All Articles Tagged iPhone

If there is one thing I cannot tolerate it’s a technology company playing with my emotions by promising one thing and delivering another. During the keynote, Steve Jobs clearly indicated the iPhone will not have 3G support built-in, meaning it will not poses UMTS or HSDPA technology. And yet John Markoff of the New York Times is claiming that Apple will provide a firmware upgrade that will unlock this hidden functionality.

Hint to Mr. Markoff 3G is a hardware feature, not software. Meaning that it’s going to take a hell of a lot more than a firmware upgrade to add 3G capability to iPhone if the underlying hardware that enables it is missing. Smacks John on forehead

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PC World’s Yardena Arar and Eric Dahl interviewed Apple VP Greg Joswiak, posing some of the same questions formulated by Mike Elgan of ComputerWorld.

I found this item particularly juicy, and disturbing …

The touchscreen technology worked, but not as perfectly as it did in the demo, at least in my brief experiment with the prototype. In particular, I had real problems with the software keyboard: My thumb-typing was consistently hitting keys adjacent to the ones I targeted. The iPhone has auto-correcting text entry technology that’s supposed to figure out what word you were trying to enter, but there’s a limit to its second-guessing skills after you’ve entered three or four incorrect characters in a row. Joswiak kept telling me to stop trying to backtrack and correct the typos (”Have faith,” he said repeatedly), but it just wasn’t working for me.

Renowned columnist Bob Cringely, an old favorite of mine, has written a great editorial about iPhone and Apple’s struggle to wrestle control of the product name away from Cisco’s clutches.

The iPhone is cool; the iPhone is neat; the iPhone is weird in a couple of ways. You know it isn’t even close to being the most expensive mobile phone on the market, for all the grousing I’ve read about the price. My Nokia N.93, which was technically not available yet in the U.S. until recently, but could be freely found in the United States of eBay, costs substantially more at around $800. What’s weird about the iPhone is, first, its name, since iPhone is a registered trademark of Cisco Systems, which sells a variety of products under that brand. Apple has been negotiating with Cisco about licensing the iPhone name, so they can hardly claim ignorance of the trademark, yet this week they announced the product without such a license and of course Cisco filed a lawsuit in response. As the trademark holder, Cisco had no choice, because to not file suit would have been to not defend the trademark, perhaps making it more vulnerable to poaching by Apple.

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More industry publications weigh in on iPhone, forecasting a less than rosey outlook. This from Mercury News…

“My perspective since I first learned about it is, `Wow, this is really cool.’ But `really cool’ doesn’t mean success right away,” said Neil Strother, an analyst who covers the mobile phone business for NPD Group, a research firm.

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And this year’s “things we say that come back to bite us right in the ass” award goes to Palm CEO Ed Colligan, who was interviewed back in November ‘06 during a Churchil Club event by the New York Time’s John Markoff about his thoughts on Apple’s secret development of a mobile phone device. Colligan proudly boasted…

“PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.”

Oh, Ed. I feel your pain. If only I hadn’t consumed that last Gin and tonic at the company Christmas party I might not have told my boss he looked sexy in that suit he was wearing. He still gives me nervous looks as we pass each other.

On a serious note, it remains to be seen just how “right” Apple may have gotten it. But Apple’s vision of mobile software certainly forces the moguls of mediocrity Triumvirate of telephony (RIM, Palm, and Nokia) to rethink product strategies and begin taking software development more seriously. That is especially true of Palm whose orphaned Operating System, the beleaguered PalmOS Garnet, has languished.

This is your wake up call, boys! Pick up the phone before the market hangs up on you.

The tech world’s greatest child custody battle continues; it’s Kramer vs. Kramer, or Apple vs. Cisco. Who will win, who will lose. Slowly I turn…Niagra Falls!

Read the story on MarketWatch.

AppleInsider has posted some really great shots (from behind the giant Bell glass display case) of the iPhone on display at MacWorld.

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Wall Street Journal columnist, Walt “Uncle Walty” Mossberg says iPhone beats out the BlackJack and Palm’s new Treo 750. High praise indeed coming from such an Apple shill unbiased product reviewer.

“…But if you’re in the market for a smart phone and can afford $499, you might want to wait until June for the Apple iPhone. The Apple entry is so full of promise that anyone buying a smart phone in 2007 should at least wait for the full reviews and a chance to try it out.”

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Carl Weinschenk from ITBusinessEdge calls the iPhone a “Milestone in Business Mobility”. But can Apple really lure corporate customers with what is clearly a consumer play? I don’t see that happening. iPhone is, by design, an entertainment device…not a business oriented mobile productivity tool like the Treo or Blackberry. It would be nice to see the IT world embrace such a lavish smartphone, but it’s going to take much more than style and software elegance to dislodge Blackberry.

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The National Post has published an interesting story about Apple’s sudden appearance in the smartphone market, how its presence will impact all major players, notably Palm and RIM. For better or worse iPhone certainly forces both companies to rethink their product strategies and take software more serious, which hasn’t been the case for RIM and Palm.

Still, that doesn’t mean iPhone will be an instant success…

“Apple’s success is not a fait accompli – Wireless is hard!” Mr. Abramsky wrote in a research note. “RIM’s experience, enterprise focus, and strengths (battery life, e-mail, keyboard, network, carrier distribution) may limit i Phone’s threat.” However, he acknowledges that iPhone’s thin and sleek design, features and already powerful iTunes and Apple brands could prove a hit, which could damage RIM’s consumer momentum.”

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