Huh, another article about Steve Jobs’ brilliance. He invented the GUI in 1984 and the digital era of publishing with iTunes just a few years ago, and they say he’s going to three-peat his previous two performances with the iPhone. I may as well publish it, after all, it’s 100% correct, and it’s a well-written piece at the Economist. Also, Boom! Another one. [via]
All Articles Tagged hype
There’s a rumor floating around that states Apple will have 3 million iPhones available on launch day. I’m not sure that I put stock in it, as 3 million iPhones sounds a lot like 1% of the entire US mobile phone market to me. It would be surprising if Apple had an iPhone for every single person Apple initially expected to want one.
But, I can always hope that I’m wrong and the rumor is true. I’ve got to get one, it may as well be on launch day. I’d like to think that an electronics company doesn’t need artificial shortages to build hype, for once. That’s the reason that there’s so much hype around the iPhone, anyway: so far, it looks like the iPhone is worth the hype on its own.
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.
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.
There’s a lengthy interview with Brian Lurie, the iPhone project lead at AT&T, at the Seattle Times website. It’s a good interview, confirming several things that I’ve been reading before that were previously unsubstantiated. For example, the 5-year exclusive we’ve heard about is confirmed by Mr. Lurie.
The interview is a bit short — Brian Lurie is obviously keeping mum about his favorite features, though he absolutely gushes about widgets and the browser, and has some good things to say about the price point and convergence devices. It doesn’t read too much like a marketing interview, so I’d say it’s definitely worth it. [via]
There’s a good summary of the carrier industry over at USA Today, which helps explain why the iPhone (and other phones with cult followings) are so important to the carriers: 73% of the U.S. households already have a mobile phone, and the carriers largely have to steal customers from each other. That’s why they try to lock you into a two year contract, and hit you with conract breakage fees when you leave. The iPhone is potentially doubly potent, as evidenced by the 5 year exclusive deal with AT&T — if you want the Apple iPhone, you will have to go to AT&T to get it. iPhone aficionados will likely be stuck on AT&T for a long time.
So, the carriers need the shiniest shiny toys to drag you away. The article also covers the old news that Verizon passed on the iPhone, unwilling to cave in to Apple’s demands. I’m glad to hear that deal didn’t go through — I’ve not been fond of Verizon in the past, and they have this nasty habit of locking up abilities on their phones that other carriers leave open. [via TreoCentral forums]
There’s a great article at Communities Dominate Brands that does a fair job of explaining why the iPhone will be a watershed moment in the mobile market. It’s a long article, but a good in-depth read as to how the iPhone is predicted to ‘frame the discussion.’ Other smartphones are going to be compared to the iPhone; it becomes their yardstick to measure against.
“What will change? Pretty much everything. And funnily enough, most of it is not actually caused by the iPhone, they only happen to occur so closely to the iPhone, that the iPhone will be given much of the credit.”
Tomi Ahonen (with a name like that he can only be Finnish) goes on to state what the iPhone will do to mobile handset design, mobile internet, mobile advertising, mobile media, Silicon Valley, the blogging communities, mobile messaging, and the inevitable roar of media come June when the device is actually available.
“But the level of the noise around mobile will double in June. Very many big guns will join the game. That is good. And it will be a change from an old Era, where handset makers like Nokia and Motorola ran the show with the major mobile operators (carriers). Now media giants will join in, as will major IT players and internet companies.”
