Posted on 01/09/2007 10:18:35 AM PST by AnotherUnixGeek
"Anyone know where to find what 3rd party applications would work with the iPhone?"
This is a very interesting question. It's a mobile version of the MacOSX, which uses PDF as a native file format, so expect a PDF reader/thin version of Acrobat for sure. Possibly photo-editing apps from Adobe, but it uses Core Graphics, so anyone can write to that AP.
The next World Wide Developer Conference Apple holds will probably have a lot of content for developers for this phone, even though it's after the release of the product (August). Might be interesting to find out how to develop for it now - one could jump ahead of the market and have apps ready by release, there's going to be a big, new market waiting! Like Jobs said, if they get 1% of the phone market, that's 10,000,000 phones - and a LOT of potential customers for software.
Here's some things I expect, eventually:
iChat/Aim clients
VIOP clients using the wifi (both lines on one phone...cool...)
Voice recognition
Some way to connect this to a MacBook or MacbookPro and let the laptop use it's internet connection. No more paying for wifi in airports.
Some form of Ink, the handwriting technology, for finger gesture capture
Thin versions of Office, not from Microsoft tho. Google apps for it? Bet on it, and they have an Office suite already.
Anything Palm has, developers can make for this. Productivity (Quicken for iPhone? Sold!), communications, reference, games, the GPS in it opens up lots of possibilities...
The only thing it can't do that I can even think of right now is function as the Uber Remote Control of all Time using IR to talk to iPods, Macs, and the new Apple TV... but who knows?
I use a PsP to watch movies on planes. This will replace it. In fact, I don't see any reason to take my laptop on a lot of trips, if I have this.
I'm hesitant about Cingular too, my Verizon contract is up in April, and I love Verizon, but hate the phones they have right now. I hope and pray they allow it to be used with Verizon! But this thing fits so many of my needs (truly private e-mail at work that never hits the corporate server, websites that are'nt filtered by the corporate firewall, internet everywhere, GPS and driving instructions from Google in the car...) I could see bumping down to the lowest Verizon service plan, and still getting one of these through Cingular, and just have my away message say to call the iPhone. :)
They're going to sell a lot of these. I'm sold already, the GPS feature in the Keynote sold me. The potential of this device is huge, what we know so far just scratches the surface! I was disinterested in the iPhone rumors up until today, but this went so far beyond my expectations...Apple did it again.
What GPS feature? All I saw was jobs selecting preset locations and showing them off in Google maps and the satellite overlay of same.
That's pretty good, actually. You must have been following the live thread last night and saw my prediction (which was terribly off).
I am eating crow following that game, trust me. Next time, I'd probably be better off putting my prediction in a much smaller font.
Yeah Apple is really going to shake up the market with that breakthrough technology. ;-) This is more about packaging and presentation than any emerging technology. Nothing wrong with that but some of us have had these features in our phones for months if not years.
It's OS X... should be lots of apps that will run with slight modifications.
Yes, cell phones have had mediocre web browsers for years. The browser on my current cell phone is so lousy, it's virtually unusable for everyday purposes.
The iPhone has a real full-featured web browser displayed on a super-high-resolution display with a best-of-breed user interface, plus WiFi connectivity. Compared to the existing cellphones/pdas on the market, the iPhone web browser is vastly superior and will be used daily. It will be great for accessing FreeRepublic.com from anywhere.
Perhaps Microsoft will be able to copy it and introduce a competing product in a few years.
Engadget is now reporting that it may not be an open platform for third-parties, but that is unconfirmed.
Did you catch the fact that Steve Jobs selected a BEATLES song from a Beatles Album to play on stage from from his iTunes playlist? I think that means something. It wasn't just randomly chosen.
Did you catch that Jobs selected a Beatles song from his iTunes play list on stage??? That was not done randomly.
Jobs selected a track from the Beatles Sgt. Pepper Album for part of his iTunes demo... heheheh,.
Full web pages with graphics? Which phones?
Regardless of all of the great features, if it underperforms as a basic cell phone, Apple will have big problems. It must not have a high rate of dropped calls, etc. compared to the competition.
Apple and Cingular/AT&T have totally different corporate cultures, and they may not play well together. I hope Apple has a good termination clause in the agreement in case Cingular fails to live up the the standards that Apple customers expect.
I understand that the case is made of some sort of high-tech ceramic. It must be durable enough to get knocked around like other cell phones. If the case is easily damaged, it will be big trouble for Apple.
How do you define "high-end" if not by price? If you're saying that the top-end phones are the smallest, you're years behind the curve on that. Back around 2001, folks were paying top dollar for thumb-sized phones.
More recently, the trend has been toward bigger screens and more usable buttons. I was at a Sprint store and an Office Depot yesterday, and all the high-end phones were Palm- or Windows Mobile-based, or Blackberries, none of them small. The smaller phones are the ones the companies are literally giving away.
It's not a gripe, just a projection that this device will not make the in-roads into the mobile communications market that Apple wanted due to the size.
I don't know where you're getting your notions of what Apple wanted. If all you want is something to make phone calls and the occasional SMS message, the iPhone isn't for you and wasn't designed for you. If you want to watch a movie or browse the Web, I can't imagine that you'll spend a lot of time griping that the screen is too big.
How many times have we heard that today?
There is a whole world of unknown phantom electronics out there.
Sosumi
I was thinking the same thing. Apple did have an advantage with the popularity of iTunes, but Sony had the resources to challenge Apple with their own music library. Certainly other companies could have designed a button-free interface.
There is no reason why a company could not have worked on a phone like this, and provided a good, fast, easy to use user interface before now, except for a lack of vision.
Yup. It reminds me of the mini-computer versus PC days. Where are Prime and Wang now?
Like somebody said on another forum, most phones these days are designed by engineers. The iPhone is designed by designers - people who have actually studied how phones are used, what people want, etc. The Apple engineers then had to make it work, and they did. Just like the iPod.
That's the heart of the matter. The consumer electronics company that I work for is just beginning to acknowledge the importance of the user interface, etc. But it's still an engineering-driven company. Non-engineers are still looked down on. Oh well. Some companies have to learn the hard way.
I've been posting to this site from my Palm Treo for almost 2 years now. While I prefer this phone to the Mobile PC phones from Microsoft, they've had products that allowed that for at least as long.
My Treo 650 for example, it's been on the market since late 2004, and has what is commonly referred to as an "HTML browser" verses a "WEP" browser. I've actually got 2 different HTML browsers loaded, and I could load more if I wasn't satisfied with the 2 I already have. The only thing these don't do well is Active X, but the IE that comes on Mobile PC phones might handle that, but it's not something I really need on my Treo since I can remote control my PC's with the Treo and use their local IE to get to sites like that when necessary.
The Apple phone looks great, I'm sure it is, but it's definitely evolutionary not revolutionary.
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