That's unclear. If all ATT did was clean up some of the bottleneck areas on the network (the ones that were 'flooring' at 40 kbps), that's great for those areas, but does not necessarily make the network lots faster everywhere else.
They only spent 50 million. Sounds like a lot, 'til you realize that major US carriers spend 5-6 billion eachyear on their networks as a whole.
It may be that most of what ATT did was to bring the crappy portions of the EDGE network up to par, not majorly 'turbo-ize' the entire network (though you really can't do that with ATT's EDGE, as real-world it peaks out around 200 kbps).
I was worried about not being able to put the movies I've ripped onto a iPhone. All you have to do is convert the movie to mp4 and import it into itunes. iSquint is a free program that does the converting. I'm leaning more and more into getting a iPhone over the 8525!
Walt Mossberg's review is now on the Wall Street Journal website. It is quite favorable overall and he actually used the phone all day for two weeks straight. He says keyboard is easy to get used to, battery life is excellent, and screen does not scratch easily. He mentions lack of MMS as a drawback. Also the slow EDGE network. It is a lengthy review that touches on pretty much everything that has been in the AI threads.
I think one thing lost in the debate is that iPhone buyers in general are new to smart phones. They will find the UI and ease of use to be a major home run and won't be comparing the functionality to the Blackberry experience where there will be pluses and minuses.
I know that many people on here will defend Apple products against incorrect claims and lies designed to stop people buying Apple products, this is fair enough and people here do a good job of that. But you also need to be honest and realistic and admit to real flaws in Apple products otherwise you lose credibility and even the great comments you make will face more scrutiny about your motives for posting them, i.e. are you a serious commentator or just an apple fan who can see no wrong in whatever they do.
My point is the lack of MMS in the iPhone is crazy, I am stunned to find out that the most hyped and anticipated mobile phone of all time does not support MMS, a technology that is years old now and widely used (in Europe very much so). No-one in their right mind can put any kind of spin on this to make it sound better. To hear people say "Well you can just email it to [email protected]ever. oh how do you remember which carrier? you just write it down in notes, easy!" What? that is not easy, easy is taking a photo, going to contacts, clicking a name and pressing send.
PS - Does apple accept MMS? i don't know, if it does not do all your friends have to keep your email address to send snaps to? What if they do not have mobile email, are you excluded from the 'photo group' of your friends.
Are you saying keep SMS because it's something the iPhone can do?
No. SMS is too useful to get rid of as a universal method of communication, as all phones support text messages. I personally use SMS for work, and not having it on the iPhone would be a massive mistake and barrier to me getting one. However, the ability to send picture messages is not something I really care about, mainly because other than "check out this chick I pulled" I don't see it as much use personally.
This isn't just me under the influence of the RDF. I've owned a phone with multimedia messaging and a camera for 3 years, but only recall ever sending one such message, and I have never received any. In comparison I send/receive about 2-3 SMS messages per day on average.
ltimatley i think email is a better solution then mms. a couple of reasons, first you can view it anywhere you can view your email, second you have a copy of it in cyber space, and i'm sure there is a few more. the only problem is the rest of the world doesnt have "true email" on their phones yet but i believe after the iphone others will follow making things better for everyone. as a mac user its not un-common for us to have to wait for the rest of the world to catch up to where we are leading them.
This may not be the case at all, The smart and great thing about MMS is when you snap a pic and send to your friends via MMS the picture is already in a low resolution format perfect for viewing on a phones screen and more importantly using little bandwidth to make it quick to download to your phone. Email does not work like that, when you email a photo to someone yes you can change the resolution to make it a smaller file but with email it is not as important and more importantly when viewing photo's on your PC you don't want a tiny compressed image you want a picture that will fill your screen. So you take a picture to send to friends mobiles, you need to first shrink it down to a small size (can we do this on the iPhone?). But the copy in cyberspace is no good to save to iphoto or whatever because it is nothing more than a thumbnail.
Quote:
the rest of the world doesnt have "true email" on their phones yet
I am sorry but this is completely and utterly wrong. The rest of the world have had 'true email' on their phones for years now, every single mobile phone i have had for the last five years has had a pop3 email client (Nokia's and Sony Ericcson's) I have never used them once, why? because SMS has always been the defacto way of sending text to others and i cannot see that changing ever, it is too easy, too widely used and most importantly for 90% of the sms's that are sent what benefit would sending an email bring? None! And for the other 10% then these people (like me for work) already have a Blackberry or similar device anyway.
My point is the lack of MMS in the iPhone is crazy, I am stunned to find out that the most hyped and anticipated mobile phone of all time does not support MMS, a technology that is years old now and widely used (in Europe very much so). No-one in their right mind can put any kind of spin on this to make it sound better. To hear people say "Well you can just email it to [email protected]ever. oh how do you remember which carrier? you just write it down in notes, easy!" What? that is not easy, easy is taking a photo, going to contacts, clicking a name and pressing send.
PS - Does apple accept MMS? i don't know, if it does not do all your friends have to keep your email address to send snaps to? What if they do not have mobile email, are you excluded from the 'photo group' of your friends.
Well, it is a lack of feature, but as always with apple products, they tend to think a bit ahead.
MMS has been around for years and has not taken off the way that SMS has.
That being said. (and I don't know how the rest of the world uses it but) I only send photo's via MMS to people who are pretty close friends. where I tend to know what carrier they are on since I talk to them regularly and try to keep it to nights/weekends/mobile-to-mobile...
and that being the case, It's not to hard to copy their number and add that email into my address book for syncing.
IMO as the phones and phone industry develop we'll all be using our email more and more on a mobile device rather than tethered to a desktop or laptop PC. again. apple thinking ahead.
anyway if it's such a big issue, I'm sure there will be one of those "web 2.0" apps in the coming months to satisfy the picture messaging needs in all of us.
this also works with t-mobile, but I don't recall the mail address.
That sounds like a very cool way around the lack of MMS.
BTW, we don't need no stinkin' Verizon FUD. Pogue says the iPhone's battery life is pretty good. Just recharge ever other day when using all the iPhone's features in a normal way.
Just curious, but what is the advantage of MMS over sending the same picture via regular email?
I know all my friends' phone numbers, but not all of their email addresses.
I still have some friends with no internet at home, but who have picture-capable phones.
If I send an email, I have to wait for them to check their mail. If I send an MMS, it arrives there and then (if they have their phone on) and alerts them to the fact.
why are the verizon phones crippled in terms of features. remember the bluetooth mess?
lets list the verison and sprint crippled features.
lets use these as a barameter of success
the more they "point" the more it points to apple going up and them down. how much is it going to cost verizon and sprinnt to get back a iphone customer. they realize once apple has them there are no reason to get back
Well I cannot receive MMS from outside my network (though sending seems to work). But I can receive email from anyone. And this is from a 4 year old Nokia 6820.
oh my god, ive been wondering what was wrong with my phone till now.
its the strangest thing. do you think at&t like blocks mms from other networks?
Not many non-business users carry around a spare battery. I know people who use car chargers, but that's as far as it goes.
The only thing that scares me about the battery not being removable is that with my past experience with cell phones, sometimes they lock up, and the only way to get them to power off is to remove the battery. This is Apple, so hopefully I won't have this problem. Maybe some type of force quit built in.
From what I've read, the iPhone has a force quit... you hold hold the Home button in for 6 seconds, so they seem to have that one covered.
Do the videos cover how to reset an iPhone? I owned an iPod that locked up and refused to reset, and I had a couple that took as many as five tries to reset, because of a lock-up bug in the 4th Gen ipods. Not having a real reset button and relying on the processor to honor a reset when it has crashed seems a little silly.
I saw where a 6 second hold on the Home Button does a Force Quit. I'm hoping that it will also do a Reset if the phone crashes. Perhaps it will be holding the Home button and another button for 6 seconds that will do it.
I have a feeling that Apple has already figured this one out, and it will be something along these lines.
I know that many people on here will defend Apple products against incorrect claims and lies designed to stop people buying Apple products, this is fair enough and people here do a good job of that. But you also need to be honest and realistic and admit to real flaws in Apple products otherwise you lose credibility and even the great comments you make will face more scrutiny about your motives for posting them, i.e. are you a serious commentator or just an apple fan who can see no wrong in whatever they do.
My point is the lack of MMS in the iPhone is crazy, I am stunned to find out that the most hyped and anticipated mobile phone of all time does not support MMS, a technology that is years old now and widely used (in Europe very much so). No-one in their right mind can put any kind of spin on this to make it sound better. To hear people say "Well you can just email it to [email protected]ever. oh how do you remember which carrier? you just write it down in notes, easy!" What? that is not easy, easy is taking a photo, going to contacts, clicking a name and pressing send.
PS - Does apple accept MMS? i don't know, if it does not do all your friends have to keep your email address to send snaps to? What if they do not have mobile email, are you excluded from the 'photo group' of your friends.
I'm in Canada, and frankly, MMS is not that popular. Is it THAT popular in the USA?
SMS is crazy popular, but MMS, from what I know, is too expensive to use, especially between carriers. In my case, even WITHIN my own carrier.
Like other AT&T rivals, Verizon Wireless has issued a list of talking points to help its employees encourage customers not to drop their service plans and switch to iPhone. "Stay near a plug," reads one of the points to be conveyed to potential switchers. "The iPhone battery can't be removed or swapped for a spare."
The multi-page document, labeled "Proprietary & Confidential. For Internal Use Only," offers Verizon's take on why it "more than holds its own" against Apple, AT&T and the iPhone.
"Sorry, iPhone can't send picture or video message -- only e-mail," the carrier wrote. "No over-the-air downloads. You have to connect to a PC to load music." For its part, Verizon offers both features through certain of its service plans.
In the documents, the AT&T rival also suggests that employees tell prospective iPhone buyers to "watch their wallets," as the "cheapest iPhone is $499."
OK, but what about customers who talk about iPhone's "cool features" like Wi-Fi access and the touch screen?
"Wi-Fi is not a mobile technology," Verizon explains. "You have to be in a fixed location to use it -- and that's if you know where to find it. And some Wi-Fi hotspots make you pay to use them. There're also those pesky concerns about security of Wi-Fi."
As for the Apple handset's touch screen, "it sounds cool," claims Verizon, "but if you're a heavy text or email user, it could be challenging not being able to feel the keys as you press them."
"And how are you going to type without looking with a keyboard you can't even feel," the carrier adds.
For those interested, both Verizon documents can been seen after the jump. Slightly more entertaining talking points issued by Sprint were covered on Monday.
The battery life issue has been resolved with 8 hours of life. You hardly need to be by an AC outlet with this kind of battery life. Touch keyboard seems to work fine and has been demonstrated many, many times already so I think the point about needing to feel the keyboard is also a NON-ISSUE. So Verizon so far you have said nothing, what next?
Since iPod already has this (you have to hold down a couple of buttons... I forgot which ones though but I used it to fix my Mom's iPod after it locked up because it was syncing when the PC crashed) the iPhone probably has it too. My guess is you'll have to hold down the home button for about 5-10 seconds.
Hum... My iPod has crashed a couple of times so bad that I couldn't use the "hold such-and-such buttons down" technique listed on Apple's support website to reset it.
I actually have to leave it running (but locked up) and let its battery run down completely before I can get it working again.
Actually, the hold switch really isn't necessary. I think that is to make sure that the hold switch isn't on. But yes, I did it exactly as Apple says. There really was a bug in many 4G iPods, really long AAC files (such as 1/2+ hour podcasts) threw them for a loop if they go to sleep in the middle, they wouldn't wake up at all, or rarely after a reset attempt. The Apple store replaced mine two or three times when I brought it in locked up and they couldn't reset it. I had later switched to a nano and it never had a problem.
Comments
It should.
That's unclear. If all ATT did was clean up some of the bottleneck areas on the network (the ones that were 'flooring' at 40 kbps), that's great for those areas, but does not necessarily make the network lots faster everywhere else.
They only spent 50 million. Sounds like a lot, 'til you realize that major US carriers spend 5-6 billion each year on their networks as a whole.
It may be that most of what ATT did was to bring the crappy portions of the EDGE network up to par, not majorly 'turbo-ize' the entire network (though you really can't do that with ATT's EDGE, as real-world it peaks out around 200 kbps).
It's still a lot better than nothing, though.
.
I think one thing lost in the debate is that iPhone buyers in general are new to smart phones. They will find the UI and ease of use to be a major home run and won't be comparing the functionality to the Blackberry experience where there will be pluses and minuses.
My point is the lack of MMS in the iPhone is crazy, I am stunned to find out that the most hyped and anticipated mobile phone of all time does not support MMS, a technology that is years old now and widely used (in Europe very much so). No-one in their right mind can put any kind of spin on this to make it sound better. To hear people say "Well you can just email it to [email protected]ever. oh how do you remember which carrier? you just write it down in notes, easy!" What? that is not easy, easy is taking a photo, going to contacts, clicking a name and pressing send.
PS - Does apple accept MMS? i don't know, if it does not do all your friends have to keep your email address to send snaps to? What if they do not have mobile email, are you excluded from the 'photo group' of your friends.
One word: PWNED!
Are you saying keep SMS because it's something the iPhone can do?
No. SMS is too useful to get rid of as a universal method of communication, as all phones support text messages. I personally use SMS for work, and not having it on the iPhone would be a massive mistake and barrier to me getting one. However, the ability to send picture messages is not something I really care about, mainly because other than "check out this chick I pulled" I don't see it as much use personally.
This isn't just me under the influence of the RDF. I've owned a phone with multimedia messaging and a camera for 3 years, but only recall ever sending one such message, and I have never received any. In comparison I send/receive about 2-3 SMS messages per day on average.
ltimatley i think email is a better solution then mms. a couple of reasons, first you can view it anywhere you can view your email, second you have a copy of it in cyber space, and i'm sure there is a few more. the only problem is the rest of the world doesnt have "true email" on their phones yet but i believe after the iphone others will follow making things better for everyone. as a mac user its not un-common for us to have to wait for the rest of the world to catch up to where we are leading them.
This may not be the case at all, The smart and great thing about MMS is when you snap a pic and send to your friends via MMS the picture is already in a low resolution format perfect for viewing on a phones screen and more importantly using little bandwidth to make it quick to download to your phone. Email does not work like that, when you email a photo to someone yes you can change the resolution to make it a smaller file but with email it is not as important and more importantly when viewing photo's on your PC you don't want a tiny compressed image you want a picture that will fill your screen. So you take a picture to send to friends mobiles, you need to first shrink it down to a small size (can we do this on the iPhone?). But the copy in cyberspace is no good to save to iphoto or whatever because it is nothing more than a thumbnail.
the rest of the world doesnt have "true email" on their phones yet
I am sorry but this is completely and utterly wrong. The rest of the world have had 'true email' on their phones for years now, every single mobile phone i have had for the last five years has had a pop3 email client (Nokia's and Sony Ericcson's) I have never used them once, why? because SMS has always been the defacto way of sending text to others and i cannot see that changing ever, it is too easy, too widely used and most importantly for 90% of the sms's that are sent what benefit would sending an email bring? None! And for the other 10% then these people (like me for work) already have a Blackberry or similar device anyway.
My point is the lack of MMS in the iPhone is crazy, I am stunned to find out that the most hyped and anticipated mobile phone of all time does not support MMS, a technology that is years old now and widely used (in Europe very much so). No-one in their right mind can put any kind of spin on this to make it sound better. To hear people say "Well you can just email it to [email protected]ever. oh how do you remember which carrier? you just write it down in notes, easy!" What? that is not easy, easy is taking a photo, going to contacts, clicking a name and pressing send.
PS - Does apple accept MMS? i don't know, if it does not do all your friends have to keep your email address to send snaps to? What if they do not have mobile email, are you excluded from the 'photo group' of your friends.
Well, it is a lack of feature, but as always with apple products, they tend to think a bit ahead.
MMS has been around for years and has not taken off the way that SMS has.
That being said. (and I don't know how the rest of the world uses it but) I only send photo's via MMS to people who are pretty close friends. where I tend to know what carrier they are on since I talk to them regularly and try to keep it to nights/weekends/mobile-to-mobile...
and that being the case, It's not to hard to copy their number and add that email into my address book for syncing.
IMO as the phones and phone industry develop we'll all be using our email more and more on a mobile device rather than tethered to a desktop or laptop PC. again. apple thinking ahead.
anyway if it's such a big issue, I'm sure there will be one of those "web 2.0" apps in the coming months to satisfy the picture messaging needs in all of us.
as a workaround for no mms you can simply email a photo to the [email protected]
ex: [email protected]
this also works with t-mobile, but I don't recall the mail address.
That sounds like a very cool way around the lack of MMS.
BTW, we don't need no stinkin' Verizon FUD. Pogue says the iPhone's battery life is pretty good. Just recharge ever other day when using all the iPhone's features in a normal way.
Just curious, but what is the advantage of MMS over sending the same picture via regular email?
I know all my friends' phone numbers, but not all of their email addresses.
I still have some friends with no internet at home, but who have picture-capable phones.
If I send an email, I have to wait for them to check their mail. If I send an MMS, it arrives there and then (if they have their phone on) and alerts them to the fact.
Amorya
why are the verizon phones crippled in terms of features. remember the bluetooth mess?
lets list the verison and sprint crippled features.
lets use these as a barameter of success
the more they "point" the more it points to apple going up and them down. how much is it going to cost verizon and sprinnt to get back a iphone customer. they realize once apple has them there are no reason to get back
Well I cannot receive MMS from outside my network (though sending seems to work). But I can receive email from anyone. And this is from a 4 year old Nokia 6820.
oh my god, ive been wondering what was wrong with my phone till now.
its the strangest thing. do you think at&t like blocks mms from other networks?
Not many non-business users carry around a spare battery. I know people who use car chargers, but that's as far as it goes.
The only thing that scares me about the battery not being removable is that with my past experience with cell phones, sometimes they lock up, and the only way to get them to power off is to remove the battery. This is Apple, so hopefully I won't have this problem. Maybe some type of force quit built in.
From what I've read, the iPhone has a force quit... you hold hold the Home button in for 6 seconds, so they seem to have that one covered.
Do the videos cover how to reset an iPhone? I owned an iPod that locked up and refused to reset, and I had a couple that took as many as five tries to reset, because of a lock-up bug in the 4th Gen ipods. Not having a real reset button and relying on the processor to honor a reset when it has crashed seems a little silly.
I saw where a 6 second hold on the Home Button does a Force Quit. I'm hoping that it will also do a Reset if the phone crashes. Perhaps it will be holding the Home button and another button for 6 seconds that will do it.
I have a feeling that Apple has already figured this one out, and it will be something along these lines.
I know that many people on here will defend Apple products against incorrect claims and lies designed to stop people buying Apple products, this is fair enough and people here do a good job of that. But you also need to be honest and realistic and admit to real flaws in Apple products otherwise you lose credibility and even the great comments you make will face more scrutiny about your motives for posting them, i.e. are you a serious commentator or just an apple fan who can see no wrong in whatever they do.
My point is the lack of MMS in the iPhone is crazy, I am stunned to find out that the most hyped and anticipated mobile phone of all time does not support MMS, a technology that is years old now and widely used (in Europe very much so). No-one in their right mind can put any kind of spin on this to make it sound better. To hear people say "Well you can just email it to [email protected]ever. oh how do you remember which carrier? you just write it down in notes, easy!" What? that is not easy, easy is taking a photo, going to contacts, clicking a name and pressing send.
PS - Does apple accept MMS? i don't know, if it does not do all your friends have to keep your email address to send snaps to? What if they do not have mobile email, are you excluded from the 'photo group' of your friends.
I'm in Canada, and frankly, MMS is not that popular. Is it THAT popular in the USA?
SMS is crazy popular, but MMS, from what I know, is too expensive to use, especially between carriers. In my case, even WITHIN my own carrier.
Like other AT&T rivals, Verizon Wireless has issued a list of talking points to help its employees encourage customers not to drop their service plans and switch to iPhone. "Stay near a plug," reads one of the points to be conveyed to potential switchers. "The iPhone battery can't be removed or swapped for a spare."
The multi-page document, labeled "Proprietary & Confidential. For Internal Use Only," offers Verizon's take on why it "more than holds its own" against Apple, AT&T and the iPhone.
"Sorry, iPhone can't send picture or video message -- only e-mail," the carrier wrote. "No over-the-air downloads. You have to connect to a PC to load music." For its part, Verizon offers both features through certain of its service plans.
In the documents, the AT&T rival also suggests that employees tell prospective iPhone buyers to "watch their wallets," as the "cheapest iPhone is $499."
OK, but what about customers who talk about iPhone's "cool features" like Wi-Fi access and the touch screen?
"Wi-Fi is not a mobile technology," Verizon explains. "You have to be in a fixed location to use it -- and that's if you know where to find it. And some Wi-Fi hotspots make you pay to use them. There're also those pesky concerns about security of Wi-Fi."
As for the Apple handset's touch screen, "it sounds cool," claims Verizon, "but if you're a heavy text or email user, it could be challenging not being able to feel the keys as you press them."
"And how are you going to type without looking with a keyboard you can't even feel," the carrier adds.
For those interested, both Verizon documents can been seen after the jump. Slightly more entertaining talking points issued by Sprint were covered on Monday.
[ View this article at AppleInsider.com ]
The battery life issue has been resolved with 8 hours of life. You hardly need to be by an AC outlet with this kind of battery life. Touch keyboard seems to work fine and has been demonstrated many, many times already so I think the point about needing to feel the keyboard is also a NON-ISSUE. So Verizon so far you have said nothing, what next?
Since iPod already has this (you have to hold down a couple of buttons... I forgot which ones though but I used it to fix my Mom's iPod after it locked up because it was syncing when the PC crashed) the iPhone probably has it too. My guess is you'll have to hold down the home button for about 5-10 seconds.
Hum... My iPod has crashed a couple of times so bad that I couldn't use the "hold such-and-such buttons down" technique listed on Apple's support website to reset it.
I actually have to leave it running (but locked up) and let its battery run down completely before I can get it working again.
Did you remember to toggle the hold switch?
Actually, the hold switch really isn't necessary. I think that is to make sure that the hold switch isn't on. But yes, I did it exactly as Apple says. There really was a bug in many 4G iPods, really long AAC files (such as 1/2+ hour podcasts) threw them for a loop if they go to sleep in the middle, they wouldn't wake up at all, or rarely after a reset attempt. The Apple store replaced mine two or three times when I brought it in locked up and they couldn't reset it. I had later switched to a nano and it never had a problem.