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Funniest post I've read since aught 5 ( http://www.osnews.com/permalink?71688 ).

heheh.. an Anonymous coward, but that wasn't me.

I typed my pedantic little comment because it reminded me of a "conflict" I had with a professor a while ago. I had written an article (on something extremely interesting, of course) in English and he said (himself Dutch) I should use "Firstly.. secondly.. thirdly.." instead of "First.. second.. third.." which I had written.
Now I happen to really hate the -ly version of these and told him it was just a matter of taste. He was not so good at that kind of dispute, also not so good at just googling it, and refused to let go of his high school creed that it has to be -ly.

I didn't change that part of the text and it did
negatively influence his judgment.

I'd say you were in the right from a grammatical standpoint too - IMHO, the "ly" suffix is for adverbs, not adjectives.

Amusingly enough it's usually the opposite transgression that I rant about (people who omit the "ly" suffix from adverbs - an action is performed quickLY, not "quick," damnit).

I guess "linguaphilia" and mild OCD aren't such a great combination after all (every time I post a reply, I have to restrain the urge to go on a tirade about how "Italic" is not a verb).

I was on the fence about geting an iPhone, given that I've only owned basic call & text cellphones. Turns out that my mobile carrier, Globe, has first dibs in the Philippines (may or may not be exclusive), almost definitely the 3G version.

So who is Google partnering with? Who's actually shipping Android on an actual phone?

My two cents: It isn't in any carrier's interest to create a truly open platform that anybody can leverage. That's why the mobile phone market has evolved the way it has, with carriers having a chokehold on all services. They want to be the ones to sell you the ringtones, carry the messaging traffic, sell you the applications, etc. If applications can use the data pipe to bypass the carrier's SMS messaging stack, for example, it means a huge loss of revenue for the carrier; instead, the carrier is relegated to charging for data bandwidth, which is a lower-tier service and one in which traditional wired ISPs make the bulk of their money (in other words, not as desirable). Consequently, based on the economics of the situation, I have to believe that partnerships between Google and carriers will be difficult to come by. Sure, they may use Android as a platform--but will they open it up completely? Call me skeptical. It just isn't in their interest to do so.

Don't get me wrong. I HOPE that most phones eventually use an open platform. It's just that I'm not so deluded as to think that carriers will forego economic realities in favor of handing all of us the keys to their kingdom. They are in business to make money, after all, and they're probably not going to do anything which jeopardizes their revenue stream. That said, there may be other revenue opportunities (eg. advertising, search, etc) which could replace existing opportunities; but, put yourself in their shoes: why would you RISK it, when you have guaranteed revenue from SMS, etc?

Edited 2008-05-29 22:00 UTC

HTC and they have really nice powerfull hardware.

Which carrier is selling the phone?

T-Mobile for example.

http://www.openhandsetalliance.com/oha_members.html

here are the members of the open handset alliance. t-mobile and sprint.. LG, HTC, Motorola.. plus a bunch more. it seems that android/google have some powerful players ready to support this.

Sadly, the only US carriers in the alliance are Sprint and T-Mobile. Neither really have great coverage, hence they are losing market share, and forced into competing in novel ways (like the open handset).

NTT DoCoMo is huge in Japan, IIRC.

It's really the US that gets the shaft as far as neat features, etc (as always). To bad (for my cellphone) that's where I live and work.

But the sun & the beach are nice. And the pay, for now. I 'll trade those for a neat cellphone any day.

Maybe once I learn Japanese... Supposedly hard to get accepted as a non-japanese in Japan. But I'm a computer geek. I'm used to not being accepted anyways. As long as I get paid...

(but no, I'm not really switching countries to switch carriers..). Maybe for effective mass transportation.

Don't complain yet. The US most certainly gets the shaft on features and cost. Multiply that by two, or three, and you'll see the shaft Australia gets.

Not to mention Canada. While one of the two major wireless carriers here (Rogers) is an AT&T partner, the iPhone is still not available "up north" - and many suspect that's because of the ridiculous rates that both Rogers and Telus charge for data transfer (you can get better rates in nearly all of Europe and Asia, and much of Africa & the Mid-East).

http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/2117/135/

Last time I personally checked, the "best" data transfer plan that Rogers offered was 100MB/month for $120/month.

From seeing all those videos of the fifty page iPhone bills from AT&T, the iPhone would gobble up a hundred megabytes in a week, never mind a month.

Oh yes. A neighbour of mine spends about half of the year in the US and bought an iPhone while he was done there. For "fun," he calculated what the iPhone would be costing him if he used it in Canada (based on his typical usage and data transfer rates up here): it came to around $600-700 per month.

Needless to say, he disables the "phone" part of his iPhone whenever he's back in Canada.

I have Sprint and it blows any other carrier I have ever used away. And their internet access is fast which will help on such a device.

Customer service is horrible though I'll give you that.

Personally, I'm putting a lot of hope in Verizons 'Any apps, any device' initiative (official Verizon statement: http://news.vzw.com/news/2007/11/pr2007-11-27.html ). I don't know why they did it (I think I read it was pressure from Google, maybe they wouldn't let them use Android otherwise? Doesn't make much sense since it's open source) but I'm hoping that they'll stick to the spirit of that agreement. Sprint uses a CDMA network so there should already be CDMA Android phones and I would buy one in a heartbeat if I could use it with Verizon.

I recently watched all the available video footage from the Linux Foundation's April 2008 collaboration summit. It was all pretty cool. HP, Intel, Dell, kernel devs, and many others all there to come up with ways to help each other... until it came to the phone panel session. The representatives of the (many) phone initiatives sat around and took pot shots at the others, claiming theirs was the best and that the others were crap. I don't think a one of them actually had a phone on the market.

Eventually a couple of them *will* have products built on them, and hopefully the others will fade into obscurity. The phone market smells too much like the Unix wars to me. Everyone talking about being "open", but no real cooperation is apparent. That session did not even seem like it was part of the same summit as the others.

Edited 2008-05-30 02:53 UTC

"""So who is Google partnering with?
Who's actually shipping Android on an actual phone?"""

NOBODY is shipping Android because it is not finished yet.

As for who's Google partnering with, well, just google for it, and you'll find plenty of information online. OK, I'll save you the effort: As for operators, there's China Mobile, NTT DoCoMo, Telefónica, T-Mobile, Telecom Italia, Sprint and KDDI... How about that? Very few of the largest are missing, and these add up to quite a large proportion of the worldwide mobile market. As for cellphone makers, there is Samsung, Motorola, LG and HTC; not bad, really, not bad at all.

Even bearing in mind their openness, think that the iPhone may be even worse for the operators: it is Apple inside and out, and there's not much room for operator identity integration. There are also leonine conditions imposed by Apple on what may be done and not done with the phone, and they pass around the hat to gather a sizeable proportion of the earnings.

Unfortunately for Android Verizon and AT&T have majority market share. Verizon replaces the OS/UI on every single phone they sell. So does AT&T Cingular with customized versions. I have a Sony Ericsson that was bought after market with the standard OS/UI. CIngular's version had features disabled and was unstable. So handset manufacturers can put Android on a phone but carriers don't have to release them with the same version or OS.



Operators all over the world are fighting to get iPhone exclusivity. I would think that means they see it as a competitive edge in their local markets.

Sounds like the mentality that SCO had, right before they went bankrupt.

But, I agree with you. My point is, they may go kicking and screaming, but eventually they will have to adjust to a new business model.

SCO never went bankrupt. They sold their OS division, changed their name to Tarrantella, Inc., worked hard on their remote desktop product, and IIRC Sun bought them for a pretty penny and everyone lived happily ever after. SCO was a good company.

I think you may have them confused with The SCO Group, AKA Caldera. Different company.

You probably already knew that, but I think it worth a reminder from time to time. SCO carried the Unix on x86 banner long before Linux and the *BSDs were born, and gracefully left the party when they recognized they were no longer needed.

Edit: There was a brief period in which they made fun of Linux, but their president later actually apologized for that, shortly before they rode off into the sunset. It's really too bad what has happened to their name.

Edited 2008-05-30 15:29 UTC

Apple set the bar by bringing this tech to the mass market.

MS's surface is too expensive (and limited) for most people and just about everyone else was researching this or not marketing it in a way to generate much publicity.

It took the iPhone to bring multi touch within the grasp of the general populous.

The iPhone included all the usual suspects, photos you could pinch, google maps and so on, and also allowed you to browse the internet with relative easy.

Apple didn't invent this nor did they add a great deal to it, what they did do is see a market for it and integrate it well into a product.

Somehow, I'm having a hard time reconciling those two statements. The iPhone is over $500 (US). Sorry, but only the well-heeled are plunking down that much money for the phone, not the "general populous".

Reconcile what exactly? The iPhone costs $399 and $499. Where did you get the over $500 from. In comparison, the MS Surface kiosk costs $20,000 and is impractical as a general purpose device especially a mobile phone.

Apple has sold 7-8 million iPhones to date. There sure are a lot of well-heeled people.

Not again. US is not the "world", just like US prices are prices that you pay in the US.

Not again. US is not the "world", just like US prices are prices that you pay in the US. "

In places like India for instance people have no problems spending $800 on Sony Ericssion P990s. It isn't uncommon to see people spend $400-$600 on phones.

The original poster used US $s so I assumed he was in the US. Given the dump the US $ has taken price conversions would make the iPhone in Euro more expensive than $500 in US $ terms.

Apple sells more phones in the US than are activated here which means people have been buying them here and jail breaking them to work outside the US. I have a south american friend that mentioned it is all the rage there.

Edited 2008-05-30 15:41 UTC

The depends on if you are looking at the world as a whole or the part of the world where the iPhone has launched. $500 is something the general populous in every country where the iPhone has launched can afford. Many may chose not to buy for any number of reasons, but there are only a very few people in those parts of the world who cannot raise $500 if it was really important to them. I'll admit that this won't stay universally true as the iPhone starts launching in more and poorer countries, but I think my point still stands.

So the iPhone does certainly bring it within the grasp of the general populous, it's now up to the populous to decide if they want to grasp it or not.

I won't be getting an iPhone because I think it costs more than I want to spend, not because I can't afford one.

So, Apple is merely good at marketing and publicity. The products aren't actually innovative.


If anything, it took the glow from the Apple reality distortion field. If you go to the link in my earlier post, you will see that several companies offered multi-touch devices for sale many years before the Iphone. It was just a matter of time before one of these companies would finally succeed. Apple has an advantage in that its fan base accepts almost everything that the company offers, good or bad.


Lots of phones/PDA-phones offer these features with excellent usability. The Iphone does not have the best usability compared to a lot of smart phones.


The Simon (1992) was "well-integrated" as the first completely touch-screen cellphone that was mass marketed. How was Apple unique in the way it marketed the Iphone and in the way it integrated multi-touch into the already well-established touch-screen phone?

Oh Geez, get over yourself. You could say the same about the wimp interface. It was around long before Apple brought it to the masses, but Apple is still around, where are the other guys.

Let's avoid the personal attacks and stick to the facts.



Actually, the WIMP interface was "brought" to the masses long before the Mac, i.e. the Xerox Star, the Three Rivers Perq and Visi-On. Apple was just the first company to market with Super-Bowl ads, etc., so they were much more successful.

Where are the other guys? That question has no bearing on the quality and innovation of a product. One could ask the same question of the many excellent software companies forced out of business by Microsoft. Indeed, Apple would probably be history if it weren't for a loan from Microsoft.

Most of those products failed because they didn't take out Super Bowl Ads???!! That's a very naive view to say the least.



Oh please! Another oversimplified view of reality. Sure the only reason Apple is successful today is because Microsoft loaned it money, Seriously!

Edited 2008-05-30 04:10 UTC

"...Super-Bowl ads, etc." -- Not just the Super-Bowl ads, but the huge marketing/advertising push that would include Super-Bowl ads.

The other companies had almost the same GUI years earlier (some arguably superior than the Mac), but they put a relatively minuscule amount of money and effort into marketing/advertising.

It is sort of naive for one to miss the "etc." qualifier.



Without the Microsoft $150 million and the colaboration with Microsoft, Apple might not exist today: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Apple#The_Microsoft_Deal

Edited 2008-05-30 05:06 UTC

Wrong. My statement was meant in shock at the very simple view that a superbowl ad or marketing would make a product successful.



Got any data on that. The Xerox Star failed because it was expensive and didn't perform well. Also Xerox was brain dead enough to try and sell it as a package with a print server and Laser printer and in sets of 2 and 3.

Apple's Lisa also failed around the same time with the same magic Apple marketing. How do you explain that?


The naivety here comes from thinking that the only way for a product to succeed is marketing. Try starting a company with that philosophy and see how that works out.




Keyword being "might". Apple may have failed even with that money if it weren't for its product line and new digital media hub strategy that Jobs brought back to the company along with the MS deal. In fact, until 2004 or so people were still predicting the death of Apple. The 1997 infusion from Microsoft didn't magically make Apple a $164 billion market cap company. Apple was trading at $7 in 2003, 6 years after the $150 mil deal. A company the size of Apple can burn through that cash in less than an year.


Your ideas and arguments are really ill conceived. I think I am done with this off topic discussion. Cheers.

Edited 2008-05-30 05:42 UTC

Your opinion but most people disagree.



Where are all those devices and who used them? How many did they sell? How good were those devices?



Name one that my 7 year old nephew could use or would want to use.



A lot of products have been touch screen before the iPhone. PDAs, treos, Apple Newton etc. All of them were a pain to use without a stylus. Not really touch if you need a pointed plastic piece to really use.

Edited 2008-05-30 03:50 UTC

No one seems to be able to create a list of Apple GUI innovations that is more than about four items.


Where are all the Apple Newtons? Who used them? How many did they sell?

Do such questions matter to innovation? Who is more important -- the inventor or the salesman? I say the inventor, because a product can sell itself without a salesman, but a product cannot exist without an inventor.

If you merely doubt the existence of these products, go here: http://www.billbuxton.com/multitouchOverview.html



An important question that is tough to answer with complete objectivity.



It looks like a 7-year-old might enjoy using some of the Multi-touch interfaces that appeared from 1994 to 1997. However, I am not sure how important it is for most of these products to be usable and to be enjoyed by 7-year-olds.


The Simon (1992) didn't need a stylus: http://cdecas.free.fr/computers/pocket/simon.php

Most of the multi-touch items in the first link above did not require a stylus.

No one? How many people have you asked?




Surely you can look that up on a thing called a search engine.



Really! One can easily say that Apple innovated the Multi-touch interface on a mobile phone.

There is a huge difference between inventing something and making it commercially viable. Unlike you ignorantly posit it has nothing to do with marketing.

Apple's Lisa and Newton failed with the same marketing.



I did and I don't see a mobile multi-touch device unit till 2006-2007. It is safe to assume that Synaptics and Apple were working in parallel so you can safely say that Apple innovated the iPhone.




You talked about usability of the iPhone. If a seven year old can use it I can say it is fairly useable. I write kernel/FW code for a living and have used most user interfaces available. I find Blackberries, Treos and Windows Mobile interfaces unintuitive and cumbersome.



Let's get this straight. I was talking about portable devices. Using a projector and camera in a PDA/Mobile phone seems stupid.

The Simon was overpriced, huge and impractical and therefore failed miserably. In todays dollars it would cost $1376.

Actually Apple and Synaptics have been working together. Apple used Synaptics for the scroll wheels on the iPods.

I don't see you making a list. I challenge you to see if you can make a list of more than four GUI items that originated from Apple.



You could say that, but it wouldn't be true if you said that Apple was the first to develop a multi-touch cell phone. That honor goes to Synaptics. They did it without Apple, prior to the Iphone.



Not exactly. It depends on whether or not one includes development in the definition of "inventing."

Regardless of one's definition, marketing doesn't really have anything to do with inventing nor innovation. It is possible that some marketing ape could contribute an actual innovation, but it rarely happens. Usually, the most that a marketing chimp will do to affect the product is maybe try to influence the style. "Design by committee" is often terrible.



No. The Onyx was developed without Apple, prior to the Iphone.



If one writes kernel code and knows little of usability, one might make such a conclusion.

However, usability is much more complex than such an oversimplified notion. You are referring only to the usability aspect of comprehension (intuitiveness), which is complicated in itself. Usability relies on many more factors that are interelated: speed, power, security/safety, physical ergonomics, technical resolution/clarity, graphic design, mapping/modeling etc.

Comprehension is not the "end-all." For example, the Sugar interface is probably great for a 7-year-old, but hideous for a businessman, "power user."

Furthermore, almost always, someone adept with a tiling window manager moves much faster within/between applications than someone using just a single-button, mouse-based GUI.




Whether the Simon was huge and/or impractical is debatable, given the relative size of cell phones in those early days.

Nevertheless, the Simon was the first, portable, fully-touch-screen cell phone. And it came out in 1992 -- 15 years before the Iphone.

Edited 2008-05-30 08:21 UTC

Making a statement is not a challenge.



Where can you buy a Synpatics phone? Which carrier supports it? What are the specs? Is it GSM or CDMA?

It is vaporware. A concept to show off a part they want to sell to companies that make the cell phones.





Eh?



What are you rambling about?



Onyx is not a real product it can't even make a phone call it is a concept to show case a touch sensing technology. It never passed FCC certification. It can't be sold. Ergo it is not a phone. So the iPhone is the first Multi-Touch phone. Period. End of Story.




I'll take this real slow. A 7 year old can use it and technically savvy person can use it. My mom ca use it. It is infinitely more useable than most smart phones.



Aparently it is another concept you can't really grasp. Everything you listed the iPhone does extremely well and better than most smartphones.



According to you. Many businesses are waiting for the 2.0 feature set. I know of many "power users" that are pestering thier IT departments to support the iPhone.



Where did that come from there is no logical flow to your comment?

I work very fast on any UI. CLI, GUI you name it.



The newton was out then. The iPhone is multi-touch and works unlike the Simon that was ridiculously expensive with not real infrastructure so fairly useless. The discussion here is about the first multi-touch phone and it is the iPhone.

I get it you don't like Apple or thier products. Just because you don't like some thing doesn't make it any less innovative.

Edited 2008-05-30 09:08 UTC

Don't know about your seven year old nephew, but MY seven year old nephew and niece have absolutely no trouble using my sisters Nokia S60 phone to take pics, play games and play music.

Oh he can use other phones just fine. However he goes absolutely giddy about the iPhone when I visit. I have never seen him do that for a blackberry or Treo.

The bottom line is the iPhone is very useable. I use it for work all the time.

My neices went giddy when around a "Tickle-Me_Elmo." That didn't make the Elmo doll usable cell phone nor mp3 player.

Apparently that Tickle-me Elmo is smarter than you are for bringing up that absurd counter argument. At least that toy speaks coherently.

The iPhone was released 11 months ago and has sold 7-8 million phone which is much higher than the iPod sold when it was launched. Ipod sales sky rocketed in 2004 or so.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Ipod_sales_2008_Q1.svg



This I agree with. I would see more of an impact from Android outside the US than inside. The Nokia N95 is unlocked in the US but hasn't gained much traction even though it is in the same price range as an iPhone.