Keeping things is perspective is usually a good motto. what on earth do I need a PIM+Cell phone combo? well, to keep track of appointments, to happily sync with whatever I’m using as mail client/scheduler and eventually take a quick peek at some xls or word document on the run.What i viciously hate about windows mobile five is mostly the quirky syncing capabilities especially over bluetooth, I really have no idea what’s going on, and it leaves me frustrated to the point I can’t even focus in order to understand it. I’ve come to terms that either bluetooth simply does not work with ActiveSync all that well…or that I, myslef (not my device) have no bluetooth capabilities. It’s possible, but I wave a bluetooth mouse that works flawlessly…well…almost.
I’m also not a big fan of the “phone capabilities” inbedded into windows mobile 5…it feels like a bastard son of the entire OS…like that patch with the extra feature that a single developer at microsoft was in charge of implementing but didnt want to. It’s not even a good enough effort in my opinion. The way it can’t deal with doing a call wile another is incoming, the annoying delays between the screen lighting up and the phone actually ringing and the phone API actually poping up. The fact that you have to choose between ring OR vibrate tells me a lot about the effort put into this crap patch of software. And the pain associated to adding custom ringtones to incoming SMS’s or any sort of trigger… it’s quite amazing how limp the phone in itself acts. and it sells…hell…I bought one! what does that tell you about ME?
so what would iphone bring to the table? embedded ipod…it’s ok, but any wm5 phone will play mp3’s and you don’t worry much about DRM issues. google maps… google just released that for the wm5 platform, syncing with ical…pretty useless to me, since Outlook does take center stage in my corporate world. The photo gimmick is fun, but pretty pointless.
As a Portuguese bloke I can’t really argue about the iphone’s price tag. every half-way decent phone here costs pretty much what the iphone costs, and we are likely to have the biggest Nokia N90 per capita ratio, so that’s no excuse.
I think it comes down to how hard will apple and eventually TMN, Optimus or Vodafone be able to push the product. it sells itself really, although I wave my suspicion that not being 3G enabled will be a big turn off to anyone comparing it to what HTC has to offer right now, and at the prices they are offering it.
i’m much more enthusiastic about macbooks dropping to never seen prices (has anyone been paying attention to fnac’s web site?), a black macbook with a 1000€ price tag is in that fine line between tremendously appealing and the OMG-I’m-getting-one-right-now appeal.
back to the iphone/ipaq/HTC, I think it’s more hype then anything else. I’m not seeing the iphone doing anything the competition isn’t doing in it’s own way. And I also think that the way to see it is actually in a iphone/ipaq/htc sort of thing. it’s not iphone against the world…it’s just another phone. it’s pretty and with a cool interface, but it’s just a phone, much like the ipod at the end of the day is just another media player. I’m a bit skeptic about it. I don’t think the iphone will change the way people communicate, I think it will be another apple product that defies some concepts, I’m sure it will be a popular-niche product, but i need a bit more to make the switch. I’m not seeing good enough reasons on the iphone to throw away my ipaq, it’s ugly and untrendy (“that is a definitive cock-block, my friend” were a close friend’s words of choice about it), but it works and it helps me maintain my piece of mind by keeping track of things and storing the stuff I don’t consider worth committing to memory, it also keeps me on track on the road and i even pick up a call or two along the way…not too bad.
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d00d, you underestimate Apple’s hyping capabilities – and most importantly, word of mouth advertising. But yes, I predict iPhone to be only a moderate success, but for purely Portuguese reasons. Consider this: most likely, Vodafone will carry it initially – but not exclusively, since it’s too big for one telco, except in the US. Vodafone sells more smartphones than TMN, but it’s a close enough margin for me to be wrong here. Also, GPRS (and I don’t think lack of 3G is a minus, we all know 2nd gen iPhone will need this to justify themselves) is very expensive in Portugal and most non-US countries, and a lot of the iPhone’s pluses come from cell+net integration. And about the device per se, I don’t know – how long will it take for flipping shit up on a cute interface to get old? I mean, even AIGLX on Linux (which is pretty effin’ sweet) gets routine-wrinkle after a couple of days, right? And the price… well, I got a butt-ugly 20GB player with absolutely no vendor lock-in, as it behaves like a mass storage device, for about a third of what a 40GB iPod (with color TFT, granted, but who gives a shit? I just wanna play some music) would cost me, with mandatory iTunes use, which I loathe – and it flies off the shelves like coupons to ride Jenna Jameson. I don’t get it, but I guarantee you can sell the iPhone for 499€/549€ in Portugal and it will sell. Oh yes. It will sell.
About WM5: I feel your pain – my short-lived experience with my Ipaq showed me that MS got it all wrong, for like the nth fuckin’ time. I can almost guess that some moron thought it would be cool to have the win32 API running on ARM architectures that have 16k of instruction cache on-die – I can think of win32 API statements that won’t fit 16k, it’s not that hard. But they’re not complete retards, they thought that having PocketPC as a compilable target on Visual Studio in 2 clicks would outweigh the slowness and obvious lack of place in one’s hand. And it did, in some regard – there are like 4000 apps for PocketPC 2k3 alone. In my humble opinion, coming up with a completely new architecture, fitted for the mobile world, COUPLED with a win32 semi-compatibility layer would be perfect, but MS would have to trust ISVs to “get with the program” so to speak, and they are way too burned because of making their lives miserable to ever hope that to work, so they took the easy route. I can’t blame them…
I of course agree, but IMO not having 3G is a definitive minus on the whole deal (I’ll refer you back to our little mailing list where the GRPS prices in out little corner of the world triggered some raging comments)GPRS traffic rarely pays of when compared to the current 3G rates. for any serious use, at least. And it all comes down (for my own personal use) if your mail client is imap or pop. anyone poping mail should care A LOT about 3G connections, imaping…not so much.
on a more personal note it’s now registered on the internet’s forever-and-ever cache that once you were apologetic about ms’s feeble attempt at a piece of software
Just thought you may want to check out a site dedicated to iphone freelance and contract gigs / jobs – http://www.iphonefreelancers.com . Pretty relevant.