In his latest column for MarketWatch, the tech world’s most beloved curmudgeon predicts iPhone will be undone by its GUI-based keyboard. Uh huh.
June 2007: Monthly Archive
AT&T has begun displaying publicly displaying iPhone banners announcing the device’s impending launch date.
Source: MacRumors
Repent, sinner! The end is near. Apocalypse is upon us! Well not quite, but all the half-joking speculation about customers camping out to buy an iPhone on June 29 may prove to be reality after all.
According to various sources Apple is sitting on a stockpile of just 3 million units ready for shipment.
Still, Apple will need to execute flawlessly. In units built and shipped, the iPhone launch will dwarf anything Apple has attempted. It plans to have 3 million iPhones ready for sale on June 29, two sources say. (Apple won’t comment.) And with its touch-screen keyboard, powerful battery-sapping processors, and a panoply of new applications, the iPhone is far more complex than the iPod. Glitches could lead to costly recalls and returns if buyers find the phone buggy or confusing.
Source: BusinessWeek
There’s an incredible SDK (that’s system development kit) article at Ars Technica, one of my favorite tech sites, about the new user interface metaphors, the work involved in making sure a new user interface is robust and polished to ensure that the use of this SDK provides high-quality applications. It’s by John Siracusa and it’s titled The Frontier.
The article even goes into detail concerning Jobs’ worry that an application could bring down a network, which has been pooh-poohed by various technical people:
I happen to know of one actual incident in which a bug in a certain first-party smart-phone application caused, essentially, a denial-of-service attack on an important data service—one that happened the same time every day for weeks before it was tracked down.
If you’re tweaked out about the iPhone SDK issue, go read it. Some programming knowledge might help.
The iPhone is not just a new platform, it’s an entirely new set of rules for interface design. That is what struck me the most once the actual iPhone demos started. There are no windows, no close/minimize/zoom widgets, no checkboxes, no radio buttons, no scroll bars, no nothing.
Seriously, I could quote this article all day. I wish it went into why an SDK is so important, but it doesn’t, so I’ll follow up where it left off.
“Of course we’re creating an artificial shortage of iPhones. Wouldn’t you?” As if all of the pre-launch hype isn’t enough, I’m facing the prospect of not being able to get the device which is, literally, my freakin job.
Someone outside of the Apple / AT&T fold got their hands on an iPhone, and thought it was great.
There have been rumors that the iPhone requires contracts, which contradicts rumors previously posted here. The recent iPhone ads said a 2 year contract was required for use. Well, there’s now a 4th ad, and when Apple posted it, they removed the ‘2 year contract’ stuff from all the ads. I’m not sure their plans are set in stone yet, but I do hope for prepaid plans. It also looks like the iPhone might do Adobe’s Flash.
In an article at Daring Fireball, John Gruber discusses the possibility of positioning without a GPS chip on the iPhone. The long and short of it is that one can determine a general location by which cell tower it’s connected to; the process is called GSM localization.
Gruber wrote in a previous article discussing the third iPhone ad:
“The Maps app somehow knows where we are: my guess is that it’s like the Mac OS X Weather widget, with a preference setting for a default zip code. (Keep dreaming if you think Apple has secretly added GPS behind the FCC’s back.)”
He’s absolutely right about GPS and the FCC — Apple would have to re-certify the device via the FCC if they wanted to add GPS functionality to the iPhone, and we would find out about that when the FCC published their results.
My hope is that Apple made the Google Maps app GPS-capable, so I could use my bluetooth GPS device for mapping when I traveled. I don’t have it with me unless I’m in the car, though. So if the GSM localization rumor is true, well that’s just an added bonus.
Robb Dunewood over at RIMarkable poses the question..
Before I became a die-hard BlackBerry user I was a die-hard Windows Mobile (Pocket PC at the time) user. I couldn’t imagine that I would ever be interested in a device like the BlackBerry, yet, RIMarkable is about to enter into its third year of existence. Truth be told, I will more than likely get an iPhone shortly after it comes out but it will be in addition to my BlackBerry. If I remember correctly, however, my first BlackBerry was in addition to my Windows Mobile device.
And so it begins. Apple’s first rival rears is ugly head. Well, not ugly. Just not as well designed or well implemented. This is HTC’s answer to iPhone and its gesture-based navigation. Dubbed the “Touch” (cute), this device offers an ingenious rotating UI layered on top of Windows Mobile.
What bothers me about this device isn’t so much that it’s a blatant ripoff of iPhone, and even marketing panache ala Apple. No, I don’t like the fact it takes something good; namely HTC’s custom UI, and layers it over something that wasn’t designed to operate like the iPhone - Windows Mobile. Like lipstick on a pig, this device fails to even remotely mimic the iPhone user experience.
That said, I give HTC a B+ for its effort.
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