OK it's true, I love my

iPhone

 .

But

Apple

  just doesn't cease to amaze me. First, my most important premise:

Apple

  will change the world (yet again) REGARDLESS of the dominance of the

iPhone

 , simply because as a Unix platform and the lack of a hard and fixed leyboard, it is multifunctional in a way that will make other phone makers and users absolutely require more. People are no longer gonna settle for a Blackberry, I'm here to tell you.

So why the post tonight?

I plug into iTunes. "There's an update waiting for your phone... do you want to install it?"

Sure. 152M download takes about 6 minutes to get, install, verify... then there's a "Firmware Update" notice as it continues to work on the phone.

After a bit, phone says "Phone Activated" and iTunes says "Update Complete."

Now I've gotten updates from

Apple

  before, but nothing really earth shaking. But today, it's clear that they've been listening to their users and have taken the next step.

First, my daughter's complaint: ringtones. Well, they fixed that an update ago, but it really swung into post-beta gear with this update.

My personal gripe: iPod volume is great, phone is not. Firmware update makes it so I can blast my ears out. Well done boys.

A couple miscellaneous updates, like being able to view email attachments in horiz-mode, OK.

But the big news, and the most admirable marketing piece, is new iTunes

apple

 t. I touch it... it brings up the hottest and newest today. I touch "Top 10" at the bottom... it takes me right to the 10 best selling albums in each of a variety of genres... I touch Search... I enter Rascal Flatts (PinkHat just adores them) ... I get the list of albums... I select a tune... I get the 30 second teaser on the speaker on the phone, it sounds pretty damn good. I touch Buy Now, it asks for my iTunes password and downloads the song. I select another - no password this time... it brings the song down. And BTW, over WiFi it is really fast.

Then I connect back to my

Mac

 . The new songs move back up into iTunes and settle into the correct artist directory and albums that they came from.

So now, I'm out and about, here a song and can buy it at full quality instantly... no cash, no muss or fuss... and when I get back it's on my

mac

 hine as well. Simply brilliant.

The

Apple

  guys, if nothing else, deserve unabashed admiration for their shear marketing moxie.

And the hardware is not that bad either

/p

Yeah, supposable that update was supposed to make all the hacked

iphone

 s not work too. So I guess you have AT&T, if they weren't bluffing.

Battery life ?

I have (what I believe) is the best damn phone on the (UK) market (The Nokia N95) but it is paired with the world's worst battery. To rectify this [cos a spare battery only gives crap length *2] I have cobbled together 4 AA batteries into a case and attach it to the charging port to give me loads of oomph.

it's held with Velcro and is bloody ugly and cumbersome but works.

If the

IPhone

  has a decent battery length when used for all the "good stuff" and can work with a keyboard (Bluetooth is fine) then once it updates to work with HSDPA I may well upgrade

If I have bluetooth on and am talking a lot, I get about a day and a half to two days. If I have blue tooth off and am good about shutting it off when I go to bed my record is 6 days... but more realistically 4. I burn the battery all the way to the <10% zone before recharging, typically.

I do better when I am around a WiFi as well - if I "roaming" then it seems to work the battery a bit more than if I am at home where there's WiFi.

I do not use it as an iPod very often and am not a video-while-on-the-train kind of guy, so I don't burn at it like many do.

phan boi  :

It's a fair cop.

But that does not take away from the point. It's frigging marketing genius.

Something to remember about the

iPhone

  that furthers the marketing savvy of

Apple

  ... the browser is a genuine web browser and not the "mobile only" type of browser I have on my BB

Pear

 l.  From a marketing standpoint, this means all

asp

 ects of Web 2.0 are immediately available to the end user and content providers only need to maintain a single web-presence, instead of having to maintain a separate library of code just for mobile users.

Again ... brilliant, and to Perk's point, it's truly furthering our need for mobile independence. 

Now, in regards to Asian markets where desktop computing doesn't even have a market share, I can hear the

iPhone

  channeling Jack Nicholson from Batman - "Wait'll they get a load of me."


/ja

I'm experiementing with that very thing right now in my back office applications... the ability to have all of my

PHP

 /JS/

Ajax

  stuff on the phone has already benefitted me greatly while on the road.

i fully agree that it is a leap forward, in particular because of the browser. However,

Apple

 's anal retention over control of all things

apple

 , is a bit annoying.

The new Zunes just came out, which is a different animal, however, worth a bit of comparison. The new zunes do a shitload more than the gen1 zunes. and get this... MS released the upgrade, FREE, to all zune 1 owners. you get almost all the new features and capabilities of the new zune, without having to upgrade, baring the hardware limits of course. Thats classy, and smart. the whole "welcome to the social"

asp

 ect of the zune will benefit greatly from that.

The reason I bring it up is that I think

Apple

  really missed out on completely pwning the mobile device market by not building in many of the Zune features into the

iPhone

  and iTouch. dumb. The zune

asp

 ect of walking past someone and listening to their song, is awesome.

Until I can add storage, my

iphone

  will gather dust. I have a lot more stuff to put on it that it can currently hold.

Sony does the same bullshit. Come off your high horse about making your products so asininely proprietary and add in some features that your customers might want, like removable storage.

This seems to be a trend though. Most devices now are just coming in "flavors" (different sizes), and thats it. no expansion. Which in some respects I kind of agree with, IF you provide enough other avenues. The reason is that you need to push tech forward, forcing upgrade may such, but it is required. That lack of forced upgrade is the reason why there are still sites out there that use deprecated HTML1 tags... Seriously, the browsers need to stop supporting shit that is out of date, and that will force people to update. Same with computer OS's. Windows will never reclaim its place as THE desktop OS, until they make an honest to god decision to say, start over, screw backwards compatability, and just make a kick as OS. It would be small again, and probably would blow everything away. But that will never happen unfortunately. I don't know why. Just make an emulator that runs the old shit, everything else new would run native and rock. Just like the

Mac

  can run windows in parallels and such.

the zune2 handles this with wifi syncing so when it detects your

net

 work, it checks for any changes every so often.
I guess my point was that if the zune and the

iPhone

  had a demon child, the game would be over.

IMO that's not a very strong argument VS - no one ever said that the

iPhone

  was all things.

If you add a hard drive, or 3G to the little thing battery life will plummet. If you have *so much* to store, then use a laptop or something. You add removeable media to that thing and you've just introduced a huge amount of ways the <>boneheads customers will ratfish the

mac

 hine.

Here's what I mean, from a different perspective: PinkHat's and my travel business was call centers that sold airline tickets. In fact, the motto was simple: we sold domestic round trip tickets over the phone using a credit card. Only. Period. Did we leave a lot of money on the table by not selling round trip? Perhaps. Did we lose monty by not selling international? Perhaps. Could we have made more sales by accepting checks, Wester Unions etc? Certainly. But what is the cost of that money? When we sold the biz we were doing 80MM a year with a business model that was so lean and crisp that, while other travel companies got 4-5x multiple on revenues, we got over 15x. Why? We were a crisp and perfectly targeted

mac

 hine.

And such it is with the

iPhone

 , and more broadly, the

Mac

 . They don't do everything. But what they do do os flawless (or as nearly as can be made), and the customers they focus on are profoundly satisfied because the

mac

 hine is perfectly suited to their needs.

I use this analogy because also there are alot of BHs and consultants our there that will spread themselves out like crazy trying not to leave a single dollar on the table... when in fact, picking that dollar up might cost then $5.00. I applaud

Apple

  for their laser-like approach to systems... whereas Windows as the unfortunate moneky on their back of having to be all things to all people (and they wind up doing very little of it excellently)

Apple

  can focus on keeping a smaller segment of the population 110% satisfied.


/p

ZACTLY. Windows was the shit for a great long while... and it even beat the

Mac

 , which it was modelled after, after a very short amount of time because of really great decisions. And the virtualization available today could do exactly what you are describing NBs.

However, the Windows boyz have told us for so long that they know what they are doing and that it's the right path, that a step back and rewrite would be a gigantic concession and I don't think they are prepared to do that. Additionally, there are still LOTS AND LOTS of people that think they still are the shit and will follow then with as much zeal as any

Mac

 phanboi.



The reason that the

iPhone

  is so hot is that if the

Apple

 bois see this as a real draw, they can do it as an update because they are selling a <i>platform</i> not a hardware. Just like the volume issue - it was a firmware patch I received. I'll betcha NBs that you'll see WiFi syncing reasonably soon because it is hot. I suspect that the plans for using the platform to move into all kinds of new territory is well blueprinted and even scheduled. They need to be in the public's hands for a while to make sure it's working the right way... and they also don't need to shoot their wad in the first go-round. But I'll bet in another year we will all be going "Holy Fish" at what they have done with that platform.

Let's face it, the Zune is doomed once the

iPhone

 's got a 3" x 7" usb port/receptacle and downloads porn at T-1 speeds.

"I'd like to

teach

  the world to <>{your verb here}, in perfect harmony.}"

BTW - I put my hands on a iPod Touch yesterday ... that thing needs a big port on it too!  Awesome!  Simply awesome!

There's my 

/ja

Verizon's LG Voyager phone ... anyone seen this yet?  I just heard it on the news yesterday.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20071003/tc_nm/verizon_phones_dc_1

When the OpenMoko phones comes out, I'm all over that bitch. I'm really surprised that Perk, being a developer, wouldn't rather have a phone that he can have complete and total control over with an open fully programmable API. In fact the

iPhone

 's the exact opposite of that. Anyway, to each his own.

I get it... and in a way I'd just love to hack the shit out of this little thang... but in this case, I want absolute luddite gripe rights over my phone because it's about handling more of my life than a toy. I'm actually less interested from a "How does it work" perspective and more in a "How WELL does it work" perspective.

Good eye tho VS... caught me off guard with that one