Our Windows Servers that run our Fortune 500 business work just fine without reboots (literally months at a time and most reboots are just because of upgrades being performed). All of that plus I have choices over what hardware I use, software is designed for Windows first and it’s a hell of a lot cheaper for the same or better specs.
Ok, back to phones. As I said above WM has many millions more users than the iphone so saying that “it is coming to the masses… something like I said Microsoft has NOT done with their WM platform” is simply a lie. If you had used a WM phone you would have seen the improvements that have come with each version.
With such a late entry into the mobile handset market Apple had a great opportunity to deliver something truly amazing. Instead, as with most of their products, they delivered something that is shiny and pretty, but lacks basic functionality that others have had for years. On top of that they kept their horrible philosophy of a closed system that benefits them rather than the consumer. If Microsoft doesn’t make an app for what I need then I have other choices including making it myself (something I have already done). If my battery goes dead on a long trip I just pop it out and put in a freshly charged battery, while you’re left with a dead phone. If it has to be replaced you have to pay about 4x what I would pay, ship it somewhere, wait, wait some more. If I want to use my phone on another network I swap out SIM cards, while you’re left with the 1 network that Apple said you have to use. I can create, read and edit MS Office documents and I can use ActiveSync to stay connected to our Exchange Server at work, while the iphone has about zero functionality for business users. I could go on and on, but the bottom line is the iphone is only good for “hip” people who think it will make them look cool. It’s a huge failure when it comes to users who want actual functionality and control over the device that cost them more than a better WM device.
What “great features” do you think the iphone has that WM devices don’t have? I can list a TON of features WM has had for years that the current iphone doesn’t have and the 2nd iphone still won’t have. I’d accuse Apple of trying to copy WM, but they left off so many features it’s really nothing like it.
I do not why people ge so bitter when Apple succeed. Like scionguy. Windows is ALWAYS trying to catch up with Apple , if you think about it. iPhone is a complete new device that did not exist before. I’ve had 7 smart phones given by my job, could never browse the net or play videos as in my iPhone. As far as GPS goes, who cares? my car has GPS built in and do not walk around looking for satellite link.
ONE MORE THING…. PLAIN iPHONE ENVY. JAJJJAJAJA
You wrote: “there is one thing that’s for sure: The new iPhone has Global Positioning System (GPS) built into it, thanks to legal requirements put in place by the FCC. ”
However, the 2005 article you link to talks about a law set to go into effect at the end of THAT year requiring location tracking ability, and which in the case of AT&T (nee Cingular) only requires 300-yard accuracy. Two questions:
1) If the law required GPS by the end of 2005, wouldn’t the existing iPhone already have it, thus in now way making this a possible feature “upgrade” for a new version of the phone?
2) If the current iPhone is already compliant with existing law, is there any reason that the new iPhone would be “required” to add GPS?
Just wondering.
— Bob
@apple fan NOT: “I do not why people ge so bitter when Apple succeed. Like scionguy. Windows is ALWAYS trying to catch up with Apple , if you think about it. iPhone is a complete new device that did not exist before. I’ve had 7 smart phones given by my job, could never browse the net or play videos as in my iPhone.”
I’m not bitter when Apple succeeds, I’m bitter that so many people are duped by shiny devices and hoping to help them realize there are better devices out there already. Your comment is a perfect example. NOTHING on the iphone was new! I can’t count the number of people who have been dumbfounded when I explained that touchscreen phones existed long before the iphone or when I list the features that existed 3-4 years ago on WM that the iphone is missing.
If you had a WM touchscreen device (i.e. not a WM standard that runs on flip phones without touchscreen) then you didn’t know how to use it. I browse the web and watch videos perfectly on mine and yes the website scrolls with my finger, zooms in and out, is the full page just like it would render on my PC, etc. It even supports Flash Lite which Steveo won’t give you permission to use on the iphone.
“As far as GPS goes, who cares? my car has GPS built in and do not walk around looking for satellite link.”
That much we agree on.
“ONE MORE THING…. PLAIN iPHONE ENVY. JAJJJAJAJA”
Haha, nope I’m not envious of the iphone at all. I’ll keep my WM device that has more features thank you.
Regardless of whether or not WinCe devices are crap, they are already getting their tail handed to them by Apple in terms of sales and internet usage.
Scionguy: “I’m bitter that so many people are duped by shiny devices and hoping to help them realize there are better devices out there already.”
You obviously have no idea at all about what you are talking about (or have consumed too much of the Kool-Aid), otherwise you would be bitter as all heck at MS for the load of crap they have perpetrated upon society in the form of ‘what they call’ software. All stolen ideas (but aren’t most ideas stolen anyway) that are executed in the most unreliable way. Crash, crash, crash.
I’ve owned a ridiculous number of so-called ‘smart’ phones and every one of those $400 and $500 devices was a piece of crap that eventually began crashing repeatedly because of poor hardware and poor software design. All these ‘cell phone companies’ and MS & Symbian & Unix OS phones (yep, owned one of them too) ALL FAILED. No (virtually) software updates, unusable web access, and eventually unreliable for use as phones (hard to make or receive calls when the device is always in a state of crashing).
NOT A SINGLE (smart) PHONE was worth it (Sony, Ericsson, Motorola, Treo, Nokia), that I had purchased… Until a REAL Smart Phone (and really the 1st one!): iPhone.
That’s what Kool-Aid drinkers populate these sites defending MS or they’ll have to admit they they were the ones duped all along…
Apple gets my money ONLY because they give me something that other phones are incapable of doing (regardless of their listed ‘capabilities or chipsets).
I’ve had a Windows smartphone for several years. Yes, it has a touch screen, but not a multi-touch screen which is a significant difference. The software is a heap of junk – locking up and just generally not working well. The web experience is a complete joke. I’ve had an iPod touch for a month now and used its features infinitely more than any of the ones on my “smart” phone.
scionguy is vastly exaggerating WM phone/OS capabilites, I have used WM5 HTC phones, blackberry devices and am now on the iPhone. Sure the WM5 has features galore, I hacked mine to do tons of stuff but does it do any of that without being buggy/laggy 70-80% of the time?? I seriously doubt it and if anyone tells you WM5 phones are vastly superior to what can be done on a jailbreaked iPhone their smoking crack or owning tons of MS stock. Apple sure did ripoff what was out there….but who cares!! They improved on what was already available just as Google’s Android OS is going to do the iPhone.
Scionguy, you just dont get it. It’s not that WM devices have more features or that the iPhone has less, its about how the iPhone allows people to use features that makes the difference.
WM devices are a nightmare in usability. Pocket IE does not render webpages like a desktop, and the third party browsers still dont come close to Mobile Safari’s WebKit engine. The touchscreens on WM devices are horrible, scrolling is nowhere near as smooth as the iPhone. Everything is buried in menu’s and submenus that make no sense, and I can’t count the number of times my phone has frozen or had some display glitch that required a reboot on WM 6.1. This is not how phones should work.
To answer your question about what the iPhone has that WM devices do not, the iPhone has an accelerometer, a proximity sensor, a very advanced, large, and hi-res touchscreen with multi-touch technology, one of the most powerful processors, 8-16GB of storage built in, but most importantly, it has software that is smarter, easier, and better designed than WM and that brings all these features together. Name *one* WM device on the market now that can claim all of that (and more as you say they do).
Yes, it may lack some openness and features, but to be honest I cannot wait to dump my windows mobile phone come june for the new iPhone. Especially with 3G, GPS, Exchange support, and whatever else Apple manages to come up with.
@ Scionguy
“What “great features” do you think the iphone has that WM devices don’t have?”
My iPhone is easy to use. That is the most important thing, and WM sucks to use.
“The new iPhone has Global Positioning System (GPS) built into it, thanks to legal requirements put in place by the FCC.”
GPS isn’t required; as the article you link notes, AT&T’s wireless division (formerly Cingular) must be accurate with 1,000 feet (300 meters), which they have mostly accomplished with cellular tower triangulation, which is NOT the same technology used by Apple (which is Google’s cell tower triangulation and Skyhook Wi-Fi location).
The FCC does not require GPS. Assisted GPS is enough for the degree of accuracy required by the FCC for emergency services provision requirement.
The new iPhone may or may not have GPS, but if it does, it’s because Apple decided to include it, not because the FCC requires it.
@”ScionGuy”
You are obviously one of those greasy uber-geeks who hates Apple for the pettiest of reasons, not least because of the trendy image associated with Apple users. You also are of the type that just isn’t able to comprehend why most people care more about usability, integration, and aesthetics than a feature list on the side of a box when purchasing a phone or computer. People purchase Macs or the iPhone because they are excellent devices that are easy and enjoyable to use.
Don’t kid yourself that the iPhone isn’t one of the most advanced cellphones on the market. It runs on a 620mhz ARM processor with PowerVR MBX graphics core, has a 3.5″ capacitive and glass-covered multi-touch screen, and runs one of the most advanced embedded operating system ever created. But what is MOST IMPORTANT and what separates it from every other smartphone on the market is the brilliant interface and ease of use. It is like no other device I have ever used. It’s laughable that you actually offer up the travesty that is “Windows Mobile” as a superior phone OS with “thousands of software applications”. Windows Mobile is probably the biggest piece of rubbish that has ever been conceived as an operating system. It’s buggy, slow, incredibly unstable, and is truly a pain in the ass to try to use. I mean seriously, have you actually tried to conduct business with a WinMo smartphone? I’ve had at least 6 or 7 Windows Mobile devices over the years, most recently of the “Smartphone” variety, and they all are complete crap.
Is it really any wonder why not even a year after the iPhone introduction, and only being available on a few carriers in a few countries, that the iPhone chalks up 5X the amount of web traffic of *ALL* windows mobile devices ever sold, combined?
And just wait until the SDK is finally finished and the App Store goes online. Mobile OSX is going to rapidly become the platform of choice for mobile software development and will completely revolutionize what is possible on a mobile phone. Already, without any formal SDK or even documentation, amateur iPhone hackers have whipped up new applications that put everything made up to this point on Windows mobile to shame. Just watch what happens over the next 6 months.
If you truly believe that the iPhone won’t have an enormous impact on the mobile industry and the evolution of mobile service, then you are not only a geek, but a damn moron. EVERY cellphone manufacturer from Espoo to Tokyo are racing to create iPhone “killers”, mostly by directly ripping-off the glossy black and chrome of the hardware, and graphics accelerated interface. Major websites, from the BBC to CNN to ESPN are creating iPhone-optimized mobile versions of their websites.
When the 3G iPhone has it’s worldwide debut and launch in the next few weeks, prepare to truly see the extent of the phenomenon. If you think all this iHype is going to fizzle out anytime soon, then you should put your wallet where your big mouth is and short a bunch of Apple stock. I would love to see how that will go for you…
you’re all missing the most important point… The iphone runs Mac OS X with an optimized UI and development environment (cocoa touch). It’s not a mobile OS or a scaled down OS it is actual leopard based full unix (if jailbroken with bsd tools) core animation spitting captive touch Mac OS X. The iPhone therefore is a Mac Computer by the technical definition. That’s one feature no other mobile phone can claim.
To ScionGuy,
Thanks for a great post. I agree with your take on Apple.
I have just tried the ipod touch. Interesting device, but you are locked down to the “Apple world”, I thought I could use it with Netflix, oops…
I guess Apple wants me to use the IToons store till I die. In the end this closed system will move to something else…and a new open system will take over like wild fire all over the world…Apple is just a stepping stone on the path to a open system. Apple’s has always been a inovator, but at the end of the day, their vision is very narrow (the ecosystem is a big as the player), platforms based on a open system – Android is a example, will win, fluid movement from network to network is the best choice for the end user,open networks, open sytems, flex dev practices and eco system which has a high velocity of inovation will will win. The killer applicatin’s wrapped in a open environment will win at the end of the day. The consumer will vote with their wallet at the end of the day to move this along, it will take a long time, but this is where it will go. It is the law of natural selection.
Apple has gotten their ass handed to them in Europe by the lowly HTC Touch, and the 3G iPhone will get its ass haded to it by the HTC Touch Diamond. These phones will be cheaper, will have better carrier support, more eye candy, and will also actually be able to do more (imagine trying to sell a phone in Europe without a CONSUMER feature like MMS. Great usability there, isn’t it)
Regarding the iPhone running Leopard, the iPhone runs OSX as much as WM devices run Windows.
@ Surur: “Regarding the iPhone running Leopard, the iPhone runs OSX as much as WM devices run Windows.”
Bong! Nope, Windows Mobile has a completely different kernal to desktop Windows and suffers from a terribly constrained architecture harking back to it’s origins as Windows CE crammed into the tiny amounts of memory then available. Even now it is still around 40MBs in size.
In contrast OS X on the iPhone is an amazing 500MBs in size and has the same rock-solid BSD unix-based kernal and frameworks as the desktop version of Mac OS X and was designed from the start to run on the powerful 620MHz processor with 128MB of RAM and multiple gigabytes of storage and hardware accelerated graphics subsystem.
I’ve owned several very expensive Windows Mobile PDA smart phones and can’t believe that you would laud a platform that as a design “feature” would wipe all the data, programs and settings if the battery went flat or it accidentally hard reset – an all-to-common occurrence.
Then there is their total inability to run Web 2.0 Ajax apps in their pathetic web browsers, their ridiculously tiny buttons and stupid, stupid Start Menu (on a tiny screen like that! Why for the love of Pete?) that force you to use a stylus which always gets lost.
Then there are all the chromed plastic buttons that stop working after way too short a time and the ridiculously rickety slide out keypads with the too-tiny buttons. The list goes on.
I agree the iPhone is missing some important features, but most of these lacks are easily fixed with the 2-years worth of free software updates guaranteed by Apple’s deferred revenue policy on the iPhone.
ps. Who needs terribly expensive MMS when you’ve got free, powerful email?
-Mart
@Martin
Is OSX Mobile binary binary compatible with desktop OSX? No.
Is OSX Mobile 100% Api compatible with desktop OSX? No.
Is it hellishly bloated, and unable to run on cheap hardware? Yes, and that will lose it the smartphone battle.
That you are still talking about the phone being wiped by powerloss tells me you have not used a WM phone since 2004, that issue is long solved.
Regarding the 2 years of free updates provided by Apple – yar one has been a complete bust- where is the bluetooth stack improvemnts, here is the A2DP, where is cut and paste, why cant you use the music on the device as a ring tone?
Regarding AJAX, I am running the wonderful Opera Mobile 9.5 on my Tilt, and you know, it smokes Safari Mobile. It supports more AJAX technologies, does bettr on Acid 2 and 3 and supports flash, and is much more stable than the crashtastic Mobile Safari. Thats just one advantage of an open platform.
I guess Apple must be running out of easily impressed fanboys, seeing how they lost smartphone marketshare in Q1 2008.
No it runs OS X. Take a look at the file system on a jailbroken iPhone. For real geeks apple did some that no one else has ever done. They took a desktop OS and put it on a mobile phone. I mean you can run an apache web server on the device. The iPhone is not a product its a platform, the mac platform. Development of apps on the iPhone is identical to that of the mac its called Xcode. If you can write an app on the mac you already can write an app on the iPhone. The device was kept closed on purpose for the first year so apple could make sure they understood how to approach the distobution system for the 3rd party apps and it seems like they got a pretty good plan. The iPhone IS a computer running desktop OS X. It doesnt look like it when you use an iPhone and that’s only because the desktop UI is not good for a 3.5 inch screen. The UI is called multi-touch. At its core it runs the same software as a mac. Also with the intrests of full disclosure I’m writing this post on an iPhone.
You can say exactly the same things for WM, and that part of its success. It has a windows directory and registry also, and development occurs in Visual Studio too.
And of course I am writing this on my Tilt, and more easily due to the full hard keyboard.
of course the binaries are different. The original tiger PPC binaries aren’t compatible with the Current intel binaries. The processors are differnt therfore the binaries are different. Just because it uses different binaries doesnt mean its not OS X. It doesnt have all the same API’s because they aren’t all aplicable. The quality on a2dp sucks. Why include a redundant feature that sucks. Also they lost market share cause they ran out of phones.
@Nick
So its not binary compatible, and not100% API compatible, and this is different from WM how?
I am sure any technology Apple doesnt use, like MMS, A2DP and 3G sucks for you, until Apple uses it of course.
BTW, the shortages only started in Q2. I wonder what their Q2 marketshare looks like.
@ Surur
About your comments about API/binary compatibility: Is that different from WM?
No. WM is also not binary or API compatible with Windows.
(Hell, Windows itself is not compatible with Windows sometimes…_
However, the iPhone API is using the base OS X APIs, such as the different Core Frameworks
(Core Image, Core Video, Core Data, etc.)
Separate from that, some APIs are added for the mobile device (e.g. multi-touch events) and
some APIs are removed that do not make sense on a mobile device.
Of course on the iPhone the UI is different.
That is because Apple has the idea that on a phone you need a simple button UI and
not the Start menu style as WM tries to copy from a desktop computer…
About cheap hardware:
WM devices are not cheap. They cost the same or more as an iPhone…
About updates:
Maybe those items you mention are not really requested or needed?
And maybe the v2.0 software will add those items…
On the other hand, how about some HTC drivers that indeed do hardware accelerated video drawing?
About Opera:
That doesn’t matter in the end. WM is not succeeding as an internet device.
As written by loosely_coupled, the iPhone/iPod touch devices are used more for internet browsing
than all WM devices ever sold combined.
It seems that Apple is doing something correctly.
Maybe the amount of features of a phone is less important than the amount of features usable by normal people,
instead of computer geeks/techies that can use and (like to) work around problems of a device.
Yes, I consider myself one of those geeks.
However, I am going to buy the 3G iPhone when it is available.
BTW, why is it that a new WM/Symbian/Linux phone is always positioned as an ‘iPhone killer’ and
never as an ‘BlackBerry killer’, ‘WM (fill in brand&type) killer’ or ‘Android (fill in brand&type) killer’?
Are some people jealous or scared of the iPhone product?
(Also same for the iPods)
its OS X because it runs the Mach micro kernal same as desktop OSX. I didn’t know WM ran win32. If it does that’s news to me. That’s why iPhone is OS X and win mobile is not windows. As far as A2DP the average song file has a bit rate of 128-256 Kb/s consistant Bluetooth tranfer rates are between 4-8 Kb/s that’s why it sucks. You may be right about the market share and I shoulve cited a source. So I’m not gonna comment about that.
Wow Om,
Your words have even gotten to Apple Insider! The gps is only a 2 dollar chip which is really not that much revenue for Broadcom, so how is it a big winner? If you think that is swell what do you think of if Marvell does indeed have the 3g chip in the iPhone? That’s what Investor’s Business daily is reporting.
http://biz.yahoo.com/ibd/080530/tech01.html?.v=1
@Pieter
Your circular argument that the iPhone is selling well, therefore is doing something right is defeated simply by nothing WM phones are selling better. Even Vista is selling better than OSX. You are going to need a better argument than that.
About cheaper WM devices – everyone knows the volume are with lower prices, and WM phones that can run on 200 MHz processors and 32-64 MB RAM are going to do a lot to penetrate the 3rd world. WM phones are the second biggest selling smartphone OS in India (and in the world) for example. When HTC announced the HTC Diamond and Ameo, both top of the range expensive devices, they did not forget to also release the HTC P3400, a low end device released in Asia into the developing market.
Regarding updates, its hilarious how you are still waiting for the basics, and paying Apple’s inflated “subscription” and has so far hardly received anything, except the privilege to buy more stuff from Apple.
How about things like voice dialling, bluetooth OBEX, GPS serial profile, Dial up networking, disk mode etc etc.
HTC did not promise me drivers, unlike Jobs who promised you regular significant updates. You must be very disappointed.
Regarding Opera – maybe WM was not designed as an internet tablet to start with, unlike the iPhone. I know WM devices have guided more people using GPS than all the IPhone and iPhone Touches combined. With the focus on Web 2.0, and the best mobile browsers on the WM platform, this is set to soon change.
Its interesting that you are so eager to upgrade to 3G, you must have sorely missed it, while I have been downloading podcasts OTA for years. Good luck joining 2005.
Surur you dont know what your talking about. For apple to succeed microsoft doesnt have to fail. The smart phone market is big enough for several players. As far as the developing world China Mobile reports that there are over 400,000 iPhones active on their network. The funny thing about that is the iPhone has never been officially released there. Apple is very good at what they do. They look to define ever field they enter. They defined the desktop OS they defined the portable music player and now they are looking to define mobile computing. That’s why every other device is compared to the iPhone. There were mobile phones before iPhone and mobile phones after iPhone.
Yes, the Chinese nouveau riche needed a new toy to demonstrate their extravagance. Of course, since entering Chinese is a trial on the iPhone, and you cant use a stylus, its certaily not about practicality, much like here in the west for most iphone users who needed an Apple-branded status symbol.
Interesting that you mention the iPhone smuggle trade. Those hundeeds of thousands of American iPhonez overseas were instrumental in fooling people into thinking the iPhone outsells WM in America, when its far from the case.
The failure of Apple’s exclusive carier business model is also interesting, as its a direct result of their hubris in thinking they could outsmart the hackers. Security by obscurity must have given them false confidence.
Who cares where its activated, apple is still bringing in tons of revenue. Why is everyone so convinced that the iPhone will fail. There is plenty of room in this market. Every one should be greatful. Apple is pushing the envelope and shaking up what a mobile device is capable of. Everyone benefits by apple’s innovations. Why would blackberry plan on making a touch screen phone code named apple killer if apple wasn’t doing something right. Apple is called competition which is good for everyone. Didn’t the CEO of RIM just say typing on glass was impossible.
@Nick:
“Apple is pushing the envelope and shaking up what a mobile device is capable of”
This is the problem. That sentence right there. There are plenty of entrants to the cellphone business each year. Only Apple can pretend to have invented the cellphone, and expect to be believed.
Is Apple pushing the envelope by integrating GPS? Thats just silly, but our friend Om Malik and you seem to believe its true, despite this very much being a 2006 feature. Claiming credit where none is due is a rather bad trait.
When Apple catches up to “what a mobile phone is capable of” such as, for example, being able to take video, I will stop laughing at the naivety of iPhone users who think they have the greatest phone ever.
I have no problem with Apple selling millions, I just hope, from Jobs down, they will stop pretending the iPhone has made all other smartphones obsolete.
So you see, its you and the other iPhone pundits who are the arrogant ones after all. Get some humility, its on special today.
Exclusive carrier????? The iphone will be carried on several networks in over fifty countries. Some of those countries have multiple carriers who will be officially supporting the phone. The ones that I know off the top of my head are australia, turkey and south africa. I’m sure there are more.
This conversation that we’re having has nothing to do with GPS at this point. What I’m talking about is software. There is not a single device in the world that can hold a candle to the software on the iPhone. Your missing the point. It’s the software. The idea behind the iphone is that it is a Screen that can display anything that developers can think of and they can do this with a complete SDK with desktop API’s and a desktop OS at it’s core. It’s all about the software. We are arguing two different things. There maybe other devices out there that have more hardware features but none have the software that the iPhone has. And what’s with the arrogant comment? I think we’re having a civil discussion. What’s with the personal attack?
Just the gps?, what about the other features missing?
@Nick
This conversation that we’re having has nothing to do with GPS at this point. What I’m talking about is software. There is not a single device in the world that can hold a candle to the software on the iPhone.
————–
What evidence do you have that the software is special on the iPhone? Is it just the GUI (easily replicated) or something else? Do you think its because the disk image is 500 MB? Anything else.
I can tell you why WM software is more advanced than the iPhone software. Things like file system encryption, remote wipe, internet sharing, bluetooth FTP, today screen plug-in architecture, remote policy enforcement, support for a wide range of hardware etc. Now you may say that these features are difficult to use (most are not) but that just requires a layer on top, and tells you nothing about the foundation, which is pretty solid.
In short, the iPhone’s lack of features exposes it for an immature OS, with a bit of glitter than seem to fascinate some people.
@Surur
Windows 7 will have a multi-touch UI. Remote wipe and policy enforcement are announced features of upgrade 2.0. Your begging the question about a wide range of devices that’s completely counter intuitive to everything apple believes in. OK here we go see if you can follow.
The iphone OS is the same as the OS on my macbook. The same OS. They both render animation using the core animation API. They both render animation using the core animation API. They Both accelerate 3D graphics using open GL. They Both render images using Core Image and they both playback audio and video using quicktime. That’s called the media layer they are identical between the mac and iphone. The underlying layer to the media layer is the Kernel. The Kernel has two names. Mach Micro Kernel and Darwin. The next layer is called the application frameworks layer. These differ on the two systems because the main input devices (the mouse on the mac and the finger on the iphone) are different. On the mac the application framework is known as cocoa on the iphone cocoa touch. Therefore the user events differ depending on which one your using, on a mac for example one would be a mouse over. On an iphone holding your finger down till the buttons jiggle.
Your argument about an immature OS is total rubbish. It’s OS X the most stable commercial consumer or business desktop OS. With modification anyone who can develop for unix can write iphone apps. The only thing windows mobile has in common with windows is the name. It’s based on the Windows CE kernel which is distictively different to the Win 32 NT kernel in windows XP and windows Vista. There will never be desktop quality programs on a windows mobile device do to it’s basic foundations. Windows CE was originally meant to run under 1MB.
On april 1 2008 fortune magazine did a random survey of people who’ve owned different smart-phones for 6 months. At the end of the survey they found that 79% of iphone owners were “Very satisfied”, Blackberry garnered 54% “Very satisfied”, and the highest rated winmo was the good old samsung black jack which was the phone i had before i got the iphone garnered a whopping 33% “Very satisfied”. You are the minority my man… How does it feel? Here is the link if you don’t believe me http://apple20.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2008/04/01/iphone-scores-79-in-customer-satisfaction-survey-rim-trails-at-54/….
So in short, your opinion is based on the “potential” of the OS, versus the reality.
WM supports DirectX. It supports WMV and WMA. It supports many of the desktop windows technologies, just like the iPhone, and uses a subset of the win32 API, just like the iPhone.
All of that is IRRELEVANT. Its what you do with the OS that matters, and Apple has done hardly anything with it. Yes, some things are coming, but actually actually denying the iPhone OS is immature is pure madness. In fact, I would say its about 5 years behind…
Lets put it this way – if it was more mature you would not be sitting here waiting for those wonderful updates Apple promised, like maybe being able to cut and paste.
@Surur
I did not claim that the iPhone sells more that WM devices.
I only repeated that they are used more for browsing the internet.
If you say that WM is better than the iPhone by looking at sales figures, you would and should also claim that Symbian, Linux and BlackBerry are better than WM, as they sell way more than WM…
About higher volumes for lower spec’ed devices:
The devices you mention are not cheaper than an iPhone.
A 200 MHz WM device is about the same price as an iPhone…
Something with better specs is way more expensive.
About the waiting for 3G, I am living in Holland where the iPhone has not
been introduced yet.
Before you now start that that is Apple’s fault, you have the same problem with handsets not being available in your country
(assuming you live in the USA).
I see multiple times on websites like engadget or gizmodo that a handset is finally available in the USA…
About HTC not promising drivers:
First of all, they promise a high performance handset, implying hardware accelerated video, due to the mentioning of the chipset.
That is something often done in Windows land: Mentioning specifications that in the end say nothing about the real usability of a product.
Lastly, they actually did promise drivers, than backed off and offered ‘improved software’.
About the missing of 3G:
I did not miss that at all, as I currently have no 3G or internet on my phone.
I think that the speed of 3G as promised is not really significant for 3 reasons:
As you are on a small device, the speed of the pipe is not so interesting, as you overflow the device.
See the multiple speed tests between the iPhone and other phones that are using 3G but are also slower.
Second, the 3G pipes give much larger latency, which is more important for browsing than the bandwidth.
Lastly, most people will not accept the price of a full-blown 3G connection subscription and will choose a lower speed alternative, while at the same time comparing the maximum speed of their 3G device with the actual speed of the iPhone.
Here in the Netherlands, a 1.8 MBit/s 3G connection including hotspot access from e.g.
T-Mobile is 70 euro/month, excluding voice minutes.
That is not funny. Therefor, people choose a smaller Web-n-walk 3G, with nicer prices.
Max 384 kbit/s, without hotspot access is 19.50 euro/month, max 128 is 9.50.
Those prices are on top of a voice pack.
What you then see is (as I have written), is that people compare the maximum speed of their 3G device,
with the actual speed of the iPhone… That does not seem fair if you are not planning to pay the price of the subscription…
About GPS guiding people. I would think that the standalone devices are used more.
On top of that, for instance TomTom is using Linux…
Again, I am not waiting for 3G, but for the iPhone introduction in my country.
I think that the price of the device and plan is better than what most people think.
A ‘cheap’ phone with an expensive plan that does not allow use of the features is crap.
An ‘expensive’ device with a reasonable plan is better.
Funny that you mention downloading podcasts. That podcast name is from the iPod…
BTW, your “desktop quality programs” statement is pure nonsense. What do you call Skype, or SlingBox, or Opera Mobile 9.5? Have a gander at Touchflo 3D and tell me WM cant do anything the iPhone can.
In fact, iPhone users should hope they get access to the quality apps that are available on the WM platform, like Pocket Informant, and multi-codec media players like Core Media player.
BTW, Quake was running on WM well before the iPhone.
my link got broken http://apple20.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2008/04/01/iphone-scores-79-in-customer-satisfaction-survey-rim-trails-at-54 Surur what are you talking about? The iphone doesn’t run a sub-set. It runs OS X. The iPhone with the 2.0 capability will have every major business feature added on. Push Email Contacts and Calendar with Exchange support, plus a fully open OS X SDK that has been in the development community officially for 6 months unofficially for one year. You can host an apache web server on an iPhone. You can run ssh in fact it can do anything a unix workstation can do. you can run soulseek on an iphone. plus there is a robust official app distribution channel officially through the app store coming as part of upgrade 2.0 in june and unofficially through Installer.app. Plus OS X has had a robust development environment for the last 7 or so years and for 15 years before that as Next Step. And close to 30 years as BSD UNIX. It’s the tablet P.C. Gates has been trying to create. Windows Mobile in it’s current form has no basis in win32 it actually is based on windows C.E. which was originally created in 1994 to run on systems containing storage of less then 1MB. How can you not see the difference.
Opera Mobile is based on a port of Webkit an open source apple technology (web core and java script) which is the technological basis of Apple’s safari. That being said surfing the internet is not nearly as great on a winmo phone than as on a iphone. It’s a phone i hope that it can make phone calls Voip or not. Apple said that it would not technologically block wifi voip apps on the iphone and ipod touch. I’ve used touch flow and it’s impossible to type on the iphone is awesome to type on. The overall experience is not even close to iPhone. Sling Box already announced they have made a client for the iphone using the SDK. And have you seen quake running on an iphone with the accelerometer as the input device for movement and the touch screen to fire. Go ahead youtube it…
@pieter
You are the one who brought up sales figures as if it said something of value. Secondly, why should web browsing be the measure of a smartphone. It has many other uses. BTW, only Symbian sells more than WM.
On price, you can get a HTC Touch for £149 sim-free, and almost certainly free on contract. Show me the iPhone at that price. With the iPhone you pay for the handset AND is still tied into the contract.
RE 3G, I am in UK, I only pay £32 om T-Mobile for full unlimited HSDPA AND voice plan. I find that pretty affordable, and its cheaper than the O2 iPhone contracts, for which you only get (spotty) EDGE. With a good browser, having a big pipe certainly makes a difference, and it makes a HUGE difference when it comes to streaming media like YouTube, and an even more gigantic difference when you are the thing my laptop (as allowed by the HSDPA T-Mobile plan)
Re GPS – of course you get TomTom for Windows Mobile also. Before stand-alone GPS devices got cheap enough, WM handhelds were the main way people were doing navigation in Europe. Mitac built their whole company around that.
@Nick
Opera Mobile 9.5 does not use webkit, in fact the rendering engine is the same as the desktop one. But you seem to be missing the point, which is that your statement about desktop class apps is plain wrong. Look at this example, which is a office suite for windows, Linux and Wm, which uses the same code base for all 3.
http://www.softmaker.com/english/ofp_en.htm
Lastly the WM API is a subset of Win32 API. It does not require the kernel to be the same.
Like I said, its the iPhone thats devoid of desktop-class apps at present. I see you still live in hope of the great update in the sky that will finally make your iPhone a better, useful device.
BTW, it seems this nonsense will make you happy.
http://www.rainer-keuchel.de/wince/apache-ce.html
http://www.rainer-keuchel.de/wince/ssh.html
Look, its from 2001, when people still cared about command line tools!!!
@Surur,
“Is it hellishly bloated, and unable to run on cheap hardware? Yes, and that will lose it the smartphone battle.”
No, that demonstrates that WM is so fragmented and having to target such varied and low capability hardware that they can not push the envelope like the iPhone with a much higher base level OS. Next thing you’ll be telling me Windows 95 is far better than Windows XP because is not nearly as bloated.
“That you are still talking about the phone being wiped by powerloss tells me you have not used a WM phone since 2004, that issue is long solved.”
WM 5 was released mid-2005, not 2004 and I and many of my colleagues are still using WM devices that have this “feature” (my wife and I still use our O2 Minis although my O2 XDA IIs died last year after all the buttons stopped working and the thin glass screen cracked for the second time), so it’s definitely not long solved for many in the market. My point is that even up to version 4 of this operating system, Microsoft still had such an unbelievable flaw in their OS. We also use and support WM 5 & 6 on our campus and continue to suffer the lock-ups and slow downs that plagued the earlier devices.
In fact campus-wide we’ve given up trying to get our fleet of Windows Mobile devices to connect to our Enterprise WPA wifi network as WM still takes all sorts of gymnastics to get connected and even then is so unreliable even the campus telecom manager recommends staff use expensive 3G instead of the free wifi.
You mention Touch Flo, but neglect to mention it’s just a skin where if you go down a menu or two you’re back in horrible WM territory.
Hey, I used to be a Windows Mobile power user – I bought thousands of dollars worth of software for my personal Windows Mobile PDA phone including Destinator Turn-by-Turn GPS software and a Bluetooth GPS unit, the SPB utilities package to try and make up for the many shortcomings of the Windows Mobile interface, I’ve bought dozens of SciFi eBooks and read them on Mobipocket Reader and use Avante Go to subscribe to dozens of newspapers and tech journals and purchased the full PocketBible theological library suite and also loaded up the 1GB SD card with videos and music.
However, I ended up giving up on all of that and went back to my old Symbian P900 smartphone as at least it got the basics right. Since it died, I’ve reluctantly been marking time with an O2 Mini.
“Regarding the 2 years of free updates provided by Apple – yar one has been a complete bust- where is the bluetooth stack improvemnts, here is the A2DP, where is cut and paste, why cant you use the music on the device as a ring tone?”
Hey I agree Apple has yet to release some needed features, but I think you’d better wait one more week before criticising what Apple has or hasn’t yet done in those 2 years of updates. The iPhone has only been on the market for 1 year compared to the 8 or something years of WM and yet has made such a strong showing. Version 2.0 promises to fix a very large number of problem areas, and even in it’s current form the iPhone has demonstrated how usable it is as it gets the core functions right and shows the way a user interface should be done.
You also neglect to mention the poor upgrade record MS has had with WM over the years – have any success upgrading a WM 2003 device to 2003 SE? Or 2003 SE to WM 5? You had to buy totally new hardware each time. Even WM 5 to WM 6 is touch and go depending on OEM. In contrast, the iPhone v2.0 software is designed to run on v1.0 hardware.
“Regarding AJAX, I am running the wonderful Opera Mobile 9.5 on my Tilt, and you know, it smokes Safari Mobile. It supports more AJAX technologies, does bettr on Acid 2 and 3 and supports flash, and is much more stable than the crashtastic Mobile Safari. Thats just one advantage of an open platform.”
Of course with the release of the iPhone SDK and the imminent arrival of the appstore, we’re seeing enormous 3rd party developer interest in the iPhone/iPod Touch platform, far more than Windows Mobile has ever managed to generate. For example, every major games developer in the world (like EA, ID, PopCap, etc) has announced multiple titles for the iPhone because as John Carmack from ID says, the hardware and software is better than the Nintendo DS and the PSP – it’s basically at console level quality but easier to develop on. You definitely can’t say those sorts of things about WM.
As such, I agree the iPhone has it’s issues, but so does WM and unlike WM, the iPhone is starting from a rock solid, extremely usable, gorgeous, highly upgradeable base that has *earned* it the sort of good press it is getting. Windows Mobile has just disappointed us time and again with more same-old same-old and no amount of bolted-on featuritis can get over the fundamental flaws.
That’s not to say WM and Symbian won’t and shouldn’t stick around and provide needed competition, but it does show that the iPhone is here to stay and has had an enormously beneficial affect on the industry, upping the ante and finally forcing MS, Nokia, HTC and the rest to lift their games and attempt to make phones that people don’t hate.
Just please don’t try and argue that the iPhone is hopeless and WM is the be-all and end-all. It just ain’t so.
-Mart
@Surur
You are such a fucking idiot I don’t even know where to begin. Seriously, read your own asinine statements again:
“Vista is selling better than OSX”
“[iPhone OSX] is bloated”
Those are two of the dumbest statements I’ve read this week. I don’t even need to respond to that nonsense.
And If you knew anything about software development, you’d know the iPhone runs full Mac OSX. It runs the same kernel, uses the same libraries, and has almost identical APIs, save the multi-touch UI Cocoa layer.
Windows mobile isn’t even related to the NT/Win32 base of 2000/XP. It’s a complete separate kernel with completely different supporting libraries and APIs. Windows mobile aka Windows CE aka Windows PocketPC aka Windows Smartphone sits on an ancient code base originally intended for devices with 4-8MB of memory. The libraries have been updated over the years, yet it is still a smoldering pile of rubbish. I’ve had many Windows Mobile devices, since there really wasn’t any alternative, and all of them have been slow, buggy, unreliable, and just an outright pain in the ass to use. Most recently, my Treo 700WX used to freeze up three times a day and force me to remove the battery, all while the interface was constantly lagging and nearly impossible to use. All of the software available for Windows Mobile is total crap– whether it’s the joke of Microsoft “mobile office” to internet explorer to nearly all 3rd party apps created for the platform.
I guess I just cannot BELIEVE you would sit there and defend such worthless crap, and at the same time try to criticize the iPhone and Mobile OSX. You must really be a Microsoft fanboy.
I just don’t get it! Do you really like Masochism? Why else would you continually punish yourself by using a Windows mobile device every day? NO ONE deserves that kind of pain. No ONE!
@loosely_coupled
I can see your typing fingers got decoupled from your brain.
“And If you knew anything about software development, you’d know the iPhone runs full Mac OSX”
Does mobile OSX have the scripting bridge framework? Does it have the collaboration framework? Does it Identity Services Reference Collection? Does it have Quick Look Framework? Does it have Automator Framework? Does it have Security Foundation Framework? Doe you even know what you are talking about?
You can believe all you want, but WM devices can do a lot more than your crappy iPhone, and is used to do more all the time.
@Martin
“WM is so fragmented and having to target such varied and low capability hardware that they can not push the envelope like the iPhone with a much higher base level OS.”
Tell that to the HTC Diamond, which blows the iPhone out of the water, with a higher res screen, 3G, accelerometer and more ram than the iPhone.
So you got plenty of use out of your WM smartphone, doing things you can not do at all on your iPhone, and was part of the 35 million Wm installed base, and you are complaining? Talking about Symbian and the P900, if WM was such a disaster, why is Sony Erricson jumping on board with the Experia X1? it rather makes a joke of your statement that WM does not support high-end devices.
Regarding upgrades, even if Apple delivers something great next week, you still had 11 wasted months of “double click on the home button now opens the media player” and “this update is just bug fixes”.
The fact is however that version 2 has leaked already, and doesn’t do much more at all.
And btw, on the WM platform, its very common to have one generation of free upgrades, be it from 2003 to 2003, or 2003se to wm5, or wm5 to wm6 etc. In the end , its up to the OEM, and I have done the update myself numerous times.
Regarding third party apps, it seems you are mainly interested in games. There’s plenty of games for the WM platform, which I can play now, while you are still waiting.
I never said WM is the be all and end all, I said the iPhone is not. The iPhone is not going to take over the world and put stand alone GPS device makers out of work, like this article, and all the other iPhone fanboys implies.
@ Surur
You claim that the HTC Diamond will ‘kill the iPhone’ (See my previous comment about killing…), however you are now comparing a new, not yet available product with last years hardware. It is currently unknown what changes will be done for the 3G iPhone… Oh, and by the way, 192 MB is not a big improvement over 128 MB in the iPhone. Why not use 256 MB? And why has the HTC a separate 256 MB ROM for the OS? Why not one big flash memory, so you can choose the OS size as needed? The size of the iPhone system partition can be chosen as needed. The HTC has fixed 256 MB + 4GB. The iPhone now has 8/16 GB and probably availability of 32 GB for the new version.
Of the statement about ‘higher res screen, 3G, accelerometer and more ram’, at least 1 of those is already in the current iPhone (accelerometer), while 3G is probable for a new ‘3G’ iPhone (Duh…) and more RAM memory is also probable.
About the SE X1, maybe the hardware is high end. That does not prove that the software is also high-end…
See phrack.org, issue 63 for a nice discussion about WinCE kernel implementation.
Not nice that the whole system is running in kernel mode and can touch the memory of all running applications!
According to MS (See blogs.msdn.com/ce_base/archive/ 2007/02/14/windows-mobile-6-and-the-ce-os.aspx )
the changes in the kernel itself are not large.
It seems there is the cause of the stability problems a lot of people complain about…
About an iPhone v2 OS ‘leaking’, for several months SDK developer versions are available. Those are not ‘leaked’.
It is also unknown what other functionality will be available in the final product.
The remark about OEMs creating the version of the software: That is exactly one of the big problems I see with WM devices.
Why is it that an OEM must provide a new version? Why not the same model as Windows itself, using a separate OS and a
hardware driver for the system you run on? You are able to run different OSes on PC hardware, even different OS generations.
That way MS can upgrade the OS separately from the hardware provider.
I see a lot of people talking about upgrading HTC devices using drivers from MDA forums.
Why must a normal user hack his device in such a way to provide his own hardware support?
My wife has a WM 5.0 PDA (Qtek G100) from her work that has never seen updates. Stability is crap…
The built in GPS is not working… Also, no GPS software was supplied, not even a simple terminal.
In the User Manual, much technical info about the GPS chipset with interesting dB numbers, but not an answer to the simple question of ‘What internal serial port is the GPS connected to?’
How is a normal user (think grandma) then able to use this device for a GPS? It was one of the selling features, but it is unusable.
That was my statement a couple of posts back. There is a difference between features and usable features.
Your last remark about implying: Why is it then it is always that WM fans claim that WM will take over the world? It is always WM fanboys doing that. I don’t see that behavior in Symbian, BlackBerry or other phone OS fans.
You say yourself that in the 8 years of WM, 35 million devices were sold (That is btw not the same as devices in use…) Comparing that to the amount of iPhones, I would claim that WM fails. At this point in time I would say that about 5 or 6M iPhones are sold, within 1 year. Apple claims they will sell 10M in 2008. I think that is a reachable target, seeing that a lot of countries will now get access to the new 3G version. I think that the used installed base of the iPhone is about the sold number, as the devices are new.
That would give an installed base of about 15M iPhones, after only 1.5 years. Actually, as the iPod touch uses the same software platform, the installed base for the software platform is _much_ bigger.
In the end, I hope that you are happy with your WM device.
I will be happy with my iPhone.
Other people will like their BB or Android device.
Compamies are free to release their WM devices however they like. If you wanted to use GPS without paying you are free to download Windows Live Search or Google Maps.
With the huge marketshare if Symbian (65+% of the smartphone market) one would have to be silly to think anyone but Nokia will take over the world. This does not stop iPhone fanboys from claiming fir example thar RIM is dead. Look at the much worshipped RoughlyDrafted for rabid Apple fanboyish. Nothing like that exists in the WM world. The cult of Mac is clearly alive and well.
BTW the active WM installed base is 35 million, not the amount ever sold. That installed base is growing faster than the iPhone.
Like I said, only Apple worshippers are arrogant enough to believe they are changing the world.
@Surur
You misunderstood me.
I did not want to use the GPS in a navigation program, but just check it as a hardware GPS.
Even using a terminal program and displaying the NMEA output fails.
Actually Apple _is_ changing the world.
Every phone brand is suddenly creating ‘iPhone killers’.
(But not WM/Linux/BB, etc killers, as I already had written… Odd…)
Even RIM, after first telling that the iPhone would fail due to a touchscreen and not a keyboard, seems to be building a ‘touchscreen without keyboard’ device.
An installed base is not the same as a user base. Installed base here is sold amount.
(Normally it is the number of machines it is installed on, but for this kind of software that of course equates to the number of sold devices, as you cannot buy a ‘WM install disk’ at your local retailer to install it on a device.
And as I have written, sold device does not equal in-use devices.
About worshippers, two things: It seems that it are always MS fanboys claiming that ‘Apple fanboys’ are not realistic. I never see it the other way round.
Secondly, if Apple fanboys exist, maybe that is due to Apple creating products that give that reaction. I don’t see people wearing MS T-shirts…
I find it annoying that people are always bashing Apple.
If Apple is so insignificant as claimed, why not ignore it?
A lot of articles on RoughlyDrafted just point out the odd things people say about Apple products.
Why do you for instance first claim that Symbian has 65+ percent of the market, then claim that Apple will fail due to a low percentage of sales, but then claim that WM will succeed while having the same percentage of sales?
The same is seen in music players. Apple has the largest market-share with the iPod. The rest are small fry.
Why is it then that people point first to the PC market and say that Apple will fail due to only having 8% market, but then say about mp3 players that Apple will fail while having about 80%? For the PC business it is claimed that the market has given applications and hardware that is not available for Mac. Funny thing is, that that is also true for the iPods. The accessory market for iPods is huge. For other players, almost non-existent or the accessory can be used for both.
@loosely_coupled
Please, you’re sounding pretty shrill there. No need to go overboard and get nasty. It is possible to use Windows Mobile productively despite the hassles – I certainly have done that over the years even if I felt like I was bashing my head against a brick wall a lot of the time.
I do however recognise the quantum sea-change that the iPhone represents in so many areas, something that Surur can’t seem to see. The iPhone is by no means perfect, it has it’s issues, but it gets so much right and shows such huge potential that you have to be suffering quite a large case of denial not to admit it.
@Surur
35 million Windows mobile users and yet it is the 5 million iPhone users that have 71% of the mobile browsing market. Then there is Google’s discovery of 50 times more searches on Apple‘s iPhone than any other mobile handset. Google “thought it was a mistake and made their engineers check the logs again,” said Vic Gundotra, head of Google’s mobile operations.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/667f13de-da60-11dc-9bb9-0000779fd2ac.html
Likewise, you crow about the drop in the iPhone’s marketshare to 19.2 percent from 26.7 percent in Q1 2008 but neglect to mention that the marketshare of HTC, manufacturer of some of the most popular WM smartphones including your HTC Tilt fell in the same quarter to 4.1 percent from 7.9 percent the quarter before. The upcoming 3G iPhone which has been hyped around the world is a pretty good reason for the iPhone’s drop, but it is Blackberry, not WM that is making hay while the sun shines.
“Like I said, only Apple worshippers are arrogant enough to believe they are changing the world.”
Heh, well, the funny thing is, Apple does actually have an amazing track record of leading the way and actually making some pretty remarkable changes to the world. Witness the Apple II, the Mac OS, the iPod and the enormous impact Apple has had on the music industry. You can’t deny the iPhone has in fact had a remarkably major impact on the phone industry with everyone including MS scrambling to pull out all stops. All legitimate commentators agree that the iPhone has raised the bar whether you want to admit it or not.
By the way, I do agree that there are many Apple users who go over-board with their fanaticism and do a disservice to the rest of us who just enjoy the great functional as well as aesthetic design talent that Apple brings to the table. However, fans on the other side of the fence can be just as grating…
Phew, this is getting exhausting.
-Mart
Re web browsing market share:
Seeing how Symbian has a gigantic market share, how is it that they do not have the lion share of the web browsing market? Maybe because web browsing is not the measure of a smartphone? I would bet WM has the lion share of the 3rd party app market, which I have always felt is what a smartphone is all about.
BTW, regarding the US market share –
Samsung + Moto WM market share in USA totalled 11.2%. There is a further 12% thats unaccounted for, but probably consists of carrier-branded WM devices such as the AT&T Tilt, T-Mobile Shadow and Sprint Touch. Thats more than 20% in total.
In addition of 19% which consist of iPhones sold, a huge amount were exported to overseas, so should not really count as part of the US market. AT&T for example only activated 2.5 million iPhone since June 2007, while Apple sold at least twice as much.
In conclusion then, I feel its safe to say more WM phones than iPhones are ending up in consumer hands in the USA, vs being smuggled illicitly to China.
The 3G iPhone is no excuse, as this dropped happened in January, February and March,2008, well before the 3G iPhone was expected. Q2 2008 is going to look like murder though.
Regarding Apple changing the world, Apple likes to take credit for broad trends. The world would change just as happily without Apple being around.
I sit here at my I Mac just after leaving and cursing at my wife’s Dell Windows XP. I will never go back to Microsoft, only a techie could love all the effort and frustration. I hope to be able to get that I Phone on June 10th with or without 3G or GPS. A phone anyone can use.
As to Apple not changing the world, I know no one with a Windows Mobile Device but I know lots with I Phones, I don’t know anyone with a cheapie music device but I know lots with I Pods.
Web browsing is an excellent measure of how many users *ACTUALLY USE* their device. If windows mobile is such a joy to use, how come a few million iPhones represent 5X more web traffic than all Windows mobile devices combined?
The use of 3rd party applications is a difficult metric, not least because the iPhone’s SDK isn’t finished. Even in the future, when I’m sure many iPhone users will regularly download 3rd party apps, it’s a pointless measurement since it depends so heavily on how much utility users get from the factory-included software, which is one of the enormous advantages the iPhone has over other mobile devices. It has functional, easy-to-use features like Email, Contacts, Calendar, Maps, Web Browser, Stocks/Weather Applets, Notepad, Camera, Media player, etc built-in by default. To accomplish similar functionality in a WM smarphone would require an extensive amount of learning and effort from an average user.
This gets to the crux of my argument. There are plenty of windows mobile ‘smartphones’ that have long features lists and do many things the current iPhone can’t, many of which you mentioned. However, these ‘features’ are worthless if they are nearly impossible for a normal person to use, case in point the man above talking about having to try to configure the built-in GPS in his wife’s phone. Similarly, many of the ‘features’ that WM fanboys love to brag that the iPhone doesn’t have are difficult to setup, difficult to use, and very poorly integrated.
The iPhone, for all it’s flaws, represents an enormous leap for mobile phone user interfaces, ease of use, and cohesion of features. An average user can buy the iPhone, and be completely confident in using the entire range of features in about an hour. And that is not for a lack of utility, but an indication of how much effort went into designing the simple and intuitive interface. Having seen just how much my dad struggled with accomplishing anything on his new Windows Mobile-running Treo all while attempting to read the accompanying manual, I understand how important the interface and usability of ANY device is. Not everyone is a technically-competent geek like yourself.
Like Mr. Hill mentioned above, the iPhone has certainly raised the bar and pushed the market forward — with every phone manufacturer rushing to build an “iPhone killer” — whether you wish to acknowledge it or not. It appears you are completely unwilling to recognize any of the achievements of the iPhone, and just wish to wallow in frustration and denial. That seems to be the MO of every Apple-hater, and I just do not understand why they would want to be that way. Every company/device has crazy, totally unrealistic fanboys (look in the mirror); That is no reason to have an unhealthy hatred for them.
@loosely_coupled
An average user can buy the iPhone, and be completely confident in using the entire range of features in about an hour. And that is not for a lack of utility, but an indication of how much effort went into designing the simple and intuitive interface.
————-
Actually it is an indication of lack of utility.
Lets see – how do I set up video recording on the iPhone? I cant? Wow, thats easy.
How do I set up voice dailing on the iPhone? I cant? Thats easy.
How do I change the size of the pictures I take on the iPhone? I cant?
How do I e-mail full-sized pictures, instead of shrunken down ones? I cant?
How do I sync over bluetooth? I cant?
How do I do anything more than Jobs decided to dumb down the iPhone to? I cant.
Ow well. At least its easy to use, almost like a kindergarten toy.
@surur
Are you just bitter why do you get personally offended and feel the need to attack other people. What’s your problem man? You just like creating conflict. I really hope that you don’t actually believe the vile garbage your spewing… Not every device has every feature that every user wants. If you start to claim that your HTC does that’s because it has the features you want. It surely doesn’t have the features that I want. You want a device with a completely open experience regardless of the User Experience. I want a device with a refined set of features and a polished well thought out complete solution for what my needs are. The device makes sacrifices (no 3g and no camera do to the battery requirements for example) to make sure that the overall complete polished feature set is Solid and Stable. It’s the first time a handset maker made a list of the features most people need and made sure those features were as flawless as possible instead of winmo companies that just throw in as many features (useful or not) to make sure they can be distinct with the other winmo devices their competing with. That’s the fundamental difference between mac and pc openness vs user experience. There are those who value both…
Please, just try to ignore Surur. He would regularly pop onto the Phone Different site (now merged with The iPhone Blog) to spit the same nonsense. Every time he is shown a valid, iPhone strengthening point he will beat it down with some garbled nonsense that 98% of smartphone users couldn’t care less about. He is the utmost definition of fanboy, and arguing with him —regardless of how valid your argument is— is nothing more than an exercise in futility.
Just let it go and he will go away.
I am sure being exposed to the truth hurts, and I find it hilarious that you believe 98% of smartphone users don’t care about video recording, voice dialing, MMS, bluetooth stereo and e-mailing full resolution pictures instead of having their 2 megapixel pictures reduced to 640×480.
Yep,I am sure iPhone users only care about what Jobs tells them to care about.
I don’t have an iPhone chief. Unlike you, however, I can actually accept it for what it does and give it credit where it is due.
1. Video recording really isn’t that important to a lot of people. Some like it, some use it occasionally, others don’t ever use it. By the way, RIM’s BlackBerry regularly stomps your precious Windows Mobile into the ground in usage statistics, yet until LAST MONTH, not a single BlackBerry device supported video recording.
2. I have had voice dialing on more phones than I can count, and I have never used it on any of them. Go over to CrackBerry.com and do a search for “Voice dialing love it or hate it.” It is a thread of people talking about it, and you will see just how many people really do ignore it altogether. Hotkeying, or using a favorites list is just as easy to me, and it never screws up and dials the wrong person.
3. MMS can be sent and received via email. No, it is not exactly the same, but it IS a real workaround. You also still refuse to acknowledge that it may come with firmware 2.0, and/or the 2nd gen iPhone. By the way, I once had a Moto Q that couldn’t do MMS either… Hmm…
4. You know what I think of stereo bluetooth? I think it is something else to point and laugh at people for. Give me my small, unassuming earbuds any day of the week over some overly large, super dorky looking headset. Oh, I would rather do without the increased battery drain as well.
5. I hardly use my phone as my main source of digital photography. If I snap a picture with my phone and email it, yes, 640×480 is absolutely fine because it is more than likely a simple image that is meant to be commical… Not a modern masterpiece.
The iPhone is LESS than 1 year old and it has shaken up the stagnant world of cellphones so severely that most every company is trying to create an iPhone-killer. If it wasn’t something special, this would not be the case. Even a glaring fanboy like yourself should be able to see that. Maybe you refuse to accept it, but that doesn’t make it any less true.
Again… the iPhone has been out for less than 1 year. Do you understand that? Less than 1 year. Say it with me…. Less… Than… 1… Year…. WinMo has been a mobile OS for how long? The device manufacturers have had how long to implement certain features and make certain tweaks? Yeah, exactly.
That is the real kicker though. WinMo has a huge feature list, and it has had years upon years to improve, yet it is still a God awful, critically assaulted, mess to use. I will take the easy to use iPhone platform, with its INCREDIBLE future over WinMo every day and twice on Sunday.
Did I mention I don’t even own an iPhone? Yeah, I have an At&t Tilt. Cooked ROM, registry tweaked, user interface improving apps all over, and it is STILL a pain in the ass to use.
By the way, if WinMo is so amazing, why are cooked ROMS almost a necessity to have a remotely decent user experience? Why do WinMo devices, like the Touch Diamond that you keep raving about, even need a glossy interface sitting over top of the standard WinMo UI? Why do companies like SPB make a killing with their Mobile Shell and Pocket Plus apps? Why do sites like the following have top ten lists of things to do to actual make a WinMo device more usable?
Site in question: http://www.pocketables.net/2008/01/10-tips-on-fixi.html
The reason is that WinMo, as powerful as it is, is a bear to use and is ugly to look at. It hides things too deeply in menus, it confuses the average user with far too many choices, and it doesn’t make itself clear on how to operate it properly. The results are ass dragging slow devices that freeze up and cause the people that just want a reliable smartphone an endless string of headaches. Techies love WinMo devices, and the average smartphone user hates them. Who do you really think makes up more of the market share needed to help a product thrive?
All the features in the world mean jack to a person that just wants a reliable device, but needs more than a common flip phone. And reliability is not one of WinMo’s trademarks…
One last thing…
On a WinMo device, it is almost a prerequisite to load up on third party apps just to have a decent user experience. You were commenting on the cost of the HTC Touch being less than an iPhone, and that is fine. You are forgetting to add a few things to it though…
Better MP3 player
Better video player
Better web browser
Better address book
GUI app that is actually usable
I will give you the benefit of the doubt on the MP3 player and say that you can just use the HTC Audio Manager, the rest, however, you need to pay for.
1. Video. CorePlayer is widely regarded as the best 3rd party player for WinMo, and it is $30.
2. Web. Opera Mobile 9.5 isn’t out for public purchase yet, but the far less attractive 8.65 is. It is $24.
3. Contacts. Finger Friendly Friends was my choice. It is $15.
4. GUI. I found SPB Mobile Shell to be the prettiest and most intuitive. It is $30.
Now, just to try and match the out of the box user experience of an iPhone, you have to dish out an additional $100… Groovy.
Also, your mention of things like TouchFlo is laughable. First of all, it poorly mimics multi-touch and is very unresponsive. Second of all, it is just another program that runs on top of the WinMo UI and eats up system resources.
Finally… If WinMo is SOOOOO great, why are WinMo forums full of posts and requests for iPhone mimic software? How do I make my screen look like an iPhone? How do I make my contacts look like an iPhone? What is the best iPhone-like web browser? How do I install Slide to Unlock? Etc, etc…
I don’t have an iPhone chief. Unlike you, however, I can actually accept it for what it does and give it credit where it is due.
1. Video recording really isn’t that important to a lot of people. Some like it, some use it occasionally, others don’t ever use it. By the way, RIM’s BlackBerry regularly stomps your precious Windows Mobile into the ground in usage statistics, yet until LAST MONTH, not a single BlackBerry device supported video recording.
2. I have had voice dialing on more phones than I can count, and I have never used it on any of them. Go over to CrackBerry.com and do a search for “Voice dialing love it or hate it.” It is a thread of people talking about it, and you will see just how many people really do ignore it altogether. Hotkeying, or using a favorites list is just as easy to me, and it never screws up and dials the wrong person.
3. MMS can be sent and received via email. No, it is not exactly the same, but it IS a real workaround. You also still refuse to acknowledge that it may come with firmware 2.0, and/or the 2nd gen iPhone. By the way, I once had a Moto Q that couldn’t do MMS either… Hmm…
4. You know what I think of stereo bluetooth? I think it is something else to point and laugh at people for. Give me my small, unassuming earbuds any day of the week over some overly large, super dorky looking headset. Oh, I would rather do without the increased battery drain as well.
5. I hardly use my phone as my main source of digital photography. If I snap a picture with my phone and email it, yes, 640×480 is absolutely fine because it is more than likely a simple image that is meant to be commical… Not a modern masterpiece.
The iPhone is LESS than 1 year old and it has shaken up the stagnant world of cellphones so severely that most every company is trying to create an iPhone-killer. If it wasn’t something special, this would not be the case. Even a glaring fanboy like yourself should be able to see that. Maybe you refuse to accept it, but that doesn’t make it any less true.
Again… the iPhone has been out for less than 1 year. Do you understand that? Less than 1 year. Say it with me…. Less… Than… 1… Year…. WinMo has been a mobile OS for how long? The device manufacturers have had how long to implement certain features and make certain tweaks? Yeah, exactly.
That is the real kicker though. WinMo has a huge feature list, and it has had years upon years to improve, yet it is still a God awful, critically assaulted, mess to use. I will take the easy to use iPhone platform, with its INCREDIBLE future over WinMo every day and twice on Sunday.
Did I mention I don’t even own an iPhone? Yeah, I have an At&t Tilt. Cooked ROM, registry tweaked, user interface improving apps all over, and it is STILL a pain in the ass to use.
By the way, if WinMo is so amazing, why are cooked ROMS almost a necessity to have a remotely decent user experience? Why do WinMo devices, like the Touch Diamond that you keep raving about, even need a glossy interface sitting over top of the standard WinMo UI? Why do companies like SPB make a killing with their Mobile Shell and Pocket Plus apps? Why do sites like the following have top ten lists of things to do to actual make a WinMo device more usable?
Site in question: http://www.pocketables.net/2008/01/10-tips-on-fixi.html
The reason is that WinMo, as powerful as it is, is a bear to use and is ugly to look at. It hides things too deeply in menus, it confuses the average user with far too many choices, and it doesn’t make itself clear on how to operate it properly. The results are ass dragging slow devices that freeze up and cause the people that just want a reliable smartphone an endless string of headaches. Techies love WinMo devices, and the average smartphone user hates them. Who do you really think makes up more of the market share needed to help a product thrive?
All the features in the world mean jack to a person that just wants a reliable device, but needs more than a common flip phone. And reliability is not one of WinMo’s trademarks…
@Laughing harder (I sure am)
Did I ask you whether YOU cared about MMS, video recording and voice dialing? These are simple mobile phone features which has been selling phones for years now. You talk a good talk about making a simpleto use phone for the common man, then hate on features that have been loved for years. For shame.
Is it even legal to use a phone in the car without voice dialing? In fact, to bring the iPhone up to the standard of a modern phone will take hundreds of dollars.
Let me give you an example of this in action:
————————-
O2 MMS for iPhone
In order to use this application, you must register.
If you’ve registered before, and you’re seeing this screen – don’t worry – just complete the process again to log in to your inbox (you will not have to donate again!)
As of February 2008 a donation is required to use the full functionality of this app. These donations help secure the future of the application, and help ensure it’s continually improved.
————————-
Now imagine adding voice dialing, stereo bluetooth, the bluetooth serial profile so the newly obsolete gen 1 iPhones can use GPS, better e-mail software so it wont make your pictures unprintable when you e-mail it to granny, office software so you can edit that document, core player so you play something other than mp4, a proper notes app, not to mention a browser that supports flash.
Look at what the iPhone offers, and ask yourself why 99.5% of people did not buy one. Maybe that also explains why 50% if iPhone users also carry a REAL phone, instead of a glorified internet tablet.
BTW, WM outsells blackberry, just FYI.
You’re losing it now Surur.
You have been beaten down with techie logic by numerous people above.
You have been beaten down with common reasoning about a phone just working.
You can’t actual give a real answer to any claims made against your WinMo, and you instead keep repeating the same 4-5 statements over, and over again.
The funniest part, is that I don’t even own an iPhone. I own an At&t Tilt, the “most powerful WinMo smartphone in the US right now.” I am categorized as a techie and I have tweaked this thing to hell and back, and I STILL disagree with you on WinMo being a nice, usable platform that rules all. I am not some spec studying ding dong. I am not a person that hasn’t used a WinMo device since 2003. No, quite the opposite. Instead, I have one of the most feature laden pieces of junk to ever be released on the At&t network.
Don’t even try to talk to me about it being the fault of my buying a carrier branded Kaiser/TyTN II/8900. The damn thing cost me just under $600 to buy from a retail store; buying it unlocked would have cost me even more. You are preaching the choir about WinMo being cheaper…. No, not at all…
My actual experience:
-At&t Tilt = $550
-Opera Mobile to make up for the utterly AWFUL PIE = $25
-CorePlayer to make up for WMP = $30 (this was also necessary to watch YouTube, Oh… I know about the HTC Streaming Media Player, but I would prefer something that didn’t suck…)
(by the way…. Every flash site I have visited from this thing has told me that it won’t work on my phone… Oh, that’s right, in order to use Flash I need to go crazy trying to find plugins and 3rd party solutions to make it work…. Yeah, that is a really good user experience for the non-techie… Safari may not have it, but the vast majority of WinMo phones don’t have it out of the box either and it isn’t clear cut on how to get it)
-SPB Mobile Shell to make up for that atrocity of a standard UI = $30
-SPB Pocket Plus to make up for that atrocity of a standar UI, and since Mobiel Shell is nothing more than, well, a shell, I was still forced back to the standard UI to do certain things. = $30
– SD Card for memeory = $25
Yeah, I spent $140 just to make an already expensive device something more usable. Not including tax, I spent almost $700 on this thing. Do you understand that? I am a real user of a real WinMo device, and it cost me $140 OVER the device cost just to make it usable?
Yeah, that is a gem right there.
A feature list is nothing more than a list if it doesn’t work worth a damn and you need a fricken degree just to understand it. This is the thing you are missing, and your blind lack of common sense to this simple fact is sad. It also irritates me that I have bothered to spend time arguing with you. I am not trying to beat you with comments about the OS Kernel, or blah, fricken, blah. Why? I don’t know about it on that kind of level, and I don’t care about it on that kind of level. I am a common user with some tweaking knowledge, and as such, I have had nothing but a horrible experience with the Tilt, and every other WinMo phone I have ever used. It is even worse for a non-tweaking common user that doesn’t understand how to go as far as I have to try and make it better.
Again, who do you think really makes up more of the important market share? Insane techies like you, or common users and slightly more informed common users like me? You should not have to research the web to make a phone work right, be it a smartphone or not. Apple gets this, Nokia gets this, RIM gets this. You and Microsoft are the ones that miss it.
Go ahead, come back and try to explain your position with the same tired feature set again…
@Losing it
Now you are getting tiresome. I’ll try and break it down for you.
The so called usability of the iPhone is based on a dumbed down device, devoid of options which people actually use.
WM is quite usable as is, and is used by millions of people without the software you mentioned.
The Windows Mobile market consists of people who want to do more with their device, which is why they did not buy an Razr, or even less functional iPhone.
Windows Mobile is an OS with a great future. I know this, Qualcomm with their Snapdragon knows this, NVIDIA with their Tegra processor knows this, ASUS who plan to make 10% of their revenue for WM devices know this, and all the carriers who sell WM devices under their own brand know this.
Comparing a functional OS with a toy is your real problem.
I am done with you. You really are one of the dumbest people I have ever run across on the intrawebs. You are easily up for the running of blind fanboy jackass of the year.
You can think you won, but the truth is that I just don’t have the strength to argue with someone as close minded and utterly silly as yourself. You can’t address any of the questions directed to you, while I have addressed everyone you have sent at me. Maybe you should come out of your techie hole and actually look outside your WinMo fanboy world and see what everyone else in professional tech society says about WinMo.
My last comment, because I won’t be back, is this…
If WinMo is so usable, and is so good in its current state, why is it being drastically changed to mirror the iPhone? WinMo 7 is claiming to be multi-touch, actually intuitive, and finger friendly. If WinMo is so great as is, and is so usable, why would MS completely revamp it to make it more like the iPhone? If usability was so great, why would almost every WinMo device be labeled a “power users” device best left alone by your average user? If WinMo was so great, why would WinMo devices carry the HIGHEST return rates at cellular carrier retail stores?
One last thing… WinMo is an OS that is shoveled and force fitted into thousands of devices across the world. If you add all these manufacturers together, they overtake RIM, this is true. They constitute the “other” category on market share reports. Don’t you find it comical, however, that it takes a conglomerate force of companies to gain more market share than a single? RIM is one company, it makes one line of devices with one OS, and it holds 11% of the worldwide smartphone market share. WinMo requires the combined efforts of countless manufacturers to take roughly 20-22%. So, yeah… RIM pretty much does walk all over WinMo. Even better than that is Apple with about 6%. One company, one device, less than one year old and it already has a quarter of the worldwide market share of WinMo. This is also taking into account that it is being sold in 3G heavy countries and it doesn’t have 3G…
Enjoy getting the last word chief. You aren’t worth the time at this point and I am actually going to take my original advice and ignore you so you can go back to your WinMo hole and hopefully stay there.
@Yeah
I am glad to see you have conceded the field. Your arguments were empty and devoid of substance.
Regarding the changes to Windows Mobile. Windows Mobile is not a static OS, and has seen changes every generation. Microsoft is implementing its twist interface, as seen on the Xbox 360 and Zune, and previewed on devices such as the Treo 500 on vodafone and the T-Mobile Shadow. Touchflo3D looks nothing like the iPhone, but gives you a taste of what WM7 will look like, and of course is smokes the simplistic UI of the iPhone.
Best of luck waiting for Jobs to make the iPhone better. Hopefully he will give you some of the basics it soe desperately lacks.
Surur
I really don’t want to get involved in this, but I can’t help but notice that the guy said he didn’t own an iPhone…
@Tom
All the more reason he should not be arguing about the wonders of the iPhone. He does not know how good he has it. For some people, the grass is always greener on the other side.
Surur
I don’t think he was arguing the wonders of the iPhone so much as the “not-so-wonders” of the Windows Mobile platform. Regardless though, this is one fight I want to avoid, so I am going to go back to the grandstands now.
Only of couple more days to know which rumor is right. Can’t wait till next week!
First, let me disclose my biases. I’m a Windows Mobile user and have used Windows CE-based systems since Handheld PC days. (See my history here if you care: http://history.svpocketpc.com) In fact, I’m also an Apple fan — I had an Apple II+ (it’s still in my attic) and subscribed to MacWorld and MacUser when the Mac was first released (even though I couldn’t afford a Mac myself back then).
However, I’m not a rabid Windows Mobile fanboy. I’m the first to admit that Windows Mobile is far from perfect and have many suggestions to improve it. I believe that people should use what works best for them. If that’s a Symbian phone, RIM BlackBerry, Palm OS Treo, Apple iPhone, Windows Mobile Pocket PC phone, Windows Mobile Smartphone or even a feature phone, that’s cool. I agree with what nick said: “For apple to succeed microsoft doesnt have to fail. The smart phone market is big enough for several players.” The market is potentially as big as the entire cell phone market, and lots of people are still using “dumb” feature phones. Choice is good.
I also think the iPhone is a very cool device that has changed the mobile phone landscape. Apple deserves a lot of credit for that. What I don’t like are people making it sound like the greatest thing since sliced bread (is that really one of the greatest inventions?).
So I’m not going to try to convert anybody to become Windows Mobile users. What I *will* do is point out inaccuracies or misconceptions, though. To wit….
Regarding the Start Menu:
Pieter said: “Of course on the iPhone the UI is different. That is because Apple has the idea that on a phone you need a simple button UI and not the Start menu style as WM tries to copy from a desktop computer…”
What’s wrong with leveraging something people are familiar with? It isn’t a screen hog (as Martin Hill seemed to imply) amd makes starting new programs and switching to recently used or favorite programs easy. See Adam Lein’s comments about that:
http://discuss.pocketnow.com/showthread.php?t=23438&highlight=love+start+menu
Regarding Windows Mobile prices:
Pieter said: “WM devices are not cheap. They cost the same or more as an iPhone…”
That depends on the device, of course, but it’s certainly not always true. I got my new Motorola Q9m for free. OK, it wasn’t really free — I had to pay $26.82 for sales tax. And, yes, I took advantage of several discounts: My Verizon New Every 2 $50 or $100 discount, a $100 data plan credit and a $50 mail-in rebate. Even without the credits, though, that would have cost me a maximum of $226.82. What iPhone costs that little?
Regarding iPhone Killers:
Pieter said: “BTW, why is it that a new WM/Symbian/Linux phone is always positioned as an ‘iPhone killer’ and never as an ‘BlackBerry killer’, ‘WM (fill in brand&type) killer’ or ‘Android (fill in brand&type) killer’?”
The original Motorola Q was pitched as a BlackBerry killer (it was nicknamed the RAZRBerry). So your statement is incorrect.
Even if I don’t take your statement literally, I don’t think it’s a mystery — the iPhone is the device generating the most buzz now. If an Android device becomes the hype phone next year, people will pitch their devices as “Android killers”. Big deal.
Personally, I find tags like “iPhone killer” and “BlackBerry killer” stupid anyway. See the quote from nick excerpted above. The market is big enough for multiple players, and choice is good.
Regarding what OS the device uses:
Who cares, really? What matters is what you can *do* with the device.
Martin Hill said: “Windows Mobile has a completely different kernal to desktop Windows and suffers from a terribly constrained architecture harking back to it’s origins as Windows CE crammed into the tiny amounts of memory then available. Even now it is still around 40MBs in size.
In contrast OS X on the iPhone is an amazing 500MBs in size and has the same rock-solid BSD unix-based kernal and frameworks as the desktop version of Mac OS X and was designed from the start to run on the powerful 620MHz processor with 128MB of RAM and multiple gigabytes of storage and hardware accelerated graphics subsystem.”
You know, if a Windows Mobile user said that WM used an “amazing” 500 MB for the OS, people would call it a bloated piece of crap. It’s funny that when Apple’s OS takes that space, it’s because it’s advanced. Being designed for a 620 MHz processor makes sense — it *has* to be.
Windows Mobile can run on far less powerful (and cheaper) devices. Maybe those devices won’t meet your needs, and I’m fine with that. I have a 624 MHz iPaq hx2795 myself along with my Motorola Q9h. Just don’t try to spin it as an advantage that an OS *requires* high-end hardware. By that logic, Windows Vista would be one of the best operating systems available. 😀
Regarding APIs:
nick said: “The idea behind the iphone is that it is a Screen that can display anything that developers can think of and they can do this with a complete SDK with desktop API’s and a desktop OS at it’s core. It’s all about the software.”
Yes, it’s the software that matters. And Windows Mobile has had a good application framework for years. I’ve written a couple of small Windows Mobile applications and was able to leverage my MFC and Visual Studio experience using eMbedded C++. Earlier generations of Windows Mobile devices supported the Visual Basic runtime and you could get eMbedded VB. Nowadays developers can use C# and the .NET Compact Framework to leverage their .NET experience.
So what exactly prevents a Windows Mobile screen from displaying “anything that developers can think of”? Nothing but the developer’s imagination. WM has GPS mapping, astronomy programs, various games, eBook readers and so much more.
Regarding lack of persistent storage:
Martin Hill said: “I’ve owned several very expensive Windows Mobile PDA smart phones and can’t believe that you would laud a platform that as a design “feature” would wipe all the data, programs and settings if the battery went flat or it accidentally hard reset – an all-to-common occurrence.”
Yes, older devices could lose their memory, but that’s why ActiveSync allowed you to back up your device (not that I’m defending random hard resets, mind you). As surur mentioned, just remember what time frame you’re talking about — pre-WM 5, or about three years ago (at least). When Windows CE was created, flash memory was a *lot* more expensive (I paid over $100, I think, for a 48 MB PCMCIA card!). Palm didn’t implement persistent storage for a long time, either, but the Palm OS was still laud-worthy before that, wasn’t it?
So lack of persistent storage was not a “flaw” in the OS as you claim later, just a (reasonable) design decision. Calling it a flaw is like saying DOS using a command line was a flaw because GUIs came out years later.
And, by the way, what Smartphone OS did Apple have three years ago? Oh, that’s right — NONE.
Regarding Web browsing percentages:
While the iPhone’s Web browsing statistics are admittedly amazing, people forget two things.
First, people seem to infer that means that the iPhone browsing experience is so good that people browse more. I won’t deny that’s probably part of the reason, but there’s another explanation that people seem to ignore — maybe the type of person who buys an iPhone is more likely to browse the Web. Maybe they’re younger, hipper people who care about things like YouTube or FaceBook. I think there’s also part of that going on.
Second, a Smartphone’s usefulness isn’t limited to Web browsing. I think a better, although perhaps harder to calculate, measure is how much the phone is used for non-phone tasks. How much E-mailing is done, how many games are played, how much PIM usage goes on, etc.
Regarding MMS:
Laughing harder said: “I once had a Moto Q that couldn’t do MMS either… Hmm…”
Were you on Sprint? They don’t allow MMS on their WM phones for some reason, so it’s a carrier decision, not an OS issue.
Regarding typing:
Nick Connolly said: “I’ve used touch flow and it’s impossible to type on the iphone is awesome to type on. The overall experience is not even close to iPhone.”
I guess that’s a personal preference. My wife, daughter and I all tried an iPhone and none of us liked the typing experience. Granted, we only used it for 5 minutes or so, and maybe we’d get better, but none of us were awed. I’ve heard it said that the backspace is the most used key.
Personally, I’ll stick with my Motorola Q9m’s awesome QWERTY keyboard.
Regarding defining markets:
nick said: “Apple is very good at what they do. They defined the desktop OS they defined the portable music player and now they are looking to define mobile computing. That’s why every other device is compared to the iPhone.”
Yes, Apple is good at what they do, generally, but your argument falls down in a few places.
First, how did Apple define the desktop OS? The Mac OS was a stripped down Lisa interface which was borrowed from Xerox PARC. And, if they have defined the market, why don’t they have the leading market share? (That’s a rhetorical question. As Beta vs. VHS proves, the better system doesn’t always win.)
Second, I’d say Sony defined the personal music player with the Walkman, and Diamond (I think) came out with the first MP3 player. Apple came out with a sexy player tied with reasonably priced music. Maybe Apple *redefined* portable music players, but they didn’t define them.
Finally, regarding mobile computing, maybe Apple already defined that market — with the Newton (which lots of people still seem to love). Or maybe Palm did it. Either way, this would again be a redefinition.
Apple’s problem is that they’re control freaks. Their Mac vs. PC commercials try to spin controlling the software and hardware as a plus (and it is in some ways), but it limits their market share. (And, when Apple did allow Mac clones, it hurt their bottom line so much that they killed that experiment.)
You see the same thing with the iPod and iTunes. Apple won’t share their DRM to allow people to purchase music from other outlets. I believe they’re being sued for that in a few countries, too.
And you see it with the iPhone, where they’re only licensing certain carriers (and making the carriers play ball Apple’s way) and (I think) only allowing software to be distributed through the Apple store. If anything kills the iPhone, their control will be it. Windows Mobile is so successful because Microsoft licenses it to lots of OEMs. Google is taking a similar tack, making Android available to pretty much anybody.
I understand *why* Apple does that — they’re primarily a hardware company, while Microsoft and Google are primarily software companies. (RIM is more like Apple, of course.)
I alluded to Beta vs. VHS earlier, and one of the biggest reasons that VHS won is because JVC licensed the format to lots of OEMs, while Sony had very restrictive licensing. It’s something to consider….
Om,
Was your source connected to thestreet.com, we know how reliabe they are. Yesterday they reported that the Google Phone would be delayed until 2009. And Google comes out midday and corrects this and say the rumor is false. Here was the Global Locate rumor. Which was last year, is this your source?
http://www.thestreet.com/s/faster-apple-iphone-due-next-year/newsanalysis/techtelecom/10379941.html
or maybe here?
http://seekingalpha.com/article/47743-sirf-technology-rumored-to-have-lost-out-on-iphone-gps-partnership
This rumor thing is really getting carried away!!
The iPhone 3G has left me a bit surprised as to why some features were not upgraded to compete with many current technologies. Some of the new features appear to be very handy and useful providing the downloads work as they say and that includes auto updates without the use of iTunes.
The 1 thing that I cannot believe was not included was the addition of bluetooth audio (or whatever it is called). It would be really nice to have this capability “right out of the box” and thus eliminating the multitude of wires. Certainly, t still has no value to replace my stereo unit in my truck to another unit that has the plug-in for a direct line of connection.
Additionally, just to show what I do not know, is referring to the bluetooth issue. The iPhone has bluetooth, but would it or could it be something as simple as a software update to finally capture wireless transmission of my iTunes library in my truck? OR Why not a plug-in module for the phone creating bluetooth stereo and than allowing wireless connection.
Ok, so would I buy one, probably I would and I give my son mine, which is just the 8 gig that I bought for 399.
In the end it comes down to how many apps are available for a particular device.. Since there are not too many free apps for iphone i’ll stick with
symbian based phones or WM. I like to play games for free which I can easily download on the internet and install on my symbian phone. Iphone is a alot sexier though and has great features, but where are the apps? NOt sure what would happen if I dropped either… I just downloaded IPHONE SDK and guess what I need 10.5.3 i’m still using 10.4.9… Plus there is a hundred dollar fee at the end of the deal.. MAC == Microsoft GO with brew and java based cell phones lots more apps…
But in the future were going to see some way cool apps and games for Iphone lets hope i can crack ’em and make some of ’em…
A more detailed explanation of LBS for mobiles can be found by
http://to.swang.googlepages.com/lbs
Still waiting for THE killer app to take advantage of the 3g GPS. Not sure if Apple will write the GPS software or they will rely on 3rd parties through the App Store to provide the GPS apps.
I think iphones will be a thing of the past with all the recent smart phone development especially from android, with their open source apps.