Letters to the Editor
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Hi vaporland,
You raise some good points. Particularly about reliability and customer service. That's going to be a key point especially if they want to lure the Blackberry/Treo addicts away from their devices.
"We have not even addressed the potential impact of portable VoIP WiFi telephony on the current industry paradigm."
That is an interesting issue. I think, other than owning the patent on the name iphone, Cisco also labeled a potential portable VoIp product iphone to try and keep Apple from using the name. I guess that's why they're going to court about it.
"My excitement stems from the potential derived from applying the user interface exhibited in the iPhone to other electronic consumer products."
Could be a winner but the other issues will play at least as big a part in the overall success of the iphone.
About your "ranting", nah, I didn't think you were ranting nor did I think it was anything personal.
Good discussion, thanks.
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Macs don't 'crash'
Umm. nice article. umm. Max OS X doesn't crash. iPhone runs OS X. iPhones won't 'crash'.
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cingular=death? totally wrong
My second letter about this idiot Farhad Manjoo you have rewriting Microsoft press releases for Salon.
I was talking to my son, who has ten times the business savvy i do, about the iPhone. He can't wait for one.
His very interesting comment today: that the real story is, which nobody has picked up on (certainly not Manjoo who is a total bonehead) is Cingular, which has also positioned itself as ::::drumroll::::: the official phone for MySpace ... which grew from 45 million to 150 million users in the past year ...
The iPhone, despite the claims from the Apple-haters that it isn't really anything new, is another world-changing product from Cupertino.
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More revolutionary stuff
Tell your son to check out the FIC Neo1973. It's an open source, unlocked smartphone with a large touchscreen that's available NOW for $350. Btw, when you see a picture of it, you'll probably notice where Apple, ripped off...um, I mean shared...the design from.
Also about Cingular, check out the Consumer Reports survey where they were rated dead last in service.
Finally, PC magazine has a good analysis of the phone and they point out that it doesn't use OSX. It uses and OSX like system. They mention the good stuff but they also raise interesting questions about it as well.
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can an old apple learn new tricks?
I am less optimistic today about where Apple may ultimately be going with the iPhone.
Part of the reason for Apple's decline and failure to dominate sales in the personal computer industry was their fixation on maintaing control of all aspects of the Mac hardware and operating system.
It seems that Mr. Jobs is exhibiting similar behaviour regarding the iPhone and it's embedded OS X.
This quote from an interview in Newsweek makes me worry:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16566968/site/newsweek/page/3/
Another intriguing possibility not yet exploited in the iPhone is the ability to take a song from one’s iTunes music library and instantly make a ring tone from it. “Wouldn’t that be cool?” says Jobs, after (Steve Levy) brought it up. “It could be done.” Then he rubbed his fingers together, the universal symbol for “that would cost us.”
I had to hack my Nokia own Verizon cellphone in order to assign MP3 ringtones to my contacts. I did this via a USB cable, not Verizon's paid music subscription.
This means each person in my address book has their own song associated with them. When the phone rings, I know who it is without looking.
I had to turn off Verizon's setting that blocked MP3 files as ringtones. Verizon did this becuase they wanted me to buy music from them at $2 a pop.
This quote from the same article is also worrying:
But it’s not like the walled garden has gone away. “You don’t want your phone to be an open platform,” meaning that anyone can write applications for it and potentially gum up the provider's network, says Jobs. “You need it to work when you need it to work. Cingular doesn’t want to see their West Coast network go down because some application messed up.”
Why is this quote worrying? Because it is simply not true. See this quote from Ars Technica:
http://arstechnica.com/journals/apple.ars/2007/1/12/6597
There is absolutely no way that a single app on a single phone (or installed on thousands of phones) could accidentally destroy a network.
Even if there was some sort of malicious, network-melting application making the rounds and that application somehow got installed on many thousands of phones, you would've thought that this would've happened already in the millions and millions of other smart phones already on the market . . .
What Jobs is doing here is spreading FUD (fear, uncertainty & doubt) for FUD's sake. I would have understood, but not agreed with Jobs' desire to keep unchecked installation of third-party apps on the iPhone to keep the integreity of the experience intact. He's even alluded to that elsewhere, but to go around and spout off on topics he obviously doesn't understand is just plain low. I hope that somehow, someway this message will get relayed to Jobs and the PR department at Apple (that seems to be Jobs too, these days), but I'm not keeping my hopes held very high. . .
There has been a lot of controversy in the personal computing indusrty about something called 'trusted computing'. What this basically means is that the operating system will only let 'authorized programs' run on the computer.
Like the spurious war on terror, this is purported to block installation of viruses. The real reason is to allow the operating system manufacturer to control what programs run on their operating systems and hardware, prevent competition from superior products and extract license fees from software developers.
Apple already collects a fee from manufacturers and software developers whose iPod accessories and programs say 'Designed for iPod' on the label.
If the innovations seen in the iPhone's version of OS X include control of what software can be installed onto a device I own, I'll pass.