It might backfire though. You better trust the person who is supposed to revive you.
Posted on 01/09/2007 10:18:35 AM PST by AnotherUnixGeek
Capping literally years of speculation on perhaps the most intensely followed unconfirmed product in Apple's history -- and that's saying a lot -- the iPhone has been announced today in collaboration with Cingular. Yeah, we said it: "iPhone," the name the entire free world had all but unanimously christened it from the time it'd been nothing more than a twinkle in Stevie J's eye (comments, Cisco?). Sweet, glorious specs of the 11.6 millimeter device (that's frickin' thin, by the way) include a 3.5-inch wide touchscreen display with multi-touch support, 2 megapixel cam, 8 GB of storage, Bluetooth with EDR, WiFi, and quadband GSM radio with EDGE -- and amazingly, it somehow runs OS X.
The iPhone is smaller than the linked device. Not to mention much cooler looking. Just like MP3 players smartphones needed a killer device for them to take off. This is it. This one might not sell tons, but the next generation that will likely be cheaper with more carriers will. This one just needs to get great reviews from critics and early adopters so the next generation has good word of mouth.
Cingular has iPhone exclusivity up to 2009.
That is, unless you buy the iPhone retail, then unlock it.
It's not about market dominance. The cell phone market is too large for any one company to dominate. If Apple gains 1% market share, that's something like 10 million iPhones sold.
Not every company has to own the majority of the market in order to be considered successful or profitable. Look at Nintendo if you need another example.
I'm still trying to resuscitate my Newton.
Haven't read far enough to see if anyone with experience knows, but I have long nails. Long enough so that I have trouble with electronic voting machines. :-)
But I have a Garmin Street Pilot that works just fine with the touch of a nail. It allows for a smaller screen than one could use with a large finger. I suspect that the Apple technology is closer to the Garmin one than to the electronic voting one.
Sadly, I am indeed serious. See post 166 for a CNN story confirming the exclusivity deal.
Of course, if most/all of the iPhone's features will work on other networks, you can just unlock the phone.
I completey agree, my point is Treos and Blackberry's currently rule the PDA phone market, and being already entrenched as well as specialists in this category, they will be hard to supplant.
Oh, geez, don't even remind me. It's bad enough Apple is making me choose between an iPhone and a Wii...
OK, I admit...I want. It's purty, it's got an impressive feature-set, and it appeals to my inner gadget geek.
Now...if I only had a device for fast-forwarding six months...and an extra five or six hundred bucks lying around.
True. True.
I want one. Now.
Anyone care to buy me out of eleven months of a Sprint contract?
I hope so, because that's the only way I'd consider buying one. I switched to Verizon from Cingular because Cingular's service in my area is so bad. Going back to them, even to get the iPhone, is not an option.
LOL!
I didn't see that episode, but I heard about it.
Hell, there'll be people fetching $5K and $6K easy for them - if they could get that much for a PS3 on eBay, getting that for an iPhone will be a snap. Hopefully Apple does a better job anticipating demand than Sony did with the PS3.
Microsoft's vision of future technology was violent, bombastic and overwhelming to the senses. Gates demonstrated things like bedrooms with walls literally covered with giant computer screens instead of wallpaper, and kitchen countertops with giant recipes for focaccia projected on the surface.
In comparison, Apple's presentation showed technology that was practical, easy-to-use, tasteful, compelling and affordable. I can't wait to get an iPhone for internet features like portable web browsing. And the iPhone will be wide-open for third party developers to add OS X software like Dashboard widgets and Cocoa applications.
There were some unusual things about Apple's show today. For the first time ever at MacWorld, no new Macs were introduced. Nor was an update given for the release of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. Ordinarily, those omissions would be disappointments. But the iPhone was so incredible, those things were not missed.
I believe it's Cingular exclusive because Cingular helped develop the phone network side of their voice mail system. You know, the cool feature where you can look at your voice mails on the screen and manually decide which one to listen to based on the sender.
That required cooperation from the upstream network and so it was necessary to work with one provider to design what was needed.
I've noticed an almost universal set of reactions to this phone:
1 WOW! We have to get one of these!
2 $499-$599! Ulp. Ouch. that's pretty expensive for a phone, but cheap for what this bad boy can do. I'm still onboard.
3 Cingular! OUCH! I hate those guys.
In other words, Cingular seems to be the biggest obstacle.
Unfortunately, from what I can see, Verizon doesn't seem to play nice with device manufacturers. Apparently they have some very negative policies when it comes to what features a phone placed on their network can do.
You may notice that they don't have the Blackberry Pearl either. The best phones seem to always wind up in the clutches of the worst providers (Cingular, T-Mobile).
Pity :-(.
D
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