Earlier this month, TiPb threw it’s hat in the ring of next generation handset speculation by predicting Apple would announce an iPhone HD in 2009. It just made sense to us, and apparently it’s beginning to make sense to others as well.
What happened? New York Times writer John Markoff dropped a rumor bomb:
The [unnamed search engine] company spotted Web visits from an unannounced Apple product with a display somewhere between an iPhone and a MacBook. Is it the iPhone 3.0 or the NetMac 1.0?
Jesus Diaz over at Gizmodo seems to be thinking what we’re thinking as well:
here in Gizmodo we are thinking about an iPhone HD with an updated 800 x 480 pixel display, probably coming in 2009.
So, is this just another wunderkind spoofing his or her web browser for lulz and chaos? Or is Steve Jobs already carrying around the prototype iPhone HD in his pocket, practicing the Keynote Boom! for WWDC 2009?
During Tuesday’s “Spotlight on Notebooks” Keynote, Steve Jobs wasn’t the only jean-and-dark-shirt uniformed Apple exec on stage. COO Time Cook took an unusual turn, discussing Mac business. SVP of Design, Jonathan Ive, an even more unusual presence in front of the audience, introduced the new “brick” unibody concept. And Marketing VP Phil Schiller — who’s no stranger to Keynotes — took part in the Q&A at the end.
It wasn’t all Steve, all the time.
Because of this, Gizmodo’s Jesus Diaz says Steve may be thinking of leaving in the near future, to live out his days on the beach, content that he’s shown investors and customers that Team Apple will Boom! along quite nicely without him, much as Microsoft is… er… doing without Gates in the daily driver’s seat:
Steve Jobs is leaving Apple. Not tomorrow, but probably very soon. That’s why he started to say good bye today, doing something more important than just presenting new MacBooks, MacBook Pros, and an updated MacBook Air. Today’s event was a play in which he clearly told everyone that the company is more than himself. Since the very first minute, when he immediately sat down to let Tim Cook talk, he was saying: “Hey, look, Apple is more than Steve. These are The Guys, the Goodfellas, the A-Team. They share the same vision I have. And they are going to push the company forward when I change my office chair for a hammock and caipirinhas on my private beach in Hawaii”.
Daring Fireball’s John Gruber, however, says Steve isn’t going anywhere. He points out that Jobs has shared the stage before, often letting adepts take the more highly specialized presentations, like introducing Leopard at WWDC. Gruber says:
But so long as he’s healthy, working at Apple is exactly the thing Jobs wants to do. He’s consumed by his work, and I think it’s only in the last two or three years that Apple has gotten to the point where Jobs feels he has a decent set of crayons at his disposal. In Jobs’s mind, the iPhone is only the beginning of what a truly flourishing Apple can produce. Why would he leave now? “A hammock and caipirinhas on a private beach” would be living hell for Steve Jobs.
We’re with Gruber on this one. While Diaz is saying what many of us were likely thinking during the show, Jobs doesn’t strike us as the casual CEO. His investment in Apple is lifelong. He’s not Woz, he’s the Wizard, and they’ll have to pry his hand off Apple’s perfectly balanced, aluminum and gloss black steering wheel if that’s ever going to change.
When Gizmodo honcho Brian Lam found out via Twitter that one of his readers was experiencing a brutal 8-hour iPhone sync, he did what any EiC worth his postings would do: secured time-lapse video! To put 8 painful hours fully into perspective:
That’s a full night of sleep. That’s a full day of high school. That’s longer than it takes to fly cross country, or drive from SF to Los Angeles. After seeing this video, I stopped complaining and tried to figure out what caused Brandon’s problem with him.
Heck, it’s a wait in an launch day Apple Store line! They tried syncing via a MacBook Air and an iMac, and even switched out cables, but the 74 App sync just wouldn’t — indeed couldn’t! — be tamed.
Atypical? For certain. Incredible? Pretty much. If it were us? We’d probably nuke the thing, bury it upside down, cover it in concrete, and salt the earth — then politely ask Steve Jobs to start over…
Luckily, my longest sync has probably never topped 5 minutes. What about you? What’s your longest sync been to date?
Last week Apple and Infineon were getting all the heat for shoddy 3G performance. Now AT&T is getting its share of the blame with a dizzying array of combinations. First it was Wired’s fairly damning survey and the Swedish antenna tests that pointed further fingers at the network, and now Gizmodo head-honcho Brian Lam has had the chance to chat with AT&T CTO John Donovan:
I asked Donovan if caution was the overriding strategy behind waiting to match Sprint’s initial 3G rollout, he replied, “I’d like to say we’re deliberate. ” He added that initially meeting the voice quality and data rates of Sprint’s 3G network would have been both technically and financially impossible, despite the customer benefit. (One only needs to look at Sprint’s financial weakness now to appreciate the wisdom of his point.) He also pointed out that by waiting, they got to leapfrog the limitations of Sprint’s EVDO networks, referring to the extended data rates their network will eventually run at, at a better value. “The most astute thing you can do is be as late as possible and as fast as possible. Because it’s going to cost you more if you do it too early, and if you do it too late, you don’t get the features you want.”
Well bully for AT&T, but where exactly does that leave frustrated customers with dodgy 3G reception? According to Donovan, they have a multipart plan to make sure AT&T really, truly, eventually delivers on the “more bars in more places” promise.
Lam likes having them on the record, so they can be held accountable. We think customers would prefer having them simply get the job done, so that dead zones, dropped calls, downgraded connections, and basically everything else that’s currently broken about AT&T’s 3G network is fixed and fast.
Seems like Gizmodo’s Jesus Diaz has just put Apple’s new MobileMe push Email, Contacts, and Calendars service through it’s iPhone paces and their verdict?
BlackBerry is dead, dead, dead. Dead.
And this from a self-confessed former Crackberrian, no less, using a Spanish SIM, on a UK Network, over EDGE! Along with the better, faster, and more powerful OS, Diaz credits the flawless App Store, media, and new enterprise and consumer features as making the Blackberry look “like a brick”.
Yowzer, they say there’s no such thing as bad press but… Yowzer…
As to MobileMe itself?
Not a single glitch—the thing just worked almost instantly. Knowing that Apple is using Sun Java Messaging Servers, probably paired with Synchronica or Consilient’s over-the-air synchronization modules, I’m not surprised. It feels like they have put together a rock-solid operation.
[T]here is one thing that’s for sure: The new iPhone has Global Positioning System (GPS) built into it, thanks to legal requirements put in place by the FCC.
The GigaOmster further says that new-to-the-space-space Broadcom has nailed the contract, which is great for them but panic-inducing for the stand-alone GPS market. (We know Google sees positively HUGE maps usage from the GPS-less iPhone already, so that makes the kind of sense that does.)
No thanks. Don’t need it. I’m fine with the current location technology. It works for walking and that’s all I need it for.
Lam’s reasons? Current cell and WiFi location services are much quicker than GPS, they better suit walking and the iPhone is less useful while driving anyway, GPS kills battery life dead, and GPS chips would significantly fatten up the iPhone.
Personally, both 3G and GPS are still bleeding edge tech when it comes to realistic day-to-day usage in everywhere, USA when not hooked up to a generator, so while nice to have as an option, and fetishized by the tech media and the blogphere commentorati, neither will have the impact on my life that the 2.0 software update likely will. It just ain’t mainstream enough for me to be melodramatic about yet.
