Mobile – Page 18 – ɔimoɈɒ

iPhone 2007. Windows Mobile 2009? Maybe?

Mitchell Ashley, Microsoft apologist for NetworkWorld tells us why he thinks the iPhone is doomed The iPhone is certain to fade into history as another cool Apple innovation, that others soon rushed competitive, like-products to market, blowing away any significant lead Apple might have. The iPod mp3 player is an industry Apple essentially created, the … Continue reading “iPhone 2007. Windows Mobile 2009? Maybe?”

Mitchell Ashley, Microsoft apologist for NetworkWorld tells us why he thinks the iPhone is doomed

The iPhone is certain to fade into history as another cool Apple innovation, that others soon rushed competitive, like-products to market, blowing away any significant lead Apple might have. The iPod mp3 player is an industry Apple essentially created, the iPhone isn’t. Too many major players are in the mobile phone market, who have and will bring iPhone-like products to market over the coming months and years. LG has already done so with the LG Voyager phone, and now Microsoft’s plans for Windows Mobile 7 OS have been leaked and described in considerable detail by InsideMicrosoft blogger Nathan Weinberg.

Does anyone remember what the market was like before Apple released the iPod in 2001? There were certainly lots of MP3 players on the market, some of them flash based and some of them with laptop hard drives in them. There wasn’t any decent way to buy music online and there was only really MusicMatch JukeBox for syncing your tunes that you did have (ripped using WinAMP or MacAMP).

To claim Apple invented the Mp3 player market is simply a lie. A massive straw man argument designed to help prop up the further argument that the iiPhone will fail because Apple did not create that market.

Apple has a 70%+ market share in MP3 players. Are we expecting them to take the same in the phone market? Of course not. They’re never going to release a Â£10 phone you can buy down in Tesco along with Â£10 of free minutes. The vast majority of the market are these low end handsets, so feature-free that I was surprised they still existed (until I bought one as an unlocked emergency handset a few months ago).

Apple did manage to snare 19% of the smartphone market in 6 months which is a much more interesting market – one where people will actually pay for the use of a technology device. Isolating that market aside from the most basic handsets begins to crystallise out Apple’s intended market: paying customers.

The article is fluff, tripe and full of FUD. It’s meant to make you hold out for the next big thing from Microsoft. Yes, it took Microsoft six months to copy key features of the iPhone and create mockups of what they plan to ship sometime in 2009. Yes, six months to invent photoshopped images. And you’ll have to wait over a year to use this stuff.

And of course, Apple will be standing still during this time…

Translink for iPhone

David Rice on NiMUG wrote up this little app: Translink for iPhone Related posts: Cold. Hot. Translink: just close the doors and turn off the lights Translink Annual Report – #freepublictransport Questions for Translink #FOI

David Rice on NiMUG wrote up this little app:

Translink for iPhone

if the iPhone won’t come to the Enterprise, then…

iPhone is not available to business accounts in the US and iTunes balks at registering the iPhone to a non-residential address in the UK so it’s certainly not aimed at the Corporate Road Warrior but as I’ve blogged a lot recently, there certainly a lot of buzz about the iPhone and not just from consumers, … Continue reading “if the iPhone won’t come to the Enterprise, then…”

iPhone is not available to business accounts in the US and iTunes balks at registering the iPhone to a non-residential address in the UK so it’s certainly not aimed at the Corporate Road Warrior but as I’ve blogged a lot recently, there certainly a lot of buzz about the iPhone and not just from consumers, but from big business. SAP as previously discussed is bringing their product to the iPhone because their own people want it (and as we now know, the SAP client is being developed using a pre-release iPhone SDK here in Belfast).

Avaya, one of the big names in modern telephony, has also signed up to the iPhone and therefore lent it some serious credibility in the Enterprise.

Avaya one-X Mobile for iPhone will allow users to have access to visual voicemail, corporate directories, and VIP lists, all via an â€œenterprise-secureâ€ environment, and allow the iPhone to be used for both incoming and outgoing calls while maintaining usersâ€™ office identity.

Click for the flash demo (which, of course, you can’t view on an iPhone).

Nortel, (never the visionary) hasn’t leapt onto the bandwagon for either Contivity or their IP phone products. But then they’ve been hot on air and cold on “actually doing anything other than loudly collaborating with Microsoft”.

Good oh!

iPhone is missing one thing for me

Local Storage. I don’t really want to use it to download stuff and keep it, that’s not what I’m looking for. But a way to, for instance, aggressively cache a web pages so I could, for instance, download the text of “The Importance of Being Ernest” and read it while waiting in queues etc. I … Continue reading “iPhone is missing one thing for me”

Local Storage.

I don’t really want to use it to download stuff and keep it, that’s not what I’m looking for. But a way to, for instance, aggressively cache a web pages so I could, for instance, download the text of “The Importance of Being Ernest” and read it while waiting in queues etc. I can’t do this currently and have to rely on a functional EDGE connection or emailing myself the files and reading them from my email.

Add that to my wishlist for later versions of iPhone OSX.

The Third Party Application Market on Phones and PDAs

On my Newton, I downloaded maybe 20 apps. I bought two over the wire. I even bought one in a retail package. On my Palm vX, I bought two apps. A Paris City Guide and a VT100 Terminal app. On my other phones and devices between then and now I’ve downloaded two apps. One was … Continue reading “The Third Party Application Market on Phones and PDAs”

On my Newton, I downloaded maybe 20 apps. I bought two over the wire. I even bought one in a retail package.

On my Palm vX, I bought two apps. A Paris City Guide and a VT100 Terminal app.

On my other phones and devices between then and now I’ve downloaded two apps. One was a Telnet/SSH client for my SonyEricsson K800i which was so bad that I never used it and certainly never bought it.

The other was yesterday when I bought and downloaded Sonic the Hedgehog for my 5G iPod (the one I have donated to the kids, secure in a iFrogz Tadpole wrap).

I’m beginning to think that, based on my experience, the third party application market on Phones and PDAs might be a bit of a sham. I’ve spent hundreds of pounds on software for my Mac so I’m not averse to spending a bit of cash when something catches my eye.

The logic remains. I’ve only bought software for 3 devices. My Newton, my Palm vX and my iPod. Not one purchase for any of my phones in the past.

I think this is what will make the big difference in the PDA market. I think we’ll see an explosion of sales for the iPhone in third party applications even with the premium Apple will demand for signing.

That Tsunami on the Horizon: it’s the iPhone…

RoughlyDrafted visits the news that the iPhone is already beating the stuffing out of competitors in mobile phone operating system usage. With iPhone demonstrating considerably better statistics in terms of market share, it must be absolutely galling to some: The most recent market share numbers are particularly embarrassing for Microsoft, especially after CEO Steve Ballmer … Continue reading “That Tsunami on the Horizon: it’s the iPhone…”

RoughlyDrafted visits the news that the iPhone is already beating the stuffing out of competitors in mobile phone operating system usage.

With iPhone demonstrating considerably better statistics in terms of market share, it must be absolutely galling to some:

The most recent market share numbers are particularly embarrassing for Microsoft, especially after CEO Steve Ballmer announced in January that Apple wouldnâ€™t capture more than two to three percent of the market and described his own Windows Mobile platform as having or soon acquiring 60 to 80% of the smartphone market.

Ever seen Minority Report? In the film, Tom Cruise plays a cop who, through the assistance of precognitive sun-loungers, can solve murders before they happen. The precogs are pale, bald and skinny. What we missed in the film was they had a not-quite-so-good brother called Steve. He was bald, pale and kinda avocado-shaped. His predictions were pretty much 100% wrong so they kept him in a different room where he could play with his own poo.

Windows Mobile isn’t going anywhere soon, up or down in marketshare but it’s another market outside Windows for x86 markets where Microsoft is being beaten senseless with a large rubber anatomical facsimile. They’re losing money hand over fist in the games consoles. By 2005 they’d lost over $4 BILLION. They’re also going to have to pay out another BILLION or so replacing XBox 360 consoles. And they’re congratulating themselves that in Sept 2007 they got better sales figures than the Wii. Yup, 5% better despite the release of HALO 3. Brilliant, lads. You’ve chewed through more than 5 billion dollars and you’ve just edged past the Wii…for one month. I can’t wait to see your next trick.

It should also be an embarrassment for Benjamin Gray of Forrester Research, who just released another report insisting that IT departments shun the iPhone and limit their support to platforms that are dead, dying, or obscure in North America, such as the Palm OS, Linux, and Symbian.

Quite. But I’ve covered the Forrester report previously.

The rest of the article is very well written so go read.

Another gem regards why Apple didn’t run with Symbian.

It turns out that just like the original Mac System, Symbian is hamstrung by the compromises they took on in order to get decent performance on old hardware. Now, as the hardware has matured, the system remains archaic and though Symbian claims a large market share, it’s firmly divided into three separate binary-incompatible camps, a Japanese version, a version from Nokia and a third from Sony-Ericsson. Despite the investment they have, they are only licensees of the software and therefore it’s unlikely there’s going to be an overhaul of the system to bring it up to date.

A Symbian developer explains, â€œNokia is more or less stuck with Symbian since it doesn’t have the competence nor the time to make a new OS from the ground up. Its only alternative, in practice, is to go Linux, which it is of course experimenting with, but it’s still not an easy path to go.

This sort of explains where Nokia are going with the Nokia 770/N800/N810 platform. Sure, it doesn’t include mobile phone features but it’s going to give them a solid developer base when they get round to releasing later hardware especially since they have promised a WiMAX version sometime in 2008. Preparing for the VoIP onslaught – oh you better believe it?

iPhone’s OSX is just starting out, less than 6 months in the public domain and it’s making big waves. There may be some ups and downs in the near future but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was followed by an Apple TV SDK sometime later.

As Guy said earlier:

“Symbian, Palm and Windows Mobile can have third party development, so they are better”

David’s retort was

“iPhone is beating the stuffing out of them without an SDK. What do you reckon will happen in February when it’s available?”

Top 10 reasons for IT to support the iPhone

Philip Elmer-DeWitt makes an entire article for Fortune out of blockquoting a Forrester Research article Forrester predicts that the iPhone will find its way into many enterprise environments â€” if it hasnâ€™t already â€” because C-level executives are buying them and expecting support from IT. Itâ€™s only a matter of time before the iPhone filters … Continue reading “Top 10 reasons for IT to support the iPhone”

Philip Elmer-DeWitt makes an entire article for Fortune out of blockquoting a Forrester Research article

Forrester predicts that the iPhone will find its way into many enterprise environments â€” if it hasnâ€™t already â€” because C-level executives are buying them and expecting support from IT. Itâ€™s only a matter of time before the iPhone filters down the corporate pyramid, and IT should have a strategy to handle these requests.

and goes on to provide 10 reasons why IT should not or will not support the iPhone.

Balls to that. Here’s my counter-offer.

Supports industry standard POP and IMAP with SSL out of the box This gives the IT manager a huge amount of choice in which mailserver to use. No longer is he limited to using Exchange and the legacy that entails. And yeah, you can get Push email too.
Developer support is huge months BEFORE the SDK is out. Companies such as SAP have admitted they have early access to the iPhone SDK and are into the development of an iPhone app for their software. When the SDK hits the general public in February you’ll see an explosion of applications.
Lacks a keyboard so more of the real estate of the device is usable Especially relevant for the web where we spend more time consuming data and reports. Instead of 30% of the device being turned into a chiclet keyboard which you need to learn to use, you have all of the size of the unit as a screen.
The best support for web standards anywhere because it uses WebKit at its heart – the same rendering engine used by Nokia’s smartphones and also Google’s Android OS. Open source and developed by Apple. I did some shopping the other day, first time I’d ever shopped online using a phone. On the company’s REAL web site, not some cut down mobile version. And yes, over EDGE too.
Premium features for standard prices as the iPhone’s features far outstrip the capabilities of other smartphones yet is priced around the same. Again, reduce your support burden as you find executives don’t need to lug around their fragile laptops.
It’s made this splash and it’s been out less than six months which has to be remembered. Already iPhone web browsers outnumber people browsing the web on Microsoft’s Windows CE/Pocket PC operating system and that OS has been shipping for 10 years now. It would be stupid to ignore the momentum.
It’s built upon a UNIX based operating system, with cutting edge developer tools, and a revolutionary user interface.
It’s got RIM, Microsoft, Nokia and others scared. Being a good IT person is about providing technology that provides a competitive advantage. These companies wouldn’t be scared for nothing. It’s up to the IT department to squeeze the iPhone for the competitive advantage.
This is the first generation Not a usual advantage? Perhaps not. But the iPhone beats the pants off anything out there in the first generation with 1.0 software. Sounds like time for the IT department to kit themselves out with one and learn this new device.
The End User will use it. That’s absolutely terrifying to a legacy Microsoft-styled IT department. Their entire subculture is filled with FUD. It’s too fragile to enable anything useful and anything that isn’t taught on the MCP course is simply beyond them. God forbid that anything should be “easy” or that it should work as planned. The two biggest bluffers I ever met were a Laurel and Hardy duo of Wintel SysAdmins. Nice blokes I’m sure but utterly useless in IT.

By far one of the best reasons for getting an iPhone would be to rub the nose of “ringzero” from Brisbane, Australia in it. His comments on the Fortune story highlight why most IT departments should be outsourced to some of the big outsourcing companies because then when your IT service is crap, at least you’re getting what you paid for.

His number one reason for why iPhone shouldn’t be supported?

Users are stupid. They will lose, break or abuse this.

Times like this I loathe other IT people. And it would be the primary reason I’m not keen on attending IT conferences. Sentiments like that, about your Users, don’t make you sound big and clever. They make you sound like an ass. And it’s exactly the same sort of stereotyping bigotry that makes cops think they are above the law. Wintel IT folk have to remember that they’re utterly disposable. There’s another guy round the corner who’s cheaper, smarter, better qualified and isn’t a bigoted prick.

iPhone versus 3G Phone web shootout

A German web site did a test between the iPhone and a recent 3G phone in web rendering. Time in seconds taken to render the following web sites Webseite iPhone(EDGE, 2.5G) Nokia E61i (UMTS, 3G) Die Zeit 76 79 EBay 30 26 Applephoneinfo 31 27 You also have to consider that the iPhone renders it … Continue reading “iPhone versus 3G Phone web shootout”

A German web site did a test between the iPhone and a recent 3G phone in web rendering.

Time in seconds taken to render the following web sites

Webseite iPhone
(EDGE, 2.5G) Nokia E61i
(UMTS, 3G)

Die Zeit 76 79

EBay 30 26

Applephoneinfo 31 27

Webseite	iPhone (EDGE, 2.5G)	Nokia E61i (UMTS, 3G)
Die Zeit	76	79
EBay	30	26
Applephoneinfo	31	27

You also have to consider that the iPhone renders it better but that may be an entirely subjective thing.

SAP to support iPhone

Reuters has this little snippet about SAP planning to release an iPhone client despite analysts falling over themselves to tell us the iPhone isn’t business-friendly: On Monday, SAP broke with precedent by saying it would introduce a version of its upcoming customer relationship management software for the iPhone before launching versions for mobile devices from … Continue reading “SAP to support iPhone”

Reuters has this little snippet about SAP planning to release an iPhone client despite analysts falling over themselves to tell us the iPhone isn’t business-friendly:

On Monday, SAP broke with precedent by saying it would introduce a version of its upcoming customer relationship management software for the iPhone before launching versions for mobile devices from RIM and Palm Inc (PALM.O).

The reason? SAP’s own salespeople were clamoring for it, saying the iPhone was easier to use, according to Bob Stutz, SAP senior vice president in charge of developing customer relationship management software.

“This isn’t necessarily iPhone deployment by way of the IT department, but it’s by people who really want to use this device and IT is responding in a really positive way,” said Michael Gartenberg, an analyst with market research firm Jupiter Research.

This is exactly the way that the market should work. The customers want something, they build a case and the IT department responds in a positive way. In the most simple of business cases, “easier to use”, that’s exactly the sort of response an IT department should respond with.

I’m not a fan of Blackberry devices. In a previous life I was forced to help people use them when attached to the O2 network and I can say that simply because their IMAP implementation in the device sucked the big one it was not a pleasure to use for email. It was functional, it was something the customer tolerated, but under no circumstances did it take away the pain. (And frankly the number of keyboard shortcuts we needed to look up made it more reminiscent of using Wordstar or DOS than a modern handheld device).

February brings us the iPhone SDK and SAP is one of the first of many companies which will be queuing up to get their applications onto iPhone. Others we’ll see will be Skype, VNC, a Terminal, an AIM client, an MSN client – maybe even a Yahoo client (as long as they all maintain Store-And-Forward IM messages).

Sure, analysts tell us that an Exchange client is essential but that’s for Microsoft to produce and we have to ask them why they wouldn’t create Outlook for iPhone and why everyone expects Apple to create it? Same reason they don’t produce Outlook for Macintosh – because the Mac would continue to replace Windows in business but at a frighteningly quicker rate. I’ve said before there is no option out there for Groupware which realistically compares to Exchange. SAP is creating a client for their corporate applications and not expecting Apple to build it. So, come on Microsoft, where’s the client for iPhone?

(Why does Microsoft get that benefit of the doubt? Cisco creates clients for their servers/routers. SAP does for their applications. Apple does for their servers. Why does Microsoft get away with this crap?)

What application would you like to see on your iPhone?

iClones.

Ed Finegold says Forget the iPhoneâ€”Give Me an iClone The iClone, as itâ€™s being called, is itself a bit of a mystery. The PopSci writer who flew to China to see it was denied the opportunity at the last minute, but gave the distinct impression that demand for this device is growing faster than perhaps … Continue reading “iClones.”

Ed Finegold says Forget the iPhoneâ€”Give Me an iClone

The iClone, as itâ€™s being called, is itself a bit of a mystery. The PopSci writer who flew to China to see it was denied the opportunity at the last minute, but gave the distinct impression that demand for this device is growing faster than perhaps Meizu anticipated. Reports suggest that this handset is at least the equal of the iPhone, and may even be superior in its ability to interact with various types of networks, utilize various applications, and support languages from around the globe.

Does anyone think that the Meizu iClone will be similar to the iPhone in any reality?

LG have tried it. Gizmodo reported:

The LG Prada phone may look like the iPhone and it may behave like the iPhone–what with its black finish and touchscreen–but it’s not the iPhone. You can fool yourself all you want, but you’re just going to end up paying for this and the iPhone. Oh well, at least the LG’s a little smaller.

HTC have tried it. Peter Svensson described the HTC Touch, oft touted as an iPhone killer as the worst phone I’ve tried in the last few years..

But even with a stylus, the Touch is full of problems. When I turned the screen on, I often found it cluttered with inscrutable Windows error messages that I sometimes had to perform a reset to get rid of. The Windows Media music player would skip while playing MP3s, making it useless. For every digit of a phone number you tap, there’s delay before it appears on the screen.

I think it’s hilarious that people tout these devices, before they are released, as “killers”. Let’s see what it brings. My guess: it’ll be yet another cheap knockoff using Windows Mobile to emulate something better. Whoop-de-feckin-doo.