iPhone turns five today
Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 29th Jun 2012 12:06 UTC
Apple Exactly five years ago today, Apple officially released its entry into the mobile phone market, the iPhone. Immediately loved by customers the world over, ridiculed by the competition, and, in my book, not particularly innovative feature-wise, it changed the mobile phone industry virtually overnight. Love the iPhone or hate the iPhone, its industry-changing impact is evident.
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RE: Pure OS
by zima on Sat 30th Jun 2012 13:21 UTC in reply to "Pure OS"
zima
Member since:
2005-07-06

guaranteeing that a phone you buy WILL be upgradeable for the next few years

Not sure if "guaranteeing" is the right word... at least, not if you count from the more meaningful end of large-scale sales (and Apple actively promotes, pushes on consumers old models much longer; that's why 3GS is still mostly supported - it's still sold)

Also, WP7 seems to be pushed into budget role (it will probably fulfil it for quite some time) and most apps will certainly run on it ...mostly just not the native, high-performance games - for which budget (or older) phones wouldn't have the horsepower, anyway (just like such games often don't support earlier iPhones, even if iOS is up to date)

Reply Parent Score: 2

RE[2]: Pure OS
by wocowboy on Sun 1st Jul 2012 13:53 in reply to "RE: Pure OS"
wocowboy Member since:
2006-06-01

Yeah guaranteeing was not the best word, but the best one I could come up with at the time. The important part was that Apple still does sell the 3GS and has continued to pus out OS updates for it, with less and less features enabled, but those are more a function of the capabilities of the device for the most part. Nothing wrong with that, at least the OS updates have been available and users don't have to hack, root, or go to other extreme measures to get the latest software for it, unlike a lot of Android handsets that are locked to a particular version of the Android OS or locked to the carrier's version of the OS and cannot be updated at all, even tough they are perfectly capable of running later versions of Android.

Edited 2012-07-01 13:55 UTC

Reply Parent Score: 1

RE[3]: Pure OS
by zima on Mon 2nd Jul 2012 13:18 in reply to "RE[2]: Pure OS"
zima Member since:
2005-07-06

The important part was that Apple still does sell the 3GS and has continued to pus out OS updates for it

The important thing is that the latter comes from the former, and is unlikely to continue for very long beyond sales period (hence "guaranteeing [...] for the next few years" doesn't quite encompass it)

with less and less features enabled, but those are more a function of the capabilities of the device for the most part.

But also artificial segmentation. Things like an email VIP list or an offline reading list are certainly not limited by hardware - in fact, to remove them and test such variant Apple likely had to specifically exert some additional effort, to limit people.

users don't have to hack, root, or go to other extreme measures to get the latest software for it, unlike a lot of Android handsets

I suppose vast majority of users hardly care about that, more or less happy with how their handset works, and since they can install applications anyway (OTOH, with Apple OS - both mobile and desktop - devs seem to immediately jump on requiring the latest OS even if it hardly changes anything; so OS updates are pretty much mandatory, old versions quickly abandoned), and since Google updates many core apps separately from the OS.

Reply Parent Score: 2