Does it really have a beautiful interface if typing on it is not so great?
The only company that even approaches Apple's attention to elegance is Google. I remember that the first time I used Gmail, my reaction was, "Finally -- this is what past webmail systems were trying to get at."
Right, and that's another company where people act like it's crazy to like them so much.
It shows. People care.
I'm super sympathetic to this point generally, and would be specifically if the phone actually existed and the people talking about it had used it. But that's not the case.
1. It amazes me that some people are not susceptible to Apple's elegance. But it amazes me even more that they can't understand people who are. Look, I don't get ballet in any visceral way, but I understand that other people do, and I don't blame them for it. Likewise, I like my iPod as much for how it looks and acts as for what it does.
2. Less charitably, any sentence that asks, as that one does in effect, how is a Mac device different from a Windows device, could not have been composed by a brain I quite understand.
3. Blah blah, trivial consumerism, narcissism, people starving, war, etc.
if the phone actually existed and the people talking about it had used it. But that's not the case.
Pogue used it; follow the link on "commenter."
5: I totally react to elegance in design. Normally, though, functionality is a big part of that elegance. It certainly is with Google and with the GUIs that Apple pioneered.
Apple is a fucking phenomenal product designer -- and really, their products are more than just "pretty," they really are damn well designed, well suited for their functions and easy on the eye at the same time. I doubt there's more than 5% of the population that can truly say that visual design doesn't factor into their purchases (iPod, iPhone, treo, whatev') at least somewhat.
I think my concerns are whether form follows functionality here, and how big the difference is or will be from other offerings. I get iPod love in the first year or two after introduction, but most of the Neat! features (AFAIK--I've only played with iPods) have been incorporated in other players. It seems as if the attention to design justifies the purchasing decisions of the early adopters, and the decisions of those early adopters creates cachet, which justifies the purchasing decisions of later buyers.
2 reminds me to ask, anyone know what the deal is with GMail's beta status? I've been using it for like 4 years now if memory serves. Are they keeping the whole suite of Google apps in beta until they are ready to release them as a package? That would be kind of neat. But they are adding new apps at such an alarming clip I fear it could mean they never get to the release. Speaking of which -- anybody checked out Google Finance yet? It is alarmingly powerful and easy to use, though of course far from perfect.
I agree with rob in 1. If the user experience actually sucks, how is that good design? I am going to wait till the second generation.
5: I think a lot of the "bah, apple" people say that shit simply out of a reactionary desire to be cool by distancing themselves from the hype. A lot like the "she's not so hot" people who claim that the famous actress du jour isn't pretty.
Anyway, I'll try out the typing thing myself once the phone's in stores, obviously. I'm a li'l dubious about the touch-screen thing since I generally don't like those much. But *if* it works as well as they say it does--and generally when Apple hypes an interface, as opposed to simply ignoring it in favor of hyping something else, like speed or animations or whatever--then it should be awesome. If it really is a pain to use, then I'll wait until the next generation; but I suspect some of the "it's a pain to use" stuff is just a matter of learning curve, like with the iPods.
If the user experience actually sucks, how is that good design?
You obviously aren't in the field of marketing.
This is what Pogue says about the typing.
* Typing is difficult. The letter keys are just pictures on the glass screen, so of course there's no tactile feedback.
Software helps a lot. You can afford to make a lot of typos as you muddle through a word, because the software analyzes which keys you *might* have meant and figures out the word you wanted. Its best guess appears just under what you've typed; if it's correct, you tap the Space bar to accept it and continue. I typed a couple of e-mail messages with lots of typos but eventually 100 percent accuracy, thanks to this auto-correct feature. (My testing didn't involve proper names, however.)
Bottom line: Heavy BlackBerry addicts may not want to jump ship just yet.
It sounds like there's some learning curve, and some improvements that could be made.
most of the Neat! features (AFAIK--I've only played with iPods) have been incorporated in other players
Show me another music player that looks half so cool as my iPod. You're just deaf to the siren song of real beauty.
Sight isn't the only sense that matters.
My complaint with the iPod is that it sounds bad particularly when using the default headphones (slightly OT, can anyone find statistics for the audio performance of the iPod, it seems to be secret information).
I really don't generally try to talk people out of using an iPod, I acknowledge its convenience, but I just think everyone should know that, like Bose products, it's possible to get far better sound for less money if that's what you want.
Confession: I secretly think that people who don't use Apple products are technologically unserious.
15: You have a whole Williams-Sonoma wing of the kitchen which other products are not allowed to pollute, don't you? The iPod (excluding the Nano) is too big and clunky. People appear to break them all of the time. The wheel thing seems irritating if you're going to shove in a pocket. I recommend anythingbutipod.com.
I really don't care if people like it or not, but getting thirteen-year-old school-girl in public about it is just plain annoying.
I have an ipod and a windows computer because they are the most popular and thus have the widest range of accessories and software.
BTW: Has anyone else wondered about the eventual convergence of ever shrinking ipod technology and just having a song stuck in your head? I figure at some point they are going to introduce the ipod cochlear implant, and the step right after that will force IP law to address philosophical issues about the existence of qualia.
The wheel thing seems irritating if you're going to shove in a pocket.
Tim, meet the "hold" button.
People appear to break them all of the time.
If people who haven't owned any equipment other than a cell phone buy something in droves, you're going to hear more "oops, it broke" stories. I didn't get one, again, because there was something better suited to how I would use it, but I've played with friends', and they're great.
Also:
People appear to break them all of the time.
More ipods break because more people have ipods. Which means more dumb/clumsy/tweenage people have ipods.
"technologically unserious"
This phrase is the great convergence of geek snobbery and old fashioned intellectual snobbery. It reminds me of the days when people use the phrase "serious music" to describe music in the Western classical tradition.
You have a whole Williams-Sonoma wing of the kitchen which other products are not allowed to pollute, don't you?
I can't afford W-S. Because I spend all my money on Apple products.
And dude, big and clunky? Mine is 10 x 6 x 1 cm. More than comfortable in a dress-shirt pocket.
14: Gaah. I hate devices that involve that type of training -- or worse, that want to train me how to use them (such as the handwriting recognition stuff on early Palms). Make it useable out of the box, or go back and redesign.
The iPhone is so shiny and pretty, but until they find a way to make typing on it more tactile, Treo, cold dead hands, etc.
SCMT started with the conciliatory position, but is determined to back himself into a corner.
I'm surprised no one's brought up my main objection: battery life. Even though it looks fantastic, my first thoughts were memories of early iPods and their mighty 5-6 hour battery life. One look at the pretty graphics and processor-intensive tools on the iPhone made me think "Oh, shit." It's good that they're using flash memory to extend the battery life considerably, but they're predicting a battery life of Up To 5 Hours (read, 2, maybe 3 on a good day, and that's on standby). That's ridiculously little battery life for a phone. What if I want to go out for a weekend without my charger? What if I crash with a friend randomly?
It won't be any use to me for a couple generations before it becomes useful, but like the iPod, it will certainly spur a lot of good innovations from competitors.
Also? I have no Smiths at all on my iPod.
Make it useable out of the box, or go back and redesign.
So you've been using a stylus from birth?
rob, you're acting like snobbery is a bad thing, when in fact it's a trait that all of society's artistic/technological innovators share. Discriminating tastes, baby! They move the world forward.
JAC, it's 5 hours of use, 16 hours on standby.
The idea is that design is somehow irrelevant to a products Platonic level of goodness (and also that real men don't care about how something looks, just its raw horsepower). Jonathan Ive gets tongue jobs from the press and Slashdot's CmdrTaco (of "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame." fame) doesn't, so the pump is primed for people to set up a counternarrative where Apple's stuff -- or anyone you apply this to -- is only used by girlies and design fags. (The Month of Apple Bugs going on now, in which some people are trying to reveal security exploits once a day, has as its motto "They come in pink!")
SCMTim, do you actually own an MP3 player? "The wheel thing seems irritating if you're going to shove in a pocket" seems to come from Bizarro World to me.
Never mind, here are results for some tests of the ipod performance.
I'm skeptical, however, since in my experience the sound quality is notably poor but the test results are better than I expected.
a counternarrative where Apple's stuff -- or anyone you apply this to -- is only used by girlies and design fags
33: Ah, thanks, Ogged. That's at least a lot more useable for the average person who just wants to make it through work without their phone dying.
I will admit I'm atypical on this, but I do love my battery life on stuff like mp3 players and phones because I often am doing things like 15 hour flights or weekends randomly crashing at a friend's place. I still have warm feelings for Nokia because my old college phone stayed functional for an entire 9-day stay with a friend of mine in Belgium after I lost my charger.
And dude, big and clunky? Mine is 10 x 6 x 1 cm. More than comfortable in a dress-shirt pocket.
How seriously am I supposed to take the aesthetic sensibilities of someone who would put something in his shirt pocket?
Also? I have no Smiths at all on my iPod.
Now you're just being hurtful.
SCMTim, do you actually own an MP3 player?
Yeah, had a sandisk flash player which I sort of killed. Which is why I've been haunting anythingbutipod of late. I was considering a Nano, but the cultists here have convinced me that the time required by the religious ceremonies are too much of a burden to bear. The wheel's weird. Neat, but weird.
31: Learning how to use a stylus is pretty intuitive for anyone who's already learned how to use a pen. And figuring out how to poke at the pretty pictures on the Treo screen didn't require that I actually go and change my handwriting.
Ogged & JAC: On the time thing I thought the 16 hours was of audio playback, if it is just sitting in your pocket it should do much better. There really was no standby info I could find, but it can't suck as bad as the RAZR right?
Are there any MP3 players on the market that also get AM radio?
So you've been using a stylus from birth?
"The only intuitive interface is the nipple."
Sandisk's next iteration of the e200 series is supposed to get AM, I think. (It might be the next Creative Zen, though.)
Magpie, honestly, the whole "I couldn't learn graffiti" thing is pretty lame. It's basically *block printing*.
JAC, have you seen photos of Motorola's Motofone? It's a dirt-basic phone -- no camera, no yadda yadda -- designed largely for the developing world, but I bet it has killer battery life due to its ePaper display.
(I abandoned my cell phone the last time I moved, and I currently don't have one, which lets me fixate on a different object of gadget lust every few months.)
SCMT -- Irrational dislike for something is your privilege, so fair enough, but if you could call it "limp-wristed" or "sissified" you'd be doing a better job of making my point from 34. Get on it!
I kinda like the Sansa video player -- it's tinytiny, has a nice screen, and 8Gs. My brother bought one last week, and it looked awfully nifty. But it's not as purty as my iPod.
40: RAZRs have pretty good battery life in my experience. Mine tends to last at least 3-4 days per charge while spending 10 hours a day vainly searching for the ephemerous signal in my apartment. When I've stayed anywhere else, a week without charging is standard.
But if I could get a relatively cheap Nokia clamshell or sliding phone through my service, I would in a heartbeat.
SCMT -- Irrational dislike for something is your privilege, so fair enough, but if you could call it "limp-wristed" or "sissified" you'd be doing a better job of making my point from 34. Get on it!
If that's serious, I have no idea where you're getting that.
Now you're just being hurtful.
As a gesture, I freely confess that Berube's post saying "this is the last day of this blog's existence" immediately reminded me of this.
You know what puzzles me? At least since the iMac, Apple has been releasing products that do what other products do, more or less, but which are prettier, funner, and generally more enjoyable, and they've made financial progress as a result. Why do cell phones and other computers and mp3 players continue to look like crap? It's not like Apple enslaves all the good designers.
I'm perfectly serious about irrational dislike for something being your privilege (I know people who don't like ThinkPads because of the little mouse nipple). I am less serious about my desire for you to develop the counternarrative in 34 by drawing a picture of Steve Jobs in a dress, but if you did it would be pretty great.
43.--Seriously? This hasn't been solved yet?
There's no way I'm going to download podcasts onto a gismo when I can just turn on my walkman to listen to NPR.
It's not like Apple enslaves all the good designers.
It puts the GUI on its screen!
There's no way I'm going to download podcasts onto a gismo when I can just turn on my walkman to listen to NPR.
Conversely, I no longer listen to NPR because I can download podcasts to my gizmo.
1. I can move around town and not have disrupted reception;
2. No station breaks, fundraising, etc.;
3. Hear it when you want to.
I.e., same appeal as TiVo over live TV. Why's that so strange?
53: Wait, what? Time-shifting! I can listen to This American Life whenever I want!
45: I didn't say I couldn't, I said it was sufficiently different from my normal handwriting that dealing with it was really, really annoying.
Here's a chart
of Graffiti that shows that lots of letters are quite unlike regular block printing -- see especially A, F, K, Q and T and pretty much all of the punctuation. The Palm was particularly bad about distinguishing among some of the less standard letters. The letters that were more like regular block printing required me to start in a different place than I would while block printing.
In any case, being able to write by hand on the Palm wasn't something I valued enough to put a lot of effort into, since I'm a far faster typist than handwriter, even just using thumbs as I tend to do on the Treo. So by the time I found an affordable keyboard to use with the Palm, it had drifted into the junk drawer.
53: There are plenty of mp3 players that have *FM* radio; the iPod doesn't come with it out of the box, but the accessory remote has a receiver. *AM* radio is a different story entirely.
the iPod doesn't come with it out of the box, but the accessory remote has a receiver.
Unbelievable. You really are all cultists.
People appear to break them all of the time.
Indeed. My iPod, for example, could not swim. But I don't think any of the other music players can swim.
59: Which part of that makes me a cultist?
61: At this point, I'm really just flailing wildly.
51: No, but from what I've heard, Microsoft really doesn't put a lot behind its design team, and the institutional culture doesn't privilege design, which is seen as foofy and "merely" for the stupid customer who doesn't know anything about technology. Whereas Apple has a culture that sees the end user experience as really important. I suspect that's why Msoft products have historically been a lot buggier, too.
There's no way I'm going to download podcasts onto a gismo when I can just turn on my walkman to listen to NPR.
Youcrazyman? Podcasts are WAY better than radio. You can fast forward past the boring parts, pause when someone starts yacking at you, and the reception doesn't cut out when you go through a tunnel. Podcasts are the whole reason I, a total NPR addict, finally fell in love with the gift iPod I got and didn't use for 6 months.
On the iPhone, beauty is part of the functionality of the object; it's the part of the software that works on your behavior instead of on the device. I would never dream of getting a Treo, because I don't need to do all the stuff it does, so why bother? Yet the iPhone makes the same essential features look like cool new opportunities. That's the pretty UI doing that and now I want one. Not just to fondle it, but to do the same things that didn't seem interesting before.
51 -- well, there's always the Wii.
AM radio requires a big antenna due to the low frequencies involved, which makes it harder to integrate into a music player.
Why do you care about AM radio anyway, JM?
63 - The reason that Microsoft's products have been a lot buggier is that they've got a tremendously wider scope of hardware and software that they need to support, and they've really done an excellent job of providing backwards compatibility over the years. Apple has been much more willing to blow up and start anew, which makes keeping bugs out (and doing things like wholescale revisions to the security model) easier. I think you're spot on about the design team, although I think that originally Apple put a lot of effort into ensuring compliance with its (well thought out) design guidelines (the Human Interface Guidelines). Over the years that has slowly transformed into "doing things the way Steve Jobs thinks they out to be done", which is different and worse, although not nearly as bad as it could be.
No actual knowledge, Jake. There are other blogs that traffic in that kind of cheating.
I ban myself. SCMT can have my iPod while I'm gone. It's green. And pretty.
68: Huh? Apple was *great* with backwards compatibility for *years*, and only made a big break with OSX. Whereas MS didn't bother to care if you had to upgrade your software every year--they actively wanted you to.
55: I still listen to NPR live quite a bit, because of the news, and because I can listen to broadcasts of Fresh Air (which I don't think is available in a free Podcast) up to 8 times a day. The rest I Podcast because of reception issues (both NPR stations crap out for a couple of miles in the middle of my commute) or because shows I love are not normally broadcast when I'm around a radio (TAL, Wait Wait) or broadcast locally at all (Good Food).
There's also the couple of times I've used my walkman to get breaking news during catastrophes. But you guys are making me want an MP3 player--and I wish you'd stop!
If you got the iPhone, JM, you would have your mp3 player, and you could get breaking news off the net, like regular people.
One of the catastrophes was a blackout, and during both of them nobody's cellphones worked.
68 - Sorry if I was unclear -- Microsoft wanted you to keep upgrading your hardware and your Windows system, but the software you had already purchased (or, given the stranglehold on the business market, had someone write for you in Virtual Basic) tended to keep on working. I was using a Mac during the great "fat binary" transition to the PowerPC architecture when a lot of applications kakked out, and even before and after that OS upgrades routinely busted things. Whereas Joel Spolsky has an anecdote about the Windows team replicating a bug from DOS in order to make sure SimCity worked in Windows.
The podcasts of NPR are great. And my iPod is pink. And pretty.
71: I have to concur with 68. I've read about the extreme lengths microsoft has gone to to preserve backwards compatibility (e.g. keeping old bugs in their code for popular applications that depend on the bugs, writing parallel version of different code that trigger depending on the application being run, etc.) and that Apple has made many breaking changes. And I've heard both of this things from software designers, which I hold to be more credible than users in general.
Sorry if I was unclear -- Microsoft wanted you to keep upgrading your hardware and your Windows system, but the software you had already purchased (or, given the stranglehold on the business market, had someone write for you in Virtual Basic) tended to keep on working.
Unless you had Microsoft software which gradually stopped working whether or not you tried to upgrade anything, like Windows ME.
Windows ME! That's the one I have!
I hear that hackers don't even bother to write viruses for it.
71: But Apple didn't have near as much 3rd-party software to worry about. You say "MS wanted you to upgrade" and this is true wrt their Office suite -- they wanted you to buy new versions of Word Excel etc. -- but the thing is you could upgrade Windows from version 3.1 to Win95 (don't know about 98) and even to NT 4 (don't know about XP) -- which is a totally different OS and 32-bit instead of 16-bit -- and in a large majority of cases, continue to run 3rd-party and Office applications that had run on your old Windows 3.1 machine. Granted there would be a lot of cool new features in the OS that the apps would not be able to take advantage of ; but they would work for doing the same stuff they had always done.
Yeah, there's a major difference between breaking old applications and forcing you to license new ones.
Basically, all the big players are trying to move to a subscription model of software, where you only ever rent it, and never buy indefinite rights to use a given version.
81 s/b "what Snarkout said in 76".
73: Eh, you're in Manhattan -- someone would probably steal it from you anyway.
I want pink.
pdf and snarkout have the jist of it. Historically MS OS's have been more buggy and have inferior UI (underlying designs have been pretty variable, MS has had some real dogs but NT 4 was a good start --- the guts of OS 9 were way to long in the tooth), but they've had to work hard to keep corporate customers happy with backward compatability. Mac has broken things a few times, but usually with good notice. It's a toss up which approach is better for users, since you really can't do an apples & apples comparison.
The real evil in MS upgrades has been the way they push an integrated office solution (the real cash cow, with hardware coupled OS upgrades) but break document compatability all over the place. This has been far to consistent to be easily dismissed as coding/design errors. An early history of breaking some 3rd party products intentionally didn't help, either.
And my iPod is pink. And pretty.
We're not talking about mp3 players any more, are we?
Not much to say except that pdf and snarkout are right about the backwards compatibility. When I was really little, my dad, running his own business, had an Apple and a PC (pre-Windows), because it wasn't clear which businesses were going to adopt, and Apple lost out pretty much on backwards compatibility.
I can't help but note that the examples of non-backwards compliance from Apple are based on 2 examples over 22 years. Are you really upset that MacPaint II doesn't work on your MacBook Pro? And are you thrilled that CardFile 3.2 is still accessible on a Vaio? Are you bitter about unleaded gas? Come on people - change is good.
I think that a lot of the focus on aesthetics ignores the point that O made in the post: "It shows. People care." Apple products are not just pretty versions of MS or Creative products: they are designed, from the ground up (not nec. literally - please spare me examples of borrowed tech), to create an effect. This article in InformationWeek compares Vista with OSX, and goes through, point by point, the ways in which Vista's inferior interface makes things worse. Not just uglier, but worse.
Obviously, there will be tradeoffs, and Apple won't be the solution for every user. But they create great solutions for many users, whereas the competitors' products are generally great for almost no one, and inoffensive to the rest.
Lastly, I suspect that most people, like me, cannot hear the audio inferiority of iPods that audiophiles always tell us exist. This isn't the same as failure to appreciate aesthetics - my ears simply can't hear what you hear, just as I can't pick out an out of tune oboe in a symphony, or the difference between lossless and lossy audio on even good speakers. But even an engineer can spot the difference between a Mac Mini and a Gateway ca. 1995.
88: The lessons of history are that, while good design might be enough to keep a company in the game (and please people of discriminating taste much more than the competition), it takes more to be at the top of the game. Businesses care less about UI design than they do about backwards compatibility. If a large number of small-to-medium businesses running mission-critical applications were to find that those applications (the source code to which may have been lost years ago) break on a new version of Windows, they might be more inclined to switch to a competitor. And the OS that businesses choose is the OS that many employees will be comfortable with enough to use it on their home machines.
This is not to say that Microsoft doesn't play dirty.
Are you really upset that MacPaint II doesn't work on your MacBook Pro?
No, I've come to peace with that, but I'm still pretty steamed that I can't even fit my 78s into this CD player, much less get them to play.
And actually, the transition from OS9 to OSX was done beautifully: gradual, with maximum opportunity to figure out what best suited your needs. It took a couple years before they even sold computers that couldn't run OS9 out of the box, and AFAIK, you can still run OS9 (and, implicitly, a lot of OS 7 & 8 stuff) via Classic.
But it works via emulator, meaning that Apple coders did not have to "replicate bugs" in the new OS. You people are praising MS for intentionally putting bugs into their OS. This is not healthy behavior.
[N.B. - I know that the changeover did screw up a lot of peripherals, although some MS-centric printers actually worked better.]
I think people are getting much too excited about the iPhone.
I'm sure that it'll be a lot better than the treo/sidekick/whatever, but it's not doing anything that those platforms aren't already capable of -- it's just (presumably) going to do them somewhat better. It seems a little early to try to guess how much better, though. In particular I'm pretty dubious about the touchscreen keyboard and their ability to deliver a satisfying web browser.
I can say that compatibility issues for people who have to use PCs (for work/school-related reasons) may prevent many people from switching to the iPhone if Apple's as negligent with it as they were with the iPod. Meg and I had our iPods magically transform into useless paperweights when we installed XP, and it wasn't a Windows issue -- Apple never addressed some concern (this was two years ago, I don't remember the specifics) and consistently claimed that it had something to do with how XP handled USB/Firewire connections. Which was funny, because all my other gadgets which used them continued to work fine. Not that I'm bitter, mind you, and my iRiver may not be shiny, but it works.
(Of course, my next computer will probably be a Mac, but whatever.)
iPods work just fine with XP, as long as you have Service Pack 2 installed.
It's good that they're using flash memory to extend the battery life considerably, but they're predicting a battery life of Up To 5 Hours. That's ridiculously little battery life for a phone.
Steve Jobs quoth: "We've managed to get 5 hours of battery of talk time, video, and browsing. 16 hours of audio playback."
Talk time, not standby.
94: Actually, it was when we installed Service Pack 2 that everything went haywire. There were a couple of long discussions about it on the iPod Forum, but it was a common problem, and everyone who had it got the identical perpetual run-around from Apple.
Oi, SEK. If you're hanging around here complaining about Apple, could you please answer my email about Important Business Things?
I'm pretty dubious about the touchscreen keyboard and their ability to deliver a satisfying web browser.
I have a Nokia E70, which has a smaller screen than the iPhone... but the web browser is outstanding. The type is pretty tiny, but I don't have any problems reading it. I use it for reading blogs all the time; the only thing that sucks is that when I read comments threads here, half the commenters' names don't appear correctly.
A small screen shouldn't be a problem. I have the Nokia 6620, and the Opera browser it came with is awesome. I can read any blog on it.
98: Email? Never got one about anything, much less Important Business Things.
Huh. I'll try sending it again, when I get to my home computer, where it's probably in the outbox. BOLO, as the cops say.
99, 100: maybe I'm expecting unreasonable things. I haven't used mobile Opera (unless you count the Wii), but I've used netfront, pocketpc IE and the sidekick browser a lot (I'm typing this on my sk right now) and always find myself getting irritated when I use them. They're fine for blogs, but when I go to sites with more complicated formatting like slashdot I end up doing a lot of scrolling one way or another.
99, 100: maybe I'm expecting unreasonable things. I haven't used mobile Opera (unless you count the Wii), but I've used netfront, pocketpc IE and the sidekick browser a lot (I'm typing this on my sk right now) and always find myself getting irritated when I use them. They're fine for blogs, but when I go to sites with more complicated formatting like slashdot I end up doing a lot of scrolling one way or another.
"doing a lot of scrolling one way or another" s/b "double posting"
I don't think Opera is available for the Sidekick, but I've tried those other browsers too, and I'm reluctant to get any phone that doesn't support Opera. It's really nice.
I just pulled up Slashdot on my phone... the page is divided pretty nicely into thirds, so reading the articles (and ignoring the right- and left-hand sidebars) is just a matter of centering them in the browser and then scrolling up and down. The screen resolution on my phone's a hell of a lot better than on either the 1st- or 2nd-gen Sidekicks, too. (Or any PocketPC I've seen recently, FTM.)
106: From what I've read, the browser that comes with the newer Nokia phones (like the one I have) is as good as Opera. I'll probably download mobile Opera one of these days, just for the hell of it.
You people are praising MS for intentionally putting bugs into their OS. This is not healthy behavior.
Who's praising MS for this? I think everyone talking about this here is just explaining that MS made different choices than Apple did, and that those choices are part of both why they were successful in getting dominance in the business market but also why they have some seriously hinky shit in their OS.
Alternate title for this post: "Jesus talks, Apple(tm) walks".
91, 109: If you read Raymond Chen's blog, you'll hear about a huge number of compatibility hacks that MS has made over the years. Each one of them, individually, is a decision they agonize over; each one of them, individually, provides a rational benefit to some nontrivial number of users; collectively, they add bloat and complexity and drag to all attempts at future development.
It's a very tough call. Apple has been more willing, I think, to break people on each point release of the software (though they work closely with the major third party developers to get *them* to fix their stuff).
Confession: I secretly think that people who don't use Apple products are technologically unserious.
Reaallllly.
"The only intuitive interface is the nipple."
Guido van Rossum reports that this isn't true, and that the nipple, too, must be learned.
I thought my mp3 player was pretty stylish, and it was much more featureful than the ipod (except the video ipod; it didn't play videos).
Guido van Rossum reports that this isn't true, and that the nipple, too, must be learned.
He remembers that far back? Damn.
I finally clicked through to the Time article.
The iPhone will cost $499 for a 4GB model, $599 for 8GB, which makes it expensive, but not a luxury item.
On what planet is a $500 phone not a luxury item?
Fuck Guido van Rossum. Any mom can tell you this.
The sucking instinct is innate; the use of the device, isn't.
The sucking instinct is innate; the use of the device, isn't.
I'm just sitting here enjoying watching that low-hanging fruit swing. Every once in a long while the time zone thing is a feature.
115: Or another way to look at it: it's not just a phone! It's a little portable pocket computer! And a music player! And a video player! And a phone!
Now how much would you pay?
So did you Apple-followers all see the soon-to-be-newest LG touchscreen phone, the KE850? There's been stuff about it all over the internet for almost 4 weeks now, but strangely it didn't make the BBC news (nor yours I imagine). Looks quite pretty.
And what's with the $600? Will you get it cheaper with a contract? That's crazy. I haven't paid (directly) for a mobile for years.
Neat looking touch screen on the KE850. Is it an iPod?
Apropos of very little -
Pros to iPod Shuffle: cute, cool, fits on your belt loop.
Cons: If you thought your car keys were easy to misplace....
Cala, you could always knit yourself an iPod Shuffle cozy.
OMG IT'S A LITTLE WOOL IPOD HOUSE I WANT ONE!!!
Sorry. Apple does this to me.
