June 2008: Monthly Archive

Steve Jobs announced Apple would sell 10 million iPhones in 2008. Up until June, given waning sales, 3G expectations, and large-scale unavailability from Apple and carriers alike, it didn’t look possible.

Enter $199. Jobs said it. I said it. Casey said it. Pretty much everyone and their blog said it. Now the analysts are saying it to:

Sales BOOM!

In total [RBC's Mike Abramsky] expects Apple to sell 14 million iPhones by the end of the year [...] For 2009 though Abramsky is only predicting sales of 24 million, a drastic difference from Piper Jaffray estimates of 45 million. Observes note however that Piper is factoring in unannounced sibling iPhones, which could make the device more affordable for the average person.

They’re talking iPod scale numbers now, folks.

What do you think? Can Apple do with the iPhone what they did with the iPod?

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Here at TiPB we’ve covered the heck out of the Flash on the iPhone debacle. Will it, won’t it, can it, should it, omgvidz!1 and privacy nightmares. But it just won’t stop. Current case in point, Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen was once again let near a live mic:

We have a version [of (Mobile?) Flash] that’s working on the emulation. This is still on the computer and you know, we have to continue to move it from a test environment onto the device and continue to make it work. So we are pleased with the internal progress that we’ve made to date.

Great. Only Flash for OS X was never fully optimized by Adobe, making it a resource hog and increasing the bugginess of browsers (any guesses on how it will run on the iPhone?). Also, Apple hasn’t approached Adobe to do a MobileSafari plugin anyway, (though iPhone 2.0 seems to include a YouTube plugin…), and the iPhone SDK end user license still seems to disallow something like Flash (or Java) from running their own code. So, this means precisely what, exactly?

For those hoping to get Flex apps up on the iPhone, Apple already has an SDK and won’t allow a “competitive” dev environment to murky up their Cocoa Touch and SproutCore plans. From a dev point of view, sure it may limit apps from people already familiar with Flex, the same way it limits those already familiar with Java. While this may sacrifice the ability to leverage code from other platforms, most SDK demos rave about how fast porting has been, and really keen devs will just pick up the aforementioned Cocoa Touch environment and run with it anyway.

For those who just want them their vidz, Apple seems to be banking on YouTube via H.264 app and plugin being enough to stop a general revolt while they establish their “next big thing” mobile platform without Adobe’s tech being invited to the party. Will that be enough? Depends on how much people want everything beyond YouTube, from Hulu to pr0n. (And the obnoxious banner adds that will inevitably come with it).

Apple and Adobe need each other but also don’t seem to have the best of relationships. They’re both gambling big time, with huge stakes. Adobe has a more flexible hand (no pun intended) but Apple has a poker face that makes a mannequin look overly emotive.

My guess? No Flash for the iPhone remains the status quo. What’s yours?

UPDATE:

Iconfactory and Twitteriffic luminary Craig Hockenberry posts the funniest Flash on iPhone tweet ever on Twitter:

Hoping that Adobe will use a flash:// URL scheme. Would make it very easy to avoid on both the iPhone AND desktop.

Meanwhile, Adobe responds on their blog.

UPDATE 2:

Kontra ponders if this is all really a fight over the future of user interfaces, with Adobe trying to set their own cross-device conventions.

And Gruber points out even Apple’s own Quicktime content doesn’t run in-line in Mobile Safari, but launches a [Quicktime X?] player.

Which raises an interesting point: How would running video be handled in MobileSafari anyway? If you tried to swipe, scroll, pinch zoom, double-tap, etc., wouldn’t it create enormous resource demands on what’s still a small, mobile chipset? And if they lock the multi-touch down anytime Flash content (including ads) pop up, it makes the browser otherwise useless. Seems this would almost guarantee the need for an external player. (Or do the video game demos show that it could handle this well enough?)

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Woke up this morning and as per my usual modus operandi, checked mail on my iPhone and then went to read some feeds. That’s when it happened, mobile.mac.com (the interceptive RSS reading feature on MobileSafari) came back with a server error.

Seems to be working for me again, but reports have since sprung up of others having trouble with web-bound services of .Mac (though email protocols seems fine).

Server problems round Infinite Loop way? Transitions to MobileMe hitting some speed bumps? Karmic revenge for us knocking the RIM NOC again?

My guess is the road to MobileMe will be a wild ride, server side…

So you might have heard that the iPhone 3G was going to retail for $199 from AT&T. I’ve already covered how it isn’t technically $199 for current iPhone users. And you heard Rene tell you that $199 is less than the notorious price DROP of the iPhone. Well TiPb has been wondering how Apple settled on dropping the price so dramatically.

And we settled on a story, kind of—more like a collection of reasons. We’ve analyzed the outcome back and forth, from reverse and from the beginning. And we think we have come to a conclusion (or at the very least, a conspiracy theory). In a purely speculative story, I’ll give you my opinion on how we reached $199.

Read on for Apple’s Path to $199

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Hot on the heels of O2 in the UK offering FREE iPhones, and T-Mobile in Germany offering ONE Euro-buck iPhones, AT&T waddles up to the plate to remind these upstart old-worlders how a carrier is supposed to behave:

The company is treating the iPhone 3G pretty much just like any other phone in that people who are ineligible for upgrades have to pay the full, unsubsidized price for the phone. [...] AT&T hasn’t specified what the unsubsidized price is.

Based on European conversions, however, let’s expect that to push $700+

How do you know if you’re eligible? AT&T continues to rock it old-school with nigh-impenetrable explanations.

UPDATE:

Anthony sent us in a note about his conversation with an AT&T rep who confirmed/added the following: Eligible upgrades get you the sweetheart deal within your existing contract, if not you may get the price, but with contract extension.

Hey AT&T, murky much? How about just posting a nice, clear, concise breakdown of the process per subscriber situation? Not Telco enough?

Check out the read link for the deets.

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Boo! One of the most popular things to do with a 3G smartphone is to “tether” it, which is to attach it to your laptop and use it as a modem so you can get online anywhere your phone has service. Windows Mobile and Treos have multiple options for doing this — some even via some sneaky software that works in a kind of “proxy mode” so you can avoid paying the extra costs associated with a full-on “Phone as Modem” plan (which usually runs in the neighborhood of $50 a month). Sadly, AT&T has let the official word out — you won’t be able to do this with the iPhone 3G:

However according to AT&T spokesman, Mark A. Siegel, who spoke with iPhone Atlas earlier this week, AT&T will not be supporting a PAM plan for the iPhone 3G. The only available data plan for the iPhone will be the new $30 consumer unlimited data and visual voice mail plan and the $45 business data plan. The latter is charged when a person makes an enterprise type connection to Exchange or a Blackberry server for email or messaging. — [iPhone Atlas]

Of course, this has already been done for Jailbroken phones and we hope it will be done again — just don’t expect to be able to purchase something like this from the App Store when it rolls out.

Sure, O2 in the UK may be giving them away for free, but why quibble over a Euro-buck? That’s what T-Mobile Germany is counting on as they announced that Apple’s next generation iPhone 3G could be had for as little as €1 with a €69 a month contract. Want a 16GB model? Starts at €19.95 on a €89 monthly contract.

If you prefer more up front, less down the road, you can also pay your €169.5/€249.95 at the door and walk away with a tiny €29 contract.

Now why can’t AT&T — and closer to (my) home Rogers — learn from the Europeans?!?

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If the next great future of computing in the Cloud, as many pundits — not to mention Google — think, then the next great race is delivering that future via Rich Internet Applications. Right now, there are two major ways of doing this. The first involves using a proprietary, locked in technology (admittedly with increasing “openness”) like Adobe’s Air/Flex/Flash trifecta, or Microsoft’s .Net/Silverlight double team. The second is with truly open standards such as HTML, CSS, and AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript and XML) like Google, Yahoo, and many others use.

With the iPhone Apple has squarely planted itself in the second category. They even promoted them as a pseudo-SDK for a time! (And maybe gave up too soon?)

Flash-free, Silverlight-less, but full of interactivity and cloud-based applications, Apple just unleashed .Mac upgrade MobileMe complete with “desktop class” mail, calendar, contacts, and photo gallery web apps.

And according to this year’s WWDC buzz, they used SproutCore’s Javascript frameworks to do it? Why?

SproutCore not only makes it easy to build real applications for the web using menus, toolbars, drag and drop support, and foreign language localization, but it also provides a full Model View Controller application stack like Rails (and Cocoa), with bindings, key value observing, and view controls. It also exposes the latent features of JavaScript, including late binding, closures, and lambda functions. Developers will also appreciate tools for code documentation generation, fixtures, and unit testing. A key component of its clean MVC philosophy that roots SproutCore into Cocoa goodness is bindings, which allows developers to write JavaScript that automatically runs any time a property value changes. With bindings, very complex applications with highly consistent behavior can be created with very little “glue” code.

Check out the read link for more on Apple’s use of SproutCore, and how it might just be part of a growing trend for open standards-based web interactivity.

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Phone Different Week in Review June 16, 2008

Every week I will be bringing you what I think are the week’s biggest stories and articles. Last week was, uh, more than a little crazy. Read on for the news you saw and more than a few pieces that may have blown by you in the flurry of WWDC coverage.

Here we go!

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Are you tired of hearing about whether or not we’ll get actual, real, turn-by-turn GPS on the iPhone yet? You shouldn’t be, because it’s a killer feature that a lot of other smartphone platforms are justifiably proud of and the iPhone needs to get it, Apple’s crazy rules be damned. At least, that’s what we tell ourselves when we cover all this TomTom news, from “It’s coming to iPhone” to “It’s not coming.”

The latest? Despite what you may have heard (ahem), TomTom is working on a client and has one in-house that works “pretty well” according to MacGeneration (via AppleInsider). So says TomTom press chief Yann Lafargue, who adds that as for whether or not the darn thing will ever ship, TomTom can’t really say.

We know that Apple’s SDK agreement prohibits it (probably so Apple can’t get sued when you follow your GPS directions into a lake), but we’re willing to sign away our firstborn rights to sue for this, okay Apple? Can’t you guys make nice?