So many articles/posts here are sad. Apple vs. PC… pathetic. Both companies have their strengths and weaknesses. I have a MacBook for my computer that I’m tying from right now and I have a BlackBerry Storm. I had an iPhone and the even though I liked the phone the AT&T service is SOOOOO HORRRIBLE that I couldn’t take it and actually had to return the phone and switch back to Verizon. The author of this article is un-Godly biased and has written a horrible article.

I just hope no one uses this article to make their decision on which one to buy.

Fantastic idea.

Apple iPhone Feedback anyone?

I’m sure we’ll see tasks with 2.0, if not full on GTD apps and maybe even something from the MS Mac BU…

Yes, I’m aware of all of these features, I forgot about the contact search however. Exchange AS is great, but missing tasks is missing 25% of the functionality I need. Otherwise, I am excited for the iPhone 2, and will likely get one. The one thing that WM devices excel at is the Today/Home Screens. The level of customization and handiness of having your PIM information on one screen along with other information is great.

You do mac snobs proud.

Surur

“Dangit, I touched a button and it didn’t blue screen, what’s wrong with this phone? How can I avoid work now?!”

Definitely not when it comes to OSes…

Haven’t you heard all the other companies are going to roll over and die. We will all be under the benevolent rule of his Jobsness, at least for the next 5 years.

I better start protesting now.

Surur

Fascists generally both enforce their will and prevent you leaving the zone in which that will is enforced. Apple is likely ecstatic for you (sl.) to stick with WinVistaZuneMob — move over to Android or OpenMoko should you feel any pressing need for authenticity — if you don’t like their current offering.

Apple doesn’t currently offer the iPhone as a computer platform, it offers it like something closer to a console (much as Nintendo does with their machines). That will appeal to some devs and some users, and not others. Every model has benefits and limitations, and every dev and user will weigh them against their own needs.

Installing a very popular voice recorder on my Treo killed it dead (and installing other very popular software routinely made it crashy as hell). I’m willing to sacrifice that level of “open” hardware access for a working phone. Apple is betting others may be as well.

Thats why I, in general, dont respond to your mindless posts. I now know its on purpose, whereas before I just assumed you could not manage anything better.

Surur

LOL, I wasn’t assuming anything — I had no expectation of correctness. This is the internet, man! And quite frankly, your intruding reality into my @Surur posts is like me trying to leverage a reasonable data rate from Rogers by quoting a Bell plan. (Topical metaphor humor is a challenge!)

If could, I would lock Surur in the Octagon with Dilger and Stallman, may the least worst extremist win. Absent that, I have a little fun with the @Surur posts in some attempt to restore Karmic balance in face of his obsessive trolling.

And I don’t doubt your stats. After all, you’re not a Blackberry site where homepage hits would just suggest people keep coming back for news on the next regularly scheduled outage…

(Ducks and drags Malatesta between me and a charging Kevin…)

Hmmm…assumptions can be very dangerous:

Where People Go on WMExperts.com [LIST] []wmexperts.com (frontpage) – 56% []discussion.wmexperts.com – 22% [*]store.wmexperts.com – 22% [/LIST] Seems as if people just like reading our articles that details all the new devices, new software, tricks, etc. than “howling …in the forums”.

I just love living under fascists. At least the trains are on time.

Surur

What you cant read? The criteria are clear, and the restrictions real. Pretending this huge flaw is not real is pretty disingenuous.

Surur

If the appstore goes live and they won’t accept the 6 programs I have ready to go, then i’ll join you with the torches and pitchforks. Hell, I was even accepted to the developer program, which proves they aren’t too choosy

You seem to have forgotten about having to meet Apple’s capricious criteria for acceptability.

Conveniently forgotten that is.

Surur

The barrier to entry is by far the lowest. Yeah, I have to pay $99 and a cut, but I don’t have to package the stuff up, go find a distributor or set up my own web site and pay for bandwidth, handle licensing issues, etc. A lot of people who wouldn’t even know where to start in terms of selling WM or palm software will fork over $99 and click a button and be in business.

Symbian has by far the biggest market share. Maybe people develop based on the willingness of the market to buy 3rd party software.

You are joking, right? The iPhone has the biggest barrier of any mobile OS. Did you actually say that with a straight face.

You speak as if destiny has spoken. Do you hear voices?

Surur

Now iphone (and we’ll see about android) have new, modern, consistent API’s that make it very simple to write high-quality code that results in programs with amazing functionality and good looks. They also (we’ll see about android) have decent marketshare and, in iphone’s case, a low-barrier-to-entry distribution model. Some of the most talented developers will move over to iphone. Some people who never bothered to write code for mobiles are moving over too. Over time, the trickle becomes a flood.

You act like it never happened before, and that current success assures future success. Palm used to own the market, and had far more software, much nicer, than WM (or Win CE or PalmPC or PocketPC or whatever you want to call that family of stuff).

At first WM had no market share, but lots of developers (including me) moved over because we could accomplish more with less effort. The snowball kept rolling down hill and it became ginormous.

Once a few “killer apps” show up on iphone, the floodgates break open. And in 5-10 years, if apple doesn’t keep up, it will be someone else.

And you make my point for me: slingbox on palm was a royal pain to write because palm offers essentially no support for encryption, video, and only crappy outdated support for networking. WM is much better at all three of these things. Hence it arrived first.

Iphone’s SDK makes WM’s SDK look like palm’s SDK.

But does it matter? You are making a rather large thing of something which has not stopped the platform from being considered to be very easy to develop for, and has had a plethora of software firsts, such as SlingBox and Skype.

Even Google Gears came to WM first.

Surur

Update: i just spent a few minutes poking around the API’s. Other than adding more new and inconsistent stuff, most of the changes were apparently in the kernel (or, at least, below the user layer). All the same old junk seems to be there.

Win CE 6. Know what you are talking about.

Surur

Drool. Nuclear projector uber-device will make espresso too!

Apple pushing RIM pushing Apple is also the best thing for consumers. Before Blackberry, business development was stagnant. Before Apple, UE and media was going nowhere. Now everyone is upping their game, from WinVistaMob 7 to Palm Nova to Android.

I’m not stuck on any brand. If another company out-innovates Apple to better fit my needs, Apple has only until my next buying cycle to respond. Loyalty needs to flow from corp to consumer, not the other way around. We pay (and pay!) them, after all. They’re not paying us.

Here’s to an embarrassment of next-gen riches!

Except that sometimes you just pass it a pointer and it allocates it.

Except that sometimes you don’t have to pass it a pointer.

It’s fun, really.

ps: Surur, it still behaves this way in WM6, so don’t give me your “rewrite” nonsense. Until they get rid of all the crappy old sdks and move to the 21st century, it’s a heaping pile of crap.

Funny you say that, as the next WM is going to be built on the Win CE 6 kernel, which is a full rewrite and already out in the market.

You are quite missing the point, which is that these companies do not quite share your view of the future of WM? Maybe you are very very wrong?

I have not seen anything revolutionary suggested for the iPhone accelerometer which has not already been implemented on the Nokia N95, without an API. Maybe your perfect OSX API is not as important as you think, and not really essential for turning your $600 phone into a pedometer or light saber.

When talking about your fantasy iPhone future, maybe you should stop comparing it to last years WM devices.

Surur

Direct X 8 for WinVistaZuneMob will be announced at CES 2009. And 2010. (Will go without mention in 2011 and end up Cairo-esque footnote in Wikipedia thereafter).

Nope, they’re gonna try and copy iPhone 1.0 like everyone else. Where was that device 2 years ago? Oh, that’s right, being finalized by Jobs and Ive’s. The industry should really pay Apple licensing fees for their taste.

And Namaste to you, si, for the awesome visual of Microsoft and HTC both desperately trying to build separate sides of a bridge to iPhone competitiveness, blissfully unaware that never shall the two meet properly in the middle. Still, beta by 2010, RM by 2013, and Service Pack 1 by 2015. Given 17 years, and iPhone 1.0 will be in for a heap ‘o trouble!

(Hopefully 16-bit legacy API’s will be phased out by then — in different ways by every department, ‘natch — lucky developers!)

As for roll over and die, yes. I do expect it. Just like Palm did. I expect HTC and others will switch over to android or to whatever the next big thing is. These companies aren’t married to MS. Sony used to be a palm licensee. So did samsung. Things change. Companies act in their own self-interest, not in microsoft’s.

I agree that VGA is better (assuming good brightness, contrast, etc.) No argument there. However I’ve yet to see a phone where the accelerometer API is as complete and flexible as it is on the iphone. Apparently the iphone also has exclusive access to a unique graphic accelerator from Samsung, though I know little beyond what the press reported yesterday. In any event, OpenGL is built in to iphone, and I haven’t seen anything quite that nice on WM.

Channelling Archie, are you? Unlike Garnet, WM is not a static platform, and is well supported by many companies who plan to make a lot of money of it, e.g. Asus who said they expect to make 10% of their revenue of WM phones in a few years, or Sony Erricson who turned to WM to increase their market share.

Do you really expect these companies to just roll over and die, especially when they cant just take part in the iPhone market by licensing the OS?

HTC’s new phones, with slim design, VGA screens, graphic accelerators and accelerometers show they are not just going to sit there and let “unique combination of sensors for input, and a display that is among the best available on such a device” steal their market share.

Surur

1) WM development will, in a few years, be where palm development is now 2) I assume we agree on where palm development will be 3) again, i know nothing about symbian 4) misc. linux-based phones will have gotten nowhere due to too much fragmentation 5) android: big question mark. Depends on what they do as far as push email, etc. 6) RIM: again, depends on whether they adapt; they still have time to do so, and have shown signs of doing so, but their java-based environment won’t cut it long term.

Platforms die. SDK’s die. Languages die. It’s the way of things. Palm is done. WM is next. MS has shown no sign yet that it even understands why it’s in trouble, though they give lipservice to the general idea that they need to make improvements.

So no quality apps for anyone else?

Do you really believe old “1% of the market” iPhone is going to make it “all over for everyone else“?

Surur

No, it’s because:

1) the development environment and SDK are superior in many respects to any other mobile SDK (maybe not symbian – i know nothing about that one) including easy support for multimedia, animation, GPS, sql, xml, web, etc. Whatever you want to believe about WM, its api’s are nowhere near this feature rich. (and don’t give me your backgrounding apps stock answer; there will be backgrounding apps). 2) the device has a unique combination of sensors for input, and a display that is among the best available on such a device. 3) iphone has HIGs that, in combination with the fact that many iphone developers are mac developers, will lead to well thought out user experiences.

If Apple finally sees the light and opens up the dock connector and bluetooth, it will be all over for everyone else, at least as far as app quality goes.

Thats because every app which the other platforms had for ages would be met with wonderment and fanfare on the iPhone platform.

When a GPS app comes along, it would be like people could find themselves for the first time (just like people thought google maps was amazing when it was already present on the other platforms).

When they finally get VOIP, the blogs and analysts will announce the end of the telcom business model.

Everything old is new again. Its rather pathetic.

And re traffic ranking – maybe posting about VGA screens is more interesting to readers that the colour of the back of new iPhone.

Surur

I might suggest that talking trash about traffic numbers might itself qualify as “flamebait,” but I’ll just say that Phone different is not as old as WME and faces a slightly more competitive blogosphere.

Fret not, we plan on making PD’s traffic numbers as good as WME’s.

back on topic:

The key thing for me is that the iPhone is going to be where it’s at, development-wise, for the foreseeable future. I fully expect the number and quality of iPhone apps to be just incredible. More to the point — I expect these apps to be relatively higher-profile than your average app for basically any other platform. The App Store too.. mmm. Best way to deliver apps ever.

But you’re right..it’s all good..so many choices and the devices just keep getting better. I can’t wait till my phones a laptop. It can just project screen on a wall and infrared keyboard onto the desk and you can have full power in the palm of your hand. we just need nuclear batteries (back to the sensational!)

Well there is a perfect device: It’s the Nokia N95 8gb, or maybe it’s successor, the N96 (16gb).

However, thats not why I wanted to post a comment. Let me just start by saying I am a Mac user. Always have been always will. But the iPhone is the biggest flop ever. Apple could have made it so much more. Who makes a big deal about an OS update that allows you to send texts to multiple people. All those free crapy samsungs, that everyones network has, have been able to do that since their inception in the dark ages. Apple deprives it’s users of basic must have features, and then tells them you should get excited that we have now added it. Think of it as cars. All other car companies sell you cars with wheels. Apple car company doesn’t. And because it’s a Mac, there are no tires available for it. Because Apple locked ‘em. Also though, because its a hot sleek looking mac, for some reason you tolerate this. So when Apple announces we will now be including tires, they announce it as a revolutionary device. Yet again. Everyone else already gets tires. Another thing this article did for me was to remind me why all my pc friends hate me. You would almost think the article was written by some sort of Mac politician. It’s so one sided. And all it can do is say what’s amazing about the iPhone and bad about all the rest of the devices. It’s so cult like, so insanely lop sided it makes me want to stop using my MacBook and get a Dell. Because only apple users walk around with such big heads.

I will finally make the jump from WinMob to iPhone when the 2nd gen device comes out and software 2.0 with Exchange ActiveSync is available. I currently have the 1st generation Samsung Blackjack and it is completely awesome. There’s no real reason for me to make the jump beyond those 2 simple words: IT’S FUN.

http://www.macfixit.com/

Surur

That configuration is necessary for the iTerminator to allow smooth, and cool-looking, iShotgun action. Nothing says d’oh more than spinning to load the next round and accidentally hitting your vibrate switch…

Any Microsoft Forum that provides support for Microsoft’s dodgy, crash-prone, nigh unusable technology will always be far more frequently trafficked than Apple related sites for products that “just work”.

People with iPhones are busy using them. People with WinVIstaMob are howling their frustrations out on forums. Huge surprise.

Next thing you’ll be quoting Microsoft Knowledge base hits vs. Apple…

Not to stray from the sensational, but we’re incredibly blessed to live in a time and place where we can enjoy so many options, and get as close as possible to something that suits each and every one of our individual requirements and tastes.

I could never really use the hard keyboard on small devices, and used to carry a smartphone and an iPod, which was the only option I used to have. Apple’s now given me an alternative that better fits what I want to do, and made a keyboard I happen to find far more usable.

We’re all winning, and getting to poke a little at each other on the internet (likely from our devices of choice!) is just cake.

Thanks much for the comment!

BTW, Phonedifferent did not chart at all on that second traffic rankings graph. With a traffic ranking of 260 000 its no surprise.

Surur

If the killer smartphone app is voice, why would Jobs not make an additional button on the iPhone that immediately took you into the phone app. Why do you have to click to the home screen, then enter it from there?! It’s not an iPhone. It’s an iGadget.

They should change that up on the next iPhone, but then Jobs would have to admit they made a mistake on the first one!

Just since your title includes the word “Incomparable” I’ll toss in some comparisons into the comments. People love comparisons.

I think when it comes to the comparison of the Addicts to the Artsies (for lack of a better term – but seems fitting as Apple would choose looks over function), I guess it’s like comparing Apples to Berries. They’re just different.

Apple approach is Consumers will use what we tell them to use. And we build good stuff for the most part so people will mainly like it or even love it. But it is a gadget dictatorship.

RIM approach is to give users lots of form factor options – as not one style of device will suit everybody. But RIM figured out a few years ago the secret formula to turn a smartphone into an addiction: a) a prominent notification light b) one-handed ease of use c) long battery life (which hopefully won’t be sacrificed with newer models) d) instant communication (push email, BlackBerry Messenger). RIM also goes with the notion of course that a physical keyboard is better, but I won’t go there.

With RIM now developing a touchscreen phone, it shows yet again that RIM has it’s customer’s wants in mind. Gadget Democracy. I don’t think RIM “wants” to build a touchscreen phone, as it immediately sacrifices on the “addictive” factors listed above, but they’re going to do it anyways as Apple has sold a lot of people on sexiness and RIM is keen enough to give the people what they “Think” they want (as told by the dictators).

I don’t think there is an easy winner here. Jump into the CrackBerry forums and you’ll find a ton of people who we’re BlackBerry users, jumped onto the iPhone bandwagon and jumped off after a week. There are also some BlackBerry users who have switched to the iPhone and love it. And what you’re also finding is a lot of smartphone uses who now sport a BlackBerry AND an iPhone – which shows they are Berries and Apples. Even if iPhone goes 2.0 or 3.0 or 10.0, it’s still going to lack that BlackBerry factor that millions have come to love. It also shows RIM they have some work to do – on sexiness, on web browsing, on media capabilities. I like to think that there is a Perfect Device out there, but I think that might be a pipe dream… there’s always a trade off somewhere.

Gotta jet… my Red light is blinking. I’ve developed CrackBerry A.D.D. and I now have a 3.5 minute attention span max

6 months in and finger swiping through photos still hasn’t gotten old. Trying to view photos on my WM devices (2 of which actually have better 640×480 screens) and browse through them is what seems old. And 480×320 H.264 videos at 1.5Mbps look phenomenally better than 640×480 DivX or H.264 video on WM (which can maybe handle 900 kbps except on my HTC (dis)Advantage which can’t even handle 500 kbps video without faltering).

http://digg.com/apple/Top10ReasonstheiPhoneisIncomparable

LOLLERSKATES!