Just to refute non-Iphone believers (haha!) like Richard Sprague who wrote:
"Without even mentioning that the same functionality has been available on PocketPC, Palm, Nokia, and Blackberry for years, I just have to wonder who will want one of these things (other than the religious faithful). People need this to be a phone, first and foremost. But with 5 hours of battery life? No keypad? "
There simply hasn't been a good phone on the market. If you flash back to THIS GREAT ARTICLE (when I fink the link, I'll post it), you'll recollect just how many hoops Jobs and Apple had to jump through to get the iPhone approved with a carrier. How many, no doubt, calls, meetings, and white-knuckled negotiations he had to do to get his invention into the marketplace. In many ways, iPhone is the 2nd coming o "Mac" altogether, too! Here's the insightful blurb form the article:
Apple engineers bought nearly a dozen server-sized radio-frequency simulators for millions of dollars apiece. Even Apple's experience designing screens for iPods didn't help the company design the iPhone screen, as Jobs discovered while toting a prototype in his pocket: To minimize scratching, the touchscreen needed to be made of glass, not hard plastic like on the iPod. One insider estimates that Apple spent roughly $150 million building the iPhone.
The iPhone cracked open the carrier-centric structure of the wireless industry and unlocked a host of benefits for consumers, developers, manufacturers — and potentially the carriers themselves.
Verizon and Sprint wouldn't take it, fortunately, At&T came along. But Apple even built special wireless testing towers to debug and test the cellular capacity of the iPhone. And that's just the thing, it's the first phone that offers user experience First and then cellular capacities second. All over phone manufacturers (From Black berry to Nokia to LG) simply released plastic buttons with one or two new features revolving around the wireless speeds, so the wireless companies always had the upperhand. Not so with Apple nor with the iPhone. Apple's interface (which is what counts from an "actually using the phone" point of view) by far IS the phone and the actual service stays a tertiary or secondary "supplement" to the experience. That entire relationship, with the software coming first, and the wireless carrier a far second or third, is revolutionary and a key development that makes the iPhone unique. Jobs had to do a lot of flips to get his foot in the cellular door, but he knew what he was doing and now it has completely set the trend and cutting-edge standard completely redefining our connotation of "cell phone" from some plastic gadget you flip open and speak into like a walkie-talkie with a few "add-ons" to full fledged portable operating system that by the way, has cellular capacity.
In reference to my previous post about iPhone goggling up electronic gadgets, it seems awesome monopoly spreads into other industries as well, namely Hollywood and the obvious, celluar companies:
To be sure, all the parties in the three industries involved are circling each other warily as they seek to protect their overlapping interests. But as their ambitions collide, rivals are hiring talent from disparate fields to navigate through a unsettling era.
Although the
NY Times article kind of pitched the fusion of the cellular, Apple OS, and hollywood industries as something like a rivalry, the idea of coallescing Apple's technology with the movie industry sounds like the "Web 2.0" how we perceive media. In many ways, if film continues it's trend, this will make film and technology much more tangible and interactive and dynamic (like Web 2.0).
Again, this article has totaly the wrong idea. It frames apple's Fairplay copyrighting as something that "cripples" the music and phone experience, when, in reality it does the complete oppsite. Fairplay works in unison with the music business. Jobs, being a savvy and "fair" businessman has looked out for the interests of muscians, developers, and anyone who sells on the iTunes store with the Fairplay copyright (sure, the copyright also encourages use of Apple-based prouducts, but hey, that's a good thing and only secondary to the main goal of preserving the copyrights of the music, film, shows, soundbites, and apps downloaded from the store. It's astonishing how someone could deem that as "crippling" when it plugs the leak to the music (and film) industry's problem of losing sales due to pirated music and film. Apple, again, is working in unison with and in the best interests of Hollywood, the music industry, and the consumer-technology experience.
Also verifying the industry-goggling of Apple is productivity guru and esteemed blogger, podcaster, programmer (a bit of everything),
Merlin Mann, who wrote:
…Apple might eat the lunches of about three different industries over the next couple years.
What I'm REALLY interested in, though, is Apple's movement on the web-based front. With
Sun crunching out some amazing technologies like jMaki and WADL and RESTful technologies and the Comet architectures all create that "Ajax" Web 2.0 feel, but it's more than just a "feel", with more instantaneous user-activity, web technologies are just a means to totally unlimited communicaiton. Apple's aware of that. In choosing to emphasize Objective-C for apple dev, Jobs remarked that Java's too slow and bulky. It IS! It runs in a virtual machine, making it safe, but Objective-C has all the best assets of Java's OOP, combined with the grace and stability of C. Anyways, apple's iTunes and iTunes store is obviously the standard for cutting edge "web-based" interfaces and it's brilliant marketing in addition to it's cutting-edge programming.
. So far this app has crashed multiple times and failed to download the book on my electronic bookshelf. With signing up for an annoying web-based account, the vexing crashes, and the books that never download, don't get the eReader app; it's just way too bug-infested, cumbersome, and a time-drain. Jott, and Todo, on the other hand, are excellent productivity apps.+
