The second fallacy is that the iPhone does not have enough RAM to multitask. This ignores the idea of virtual memory.
It does so because iPhone OS does not have virtual memory. When it runs out of memory, it doesn't swap; it instead starts killing processes.
Quote:
The iPhone has over 4GB of flash that can be used for virtual memory--the fact that it "only" has 128MB of RAM is not necessarily a concern.
No it can't, and yes it is.
Flash wouldn't really work well as virtual memory anyway; you'd have far too many write cycles, thereby killing the flash too quickly.
Quote:
(Although depending on the flash memory controller Apple uses, they may have chosen to disable virtual memory due to poor random-write performance or wear-leveling algorithms. If so, that was a willful decision and not a technical limitation.)
It was a willful decision based on very obvious technical limitations.
In the interest of full disclosure, let me just state my history with the iPhone. I bought an EDGE iPhone for use on T-Mobile right after the 3G came out. I didn't have a data plan for a few months, then signed up for one. About four months after buying it, I ditched the iPhone for a Nokia N95 8GB, which I still have. I think the iPhone is a great device, it just wasn't for me. That in mind, read on...
I registered here just to post a comment. I guess that's probably lame.
I think a big problem is that we approach this, and I use this term with caution on an Apple website, from a fanboy perspective.
Put your pitchforks and torches down for a moment. it's not what you think, and it comes from all sides. Please keep reading, or at least don't blaze me to bits unless you've read it all.
Instead of thinking about what will be a better phone, what will stimulate the smartphone market, or what will make me a happier, more productive user, our concerns stem from who built a machine.
Example from the first page:
Quote:
Originally Posted by slapppy
Yep, so they hired EX PC guys that happens to be EX Apple guys. Since Palm can't even figure out how to make a decent phone on their own.
Fanboyism - and I am guilty of it from time to time - is most apparent when you're willing to come to blows for (or against) a company whose products you pay money for. I don't want to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but folks, these companies are not here to make you telephones, they're here to get your money. Give your money to the company that makes the best phones, talk about it, all peachy. But when you start taking personal offense at another company's product just because it's similar to your preferred product, well, it's time to re-evaluate how you spend your money.
It goes both ways, of course: I was rooting for the Blackberry Storm, trying to find merit where there apparently was none, just because it wasn't an iPhone. (I know. That was dumb. The Storm is dumb.)
Quote:
Originally Posted by MacShack
Uhmm. Smoothly and elegantly? I don't think so. One of the reasons other OSs where so slow, unstable and inefficient was because they did multitasking. And what I mean by multitasking is not that Apple decides that one can listen to music and read web pages at the same time. But by multitasking I mean that the developers and users can decide themselves when or how to multitask. Doing this at this point in time will bring up a lot of problems
[snip]
Would you argue that the Palms' WebOS is leaner than that of the iPhone? Remember it runs on a 600 MHz processor and has 256 RAM on board. The iPhone processor runs on an older 412 MHz processor and has 128 of RAM. This saves battery. But limits the possibilities software wise. So yes it was their choice to stop optimizing the code more and more and release the OS X Mobile. But I don't think that the gain they would have made by optimizing their code would outweigh the time and energy spent optimizing the code. Hardware is getting better and better. And I believe it is worth waiting for better hardware than to keep optimizing the code. It's a balance Apple knows very well.
Instead of evaluating the phones based on which we consider better, we consider why things are how they are. Going back to the Storm, I could say that it's not as good as the iPhone since it had less of a development budget, it was on a tight schedule, whatever. I don't even know, I made those up. But the fact remains that it's bad. The biggest Blackberry fanboy (if indeed such a thing exists) can find the most tragic circumstances - the Storm's puppy died last night! the Storm was not fed vegetables as a child! - but this is the cold world of consumer electronics. The Storm sucks and I'm not going to buy it. Period. No pity bucks.
Likewise, if I for some reason considered multitasking to be an essential, make-or-break feature, no amount of explaining why the iPhone doesn't have it, reasonable or otherwise, is going to change the fact that the iPhone doesn't have it, and I would give my money to the Pre. So what if the Pre has a more powerful processor and more RAM? As a user, I don't care what's doing the number crunching on my phone, I care that those numbers get crunched. We should take these companies to task for features that we want, not excuse them. That's how competition works for consumers.
Quote:
Originally Posted by PG4G
You're just a whiner. You won't be happy till you get a phone that lasts you a week with a full battery at 4G speeds with 24-7 downloads with a screen that is brighter than a fluorescent light. Massive effect on usability my arse!
Why shouldn't we demand these things? Sure, we can take those steps you outlined, but shouldn't we want it all to happen automatically?
The Symbian OS may multitask, but I still think it's a piece of shit for most things. It's not intuitive, features are buried in menus, and file transfers are like molasses. The home screen could be way more useful than it is, and I wish there was more compatibility for video formats. I acknowledge the faults in my phone because I know it isn't and can never be perfect. Neither was my iPhone. I don't tell people who acknowledge these faults to stop whining because I don't owe the company who built the phone anything; if anything, they owe me a good user experience. I'm not saying I never got it, I'm saying it can always be better and we should demand that, not silence people who talk about it.
Quote:
Does your S60 render pages with a full desktop web browser engine, run applications of desktop class, with touch interface, a 3.5 inch display, with accelerometer-based device orientation? Perhaps you should be a little bit more reasonable with your comparisons on that front hey?
If you must know, it's only got a 2.8 inch screen, but it does the accelerometer thing, it uses Webkit (bonus: embedded Flash), and I prefer physical buttons to a touch screen if I have to choose (though I'd like both). More importantly, though, why are you pissing in my Cheerios? What's it to you if the Nokia doesn't do all those things?
I bought my iPhone a year ago because I thought it looked really cool, and I was right. The iPhone was a really neat device and it introduced me to the whole smartphone thing: it was my gateway drug. All the friends and family I have who own iPhones love them. More power to them. The phone that I chose instead has a more limited appeal, but that doesn't make it better or worse. The iPhone's engineers focused on software, the N95's on hardware. That was a compromise I preferred, but I don't expect it to be right for everybody.
We should think about ourselves when evaluating consumer products, not the companies who make them. When we're willing to put time into defending an entity that makes us poorer, and mobiles ain't cheap, then we're turning the whole point of competition on its head.
Flash wouldn't really work well as virtual memory anyway; you'd have far too many write cycles, thereby killing the flash too quickly.
It was a willful decision based on very obvious technical limitations.
It's true that any individual flash cell can only be flashed (erased) a relatively small number of times. But, with wear-leveling, blocks are remapped according to how many times they've been written, to do exactly what the name implies. With wear-leveling, you can write data to flash continuously for years before wearing it out. That's why you are able to buy SSDs today and use them as primary drives, or in high-load data centers. Personally I have an SSD in my MacBook and I'm always running out of physical RAM and swapping to it. Works fine. If it didn't, Apple wouldn't sell e.g. the MacBook Air with an SSD.
If what you're saying is true and the iPhone doesn't have virtual memory enabled, it's probably because they didn't bother to optimize their access patterns for the flash. Nothing some software tuning can't fix, if they so chose. Although it might be an undertaking and they may choose to just wait for newer hardware to enable it.
Why do you people always conveniently forget that Smartphone OSs have been multitasking for years, smoothly and elegantly? You banter on about it as if it was this new fangled feature that's in its infancy. Multitasking is incredibly useful for quickly and easily switching between applications instead of having to quit out of one, and start another from the launcher. Of course, it also means you can stay logged into IM clients, etc, and do other things at the same time. The iPhone doesn't have it simply because Apple didn't design the OS to be lean enough for the hardware it runs on. They could have quite easily done it if they had worked harder at it to reduce the footprint of the OS and apps, but they didn't, and that was their choice.
Yah; Some people are just STUCK in the past with old Win 3.1 multi-swapping technologies; What can I say? I loved DOS for ages. I eventually got smart and moved on to the Windows bandwagon.
So you say that the battery lasts 4 hours of internet usage... So, why is it so bad? I've never tested a phone with a battery much better than that!
And I also doubt, or better, don't believe in a f*cking word you said about your Oh-so-powerful Nokia.
Point is; show me a laptop that does better than that! Sure there are some. But then compare the battery size of the laptop against the small tiny battery of your phone and you will quiclky discover that your phone actually does REALLY good in comparison. I think both phones perform very well on this front (albeit I would still like it to be better; but I would like it to be better also on my laptop); nuff said.
All these hate statements about the Pre are pretty ridiculous. At the end of the day; we all know full well that if this product was branded as an "iPhone 4G"; that most haters here would be drooling over it. This phone is basically done by the same iPhone/iPod people that were leached from Apple. The only main difference is the branding (it's under Palm). Most of you guys may also be surprised to learn that Apple actually HAD no real phone embedded engineers. The truth is that they basically stole a BUNCH of guys from Palm to create the iPhone. Now that Palm flashes more money at them; they come back. It's simple; in this industry. The same people end up doing MANY devices. Reality is that there aren't that many people who understand and know this stuff; so companies end up stealing employees left and right and basically branding their work under it. THAT's it. Palm was just fortunate enough to be run at the a high level by an Apple exec; meaning that everything was able to look like an Apple product; and the reality is that the Pre looke everything like an Apple product. From the packaging all the way down to the UI and attention to detail. To hate this product is to hate Apple products since the only difference is branding in this case.
And the iPhone is what? Groundbreaking? Survey says: NOPE !!!!!!!!!!! Imagine if you will and iPod Touch that could make calls. Wait, imagine no more. Introducing the old technology infested iPhone.
In the interest of full disclosure, let me just state my history with the iPhone. I bought an EDGE iPhone for use on T-Mobile right after the 3G came out. I didn't have a data plan for a few months, then signed up for one. About four months after buying it, I ditched the iPhone for a Nokia N95 8GB, which I still have. I think the iPhone is a great device, it just wasn't for me. That in mind, read on...
I registered here just to post a comment. I guess that's probably lame.
I think a big problem is that we approach this, and I use this term with caution on an Apple website, from a fanboy perspective.
Put your pitchforks and torches down for a moment. it's not what you think, and it comes from all sides. Please keep reading, or at least don't blaze me to bits unless you've read it all.
Instead of thinking about what will be a better phone, what will stimulate the smartphone market, or what will make me a happier, more productive user, our concerns stem from who built a machine.
Example from the first page:
Fanboyism - and I am guilty of it from time to time - is most apparent when you're willing to come to blows for (or against) a company whose products you pay money for. I don't want to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but folks, these companies are not here to make you telephones, they're here to get your money. Give your money to the company that makes the best phones, talk about it, all peachy. But when you start taking personal offense at another company's product just because it's similar to your preferred product, well, it's time to re-evaluate how you spend your money.
It goes both ways, of course: I was rooting for the Blackberry Storm, trying to find merit where there apparently was none, just because it wasn't an iPhone. (I know. That was dumb. The Storm is dumb.)
Instead of evaluating the phones based on which we consider better, we consider why things are how they are. Going back to the Storm, I could say that it's not as good as the iPhone since it had less of a development budget, it was on a tight schedule, whatever. I don't even know, I made those up. But the fact remains that it's bad. The biggest Blackberry fanboy (if indeed such a thing exists) can find the most tragic circumstances - the Storm's puppy died last night! the Storm was not fed vegetables as a child! - but this is the cold world of consumer electronics. The Storm sucks and I'm not going to buy it. Period. No pity bucks.
Likewise, if I for some reason considered multitasking to be an essential, make-or-break feature, no amount of explaining why the iPhone doesn't have it, reasonable or otherwise, is going to change the fact that the iPhone doesn't have it, and I would give my money to the Pre. So what if the Pre has a more powerful processor and more RAM? As a user, I don't care what's doing the number crunching on my phone, I care that those numbers get crunched. We should take these companies to task for features that we want, not excuse them. That's how competition works for consumers.
Why shouldn't we demand these things? Sure, we can take those steps you outlined, but shouldn't we want it all to happen automatically?
The Symbian OS may multitask, but I still think it's a piece of shit for most things. It's not intuitive, features are buried in menus, and file transfers are like molasses. The home screen could be way more useful than it is, and I wish there was more compatibility for video formats. I acknowledge the faults in my phone because I know it isn't and can never be perfect. Neither was my iPhone. I don't tell people who acknowledge these faults to stop whining because I don't owe the company who built the phone anything; if anything, they owe me a good user experience. I'm not saying I never got it, I'm saying it can always be better and we should demand that, not silence people who talk about it.
If you must know, it's only got a 2.8 inch screen, but it does the accelerometer thing, it uses Webkit (bonus: embedded Flash), and I prefer physical buttons to a touch screen if I have to choose (though I'd like both). More importantly, though, why are you pissing in my Cheerios? What's it to you if the Nokia doesn't do all those things?
I bought my iPhone a year ago because I thought it looked really cool, and I was right. The iPhone was a really neat device and it introduced me to the whole smartphone thing: it was my gateway drug. All the friends and family I have who own iPhones love them. More power to them. The phone that I chose instead has a more limited appeal, but that doesn't make it better or worse. The iPhone's engineers focused on software, the N95's on hardware. That was a compromise I preferred, but I don't expect it to be right for everybody.
We should think about ourselves when evaluating consumer products, not the companies who make them. When we're willing to put time into defending an entity that makes us poorer, and mobiles ain't cheap, then we're turning the whole point of competition on its head.
Apologies. I know I'm verbose.
Great post but it will fall on deaf ears here. The only thing missing on this site with some are Jack Boots, the Deutschland Uber Alles anthem, and a 3rd Reich. Anything not blessed by He Who is named Steve is considered of lesser quality and immediately dismissed. Your statements about the design philosophies of Nokia vs. Apple was spot on but Nokia has seen that Apple is correct and they will release the N97 which will be the start of better software and hardware integration. I have long given up on "brand loyalty" but now am much more loyal to my dollars. I am after more bang for my buck and in some cases Nokia is a fail, while in many more cases Apple fails even greater. It is just that simple. Well except on this site. There are a few here that present good arguments and can see things from both sides, and the mods do a pretty good job of running the place. However, the Appleista iBoys simply can not accept that there is another phone(s) on the market, nor anyone that does not think different.
All these hate statements about the Pre are pretty ridiculous. At the end of the day; we all know full well that if this product was branded as an "iPhone 4G"; that most haters here would be drooling over it. This phone is basically done by the same iPhone/iPod people that were leached from Apple. The only main difference is the branding (it's under Palm). Most of you guys may also be surprised to learn that Apple actually HAD no real phone embedded engineers.
Uhm no. If Apple would release the pre today without Palm relasing the pre I would say that they have gone backwards. As I ready stated, why would I want to buy a phone that is worse or maybe as good as the iPhone 3G? Then I go a year back in time. I rather stay in this time zone and move forward with the new iPhone. And I don't care who developed the Pre. All I know is that palm is worse off than Apple was a year ago. A year ago Apple was (and still is) ahead of competition. Palm is not. The Android has arrived. HTC has moved on. RIM has hopped along. But Palm has just answered with a very weak call "me too".
For one it's not my number. I told you saw it in a survey.
The survey was only for iPhone's, not all touch devices.
App Store apps are not the only option for screen icons. There are thousands of web apps and web based services one can use on the iPhone. So no the number of apps sold does not tell the full story of the number of apps and services on the average iPhone.
First, nonsense. Very few people use web apps. Very few developers still work on web app.s
Second, most apps stayed on the phone for less than 24 hours. (Study done by Pinch Media)
I am a developer. I have 9 pages of apps. However, I use 4 to 5 third party apps per day the max.
Why do you people always conveniently forget that Smartphone OSs have been multitasking for years...
Yes, they have.
Quote:
Originally Posted by mrochester
smoothly and elegantly
No! Those words definitely do not describe my experiences with other multi-tasking smartphone OSes, such as Windows Mobile and S60. Running more than 1 app caused them to slow to a chuggy, unresponsive crawl.
The Pre apparently doesn't fair overly well with multiple apps running.
Uhm no. If Apple would release the pre today without Palm relasing the pre I would say that they have gone backwards. As I ready stated, why would I want to buy a phone that is worse or maybe as good as the iPhone 3G? Then I go a year back in time. I rather stay in this time zone and move forward with the new iPhone. And I don't care who developed the Pre. All I know is that palm is worse off than Apple was a year ago. A year ago Apple was (and still is) ahead of competition. Palm is not. The Android has arrived. HTC has moved on. RIM has hopped along. But Palm has just answered with a very weak call "me too".
Palm's "me too" is strong. If the iPhone didn't exist I'd snap one up in heartbeat. I certainly wouldn't consider any of the other devices.
Palm know the "keep it simple" mentality that Apple has. Palm offered the best devices for a long time. Sadly they squandered their lead trying create PalmOS 6.0
Wow this is some BS, my summer home is on Martha's Vineyard, and I have several cellphones, my iPhone works just fine.
I talk about 1-2 hours a day on the phone, my verizon windows mobile devices often freeze up and you can't even push the "answer" button because the device has run out of memory (RAM). Yes the iphone eats battery, but i can tell you right now, I spent 4 hours on the phone last night, and this morning i made about a 10 minute call. It gave me the 20% battery warning, (total 3 days).
One of the windows mobile touch phones i have, isn't even touch, sure people think they get a touchscreen phone that it's like windows mobile, but it's nothing like it. You can just push on the screen, you can't move your fingers. It makes touch screens appear to suck in general, and they think "it has touch like the iphone!" it's nothing like it.
I'm a blackberry addict who uses his iPhone way more. I can type faster on the iPhone that my blackberry. I generally keep it as a backup device.
Are you in a beach house? I'm glad it works for you. My friends and their friends no such luck, They are in the beach house. They love the device, who doesn't, just can't stand that they have to go to the market to make calls.
Are you in a beach house? I'm glad it works for you. My friends and their friends no such luck, They are in the beach house. They love the device, who doesn't, just can't stand that they have to go to the market to make calls.
Comments
The second fallacy is that the iPhone does not have enough RAM to multitask. This ignores the idea of virtual memory.
It does so because iPhone OS does not have virtual memory. When it runs out of memory, it doesn't swap; it instead starts killing processes.
The iPhone has over 4GB of flash that can be used for virtual memory--the fact that it "only" has 128MB of RAM is not necessarily a concern.
No it can't, and yes it is.
Flash wouldn't really work well as virtual memory anyway; you'd have far too many write cycles, thereby killing the flash too quickly.
(Although depending on the flash memory controller Apple uses, they may have chosen to disable virtual memory due to poor random-write performance or wear-leveling algorithms. If so, that was a willful decision and not a technical limitation.)
It was a willful decision based on very obvious technical limitations.
I registered here just to post a comment. I guess that's probably lame.
I think a big problem is that we approach this, and I use this term with caution on an Apple website, from a fanboy perspective.
Put your pitchforks and torches down for a moment. it's not what you think, and it comes from all sides. Please keep reading, or at least don't blaze me to bits unless you've read it all.
Instead of thinking about what will be a better phone, what will stimulate the smartphone market, or what will make me a happier, more productive user, our concerns stem from who built a machine.
Example from the first page:
Yep, so they hired EX PC guys that happens to be EX Apple guys. Since Palm can't even figure out how to make a decent phone on their own.
Fanboyism - and I am guilty of it from time to time - is most apparent when you're willing to come to blows for (or against) a company whose products you pay money for. I don't want to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but folks, these companies are not here to make you telephones, they're here to get your money. Give your money to the company that makes the best phones, talk about it, all peachy. But when you start taking personal offense at another company's product just because it's similar to your preferred product, well, it's time to re-evaluate how you spend your money.
It goes both ways, of course: I was rooting for the Blackberry Storm, trying to find merit where there apparently was none, just because it wasn't an iPhone. (I know. That was dumb. The Storm is dumb.)
Uhmm. Smoothly and elegantly? I don't think so. One of the reasons other OSs where so slow, unstable and inefficient was because they did multitasking. And what I mean by multitasking is not that Apple decides that one can listen to music and read web pages at the same time. But by multitasking I mean that the developers and users can decide themselves when or how to multitask. Doing this at this point in time will bring up a lot of problems
[snip]
Would you argue that the Palms' WebOS is leaner than that of the iPhone? Remember it runs on a 600 MHz processor and has 256 RAM on board. The iPhone processor runs on an older 412 MHz processor and has 128 of RAM. This saves battery. But limits the possibilities software wise. So yes it was their choice to stop optimizing the code more and more and release the OS X Mobile. But I don't think that the gain they would have made by optimizing their code would outweigh the time and energy spent optimizing the code. Hardware is getting better and better. And I believe it is worth waiting for better hardware than to keep optimizing the code. It's a balance Apple knows very well.
Instead of evaluating the phones based on which we consider better, we consider why things are how they are. Going back to the Storm, I could say that it's not as good as the iPhone since it had less of a development budget, it was on a tight schedule, whatever. I don't even know, I made those up. But the fact remains that it's bad. The biggest Blackberry fanboy (if indeed such a thing exists) can find the most tragic circumstances - the Storm's puppy died last night! the Storm was not fed vegetables as a child! - but this is the cold world of consumer electronics. The Storm sucks and I'm not going to buy it. Period. No pity bucks.
Likewise, if I for some reason considered multitasking to be an essential, make-or-break feature, no amount of explaining why the iPhone doesn't have it, reasonable or otherwise, is going to change the fact that the iPhone doesn't have it, and I would give my money to the Pre. So what if the Pre has a more powerful processor and more RAM? As a user, I don't care what's doing the number crunching on my phone, I care that those numbers get crunched. We should take these companies to task for features that we want, not excuse them. That's how competition works for consumers.
You're just a whiner. You won't be happy till you get a phone that lasts you a week with a full battery at 4G speeds with 24-7 downloads with a screen that is brighter than a fluorescent light. Massive effect on usability my arse!
Why shouldn't we demand these things? Sure, we can take those steps you outlined, but shouldn't we want it all to happen automatically?
The Symbian OS may multitask, but I still think it's a piece of shit for most things. It's not intuitive, features are buried in menus, and file transfers are like molasses. The home screen could be way more useful than it is, and I wish there was more compatibility for video formats. I acknowledge the faults in my phone because I know it isn't and can never be perfect. Neither was my iPhone. I don't tell people who acknowledge these faults to stop whining because I don't owe the company who built the phone anything; if anything, they owe me a good user experience. I'm not saying I never got it, I'm saying it can always be better and we should demand that, not silence people who talk about it.
Does your S60 render pages with a full desktop web browser engine, run applications of desktop class, with touch interface, a 3.5 inch display, with accelerometer-based device orientation? Perhaps you should be a little bit more reasonable with your comparisons on that front hey?
If you must know, it's only got a 2.8 inch screen, but it does the accelerometer thing, it uses Webkit (bonus: embedded Flash), and I prefer physical buttons to a touch screen if I have to choose (though I'd like both). More importantly, though, why are you pissing in my Cheerios? What's it to you if the Nokia doesn't do all those things?
I bought my iPhone a year ago because I thought it looked really cool, and I was right. The iPhone was a really neat device and it introduced me to the whole smartphone thing: it was my gateway drug. All the friends and family I have who own iPhones love them. More power to them. The phone that I chose instead has a more limited appeal, but that doesn't make it better or worse. The iPhone's engineers focused on software, the N95's on hardware. That was a compromise I preferred, but I don't expect it to be right for everybody.
We should think about ourselves when evaluating consumer products, not the companies who make them. When we're willing to put time into defending an entity that makes us poorer, and mobiles ain't cheap, then we're turning the whole point of competition on its head.
Apologies. I know I'm verbose.
Anyway Palm CEO put his own foot in his mouth. Period.
I coulda just said that, I guess.
Point is, don't be a fanboy. I hate fanboys.
I coulda just said that, I guess.
Then your post is irrelavent and dismissed. It's based on HATE. That's a powerful and terrible way to base ones feelings or direction.
Flash wouldn't really work well as virtual memory anyway; you'd have far too many write cycles, thereby killing the flash too quickly.
It was a willful decision based on very obvious technical limitations.
It's true that any individual flash cell can only be flashed (erased) a relatively small number of times. But, with wear-leveling, blocks are remapped according to how many times they've been written, to do exactly what the name implies. With wear-leveling, you can write data to flash continuously for years before wearing it out. That's why you are able to buy SSDs today and use them as primary drives, or in high-load data centers. Personally I have an SSD in my MacBook and I'm always running out of physical RAM and swapping to it. Works fine. If it didn't, Apple wouldn't sell e.g. the MacBook Air with an SSD.
If what you're saying is true and the iPhone doesn't have virtual memory enabled, it's probably because they didn't bother to optimize their access patterns for the flash. Nothing some software tuning can't fix, if they so chose. Although it might be an undertaking and they may choose to just wait for newer hardware to enable it.
a particular feat given the faster, 600MHz Texas Instruments OMAP3 processor
The iPhone does have a 620MHz processor in it doesn't it?
It's just under-clocked for battery life.
Why do you people always conveniently forget that Smartphone OSs have been multitasking for years, smoothly and elegantly? You banter on about it as if it was this new fangled feature that's in its infancy. Multitasking is incredibly useful for quickly and easily switching between applications instead of having to quit out of one, and start another from the launcher. Of course, it also means you can stay logged into IM clients, etc, and do other things at the same time. The iPhone doesn't have it simply because Apple didn't design the OS to be lean enough for the hardware it runs on. They could have quite easily done it if they had worked harder at it to reduce the footprint of the OS and apps, but they didn't, and that was their choice.
Yah; Some people are just STUCK in the past with old Win 3.1 multi-swapping technologies; What can I say? I loved DOS for ages. I eventually got smart and moved on to the Windows bandwagon.
So you say that the battery lasts 4 hours of internet usage... So, why is it so bad? I've never tested a phone with a battery much better than that!
And I also doubt, or better, don't believe in a f*cking word you said about your Oh-so-powerful Nokia.
Point is; show me a laptop that does better than that! Sure there are some. But then compare the battery size of the laptop against the small tiny battery of your phone and you will quiclky discover that your phone actually does REALLY good in comparison. I think both phones perform very well on this front (albeit I would still like it to be better; but I would like it to be better also on my laptop); nuff said.
It's just a me too phone.
And the iPhone is what? Groundbreaking? Survey says: NOPE !!!!!!!!!!! Imagine if you will and iPod Touch that could make calls. Wait, imagine no more. Introducing the old technology infested iPhone.
In the interest of full disclosure, let me just state my history with the iPhone. I bought an EDGE iPhone for use on T-Mobile right after the 3G came out. I didn't have a data plan for a few months, then signed up for one. About four months after buying it, I ditched the iPhone for a Nokia N95 8GB, which I still have. I think the iPhone is a great device, it just wasn't for me. That in mind, read on...
I registered here just to post a comment. I guess that's probably lame.
I think a big problem is that we approach this, and I use this term with caution on an Apple website, from a fanboy perspective.
Put your pitchforks and torches down for a moment. it's not what you think, and it comes from all sides. Please keep reading, or at least don't blaze me to bits unless you've read it all.
Instead of thinking about what will be a better phone, what will stimulate the smartphone market, or what will make me a happier, more productive user, our concerns stem from who built a machine.
Example from the first page:
Fanboyism - and I am guilty of it from time to time - is most apparent when you're willing to come to blows for (or against) a company whose products you pay money for. I don't want to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but folks, these companies are not here to make you telephones, they're here to get your money. Give your money to the company that makes the best phones, talk about it, all peachy. But when you start taking personal offense at another company's product just because it's similar to your preferred product, well, it's time to re-evaluate how you spend your money.
It goes both ways, of course: I was rooting for the Blackberry Storm, trying to find merit where there apparently was none, just because it wasn't an iPhone. (I know. That was dumb. The Storm is dumb.)
Instead of evaluating the phones based on which we consider better, we consider why things are how they are. Going back to the Storm, I could say that it's not as good as the iPhone since it had less of a development budget, it was on a tight schedule, whatever. I don't even know, I made those up. But the fact remains that it's bad. The biggest Blackberry fanboy (if indeed such a thing exists) can find the most tragic circumstances - the Storm's puppy died last night! the Storm was not fed vegetables as a child! - but this is the cold world of consumer electronics. The Storm sucks and I'm not going to buy it. Period. No pity bucks.
Likewise, if I for some reason considered multitasking to be an essential, make-or-break feature, no amount of explaining why the iPhone doesn't have it, reasonable or otherwise, is going to change the fact that the iPhone doesn't have it, and I would give my money to the Pre. So what if the Pre has a more powerful processor and more RAM? As a user, I don't care what's doing the number crunching on my phone, I care that those numbers get crunched. We should take these companies to task for features that we want, not excuse them. That's how competition works for consumers.
Why shouldn't we demand these things? Sure, we can take those steps you outlined, but shouldn't we want it all to happen automatically?
The Symbian OS may multitask, but I still think it's a piece of shit for most things. It's not intuitive, features are buried in menus, and file transfers are like molasses. The home screen could be way more useful than it is, and I wish there was more compatibility for video formats. I acknowledge the faults in my phone because I know it isn't and can never be perfect. Neither was my iPhone. I don't tell people who acknowledge these faults to stop whining because I don't owe the company who built the phone anything; if anything, they owe me a good user experience. I'm not saying I never got it, I'm saying it can always be better and we should demand that, not silence people who talk about it.
If you must know, it's only got a 2.8 inch screen, but it does the accelerometer thing, it uses Webkit (bonus: embedded Flash), and I prefer physical buttons to a touch screen if I have to choose (though I'd like both). More importantly, though, why are you pissing in my Cheerios? What's it to you if the Nokia doesn't do all those things?
I bought my iPhone a year ago because I thought it looked really cool, and I was right. The iPhone was a really neat device and it introduced me to the whole smartphone thing: it was my gateway drug. All the friends and family I have who own iPhones love them. More power to them. The phone that I chose instead has a more limited appeal, but that doesn't make it better or worse. The iPhone's engineers focused on software, the N95's on hardware. That was a compromise I preferred, but I don't expect it to be right for everybody.
We should think about ourselves when evaluating consumer products, not the companies who make them. When we're willing to put time into defending an entity that makes us poorer, and mobiles ain't cheap, then we're turning the whole point of competition on its head.
Apologies. I know I'm verbose.
Great post but it will fall on deaf ears here. The only thing missing on this site with some are Jack Boots, the Deutschland Uber Alles anthem, and a 3rd Reich. Anything not blessed by He Who is named Steve is considered of lesser quality and immediately dismissed. Your statements about the design philosophies of Nokia vs. Apple was spot on but Nokia has seen that Apple is correct and they will release the N97 which will be the start of better software and hardware integration. I have long given up on "brand loyalty" but now am much more loyal to my dollars. I am after more bang for my buck and in some cases Nokia is a fail, while in many more cases Apple fails even greater. It is just that simple. Well except on this site. There are a few here that present good arguments and can see things from both sides, and the mods do a pretty good job of running the place. However, the Appleista iBoys simply can not accept that there is another phone(s) on the market, nor anyone that does not think different.
All these hate statements about the Pre are pretty ridiculous. At the end of the day; we all know full well that if this product was branded as an "iPhone 4G"; that most haters here would be drooling over it. This phone is basically done by the same iPhone/iPod people that were leached from Apple. The only main difference is the branding (it's under Palm). Most of you guys may also be surprised to learn that Apple actually HAD no real phone embedded engineers.
Uhm no. If Apple would release the pre today without Palm relasing the pre I would say that they have gone backwards. As I ready stated, why would I want to buy a phone that is worse or maybe as good as the iPhone 3G? Then I go a year back in time. I rather stay in this time zone and move forward with the new iPhone. And I don't care who developed the Pre. All I know is that palm is worse off than Apple was a year ago. A year ago Apple was (and still is) ahead of competition. Palm is not. The Android has arrived. HTC has moved on. RIM has hopped along. But Palm has just answered with a very weak call "me too".
For one it's not my number. I told you saw it in a survey.
The survey was only for iPhone's, not all touch devices.
App Store apps are not the only option for screen icons. There are thousands of web apps and web based services one can use on the iPhone. So no the number of apps sold does not tell the full story of the number of apps and services on the average iPhone.
First, nonsense. Very few people use web apps. Very few developers still work on web app.s
Second, most apps stayed on the phone for less than 24 hours. (Study done by Pinch Media)
I am a developer. I have 9 pages of apps. However, I use 4 to 5 third party apps per day the max.
Why do you people always conveniently forget that Smartphone OSs have been multitasking for years...
Yes, they have.
smoothly and elegantly
No! Those words definitely do not describe my experiences with other multi-tasking smartphone OSes, such as Windows Mobile and S60. Running more than 1 app caused them to slow to a chuggy, unresponsive crawl.
The Pre apparently doesn't fair overly well with multiple apps running.
Uhm no. If Apple would release the pre today without Palm relasing the pre I would say that they have gone backwards. As I ready stated, why would I want to buy a phone that is worse or maybe as good as the iPhone 3G? Then I go a year back in time. I rather stay in this time zone and move forward with the new iPhone. And I don't care who developed the Pre. All I know is that palm is worse off than Apple was a year ago. A year ago Apple was (and still is) ahead of competition. Palm is not. The Android has arrived. HTC has moved on. RIM has hopped along. But Palm has just answered with a very weak call "me too".
Palm's "me too" is strong. If the iPhone didn't exist I'd snap one up in heartbeat. I certainly wouldn't consider any of the other devices.
Palm know the "keep it simple" mentality that Apple has. Palm offered the best devices for a long time. Sadly they squandered their lead trying create PalmOS 6.0
dude - chill out
Copy and Paste is not my number one criteria. I rarely thought about it during my time with the iPhone..
Besides - you never know.. the Pre may have a more powerful copy/paste implementation by the time Apple releases 3.0...
And I'm not trying to defend the PRE. There is another feature that they are missing that is in iPhone 3.0 - UNDO.. I just requested it..
iPhone 3.0 HAS an undo function. After cut/paste you can shake the handset and a prompt is displayed asking if you wish to undo.
Anything not blessed by He Who is named Steve is considered of lesser quality
Because most of it is.
Wow this is some BS, my summer home is on Martha's Vineyard, and I have several cellphones, my iPhone works just fine.
I talk about 1-2 hours a day on the phone, my verizon windows mobile devices often freeze up and you can't even push the "answer" button because the device has run out of memory (RAM). Yes the iphone eats battery, but i can tell you right now, I spent 4 hours on the phone last night, and this morning i made about a 10 minute call. It gave me the 20% battery warning, (total 3 days).
One of the windows mobile touch phones i have, isn't even touch, sure people think they get a touchscreen phone that it's like windows mobile, but it's nothing like it. You can just push on the screen, you can't move your fingers. It makes touch screens appear to suck in general, and they think "it has touch like the iphone!" it's nothing like it.
I'm a blackberry addict who uses his iPhone way more. I can type faster on the iPhone that my blackberry. I generally keep it as a backup device.
Are you in a beach house? I'm glad it works for you. My friends and their friends no such luck, They are in the beach house. They love the device, who doesn't, just can't stand that they have to go to the market to make calls.
Are you in a beach house? I'm glad it works for you. My friends and their friends no such luck, They are in the beach house. They love the device, who doesn't, just can't stand that they have to go to the market to make calls.
Depends entirely on your carrier/network.