OSNews

I haven't seen the iPhone yet, but if it is anywhere near the quality of the 80G iPod I just got for Christmas, then I'm going to buy one as soon as possible.

I'm a big fan of OGG files over MP3 for several technical and ethical reasons. I have owned several MP3 players in the past (some of which supported OGG as well as some that didn't), and none of them come close to the iPod. I'm spending time ripping things anew in MP3 format just to play them on the iPod. It is that good, I think.

So, Apple may not have come up with some new, never before done gadget, but they certainly raise the bar when they do come out with something that "everybody has done before".

It can't have been a strong ethical decision for you to use Oggs, since you folded and started using MP3s again just because you wanted that cool music player.
(You haven't tried replacing the firmware with anything else?)

I can admit most Ogg-featuring players need work, Samsung has a very good range btw, but principals are principals.

Edited 2007-01-09 19:46

Nope, can't say I really hold my personal OGG vs. MP3 debate up there with whether or not I should kill babies.

The rockbox firmware for iPods can play Vorbis files. Didn't try very hard, did you?

You didn't try very hard to research your suggestion before throwing out a sarcastic stab at me, did you. I hope it was an ego builder for you.

RockBox does not yet support the 5.5 Gen 80GB iPod. Otherwise, I would not have had to make some MP3s.

I use oggdec to decode my ogg files
then use faac software to create m4a files and sync with my ipod.

That works well. The only problem with that is that you get a little poorer quality file than if you just re-rip the song.

I didn't know it works with the latest generation of ipods that are capable of video playback.

It doesn't. Somebody was just looking to earn a few ego points by trying to look smarter than somebody else.

sony sold 3 times more PS2s than Microsoft sold xbox 360s in sweden this christmas

and no 3G in a $600-with-contract phone is better than third rate internet? please.

at least sony phones have decent cameras (at least some of them...) and work as USB mass storage devices (extremely convenient).

at least sony phones have decent cameras (at least some of them...) and work as USB mass storage devices (extremely convenient).

Yeah but the mechanical reliability is low (I have already broken the little joystick on 2 SE phones) and the bluetooth plain sucks (usb? wires are so last century :-)
There is room for improvement here, maybe Apple has licked it.

Edit: BTW Sony can kiss the mp3-player phone market goodbye now. Walkman vs iPod ? No contest.

Edited 2007-01-09 20:22

i'd far rather transfer stuff over a USB link than over bluetooth. well, maybe a small picture is OK over bluetooth, but a 2 megapixel one is pushing it, and I'd rather poke glass into my eyes than transfer an album worth of songs over bluetooth. It's a hell of a lot faster to find a USB cable and plug it in.

hell, depending on how close you live to a computer store, it may be faster to go _buy_ a USB cable and plug it in.

I seem to have miss something somewhere but does the iPhone have an integrated GPS ? How can the device "know" how to locate you on the planet ?

I also would have liked to receive any digital satellite music with the iPhone.

umm... cellular triangulation works great.

Yes.

I do not know about you, but I am getting one as soon as it becomes available in Europe. No more perenially unfinished Sony Ericson and Nokia products for me.

Dido, this phone looks seriously slick, and looks like it would wipe the floor with my Windows Mobile 5 device, only time will tell. I hope they will offer it straight from the Apple Store, rather than through a contact

I read on engadget it's going to be both sold in apple stores and sold by cingular. Also I read the phone is locked to cingular...

They ran OSX on white box hardware, someone will get the iPhone running on any carrier

This is rather different. It only supports Edge and GSM, so the chance of it working on CDMA is pretty slim. T-Mobile and other GSM providers probably will have them unlocked, but the biggest provider in the US, Verizon, will not be seeing this phone for a while. And I'm sure Verizon doesn't want it either.

I couldn't agree more. Sony Ericsson with their lack of wlan and Nokia with their buggy crashing software. A sleek, sexy iPhone is just what I want!

I have WLAN on my SE

Yes, he did call the device itself revolutionary. And after watching all of the demos on:

http://www.apple.com/iphone/

I would have to say it certainly seems revolutionary. I have had many different "smart" phones, but this one really seems to be "smart."

Well, thought out. The features are not hidden underneath several layers of menus... and the web browser, it's about time that the mobile market gets a REAL browser! I always liked Mobile Opera but the Safari implementation looks like it finally makes mobile browsing worthwhile.

I don't have a Cingular plan, but when June rolls around, I certainly will then.

"I always liked Mobile Opera but the Safari implementation looks like it finally makes mobile browsing worthwhile."

Good luck with that whizzy mobile browsing over "I can nearly beat out a modem on a good day" EDGE.

Hmm, EDGE may not always be that speedy but where I live hotspots are damn near everywhere. That seems to be the case most places I go. I would be using the WIFI much more often than EDGE. In that case, a really nice full featured browser, that actually fits in my pocket more than makes up for the EDGE network. At least in my opinion.

I agree. The WiFi connectivity on this makes it quite interesting.

The interface looks amazing. It's just a bit too expensive for me, but I agree that this is a very interesting announcement.

It may not seem innovative from a hardware point of view, but integration, simplicity and slickness sells. As proven before by the iPods. Both Microsoft and Apple are good at observing their potential competitors, arriving late and stealing the show.

The iPhone is not about Microsoft and Zune though. I would guess Sony-Ericsson, Nokia, Samsung, Siemens and friends might have a year or two to match this in terms of features and looks, before the iPhone is cheap enough to really become a threat to them.

On the other hand, when technology "gadgets" start costing as much as the iPhone, everyone gadget compete with every other one. I for one can surely not afford iPhone + PS3 + Wii + GP2X + a dual core PC with an nVidia8800 + new LCD TV and home movie theatre. Provided that I wanted it all of course. My time and money wallets are not deep enough. Lucky for me, I will be happy playing around with Debian on a Slug while the kidz play with their iPhones. Or so I keep telling myself :-)

...psst: Apple, Microsoft, Sony and every other tech company have already lost by the way. Once the Burning Crusade is out, global industry and economy will collapse and be replaced by syndicates of local pizza makers. And so it happened that Blizzard saved us from global warming.

While i find this not the least bit of a revolution and the multi-touch controls have been seen before in research projects (not that this will keep apple-trolls from pretending apple had invented it) and while i'm very dissapointed that there was nothing new from OS X 10.5, i have to say that this phone looks increadibly tempting.

I'm just fed up with the barely working sony crap and crashing windows mobile phones and *arse slow* and crashing symbian smartphones.

Also this looks very interesting from an developers point of view.

I'm just a little concerned that german telcos will screw it up for germany. German telcos are ninja-übermasters at the high kung foo of screwing up.

German telcos are ninja-übermasters at the high kung foo of screwing up.
Whereas Spanish telcos are the Samurais...

from mac rumours:
8GB model - $599
4GB model - $499

And no doubt £599, £499 and €599, €499 in Europe >:[

And add a little extra Swedish taxes to that... :-)

from mac rumours:
8GB model - $599
4GB model - $499

With a 2 year cingular contract. If you already have a contract somewhere you are out of luck.
Wonder who they'll partner with in Europe ?

Ouch that's with a contract. Where I live you can practically get a very good phone for free with a 2 year contract!

And what kind of phone would that be? Remember, there are phones, and then there are phones. The iPhone appears to be the latter.

Edited 2007-01-10 05:12

Phone manufacturers don't partner anymore in most of Europe like they do in the states. So you'll be able to buy this phone directly from Apple and use whatever contract you want.

"Did it fall through the cracks?!?"

Wow, only 10 comments before someone even mentioned the fact that Leopard was not mentioned.

My money says it's fallen off schedule...jobs usually doesn't mention anything that doesn't have a firm ship date.

jobs did a 2 hour key note! so to give the audience time to catch there breath.... he will bring up leopard at a later time! my guess...with in two weeks!

Nah, they canned it; they're switching to Vista for new machines

and sold apple macs fell down to zero and apple died

I was wondering the same thing. My best guess is that the iPhone and iTV were such big deals, and more importantly big deals in the consumer electronics market, that they didn't want to muddle that in with information about their new OS.

Can that be everything?

I was thinking the same thing. He talked about a damn phone for 80 minutes straight, but nothing on new Macs or Leopard.

Sad.

Whatever happened to the agreement with Apple (Records) in relation to Apple Computers?

Doesn't their new name change bring them closer to appearing to be the same thing.

So much for Mac World. He mentioned nothing that would not have been better announced at CES.

Where is Leopard? Where is the Mac?

It is looking like the further commidification of the Mac is all that the future portends.

Apple computer is dead, long live Apple consumer electronics.

Apple computer is dead, long live Apple consumer electronics.

He did announce a name change from Apple Computer Inc. to Apple Inc. :

"The Mac, iPod, Apple TV and iPhone. Only one of those is a computer. So we're changing the name," said Jobs. "We're announcing today that we're dropping the 'Computer' from our name, and from this day forward we're going to be known as Apple Inc."
( http://www.macworld.com/news/2007/01/09/liveupdate/index.php )

I don't see this as a bad thing. I am already syncing at least 2 devices with my computer (ipod and cellphone). The convergence of these devices is a real trend and Apple is on the forefront of it, why not change the name to reflect it ?

Edited 2007-01-09 20:08

I don't know very many people that called them Apple Computer to begin with. Most people just say Apple for short, or Mac. So the name change won't make much of a difference to us.

It does make a difference to us. It points to a less than subtle shift in focus. Someone just reminded me of an interview that Jobs gave when he was out in the wilderness.

He was asked what he would do if he were still in charge of Apple, and his reply was something along the lines of:

"I would milk the Mac for all its worth, and then move onto the next big thing."

Well, the next big thing is here, and Apple is all set up to be the next monopoly (that will no doubt be fanatically hated and despised by a vocal minority).

In terms of revenues, Apple's device stuff is catching up with the computer stuff, by 2008, once this phone has been on sale for a while, it will surpass it.

But it's not just Apple; look at Dell ...

I guess Apple will be doing plasma screen TVs next.

Yup. I'm not happy with it until I can run my homebrew BioPerl scripts in bash. Nothing beats some lazy amino acids sequence analysis while listening to some tunes in the tube.

I really want to know how they make a handheld device with that resolution have those animations. Are they running a graphics chipset with OpenGL?

It's gotta be. I would guess an OMAP 3 or the latest XScale+Intel graphics.

Also how could they get OSX on an embedded device, linux and windows and had years of optomization to achieve it. My guess is that they had to put a lot of ram and processing power, that's why it's so expensive.

Steve said they've been working on it for two years.

My real question would be, what CPU is this thing running on? If it's an XScale, that would mean they have been developing OS X for ARM (sorry, I'm old fashioned) for two years without anyone knowing about it. I know they did it for x86.
Then you could have some sort of Intel x86, but that's no good for battery life.
And then you have... PowerPC! This would be the most logical option for me, but aren't we all supposed to believe Apple dropped PPC?

I don't think there is any currently available PowerPC that is suitable for cell phones (there was the 405LP, but that was years ago). It's gotta be ARM IMO.

I think when the truth comes out, we'll see that it's OSX in name only; probably stripped down to a kernel (may not even be MACH), a few services and a widget engine.

> Microsoft is shipping Vista in January, wouldn't have a big announcement made sense?

To this comment, and the one about the announcements being more appropriate for CES. Think of it this way:

At MacWorld, Apple has center stage. So they can make their announcements without fighting over the noise of other vendors. So it's better to announce at MacWorld.

And even though Apple would receive disproportionate press (in relation to their marketshare) if they announced 10.5 stuff now, they would still be fighting over the noise generated by Vista. So it is better to discuss 10.5 a couple of months after Vista is on the shelves.

As for Apple Computer Inc. becoming Apple Inc., well, it's a sad day. It isn't sad because they dropped the word (because let's face it, most people just talked about "Apple" anyway and they are more of a consumer electronics company these days anyway). It is sad because Apple feels that they have to drop a part of their history.

Where exactly do you see a Core2Duo Mac mini? Apple Store still lists it as Core Duo, not Core 2 Duo

Fixed.

what's the point of all this? to insure that the current generation of humanity has absolutely NO life away from all their gadgetry and mind numbing entertainment addictions?

I feel that too. I guess I've gotten grown up and boring and enjoy more going for a walk in the forest than running my finger up and down a touch screen... which gives me a million dollar idea of a "trainer program" that could suit this device, pretty much like "Typing of the Dead" in its time, only this is about learning to please your partner!

"what's the point of all this? to insure that the current generation of humanity has absolutely NO life away from all their gadgetry and mind numbing entertainment addictions?"


welcome to the future sweetheart! all those not on board.... will be left behind!

next stop.... the colonization of the solar system!

"Welcome to the future sweetheart! All those not on board will be left behind!"

Next comes the ZPhone from McSoft. It runs a little warm in you hand..

Day late dollar short.

I don't think you know what this means.

Apple is the first to bring this type of product to market (in a mass fashion, at least)... so it's not "a day late."

And it will certainly be the first one to integrate iTunes purchases. It's the first I know of the allow HD transfer from your PC over 801.11... so it's not a dollar short.

This product looks nice. It could be even better, but it still looks really exciting today.

These kind of extenders have been on the market for years. In fact, just yesterday Netgear announced a 1080p extender that plays many formats, not just Apple's. So AppleTV is literally one day late. :-)

Of course only AppleTV will play videos bought from iTunes, so it will probably take over the market despite inferior specs.

"despite inferior specs"

sorry... i am laughing my ass off!!!!!!!! look... maybe its not all about SPECS!!!!!! hell... there are other mp3 players the have better "SPECS" than compariable iPods.... BUT.... which is TRULY the best?

HUMMMMMMM

now.... where's my appleTV....

@tryphcycle

Well it's limited to 720p.

Video formats supported: H.264 and protected H.264 (from iTunes Store): 640 by 480, 30 fps, LC version of Baseline Profile; 320 by 240, 30 fps, Baseline profile up to Level 1.3; 1280 by 720, 24 fps, Progressive Main Profile. MPEG-4: 640 by 480, 30 fps, Simple Profile

taken from http://www.apple.com/appletv/specs.html

So he does have a point.

BUT.... which is TRULY the best?

I don't know. Perhaps the one that suits your needs? The iPod is slickand seems quite usable, but it would be rather worthless to me, since my entire CD collection was ripped in OGG (and transcoding is out of question; quality matters to me). I'm not too keen in installing a third-party firmware, either.

Thus, it's rather a matter of personal opinion, just like that iPhone. It seems great, yet far too hip-gadget for me; I have a life beyond the Net. Still, some people will find a use...

Brand loyalty is scary, sometimes.

I hope not. I detest interfacing with machines without getting tactile feedback.

How about a very small and gentle electric shook :-)

a browser with no keyboard that's only EDGE plus wifi (i'm happy for the dude who's surrounded by wifi hotspots, but he clearly lives a rather sheltered life if he never gets out of range of one...) is not a decent browser. i get the feeling the finger interface is going to be great for music and general cellphone use but even worse than stylus input for actual typing. and using a browser on something with a stylus but no keyboard already irritates the hell out of me.