Having to enter a single Name & Number is ususally a not too complex task on most mobiles today. I started with a Nokia and have recently moved to an EricsSony T68i. The Nokia UI is more intuitive than the Ericsson one. Not because I was used to Nokia, but because it's more logical in many way and behaves a lot more as you'd EXPECT it to behave.
The T68i is still a BIG improvement over older Ericsson mobiles.
i had to move ALL my old contacts to my new mobile phone. Since I hav euse the multientries in my Nokia (one name, several numbers and eMail etc.) I couldn't get them out by software. Nokia still refuses to give out the specs. So I typed them by hand into my mac OS X AddressBook application.
Using iSync and bluetooth I had over 150 persons with a total of more than 300 entries plus my calendar info on the new phone within about 4 minutes. No way you could enter that info in less than a few days by typing on that tiny keys of the mobile...
I guess iPhone might be a combination of BT headset allowing you to use it as VoIP phone integrated with iChat and QuickTime Broadcaster.
i still hope to get my speakers an mikrophone of my Mac to use as hands free set for my phone. Would be the perfect addition. Also call notification without having to have AddressBook running would be nice. :-)
I do like that one Nokia design that has a cover with a phone keypad that flips up and around to reveal a split QWERTY keyboard on either side of the screen. That is flat-out ingenious.
I have a tremendous resistance to the idea of typing letters with a numeric pad. It's just ugly, and completely un-Apple. That's why my idea did not handle text input, actually. I limited the features to whatever could be accomplished straightforwardly from the interface (in this case, the iPod's). Yes, it tethers the phone to the Mac more closely than most cellphones would be , but with the tradeoff that it would be so much cleaner and simpler to use.
In keeping with that, if Apple released a separate device with a dialpad, I would expect it to function as a dialpad. If you want text input, there has to be some straightforward way of inputting text. Which is why I like that one Nokia design (although the rest of the features on that particular phone are the usual random jumble that makes all cell phones seem not-quite-there to me). It's the most ingenious way to stash a full keyboard in a handheld device that I've seen.
<strong>Nokia sucks. Apple won't enter the phone market with a flimsy Nokia-like device and sell it on advertising.
It will be simple, with very little moving parts, and most importantly FOCUSED.
Simple keypad with navigation keys, contacts, calendar, text messaging.
Text is HUGE, and no doubt Apple will doubtlessly market Jaguar's SMS capabilities.
It will have blue-tooth and USB. Battery life will be fantastic, it will be light and small but not flimsy or fiddelly.
Barto</strong><hr></blockquote>
Apple would never put USB in over Firewire, that's just plan stupid. They have spend alot on the development of firewire and hope to have it adopted by other developers.
<strong>I don't know a single person who'd rather do it the second way. Perhaps you're more technophobic than I thought possible for a forum moderator (or is it "cellophobic"?)</strong><hr></blockquote>
I carried my T68i around for two weeks along with my Nokia that it was replacing until iSync was released so that I wouldn't have to enter all the numbers and information. Kind of a pain, but to be able to load every name, address, email, a whole range of numbers (Home, Cel, Work, etc) and notes in a couple of short minutes via iSync - that was well worth the inconvenience. I guess I'm a cellophobe. cool!
[quote]Originally posted by fridgemagnet:
HAs anyone used the Sony Ericsson T68i? I just got one and I was impressed at the ease of use, it is by far the easiest phone to use I've ever had.<hr></blockquote>
I've owned three Nokias before I got my T68i.
I had it for about four months and I'm selling it to a friend as soon as I can get the Nokia bluetooth phone.
The T68i is sluggish (I hear a firmware update fixes that, but breaks bluetooth in some phones) and the menu system sucks! I love and am used to how Nokias work. The SonyEricsson just has too many things that bug me - It turns off in your pocket even though you have the keylock on! Sheesh!
I'm amazed with all the possible ideas that the formum members come up with - with this sort of forum, Steve might decide to cost-cut his innovation department one day....
Maybe I didn't read all the comments, but I noticed that most arguments are rather technocentric. I'll try a little different approach, trying to derive conclusions from the industry logic, particularly the cell phone industry, which ticks a bit different in comparision to the "normal" IT industry.
I think that people at Apple are aware that their experience with being too pioneering are not too good: neither Newtons nor digital cameras achieved the commercial success that they, IMHO, deserved.
On the other hand side, their first experience with a "commodity entertainment device" like the iPod are very positive - the advantage is that the principle of the device is already know to a mass market, so Apple didn't need to spearhead the user acceptance.
This would be a good argument in favour of a cell phone, given that there are just about a billion people out there using one.
However, looking at the Digital Hub Strategy, it becomes clear that Apple wants to serve as the integration center of technologies, without necessarily providing the hardware themselves. In other words: it's iPhoto instead of an Apple digital camera now.
iPod was the first "contradiction" to this philosphy, Apple suddenly venturing into the hitherto - for them - uncharted waters of musical entertainment hardware.
This can leave us with one conclusion only: Apple is oberserving very carefully the markets surrounding the Digital Hub, trying to figure out where mere software integration serves best their purpose or if there's eventually a buck to be made out of offering streamlined hardware that does banal things better than any other device out there.
In other words: Apple will certainly also observe the smartphone / PDA market and iSync is the obvious first result of this.
The fact that the cellphone technology is already widely accepted might tip the balance in favour of considering also a hardware offer.
However, Apple is also very aware of the importance of branding. And the attempt to "out-Nokia" Nokia is bound to fail - and they know.
But you don't need to produce everything yourself that carries your brand.
Maybe Apple takes branding one step futher. Like most others, they have already outsourced the actual hardware manufacturing to the Flextronics of this world. Maybe they aim to integrate their brand into another branded product ?
It could make sense to have the brand of the phone manufacturer for the underlying hardware and have an Apple-branded software layer.
Nokia would certainly not accept anything like this, but someone struggeling for survival, like SonyEricsson, might be in for a bargain.
The rest of the current cellphone industry logic would support this approach: Sony Ericsson is a founding member of the Symbian consortium. Symbian is the "old" EPOC operationg system from the PSION PDAs, specially adapted to cell phones.
Sony Ericsson, Nokia, Motorola and Siemens have committed to this OS, so mastering the technology with one manufacturer will give you access to potentially 80% of the cell phone market.
However, Symbian is ONLY a OS, not a GUI. What we see now is the advent of standardized GUIs, as defined software layers on top of the Symbian basis. The best point in case: Nokia's "Serie 60" standard, which they have already licenced to Samsung and Siemens - we will see a lot of smartphones based on this software specification in the coming months.
The advantage of this standard: even though it defines the basic GUI element on the smart phone, it still gives you total freedom as to their arrangment into your particular look'n feel.
So I wouldn't wonder if Apple wasn't exploring to use underlying SonyEricsson hardware and to build its own, Apple-branded software either right on top of the Symbian OS or maybe even only design their own, particular Apple GUI within a higher-level definition like the Serie 60 approach (...but SonyEricsson, to my current knowledge, did not licence the Serie 60 standard).
This approach would allow Apple to embed whatever integration technology they deem necessary to make the device fit their Digital Hub Strategy. Standards like SyncML are, of course, already part of the mentioned cell phone standards.
Quite an intriguing thought: with this kind of approach you might either buy directly an Apple-branded phone, perfectly integrating into the rest of the MacOS world OR you might even be able to buy the phone you like most from the Nokias, Siemens etc. of this world and send it to your Apple dealer to have it flashed with the Apple iPhone software suite....
The advantage for Apple is clear: it would not need to bother with cell phone hardware, which is clearly not their focus. And it is not as easy as some forum members seem to believe to master all the different cell phone standards: only a couple of weeks ago did Qualcom introduce its first chipset to support both CDMA and GSM telephony.
Multi-band phones, supporting the different frequency implementations of GSM (900, 1800 and 1900 Mhz) are commonplace by now, but cross-standard hardware is basically non-existant. The Asian manufacturers are e.g. struggeling hard to adapt their phones to GSM - and the results are still far from being satisfactory. In other words: just because Nokia is churning out millions of phones, it doesn't necessarily mean that it's easy to do for everyone else.
Add on top of this that these observations only cover voice telephony, and not yet the whole array of CSD, GPRS, Bluetooth and other data transmission technologies which must be seamlessly integrated on top of the basic voice communication features, and you have a pretty good ideas why Apple will certainly not be so foolish as to bring their own cellphone to the market.
Mobile/cell phone providedrs get their phones directly from the manufacturers. Apple does not make any of their products. Nokia, Motorola, Sony et al have the advantage of being able to provide phones to their customers at pretty low cost. Many people who sign up for a cell service get the phone for nothing or at a price well below the actual cost of the device. Providers make their money on one and two year contracts. How can Apple make any money on such a similar deal, particularly since each of the above mentioned companies make 100s of phone variations specifically designed for the various providers. It would be a huge mistake and would cost Apple in earnings. They should stay out of a market they have no business being in. A dumb, dumb idea IMHO.
I don't have an iPod but played with one briefly at the Apple store. So what if you wanted to call someone not in your files? Where's the key pad? It would need a key pad to be successful as a phone I believe. </strong><hr></blockquote>
<strong> Apple does not make any of their products. </strong><hr></blockquote>
Nitpick: Apple assembles the PowerMacs in their own plants.
However, that doesn't contradict your larger point that Apple would contract out the production of a hypothetical cell phone, which is why it's a nitpick.
I'm too lazy to actually read this mongo huge thread.... I just want to throw in my guess as to what an iPhone would be.
My guess would be that it is voice communication over the internet. Say that iPhone is a cheap device, that you hook up to your mac. You could talk long distance to anyone else with an iPhone without long distance charges. The biggest drawbacks of this idea are that it couldn't really interact with the regular telephone network and that your would need a connection which is better than a 56k modem.
I can't see apple making a cell phone... the cell phone market is saturated and existing ones seem to work pretty well.
okay, anyone want to go over to <a href="http://www.railheaddesign.com"; target="_blank">RAILhead Design</a>, read Maury's thoughts on where apple's IP over Firewire opens all sorts of interesting possibilities with the Mac as a digital hub. now start working phone capabilities and airport and/or bluetooth.
plus, i want to say the idea earlier in this thread about using the circular trackpad as an old-time rotary dial phone is so crazy it's perfect!
[quote]Seems iPhone is going to be an iApp integrated with iChat for Voice-over-IP and Video-over-IP <hr></blockquote>
Macosrumors.com is not a very accurate sourse. The often claim stuff that was reported in other rumor sites a few days before. If iPhone is software that works with iChat, why have name for part of another program? Would the new name be iChat plus iPhone? If it is part of iChat it should just be called iChat 2.0
Macosrumors.com is not a very accurate sourse. The often claim stuff that was reported in other rumor sites a few days before. If iPhone is software that works with iChat, why have name for part of another program? Would the new name be iChat plus iPhone? If it is part of iChat it should just be called iChat 2.0</strong><hr></blockquote>
Well, they've done fairly well from what I've seen. Anyway, there's a few possibilities: 1) it's simply an internal codename, or 2) it's a seperate app that ties into iChat (ie. can be used independantly, or to initiate video with someone you're chatting with already).
Nitpick: Apple assembles the PowerMacs in their own plants.</strong><hr></blockquote>
They used to. My Power Mac was assembled by Apple in Singapore, but the new DDR Power Macs are assembled in China.
That means that unless Apple has opened a new plant in China, the Power Mac is probably now assembled by one of the Chinese or Taiwanese owned plants in Guangdong.
Well, they've done fairly well from what I've seen. Anyway, there's a few possibilities: 1) it's simply an internal codename, or 2) it's a seperate app that ties into iChat (ie. can be used independantly, or to initiate video with someone you're chatting with already).</strong><hr></blockquote>
It isn't internal, because it's been Trade-Marked.
I doubt that Apple would produce an application which enchances iChat and nothing else. It would be better as a just new feature in iChat.
I like the posts that talk about voice control. Don't like the keypad interface? Then don't provide a keypad interface. Voice control should mean being able to say "Save Bob's number under Business Contacts." And the phone does that and is smart enough to tie "Bob" "Business name" and "ph#" all in one record.
If one combined voice control, the type of logic that existed in the Newton with bluetooth and a nifty wireless headphone/headset then many of the functions that a phone or PDA handles can be delivered with no physical interface. Ya, it'd throw some people for a loop but most would quickly find chunky keypads/pen pads awkward.
david m, i've seen ads promoting phones with the functionality you describe, like "call home" and the phone starts dialing. however, i have never actually used one first-hand. is it usable? or do things like accents (even various north american regional accents) screw it up? can anyone else talk from experience?
Comments
The T68i is still a BIG improvement over older Ericsson mobiles.
i had to move ALL my old contacts to my new mobile phone. Since I hav euse the multientries in my Nokia (one name, several numbers and eMail etc.) I couldn't get them out by software. Nokia still refuses to give out the specs. So I typed them by hand into my mac OS X AddressBook application.
Using iSync and bluetooth I had over 150 persons with a total of more than 300 entries plus my calendar info on the new phone within about 4 minutes. No way you could enter that info in less than a few days by typing on that tiny keys of the mobile...
I guess iPhone might be a combination of BT headset allowing you to use it as VoIP phone integrated with iChat and QuickTime Broadcaster.
i still hope to get my speakers an mikrophone of my Mac to use as hands free set for my phone. Would be the perfect addition. Also call notification without having to have AddressBook running would be nice. :-)
It will be simple, with very little moving parts, and most importantly FOCUSED.
Simple keypad with navigation keys, contacts, calendar, text messaging.
Text is HUGE, and no doubt Apple will doubtlessly market Jaguar's SMS capabilities.
It will have blue-tooth and USB. Battery life will be fantastic, it will be light and small but not flimsy or fiddelly.
Barto
I have a tremendous resistance to the idea of typing letters with a numeric pad. It's just ugly, and completely un-Apple. That's why my idea did not handle text input, actually. I limited the features to whatever could be accomplished straightforwardly from the interface (in this case, the iPod's). Yes, it tethers the phone to the Mac more closely than most cellphones would be , but with the tradeoff that it would be so much cleaner and simpler to use.
In keeping with that, if Apple released a separate device with a dialpad, I would expect it to function as a dialpad. If you want text input, there has to be some straightforward way of inputting text. Which is why I like that one Nokia design (although the rest of the features on that particular phone are the usual random jumble that makes all cell phones seem not-quite-there to me). It's the most ingenious way to stash a full keyboard in a handheld device that I've seen.
<strong>Nokia sucks. Apple won't enter the phone market with a flimsy Nokia-like device and sell it on advertising.
It will be simple, with very little moving parts, and most importantly FOCUSED.
Simple keypad with navigation keys, contacts, calendar, text messaging.
Text is HUGE, and no doubt Apple will doubtlessly market Jaguar's SMS capabilities.
It will have blue-tooth and USB. Battery life will be fantastic, it will be light and small but not flimsy or fiddelly.
Barto</strong><hr></blockquote>
Apple would never put USB in over Firewire, that's just plan stupid. They have spend alot on the development of firewire and hope to have it adopted by other developers.
Well, that was interesting....
Aries 1B
<strong>I don't know a single person who'd rather do it the second way. Perhaps you're more technophobic than I thought possible for a forum moderator (or is it "cellophobic"?)</strong><hr></blockquote>
I carried my T68i around for two weeks along with my Nokia that it was replacing until iSync was released so that I wouldn't have to enter all the numbers and information. Kind of a pain, but to be able to load every name, address, email, a whole range of numbers (Home, Cel, Work, etc) and notes in a couple of short minutes via iSync - that was well worth the inconvenience. I guess I'm a cellophobe. cool!
[quote]Originally posted by fridgemagnet:
HAs anyone used the Sony Ericsson T68i? I just got one and I was impressed at the ease of use, it is by far the easiest phone to use I've ever had.<hr></blockquote>
I've owned three Nokias before I got my T68i.
I had it for about four months and I'm selling it to a friend as soon as I can get the Nokia bluetooth phone.
The T68i is sluggish (I hear a firmware update fixes that, but breaks bluetooth in some phones) and the menu system sucks! I love and am used to how Nokias work. The SonyEricsson just has too many things that bug me - It turns off in your pocket even though you have the keylock on! Sheesh!
<img src="graemlins/hmmm.gif" border="0" alt="[Hmmm]" />
I'm amazed with all the possible ideas that the formum members come up with - with this sort of forum, Steve might decide to cost-cut his innovation department one day....
Maybe I didn't read all the comments, but I noticed that most arguments are rather technocentric. I'll try a little different approach, trying to derive conclusions from the industry logic, particularly the cell phone industry, which ticks a bit different in comparision to the "normal" IT industry.
I think that people at Apple are aware that their experience with being too pioneering are not too good: neither Newtons nor digital cameras achieved the commercial success that they, IMHO, deserved.
On the other hand side, their first experience with a "commodity entertainment device" like the iPod are very positive - the advantage is that the principle of the device is already know to a mass market, so Apple didn't need to spearhead the user acceptance.
This would be a good argument in favour of a cell phone, given that there are just about a billion people out there using one.
However, looking at the Digital Hub Strategy, it becomes clear that Apple wants to serve as the integration center of technologies, without necessarily providing the hardware themselves. In other words: it's iPhoto instead of an Apple digital camera now.
iPod was the first "contradiction" to this philosphy, Apple suddenly venturing into the hitherto - for them - uncharted waters of musical entertainment hardware.
This can leave us with one conclusion only: Apple is oberserving very carefully the markets surrounding the Digital Hub, trying to figure out where mere software integration serves best their purpose or if there's eventually a buck to be made out of offering streamlined hardware that does banal things better than any other device out there.
In other words: Apple will certainly also observe the smartphone / PDA market and iSync is the obvious first result of this.
The fact that the cellphone technology is already widely accepted might tip the balance in favour of considering also a hardware offer.
However, Apple is also very aware of the importance of branding. And the attempt to "out-Nokia" Nokia is bound to fail - and they know.
But you don't need to produce everything yourself that carries your brand.
Maybe Apple takes branding one step futher. Like most others, they have already outsourced the actual hardware manufacturing to the Flextronics of this world. Maybe they aim to integrate their brand into another branded product ?
It could make sense to have the brand of the phone manufacturer for the underlying hardware and have an Apple-branded software layer.
Nokia would certainly not accept anything like this, but someone struggeling for survival, like SonyEricsson, might be in for a bargain.
The rest of the current cellphone industry logic would support this approach: Sony Ericsson is a founding member of the Symbian consortium. Symbian is the "old" EPOC operationg system from the PSION PDAs, specially adapted to cell phones.
Sony Ericsson, Nokia, Motorola and Siemens have committed to this OS, so mastering the technology with one manufacturer will give you access to potentially 80% of the cell phone market.
However, Symbian is ONLY a OS, not a GUI. What we see now is the advent of standardized GUIs, as defined software layers on top of the Symbian basis. The best point in case: Nokia's "Serie 60" standard, which they have already licenced to Samsung and Siemens - we will see a lot of smartphones based on this software specification in the coming months.
The advantage of this standard: even though it defines the basic GUI element on the smart phone, it still gives you total freedom as to their arrangment into your particular look'n feel.
So I wouldn't wonder if Apple wasn't exploring to use underlying SonyEricsson hardware and to build its own, Apple-branded software either right on top of the Symbian OS or maybe even only design their own, particular Apple GUI within a higher-level definition like the Serie 60 approach (...but SonyEricsson, to my current knowledge, did not licence the Serie 60 standard).
This approach would allow Apple to embed whatever integration technology they deem necessary to make the device fit their Digital Hub Strategy. Standards like SyncML are, of course, already part of the mentioned cell phone standards.
Quite an intriguing thought: with this kind of approach you might either buy directly an Apple-branded phone, perfectly integrating into the rest of the MacOS world OR you might even be able to buy the phone you like most from the Nokias, Siemens etc. of this world and send it to your Apple dealer to have it flashed with the Apple iPhone software suite....
The advantage for Apple is clear: it would not need to bother with cell phone hardware, which is clearly not their focus. And it is not as easy as some forum members seem to believe to master all the different cell phone standards: only a couple of weeks ago did Qualcom introduce its first chipset to support both CDMA and GSM telephony.
Multi-band phones, supporting the different frequency implementations of GSM (900, 1800 and 1900 Mhz) are commonplace by now, but cross-standard hardware is basically non-existant. The Asian manufacturers are e.g. struggeling hard to adapt their phones to GSM - and the results are still far from being satisfactory. In other words: just because Nokia is churning out millions of phones, it doesn't necessarily mean that it's easy to do for everyone else.
Add on top of this that these observations only cover voice telephony, and not yet the whole array of CSD, GPRS, Bluetooth and other data transmission technologies which must be seamlessly integrated on top of the basic voice communication features, and you have a pretty good ideas why Apple will certainly not be so foolish as to bring their own cellphone to the market.
<strong>
I don't have an iPod but played with one briefly at the Apple store. So what if you wanted to call someone not in your files? Where's the key pad? It would need a key pad to be successful as a phone I believe. </strong><hr></blockquote>
speech recognition.
handwriting recognition.
touch screen.
[ 12-07-2002: Message edited by: Krassy ]</p>
<strong> Apple does not make any of their products. </strong><hr></blockquote>
Nitpick: Apple assembles the PowerMacs in their own plants.
However, that doesn't contradict your larger point that Apple would contract out the production of a hypothetical cell phone, which is why it's a nitpick.
My guess would be that it is voice communication over the internet. Say that iPhone is a cheap device, that you hook up to your mac. You could talk long distance to anyone else with an iPhone without long distance charges. The biggest drawbacks of this idea are that it couldn't really interact with the regular telephone network and that your would need a connection which is better than a 56k modem.
I can't see apple making a cell phone... the cell phone market is saturated and existing ones seem to work pretty well.
plus, i want to say the idea earlier in this thread about using the circular trackpad as an old-time rotary dial phone is so crazy it's perfect!
Check out <a href="http://www.macosrumors.com/"; target="_blank">http://www.macosrumors.com/</a>;
Seems iPhone is going to be an iApp integrated with iChat for Voice-over-IP and Video-over-IP.
Macosrumors.com is not a very accurate sourse. The often claim stuff that was reported in other rumor sites a few days before. If iPhone is software that works with iChat, why have name for part of another program? Would the new name be iChat plus iPhone? If it is part of iChat it should just be called iChat 2.0
<strong>
Macosrumors.com is not a very accurate sourse. The often claim stuff that was reported in other rumor sites a few days before. If iPhone is software that works with iChat, why have name for part of another program? Would the new name be iChat plus iPhone? If it is part of iChat it should just be called iChat 2.0</strong><hr></blockquote>
Well, they've done fairly well from what I've seen. Anyway, there's a few possibilities: 1) it's simply an internal codename, or 2) it's a seperate app that ties into iChat (ie. can be used independantly, or to initiate video with someone you're chatting with already).
<strong>
Nitpick: Apple assembles the PowerMacs in their own plants.</strong><hr></blockquote>
They used to. My Power Mac was assembled by Apple in Singapore, but the new DDR Power Macs are assembled in China.
That means that unless Apple has opened a new plant in China, the Power Mac is probably now assembled by one of the Chinese or Taiwanese owned plants in Guangdong.
Barto
<strong>
Well, they've done fairly well from what I've seen. Anyway, there's a few possibilities: 1) it's simply an internal codename, or 2) it's a seperate app that ties into iChat (ie. can be used independantly, or to initiate video with someone you're chatting with already).</strong><hr></blockquote>
It isn't internal, because it's been Trade-Marked.
I doubt that Apple would produce an application which enchances iChat and nothing else. It would be better as a just new feature in iChat.
Barto
If one combined voice control, the type of logic that existed in the Newton with bluetooth and a nifty wireless headphone/headset then many of the functions that a phone or PDA handles can be delivered with no physical interface. Ya, it'd throw some people for a loop but most would quickly find chunky keypads/pen pads awkward.