Apple may see royalties from Cingular subscriber growth - Page 2

I disagree totally. The US companies may need to get bigger and bigger - but merging within the US only builds monopoly power, which is bad for many reasons. We need several options for competition to work effectively otherwise it all comes down to regulatory control which does not have the same pressures to improve.

If a telcos say they have to merge to grow - why not merge with a European Telco? or an Asian Telco? Telstra (in Australia) is a controlled monopoly - I'd rather that Telstra sold off 50% of its business to a big US competitor, AND used the money earned from that to buy a smaller US competitor (for example).

All that said - sure AT&T is getting back to its original size - but do you still have multiple options available to you in any given market? The key to competition is not needing to use AT&T at all if you don't want to.

Well, if they bring back Bell Labs* it's a plus for the US. Do we even have any labs like that anymore?

Vinea

* In its past glory. Bell Labs is still around but IMHO a pale shadow of itself after Lucent. Heck, Xerox PARC is still PHYSICALLY around.

It's very difficult for a US company to merge with a European company. Europe is very insular. Many countries will do anything they can to prevent that. Some countries, particularly France, and Italy will force their own companies to merge to prevent even other European companies from buying them. The French call it creating a National Champion. So, if a European company wants to buy an American firm, that would be ok with them. But when an American firm wants to buy an European firm, it's not.

This isn't always true, or course, but it's happened numerous times in the past 15 years or so.

Mercedes "merged" with Chrysler, but I don't think it would have been as easy if Chrysler wanted to take Mercedes over. France forced two French drug companies to merge, despite the fact that it was a bad business deal, rather than having either one taken over by a German company. Volkswagen is "protected" by the German government from being taken over. This is true in many places.

Telecommunications is an area that they protect very strongly.

Many European companies are being propped up with illegal subsidies that the EU doesn't even allow! But, it's done anyway.

American companies find it hard to compete, much less buy a majority stake, as European companies do here. Same thing is true for Japan, S Korea, China, etc.

It's a one way deal.

I think IBM's is about it. PARC still exists, but as Zerox ain't what it used to be, neither is PARC.

Yes Palm has API's I'm not arguing that. I'm saying iPhone uses Cocoa which is a higher development platform.

As evidenced Palm OS is up for license but no one wants it and Palm itself is using Windows Mobile.


The interface is everything. That's the starting point from how all software will function. That is what made the GUI such an important development.

Multi-touch introduces new way simplify the use of complex actions. Instead of having to deal with proxy controls that manipulate software. You actually touch the software and controls themselves.



Yes but their functionality and ease of use are not much like that of their desktop equivalents. From what we've seen iPhone apps are much like their desktop equivalents. The look, feel, and operation of Safari on iPhone was pretty much exactly like Safari for Mac. Mail for iPhone appeared to have 90% of the functionality of Mail on the Mac. Google Earth on the iPhone was exactly like Google Earth for the desktop. This functionality comes directly from OS X and the iPhones interface.


Its likely Apple wants to implement a discipline of strict control of iPhone app development, to ensure that apps make the most efficient and easy use of the devices size and multi-touch capability. A free for all of app development would not maintain such a strict control.


That is true we do not know how far Apple will open the iPhone or what they will allow third parties to develop. But that is not my point. My point is that the technology in the iPhone is potentially able to do all of those things. Whether Apple will allow the iPhone to do them is another issue.

Apple could allow a stylus pad to be attached to the iPhone and handwriting through Ink Well. The technology is there.

AT&T was not as bad as you guys are making it out to be, Momma Bell was a regulated monopoly. The Bell System was limited to 12% profit. All its advances were made available outside the company. The semiconductor invention was a profit to the company in that it was integrated into equipment, reducing cost and lowering rates. The transistor was developed in Bell Labs. In 1953, five years after it was developed, the transistor was licensed to Akio Morita for $25,000, who began to sell transistor radios two years later. In 1957, he changed the company name to Sony.

UNIX was developed in Bell Labs and open source. The Bell System was forbidden to enter the computer industry. They posed no threat to emerging companies such as Microsoft, Apple, and Intel.

On Feb 27th, 1975, there was a fire at the E13th St (2nd Ave) NY Tel switch center. All telephone equipment was destroyed. 300 city blocks were without any phone service. In an era before cell phones and only rudimentary telecom satellites like Telstar (another Bell Labs invention), estimates were that service would not be restored for at least a year.

A command center was set up in a store on E14th St. Western electric began to ship equipment the next morning. Two crews of 2000 each worked 12 hour shifts. The 6 hospitals and the fire and police stations got service in 24 hours. Total service was restored in 22 days.

Maybe so, but it's also a lot more overhead. It's also questionable as to what advantage it would have for something such as this. If Apple came out with an Origami-like product, it would be different.


No doubt that Palm made many mistakes over the years, but so has Apple. The world is still Windows, even Apple is making it easy to run. They realize it as well as Palm does. BVut if Apple came out with a Windows computer, it could kill the company because of the speculation.


The interfact is just one part of the whole. The hardware is at least as important. So far, we don't know much about what it can do, other than the phone demo's.


The screens on these tiny devices are anything but complex. That's been their problem. Would you want to use a 480 x 320 screen on your computer, multi-touch or not? I sure as hell wouldn't.

I really have no idea what you're talking about when you say proxy controls. How is multi-touch simpler to the software than using a stylus? If anything, it's more complex, and has an additional layer of control and interpretation that has to be dealt with. You don't touch the software any more than you do with a stylus. But, now you can't make those very fine distinctions between small points on importance. The software must be written to be so simple on the screen that much sophistication might be lost.

If you type a short paragraph, and notice an error only when reading it back, how do you correct it? With the stylus, I touch behind the letter make a short sweep leftward, and just write the letter on the screen. How will that work here where the letters are so small that you can't select them with your finger? Are you going to have to move up letter by letter and line by line with a curser until you hit that letter?

It looks as though it might make simple actions complex.

What about my drawing programs? how do they do that?


If you can use an app with just the mouse, it should work fine here. But what about more complex apps?


Yes, that's obvious. That's what I don't like about Jobs. He wants to control everything. This is one area where MS is better. You don't see them controlling the apps on their phone OS's.

He also gives flimsy excuses for it. He wants the control, and possibly a royalty as well. But, he uses the excuse that these apps might bring the phone network down. That's a lot of cr*p!. I've never heard of a phone app bringing any cell network down. If that ever happened, the cell companies would prevent apps from running. They wouldn't wait for Jobs to come save them.

It's up to the market to decide which apps make the best use of the phones API's, and IP. We might love apps that Jobs decides aren't suitable, but we'll never know.


Until we know how open this phone is, and Jobs was circumspect about that, we can't decide how good a "computer" it will be. We consider computers to be able to run whatever anyone makes. If it is too limited, then it isn't a computer, it is an appliance, with with an embedded cpu that does just what the manufacturer builts in.

We were told that it only accepts finger input. No stylus at all.

I wasn't aware that once you stop paying for your phone contract, the iPhone stops working as an iPod. Is that the case? You can't use it as an iPod and might as well chuck it?

I would imagine that you could use it for everything other than for the phone and internet functions. Though it's possible that the WiFi might be tied to that as well.

Proxy controls are having to move and click a mouse that represents a pointer. The pointer is used to touch on screen buttons, sliders, and rubber bands. Multi-touch goes around this to allow your finger to directly touch and manipulate the buttons, sliders, or rubber bands.

On the Blackberry and Motorola Q their is a scroll/click wheel that compliments this function.


Apple is pretty imaginative they may come up with something. Its possible you can touch a misspelled work in a paragraph. The word is highlighted and enlarged to ensure it is the word you intend, which will allow you to retype the word or move on to another. But certainly I don't know we will have to wait and see.


That is what I was saying earlier is that multi-touch could make using more complex apps easier. Its possible it just takes imagination.


Yes that does have its pluses and minuses. So far his strategy has had a successful stewardship. I would cite Origami as an example of the weakness of MS strategy. No one seemed to question the purpose and real world usability of desktop apps on a 4" screen. Which is partially why the strategy has not worked.


Yeah the bad that goes along with the good. But its possible some new information may come to light that helps these statements make more sense.


No stylus on the iPhone screen itself. Which I think is fine as the QWERTY keyboard has proven far more popular than the stylus. But he did not definitively say there would be no third party add on of stylus input.


I agree. I'm only saying there is a great deal of potential.

Don't the m2m part of most plans stipulate that the other mobile must be from the same carrier?

That is the point of mobile to mobile and how works for every carrier.

Most of the phones and PDAs currently available have about the power of a personal computer of maybe ten years ago. Apple isn't saying what they are using, but I don't think they are using anything siginificantly different. The graphics and user input will certainly be smoother, but I don't think that alone necessarily makes it cross over into what is considered a computer.

The fact that Apple seems to be saying that they will excercise some amount of control over what software goes onto a user's phone in at least one way makes it more like a mobile WebTV console.

Are you sure? I don't think that makes sense. For any calls after 9pm, I already get unlimited minutes regardless of who calls me or who I call, so how would free mobile to mobile make any difference if I can't use them during the day and the unlimited minutes in the evening are already covered?

From what I understood Wally was saying calls made between 9am and 9pm to carriers outside of your own would be charged to your anytime minutes not your mobile to mobile. I'm saying yes that's how it works.

I'm not sure how unlimited minutes came into the discussion.

He wasn't clear as to whether the other person was of the same carrier or not, that's why I asked.

Here's the quote from the cingular term and conditions. Sometimes its good to read these. So as I read this Cingular's isn't even nation wide for m2m, just within your calling area.

I've always understood that any calls I make to another T-Mobile customer with my phone are free for me. I've never thought that I can call someone with any other carrier (like my fiancee' with her Verizon phone) and get a free call.

If you dropped Cingular, I would say the internet would continue to function through wifi, as it does when using Cingular. Hopefully we'll see some ways of changing providers before long, too.


No, he didn't say definitively. However, the type of touch screen used can not sense input from plastic etc, just fingers. That would make a 3rd party stylus complicated.

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Yes, those people are called mac fanatics, not general public. These people (if other than mac fanatics) that prefer ease of use, where are they?.. cause apple would like them to get off their butts and buy computers!!!. Microsoft still has over 80% worldwide marketshare

I'm talking about a third party device with a pad like the old Palm Pilot for stylus writing that connects in the iPhone's bottom port. Such a device would only need access to Inkwell that is already built into OS X.

Mac is not significantly easier than Windows anymore. They've both come a long way.

Anyway - it's never just about ease of use. You buy something to do a job, and the price and functionality are part of your requirement.

Back to Physguy - I agree, perhaps Apple is creating a new kind of market. For example -it's no good keeping the existing desktop model while reducing the size of the device. The possibilities are wide open and different makers are approaching it slightly differently.

I think that Wally guy was pulling our legs.. I cannot believe anyone in this modern age thinks mobile to mobile includes calls to cell on another network. I mean, even 10 year olds with cell phones get this. Wally is just bitching, leave him be.

Scary. I think this would bulk up the iPhone too much and reduce usefulness.

Those are fighting words mate (hehe).. regardless, i was replying to post that thinks cause the iphone is easy to use, people will overpay for it. The history of mac computers points to different results. I have three mac computers (qualifying me as a mac fanatic i guess) but that's becuase i have the ability to pay for them. The same will go for iphones.. people are not gonna take the rent money and buy a cell phone cause it's easy to use and the population of people who have 500 disposable income to devote to one device is small indeed (else, everyone and their grandmother would have already owned a treo or a window mobile device or a blackberry or some similarly expensive device).

The problem is your confusing % of market with # of customers. No one, including Apple, is claiming that this first iPhone will dominate the market. I believe they are looking at 1% of total market. This will not happen if the target market is 'just' the smart-phone market, which is my point. With this first iPhone Apple would be quite happy with the type of market you're assigning to 'Mac fanatics'.

Ahh.. I missed the general thread... working and glancing across to here does that. Yeah - I agree that ease of use has a $$$ value attached to it - and a $500 phone is more than that $$$ value IMO.

I'm actually surprised Apple called it the iPhone. I mean - video came out and they went to great pains to say "this is not the iPod Video! it's an iPod that happens to do video" (or similar). It strikes me that this is not an iPhone... "this is an iPod Video, that happens to also be a phone".

Anyway, Apple will release the phone at $500 - I hope they watch what happens and adjust accordingly. Apple has a history of not being able to keep up with demand, which either means
1) they're setting their price point perfectly - they can't produce any faster so might as well make the most they can from them.
2) they're simply not bothering to ramp their production up higher. Sure they'd make less per unit, but they'd sell more units.
#1 seems much safer. And if they're not sold out, Apple can drop the price $50, or $100, without too much trouble at all.

This type of thing is nothing unusual there is a billion dollar industry around plugging devices into the iPod. Third party manufacturers are chomping at the bit to have access to the iPhone. Belkin already has an iPhone page: belkin.com/ipod/iphone/




Plug in devices do not necessarily add bulk, it simply requires good engineering.

Ok, so you're talking about indirect control. But the Treo doesn't work that way. A stylus is just as direct as using your finger, except that it gives more precision. You can also use your finger with the Treo if what you're doing isn't too small. I do it all the time.


As we said.


There have been questions about this, but no real answers so far. I won't be too optimistic. If it were real easy, I would think that he would have shown it. On stAge, he made a few typos, but corrected them immediately by backspacing.


But it can also make them more difficult, it it is the only method.


The keyboard on the Treo is bad, as are all of the really small ones. They could have made it much better by dishing the keys instead of making the tops round so that your finger or stylus slides off. But I use a program called Mobile Write which lets me write on the screen somewhat like Graffiti, except this is much better.


Potential always sound good. We have to hope he didn't mean it when he said that it wasn't a computer, but just a phone

He doesn't seem to understand that it's the way cell works, that both parties are charged for every call off everytime minutes unless you are both from the same carrier.

I'm not sure. That's why I said that. You would think that it could work, but I wouldn't be surprised if it didn't. This is Apple after all.


Yes, I read something about that as well.

That's really going overboard! Who is going to want to carry that around?

The screen should enable that, like my Palm has done. They could have chosen a way to do that. The multi-touch tech they are using doesn't preclude it.

That looks to be a power adapter, which would be bulky. What does the part connected to the bottom do?

Its not that complicated a device. It can be made small enough and not add much more size. It could be made the same thickness and width only adding length. As I said above these add ons are nothing unusual for the iPod.




Apple could have included FM radio in the iPod. There is a healthy market for add on FM tuners for the iPod.


That's adaptor is for connecting to a car. I used that picture as an example of the size of a device plugged in does not necessarily add a great deal of bulk.

Yes, there are devices that don't add much bulk. But not your device. It would consist of an adapter that plugs into the iPhone, with a cable that extends to another device at least a large as the iPhone, because it is that screen you are talking about with the electronics and battery. That would be like carrying two iPhones with cables. What's the point?

If Apple did it right (that is, for use with a stylus, in addition to a finger, like the Palm's) then you wouldn't need any of that bulk, or have to pay the extra $200, or more, for it.

No that's not what I'm talking about. You are thinking about how the current Palm works. I'm thinking of the old Palms where you did not write on the screen itself you wrote on the small pad at the bottom of the screen.





A device that is only that small pad and plugs into the bottom.

The old Palms allowed you to do whatever you wanted, anywhere.

While it's true that the built-in Graffiti had those two partitions for writing, there were programs, just as there are now, that allowed you to write anywhere. The drawing programs always allowed one to draw over the entire screen.

It wasn't a limitation of the screen itself, so much as a way to let the OS know that you were either drawing letters or numbers, for ease of character recognition.

But, that was then. Why go over an old technology, when the new ones are far better?

And it still doesn't explain how a drawing, painting, or photo retouch program will work.

The same way drawing, painting, photo retouch work on a Wacom Tablet.



My over all point is that the technology exists for writing or drawing with a stylus on the iPhone. If one prefers to use a stylus as their primary input device exactly the way the Palm works, then the iPhone certainly is not for them.

Teno, that's what this is all about. It won't!


It doesn't. Not if you have to add another device to do it.

I'm not saying that you would want to use a stylus all the time. I don't. I like the on screen keyboard. I dial on a keyboard like that on my Treo. The keys are large enough so that it doesn't need multi-touch for that. I usually play Solitare, or other gasmes that don't need too fine a pointer. I can often move around on websires with my finger, but I do have nails. I don't cut them that short.

But when it's needed, it's really needed.