Apple iPhone...

[Uraniun235]

I guess it'll be cool for people who want their phone to do everything.

[Stile]

http://www.breitbart.com/news/2007/01/10/D8MIN3LO0.html

^ SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- Cisco Systems Inc. said Wednesday it is suing Apple Inc. in federal court over Apple's use of Cisco's registered iPhone trademark for its new handheld device.

Mmmm, trademark squatting

How is it squatting?? Cisco has had liscensed products out for months now under the iphone name.

[Medic]

Seriously, 4th page and I hardly posted yesterday and I'm the 1st to point out the price options equal the PS3? For shame!

599 US Dollars. 599 US Dollars. 599 US Dollars.

That being said watch this sell like hotcakes cause unlike a PS3, or really any console system, you can pretty much use it anywhere, anytime. Well... I dunno.

599 US Dollars. 599 US Dollars. 599 US Dollars. 599 US Dollars...

[Stark]

To: Mr. Stark
From: The Management

Dear sir,

It has come to our attention that you may not be keeping up on maintenance of your Personal Humour Device (PHD). We advise that you regularly keep this system in perfect working order with routine check-ups (see user's manual for more), else your unit may malfunction intermittently or fail altogether.

If you have any queries or doubts about our service, please feel free to LOLLERSKATE to your nearest dealership and ROFFLE-a-WAFFLE.

Sincerely,

The Management
SDN Post Oversight Committee

...

You think my post was in seriousness? Even the 'doesn't list any modern wireless protocols either'? Who needs what checked? I matched Red dry for dry.

Call yourself ENGLISH.

Hey Red, have you seen those awesome handset things you can plug into mobiles? Your phone rings, and you pull a giant 50s reciever out of your back and chat away... that's class.

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

1. I use phones a fair bit and thus are subjected to heck of a lot of wear and tear. Buy a pretty phone, and I think the phone ain't going to be pretty soon.
2. It's darn expensive.
3. Cingular lines are expensive. I'd rather go with T-mobile which gives me adequate amount of reception in where I am.

[RogueIce]

As much as I dislike the bullshit marketing drivel that Apple shoves out (the digicam/PC iMac ad, anyone? ), if the new phone has good loud sound quality and you can make phone calls without having to go through a shitload of menus, it'll be on my 'try' list when my Cingular contract expires later this year.

I'm just curious, but what phones have you used where it takes a bunch of menus to make a call? All I have ever had to do is hit my shortcut key to the Address Book, get to the name, and hit Send. I'm not sure how much more simple you can make that.

As to the rest of it, it's a nice little phone, but I'm not too enthused by it. But then I'm basically a very basic guy when it comes to my cell phones: I use it to call people, store numbers, send out a text message or two, and maybe snap photos of something interesting to use as a wallpaper. I have downloaded some simple games to pass the time, but hardly needed something with great power behind it. So all the Internet, MP3, GPS, etc. gizmos are wasted on me.

I've never really been a fan of the thin phones in general, though they do come in handy putting them in uniform pockets so nobody can see the bulge.

In the end, it just isn't the phone for me. Good luck to Apple though I guess. I never understood, personally, what you need to play MP3s, browse the web, and all the rest of it from your phone for (especially if you've already gotten an iPod or MP3 player of your choice...isn't it a little redundant?). But that's just me, I guess.

[RedImperator]

You think my post was in seriousness? Even the 'doesn't list any modern wireless protocols either'? Who needs what checked? I matched Red dry for dry.

Call yourself ENGLISH.

Hey Red, have you seen those awesome handset things you can plug into mobiles? Your phone rings, and you pull a giant 50s reciever out of your back and chat away... that's class.

One of these days we'll have to have a dry contest.

And yes, I have seen them. I actually toyed with the idea of getting one, since I find cell phones really uncomfortable for any length of time, but where the hell do you put one of those when you're not using it? I'm not going to walk around town with a giant phone hanging out of my pocket.

[Max]

I thought Apple had a deal with Cisco over the name....

[Covenant]

This combines nearly everything I hate into one single appliance. If it shipped with a copy of Mein Kampf, it would be complete. I guess they're just settling for fully operational.

Bleh! I'm certainly never going to get one, but just a random question, how do you make calls on the thing? Is there a pull-out bit that you talk into? It doesn't seem sized correctly to fit my face for comfortable talking without getting it all smudged up. For women with makeup or such, I have to imagine it'd even be worse. It also looks fragile. I'd really like a cheap, usable, streamlined cellphone for if I ever get one some day, but why do they keep adding stuff I don't want while making it less durable?

Seriously, I was offered an iPod this Christmas, and declined it. I don't like cells either. I realize I'm probably the only person not to, but as cool as I find touch technology I'm really frustrated the widescreen touch iPod got rolled into the phone, and ships for the price of a freaking PS3. I love the little nintendo DS and the Wii because it's clever, usable, and streamlined. I know I'm hoping for a cheaper version of the touchscreen for just general use. What I really do want is just a general tablet PC with a phone link. It'd be interesting, at least. Then, as long as I'm in cell reach, wouldn't I be able to get dialup speeds? Or something?

Really though, besides cool factor, why?

[Stark]

You're asking 'why' about consumer electronics? I mean, you're obviously fucking nuts, but CONSUMER should give it away. The 'why' is 'because it will sell and make piles of money'. Why have a big tv? Why have a cordless phone at home? Why use portable audio at all?

Frankly, if you haven't encounted phone-smudge in you're life, you're a lucky man. Even regular-form phones can get pretty grotty with wax and sweat and shit. And you're worried about smudging your makeup? Are you going to rub it into your face or something? It's like you've never used a mobile phone in your life.

And Red, I've only seen girls with them, and of course hey have bags. So... manbag?

[Covenant]

None of my phones have screens. ;/ I've used a mobile phone maybe a handful of times. I don't own any, never have, and I've only been lent a few that were screenless. My phone has one of those crappy spiral cords, I don't have portable audio besides a hand-down casette player, and I don't have or have plans to purchase any largescreen TV in the future. My headphones for the casette player (which also has a radio!) are the old type, not those earbud things.

I suppose, yeah, consumer electronics would give it away... but it's not like people buy ANYTHING that's bundled and slapped into a store. Apple is very smart about what they do, and I just wonder why people want to combine these things, and if it's going to be able to do it's job properly. It just always seems to me that people rush for the new stuff and then rush for the newest thing when THAT comes out. Like, LCD is now beating out Plasma screens to the point that they're saying Plasma is going the way of the dinosaur. At least when it comes to huge screens.

I know people are always going to want that biggest TV, or that fastest processor, or that new car or whatever the phat lewt is, but there has to be some variety of gain/loss metric going on. Why do people want this thing so bad? Is there something about it I'm missing? Since I have neither a cellphone, mp3 player, or digital notebook, this would be an ideal thing to get and put it all together. But I can't imagine many people are in those situations.

[Stark]

So what the fuck are you doing in a thread about consumer electronics? YOU HATE CONSUMER ELECTRONICS AND SEE NO NEED FOR IT.

Sounds like you're talking shit to me: hardly anyone in this thread has expressed a 'want this thing so bad' attitude. But hey, you think LCD getting bigger than plasma after six fucking years means everyone who bought a TV in the interim got owned due to wanting the newest thing. Those capitalist pigs!

[Covenant]

Eh... while I certainly have nothing against people spending their money on fancy electronics, I scrapped my post discussing my reasons for being dumbfounded at the iPhone buzz. I think you're right, and I just don't get consumer electronics. Point ceded. It's certainly no anti-capitalism thing though, for the record. If people want to buy it, that's fine. I just never understand why.

[Praxis]

http://www.breitbart.com/news/2007/01/10/D8MIN3LO0.html

^ SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- Cisco Systems Inc. said Wednesday it is suing Apple Inc. in federal court over Apple's use of Cisco's registered iPhone trademark for its new handheld device.

Mmmm, trademark squatting

How is it squatting?? Cisco has had liscensed products out for months now under the iphone name.

It's an interesting situation. Apple has had iPhone trademarked in several countries for longer than Cisco, but not in the U.S....Apple also owns iphone.org and has for many years.

[Durandal]

Seriously, 4th page and I hardly posted yesterday and I'm the 1st to point out the price options equal the PS3? For shame!

599 US Dollars. 599 US Dollars. 599 US Dollars.

That being said watch this sell like hotcakes cause unlike a PS3, or really any console system, you can pretty much use it anywhere, anytime. Well... I dunno.

599 US Dollars. 599 US Dollars. 599 US Dollars. 599 US Dollars...

$499 for the 4 GB. Same price as a 4 GB iPod nano and a smart phone combined. And for the ridiculous amount of technology in the thing, $499 is a bargain. The problem is the contract Cingular is going to force on people to subsidize it.

[Beowulf]

4GB iPod nano: $200
Smartphone: $100 and up (from Cingular)
cheapest iPhone: $500
Apple, Inc employee being shown to be wrong: Priceless.

[Mobius]

Seriously, 4th page and I hardly posted yesterday and I'm the 1st to point out the price options equal the PS3? For shame!

599 US Dollars. 599 US Dollars. 599 US Dollars.

That being said watch this sell like hotcakes cause unlike a PS3, or really any console system, you can pretty much use it anywhere, anytime. Well... I dunno.

599 US Dollars. 599 US Dollars. 599 US Dollars. 599 US Dollars...

$499 for the 4 GB. Same price as a 4 GB iPod nano and a smart phone combined. And for the ridiculous amount of technology in the thing, $499 is a bargain. The problem is the contract Cingular is going to force on people to subsidize it.

45$ per months (it seems you'll be pushed to use the pda data plans); that like my yearly budget for cellphone call...

[Max]

Sounds like you're talking shit to me: hardly anyone in this thread has expressed a 'want this thing so bad' attitude. But hey, you think LCD getting bigger than plasma after six fucking years means everyone who bought a TV in the interim got owned due to wanting the newest thing. Those capitalist pigs!

I actually really want this. I tend to be one of those people that enjoys having the latest piece of technology. Not only would this be fun to fiddle with, but it is pretty functional and would easily replace my 700wx. Plus it would be nice to not have to carry my treo AND my ipod everywhere I go (not to mention the Nike + iPod Sport Kit). So the convergence factor there is really nice. Then the fact that it has no buttons... :drool:

I, personally, can't compare this to a PS3 price gauge as this undoubtedly would be much more useful in an everyday setting for myself.

I just wish there were more than 8gb of memory...

[Bounty]

I actually really want this.

I think a lot of people want it, including myself, because it is the latest, coolest toy. I'm just not sure you'll find a lot of people who want it and want to spend $600 on it.

[General Zod]

Sounds like you're talking shit to me: hardly anyone in this thread has expressed a 'want this thing so bad' attitude. But hey, you think LCD getting bigger than plasma after six fucking years means everyone who bought a TV in the interim got owned due to wanting the newest thing. Those capitalist pigs!

I actually really want this. I tend to be one of those people that enjoys having the latest piece of technology. Not only would this be fun to fiddle with, but it is pretty functional and would easily replace my 700wx. Plus it would be nice to not have to carry my treo AND my ipod everywhere I go (not to mention the Nike + iPod Sport Kit). So the convergence factor there is really nice. Then the fact that it has no buttons... :drool:

I, personally, can't compare this to a PS3 price gauge as this undoubtedly would be much more useful in an everyday setting for myself.

I just wish there were more than 8gb of memory...

Have you ever actually had to use touch screen interfaces before? Frankly they're a pain in the ass. Good luck trying to dial while you're on the go as well, you have to stop to tap at the screen just so you make sure you don't misdial the number. I await news reports of people crashing their cars because they were attempting to dial on their iPhones while driving.

[Max]

Sounds like you're talking shit to me: hardly anyone in this thread has expressed a 'want this thing so bad' attitude. But hey, you think LCD getting bigger than plasma after six fucking years means everyone who bought a TV in the interim got owned due to wanting the newest thing. Those capitalist pigs!

I actually really want this. I tend to be one of those people that enjoys having the latest piece of technology. Not only would this be fun to fiddle with, but it is pretty functional and would easily replace my 700wx. Plus it would be nice to not have to carry my treo AND my ipod everywhere I go (not to mention the Nike + iPod Sport Kit). So the convergence factor there is really nice. Then the fact that it has no buttons... :drool:

I, personally, can't compare this to a PS3 price gauge as this undoubtedly would be much more useful in an everyday setting for myself.

I just wish there were more than 8gb of memory...

Have you ever actually had to use touch screen interfaces before? Frankly they're a pain in the ass. Good luck trying to dial while you're on the go as well, you have to stop to tap at the screen just so you make sure you don't misdial the number. I await news reports of people crashing their cars because they were attempting to dial on their iPhones while driving.

My treo is touch screen..which I tend to use more for dialing than I do the keypad, since the numbers are too small for me to see quickly. So, to answer your question, yes. Being that the iPhone is ALL touch screen... I don't see why they wouldn't make the numbers larger and easier to touch with less chance of mistyping. I'm sure reports of people crashing from dialing on a touchscreen will be just as numerous as people doing it with a regular pad. Those people, perhaps, shouldn't be driving and dialing if they can't pay attention to the road, regardless of the phones interface.

[Xisiqomelir]

Time magazine handjob = success confirmed?

Apple's New Calling: The iPhone
Tuesday, Jan. 09, 2007 By LEV GROSSMAN

If you've ever wondered how it works, this is how it works: I don't call Steve, Steve calls me. Or more accurately, someone in Steve Jobs's office calls someone in my office—someone at a much higher pay grade —to say that he has something cool. I then fly to the metastasized strip mall called Cupertino, Calif., where Apple lives, sign some legal confidentiality stuff and am escorted to a conference room that contains Jobs, some associates, and some lumps concealed under some black towels. I stare at what was under the towels. Everybody else stares at me.

This is how Apple, and nobody else, introduces new products to the press. It can be awkward, because Jobs is high-strung and he expects you to be impressed. I was, fortunately, and with good reason. Apple's new iPhone could do to the cell phone market what the iPod did to the portable music player market: crush it pitilessly beneath the weight of its own superiority. This is unfortunate for anybody else who makes cell phones, but it's good news for those of us who use them.

It's also good news for Jobs. Apple has had some explaining to do lately about backdated stock options it issued to Jobs and some other senior Apple executives. An internal investigation has cleared Jobs, but a federal investigation and a shareholder lawsuit are still going forward.

Sure, backdating options is common in Silicon Valley, but the essence of Apple's identity is that it's an uncorporate corporation: a glossy white iPod-colored company, the kind that doesn't get mixed up in this kind of thing. When Jobs calls the iPhone "the most important product Apple has ever announced, with the possible exception of the Apple II and the Macintosh," he means, technologically. But now is not a terrible time to be hitting a home run.

The iPhone developed the way a lot of cool things do: with a false start. A few years ago Jobs noticed how many development dollars were being spent—particularly in the greater Seattle metropolitan area—on what are called tablet PCs: flat, portable computers that work with a touchscreen instead of a mouse and keyboard. Jobs, being Jobs, figured he could do better, so he had Apple engineers noodle around with a tablet PC. When they showed him the touchscreen they came up with, he got excited. So excited he forgot all about tablet computers.

Jobs had just led Apple on a triumphant rampage through a new market sector, portable music players, and he was looking around for more technology to conquer. Cell phones are perfect because even Grandma has one: consumers bought nearly a billion of them last year. Break off just 1% of that and you can buy yourself a lot of black turtlenecks. Cell phones do all kinds of stuff—calling, text messaging, Web browsing, contact management, music playback, photos and video—but they do it very badly, by forcing you to press lots of tiny buttons, navigate diverse heterogeneous interfaces and squint at a tiny screen. "Everybody hates their phone," Jobs says, "and that's not a good thing. And there's an opportunity there." To Jobs's perfectionist eyes, phones are broken. Jobs likes things that are broken. It means he can make something that isn't and sell it to you for a premium price.

That was why, two and a half years ago, Jobs sicced his wrecking crew of designers and engineers on the cell phone as we know and hate it. They began by melting the face off a video iPod. No clickwheel, no keypad. They sheared off the entire front and replaced it with a huge, bright, vivid screen—that touchscreen Jobs got so excited about a few paragraphs ago. When you need to dial, it shows you a keypad; when you need other buttons, the screen serves them up. When you want to watch a video, the buttons disappear. Suddenly, the interface isn't fixed and rigid, it's fluid and molten. Software replaces hardware.

Into that iPod they stuffed a working version of Apple's operating system, OS X, so the phone could handle real, non-toy applications like Web browsers and e-mail clients. They put in a cell antenna, plus two more antennas for WiFi and Bluetooth; plus a bunch of sensors, so the phone knows how bright its screen should be, and whether it should display vertically or horizontally, and when it should turn off the touchscreen so you don't accidentally operate it with your ear.

Then Jonathan Ive, Apple’s head of design, the man who shaped the iMac and the iPod, squashed the case to less than half an inch thick, and widened it to what looks like a bar of expensive chocolate wrapped in aluminum and stainless steel. The iPhone is a typical piece of Ive design: an austere, abstract, platonic-looking form that somehow also manages to feel warm and organic and ergonomic. Unlike my phone. He picks it up and points out four little nubbins on the back. “Your phone's got feet on,” he says, not unkindly. “Why would anybody put feet on a phone?” Ive has the answer, of course: “It raises the speaker on the back off the table. But the right solution is to put the speaker in the right place in the first place. That's why our speaker isn’t on the bottom, so you can have it on the table, and you don't need feet.” Sure enough, no feet toe the iPhone's smooth lines.

All right, so it's pretty. Now pick it up and make a call. A big friendly icon appears on that huge screen. Say a second call comes in while you're talking. Another icon appears. Tap that second icon and you switch to the second call. Tap the big “merge calls” icon and you've got a three-way conference call. Pleasantly simple.

Another example: voicemail. Until now you've had to grope through your v-mail by ear, blindly, like an eyeless cave-creature. On the iPhone you see all your messages laid out visually, onscreen, labeled by caller. If you want to hear one, you touch it. Done. Now try a text message: Instead of jumbling them all together in your in-box, iPhone arranges your texts by recipient, as threaded conversations made of little jewel-like bubbles. And instead of “typing” on a four-by-four number keypad, you get a full, usable QWERTY keyboard. You will never again have to hit the 7 key four times to type a letter S.

Now forget about phone calls. Look at the video, which is impressively crisp and plays on a screen larger than the video iPod's. This is the first time the hype about "rich media" on a phone has actually looked plausible. Look at the e-mail client, which handles attachments, in-line images, HTML e-mails as adroitly as a desktop client. Look at the Web browser, a modified version of Safari that displays actual Web pages, not a teensy crunched-down version of the Web. There's a Google map application that's almost worth the price of admission on its own. Weaknesses? Absolutely. You can't download songs directly onto it from the iTunes store, you have to export them from a computer. And even though it's got WiFi and Bluetooth on it, you can't sync iPhone with a computer wirelessly. And there should be games on it. And you're required to use it as a phone—you can't use it without signing up for cellular service. Boo.

The iPhone breaks two basic axioms of consumer technology. One, when you take an application and put it on a phone, that application must be reduced to a crippled and annoying version of itself. Two, when you take two devices—such as an iPod and a phone—and squish them into one, both devices must necessarily become lamer versions of themselves. The iPhone is a phone, an iPod, and a mini-Internet computer all at once, and contrary to Newton—who knew a thing or two about apples—they all occupy the same space at the same time, but without taking a hit in performance. In a way iPhone is the wrong name for it. It's a handheld computing platform that just happens to contain a phone.

Why is Apple able to do things most other companies can't? Partly by charging for it: The iPhone will cost $499 for a 4GB model, $599 for 8GB, which makes it expensive, but not a luxury item. And partly because the company has highly diverse talent who are good at hardware, software, industrial design and Internet services. Most companies just do one or two things well. Unlike most competitors, Apple also places an inordinate emphasis on interface design. It sweats the cosmetic details that don't seem very important until you really sweat them. “I actually have a photographer’s loupe that I use to look to make sure every pixel is right,” says Scott Forstall, Apple’s head of Platform Experience (whatever that is). “We will argue over literally a single pixel.” As a result, when you swipe your finger across the screen to unlock the iPhone, you’re not just accessing a system of nested menus, you're entering a tiny universe, where data exist as bouncy, gemlike, animated objects that behave according to consistent rules of virtual physics. Because there's no intermediary input device—like a mouse or a keyboard—there's a powerful illusion that you're physically handling data with your fingers. You can pinch an image with two fingers and make it smaller.

To witness the iPhone launch from behind the curtain (or under the towel) is to see the controlling hand of Steve Jobs, for whom this is an almost mystically significant year. He’s 50 years old. It's been 30 years since he founded Apple (with Stephen Wozniak), and 10 since he returned there after having been fired. In that decade Apple's stock has gone up 1,000%. Neither age nor success (nor cancer surgery in 2004) have significantly mellowed him, though some of the silver in his beard is creeping into his hair. All technologists believe their products are better than other people's, or at least they say they do, but Jobs believes it a little more than most. In the hours we spent talking about the iPhone, Jobs trash-talked the Treo, the BlackJack, the Sony PSP and the Sony Mylo (“just garbage compared to this”), Windows Vista ("It's just a copy of an old version of Mac OSX") and of course Microsoft’s would-be iPod killer, Zune.

Jobs’s zealousness about product development— and enforcing his personal vision—remains as relentless as ever. He keeps Apple’s management structure unusually flat for a 20,000-person company, so he can see what’s happening at ground level. There is just one committee in the whole of Apple, to establish prices. I can’t think of a comparable company that does no—zero—market research with its customers. Ironically, Jobs's personal style could not be more at odds with the brand he has created. If the motto for Apple's consumers is “think different,” the motto for Apple employees is “think like Steve."

The same goes for Apple's partners. The last time Apple experimented with a phone, the largely unsuccessful ROKR, Jobs let Motorola make it, an unsatisfying experiment. “What we learned was that we wouldn't be satisfied with glomming iTunes onto a regular phone,” Jobs says. “We realized through that experience that for us to be happy, for us to be proud, we were going to have to do it all.”

Apple’s arrogance can inspire resentment, which is one reason for some of the glee over Jobs's stock options woes: taking pleasure in seeing a special person knocked down a peg is a great American pastime. (Jobs declines to talk about the options issue.) But there's no point in pretending that Jobs isn't special. A college dropout, whose biological parents gave him up for adoption, Jobs has presided over four major game-changing product launches: the Apple II, the Macintosh, the iPod, and the iPhone; five if you count the release of Pixar's Toy Story, which I'm inclined to. He's like Willy Wonka and Harry Potter rolled up into one.

That doesn’t mean Apple can operate beyond the boundaries of the Securities and Exchange Commission, but the iPhone wouldn't have happened without Apple's “we're special” attitude. One reason there's limited innovation in cell phones generally is that the cell carriers have stiff guidelines that the manufacturers have to follow. They demand that all their handsets work the same way. “A lot of times, to be honest, there’s some hubris, where they think they know better,” Jobs says. “They dictate what’s on the phone. That just wouldn’t work for us, because we want to innovate. Unless we could do that, it wasn't worth doing.” Jobs demanded special treatment from his phone service partner, Cingular, and he got it. He even forced Cingular to re-engineer its infrastructure to handle the iPhone's unique voicemail scheme. "They broke all their typical process rules to make it happen," says Tony Fadell, who heads Apple's iPod division. "They were infected by this product, and they were like, we've gotta do this!"

Now that the precedent has been set, it'll be interesting to see if other cell phone makers start demanding Apple-style treatment from wireless carriers. It'll also be worth watching to see how successful they'll be in knocking off the iPhone's all-screen form factor, which will be very difficult without Apple's touchscreen technology. Apple has filed for around 200 patents associated with the iPhone, building an imposing legal wall. Considering the size of the market, the stakes are high. The phone market is, of course, divided into armed camps by carrier, and so far the iPhone is exclusive with Cingular. Apple has sold 100 million iPods worldwide, but Cingular has only 58 million customers. Apple expects to launch the iPhone abroad in the fourth quarter of this year. It's not quite right to call the iPhone revolutionary. It won't create a new market, or change the entertainment industry, the way the iPod did. When you get right down to it, the device doesn't even have that many new features—it's not like Jobs invented voicemail, or text messaging, or conference calling, or mobile Web browsing. He just noticed that they were broken, and he fixed them.

But that's important. When our tools don't work, we tend to blame ourselves, for being too stupid or not reading the manual or having too-fat fingers. “I think there's almost a belligerence—people are frustrated with their manufactured environment,” says Ive. “We tend to assume the problem is with us, and not with the products we're trying to use.” In other words, when our tools are broken, we feel broken. And when somebody fixes one, we feel a tiny bit more whole.

[Praxis]

Sounds like you're talking shit to me: hardly anyone in this thread has expressed a 'want this thing so bad' attitude. But hey, you think LCD getting bigger than plasma after six fucking years means everyone who bought a TV in the interim got owned due to wanting the newest thing. Those capitalist pigs!

I actually really want this. I tend to be one of those people that enjoys having the latest piece of technology. Not only would this be fun to fiddle with, but it is pretty functional and would easily replace my 700wx. Plus it would be nice to not have to carry my treo AND my ipod everywhere I go (not to mention the Nike + iPod Sport Kit). So the convergence factor there is really nice. Then the fact that it has no buttons... :drool:

I, personally, can't compare this to a PS3 price gauge as this undoubtedly would be much more useful in an everyday setting for myself.

I just wish there were more than 8gb of memory...

Have you ever actually had to use touch screen interfaces before? Frankly they're a pain in the ass. Good luck trying to dial while you're on the go as well, you have to stop to tap at the screen just so you make sure you don't misdial the number. I await news reports of people crashing their cars because they were attempting to dial on their iPhones while driving.

Have you watched the intro video? Steve Jobs makes it very clear that he thinks every other touch screen interface on the market sucks, and goes on into explaining just how much of a pain it is to use most touchscreen smartphones, and that the iPhone is much better in terms of usability.

4GB iPod nano: $200
Smartphone: $100 and up (from Cingular)
cheapest iPhone: $500
Apple, Inc employee being shown to be wrong: Priceless.

Uh-huh.
Watch this.

$579. Smaller screen, no multitouch, no accelerometer, no light or proxy sensor, it's 802.11b instead of g, thicker, 64 MB of memory compared to 4 GB, uglier interface...

Same price point.

The iPhone is going to blow the high end PocketPC PDA-phone market out of the water.

Apple's 1% marketshare in 1.5 years probably isn't a bad estimate, IF they expand it beyond Cingular.

[Mobius]

The iPhone is going to block the high end PocketPC PDA-phone market out of the water.

if it can integrate smoothly in a corporate network:
my E61 has Domino/Lotus Note support; SIP if the iphone doesn't do it it's a deal breaker (oh yeah and EDGE?, when are we? back in 2002?, i want UMTS damnit; my company is paying enough our cellphone carrier to have the ability to use our phone as real pocket computer )
the iPhone is a cool gadget nonetheless, but i'm pretty sure that's not whate the corporate environment are looking in a pda/smartphone.

[Admiral Valdemar]

...

You think my post was in seriousness? Even the 'doesn't list any modern wireless protocols either'? Who needs what checked? I matched Red dry for dry.

Call yourself ENGLISH.

Hey Red, have you seen those awesome handset things you can plug into mobiles? Your phone rings, and you pull a giant 50s reciever out of your back and chat away... that's class.

FOOL! I had to get my piece in too. I can't have all you colonials using your sarcasm, I even added Intarweb lingo in.

And I'm British.

OT, the phone price is pretty damn high, even for something so shiny.