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| an article from I've been telling people the iPhone is junk since it first came out. Now they just proved me right. Macs are still the far superior best though. I'm still a Mac zealot and always will be. I'm just not in love with Apple and I'm not an ignorant follower that just believes in hype and spends too much money on something just so I can say I have one. |
| Is Something Rotten at Apple? In its ubiquitous TV ads, Apple claims that its new iPhone is twice as fast as the original version and just half the price. Neither is true. The half-price fib has been obvious for some time: When you add the price of AT&T's required two-year contract, the new phone costs slightly more than the old phone. In a lawsuit filed last week, an iPhone owner na med Jessica Alena Smith argues that Apple hasn't been honest about the phone's speed, either. Smith, echoing thousands of complaints logged on Apple's Web site, says that her iPhone rarely connects to AT&T's fast 3G network, instead staying fixed to the pokey EDGE service that was the bane of the first iPhone. Smith's iPhone doesn't just fail on tasks like downloading e-mail and surfing the Web, she says. It also drops many of her voice calls. Smith lives in Birmingham, Ala., but I've had the same problem with my iPhone 3G in cell-tower-rich San Francisco—more dropped calls than I've ever had on a cell phone (including on the original iPhone) and terribly spotty 3G service. Last month, I raved about the great third-party programs available on the iPhone's fantastic built-in App Store. But I've since soured on that system, too. As many iPhone owners have noticed, the phone often mysteriously refuses to load these apps, rendering them useless. Smith is asking a judge to grant her lawsuit class-action status. I hope it's approved. Apple has reluctantly acknowledged flaws in the iPhone and has quietly promised to correct them, but there's no sign that it's taking the complaints very seriously. The lawsuit might be just the kick it needs to fix the world's broken iPhones. But the company's troubles go beyond the iPhone. Last month, Apple launched MobileMe, a $100-per-year online service that aimed to sync documents and e-mail across computers and Internet devices. MobileMe failed spectacularly in its opening weeks, with some users reporting losing years of saved e-mail. In a widely circulated post, Techcrunch's Michael Arrington claimed last week that Apple's PCs aren't doing so well either. Arrington, a longtime Apple fan, says he's had four new Macs break in different ways—one refused to connect to Wi-Fi networks, one suffered a keyboard flaw, and two shut down mysteriously. Is something rotten at App! le? Is it "flailing badly at the edges," as Arrington argues? Is it possible that Steve Jobs' reality distortion field is finally weakening—that the scales have fallen from our eyes and we're now seeing that Apple's products are just as flawed and prone to failure as any other hardware? Well, not really. As Apple fans point out, people still love Apple. Last week the American Customer Satisfaction Index, an annual survey of consumers' feelings about major brands, gave Apple a record score of 85 points out of 100 in the personal-computer cat! egory. Apple scored 10 points higher than Dell, 12 points higher than Hewlett-Packard, and 13 points higher than Gateway. Apple has led the category for five years straight. Claes Fornell, who directs the survey, told Computerworld that even though customers know that Apple's products aren't perfect, "Apple has an almost Teflon-like quality. Its problems don't really seem to matter to consumers." So much for the death of the reality distortion field. Why don't consumers seem to care about Apple's problems? For one thing, Apple gets more press than any other company in tech, and both its successes and failures tend to dominate the Silicon Valley blogosophere. It registers as big tech news when a high-flying blogger like Arrington gets a few unlucky Macs, but such difficulties probably don't filter down to most customers. Years of savvy brand advertising and a string of genuinely great p! roducts have helped Apple build up a well of good-feeling; as a result, people are more willing to overlook the company's occasional failures. Besides, many Apple products still beat their rivals, hands down. You may hate Apple for selling you an iPod with a battery that dies, but what are you going to do when you go looking for a new music player—get a Zune? Not likely. What's troubling, though, is Apple's tendency to milk this advantage—when it does screw up, it prefers secrecy over full disclosure, and it expects customers to quickly forgive any slight. Its response to the MobileMe meltdown was a classic example. For several days after the site's rocky launch, Apple refused to disclose what had gone wrong. It wouldn't say why MobileMe was down, and it wouldn't say when MobileMe would be fixed. Only after the New York Times' David! Pogue and the Wall Street Journal's Walter Mossberg published critical columns did Apple change its tune. Two weeks after MobileMe's launch, the company put up a blog documenting the service's status. Last week, it gave all users a credit for two months of MobileMe service. Apple is dealing with iPhone problems in much the same way—grudgingly. Apple-focused blogs recently reported that Jobs fired off one-line e-mail replies to two different customers upset about iPhone difficulties; in each case, he said Appl! e was working on the problems. And an Apple spokeswoman told USA Today that Apple would issue a software patch to improve "communication with 3G networks." But that's it: The company won't say why the phone's failing to load apps or connect to 3G, it won't say how serious the problems are, and it won't say what, if anything, customers can do to resolve the problems until it issues a fix. Contrast Apple's response to how other major tech firms handled recent failures. As Adam Engst, editor of the Mac newsletter TidBits, points out, when Netflix suffered shipping delays earlier this month, it issued an immediate, clear explanation and apology and automatically credited customers' accounts. Netflix customers raved about how the company handled the p roblem. Voilà: The company turned a tech failure into a PR win. Google accomplished something similar when Gmail died for a few hours on Aug. 11. Within hours of noticing the problem, Google put out a statement on its blog explaining what had gone wrong—the post was titled, "We feel your pain, and we're sorry"—and the steps it had taken to prevent a future failure. Apple's strategy for dealing with complaints stems from a companywide emphasis on secrecy. Tight lips work well for Apple, building suspense among loyalists and the press about upcoming products and burnishing its reputation as a company that leads rather than follows. But as it expands into new, highly complex businesses—phones, set-top boxes, "cloud computing" ser! vices—Apple is sure to make more mistakes. As Jobs wrote in an internal e-mail to employees, the MobileMe screw-up happened because the company was trying to do too much at the same time (the system launched on the same day as the new iPhone) and because "we have more to learn about Internet services." What's more, Apple's customer base is widening beyond longtime Mac fanatics—people who give the company a pass because they regard it as an underdog. The Mac's market share is growing rapidly, suggesting that lots of Windows users are switching. Last month, millions of people waited in line for the iPhone not because it was emblazoned with the Apple logo, but because they'd heard it was the best phone on the market. Combine that with the fact that the iPhone and MobileMe are vital to people's lives in a way that, say, an iPod isn't, and you've g! ot a recipe for customer dissatisfaction. You may be willing to overlo ok Apple's silence about a dead battery on your MP3 player. But if the company continues to stonewall people whose phones cut off every five minutes, Steve Jobs better get ready for some marches on Cupertino. Farhad Manjoo is Slate's technology columnist and the author of True Enough: Learning To Live in a Post-Fact Society. |
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Go here and look at what the interface is like on this phone. It's the first one I've seen that looks better than the iPhone. It's all 3D and it does the automatically tilt the screen when you rotate the phone thing like the iPhone does. And the phone looks better and you can get it with or without a keyboard. It's also got a tv out so if you get the HTC cable to go with it, you can connect it to a monitor or tv and run a Powerpoint presentation off it, and who knows what else. It's got all the specs of the iPhone and some better: wifi, 3.2 MP camera, memory card slot up to 16GB, Windows Mobile 6.1 (so lots of apps and support), stereo bluetooth, 3G, GPS.
There's going to be some variation of it on all the major carriers this fall, both GSM and CDMA, so anybody can get one. The iPhone would sell a lot more if it wasn't so far out of reach for many people like myself. For me personally, the iPhone is not everything I want and I'll never have the money to get one nor the desire to tolerate Cingular/AT&T screwing up my bill every single month. For me to get an iPhone right now, I'd have to buy out of my Sprint contract, pay up money I owe to Cingular, pay a security deposit to get service with them because I have bad credit, then pay for the iPhone and a more expensive plan every month. I still wouldn't have a keyboard to type on or some of the other things the iPhone still lacks that I value. So there is nothing Apple could ever do to the iPhone that would make it worth the literally $1,000 to $1,500 I'd have to spend to get one. Even if I hadn't screwed Cingular out of the money they tried to screw me out of all those years ago, it'd still be a venture that would cost me many hundreds of dollars. I am certain there are many people out there like me. When you consider that Tmobile will let anyone have service with a contract regardless of their credit with little or no deposit, and Sprint will let anyone on board with a deposit far less than that of Cingular (at least the deposits Cingular demanded a few years ago when I worked at Cingular), this phone being available on all carriers allows it to reach a vast audience that the iPhone doesn't have access to. Also, Sprint still allows customers to upgrade their phone after one year into their contract. They will get less of a discount than someone off contract but they will still get a cheaper price than buying it outright. So, in the example of me, I can spend four figures on an iPhone and enslave myself to a vile company that I despise, or I can spend a third of that or less and get the Touch Pro on the carrier I'm already on.
The HTC Touch Pro is like the iPhone's hotter, more talented sister. It's also the iPhone's less snobby, more slutty sister since it can be had by anyone rather than just the chosen ones as with the biPhone. It's not the first phone to come out that is better than the iPhone. But it's the first to really compete with iPhone's style and surpass all the other wannabes in its availability to everyone. If HTC gets this message across and prices the phone as reasonably as the iPhone 3G, then it will give the iPhone a run for it's money.
HTC - Touch Phone, PDA Phone, Smartphone, Mobile Computer
Despite what the video says, it works on Symbian phones as well as Windows Mobile.
Mobile carriers worst nightmare has come true, thanks to Qik
Posted Jul 7th 2008 9:30AM by Joey CelisFiled under: Video, Windows Mobile, Symbian, Web services, iPhone
Live video streaming from your mobile phone is probably a mobile carrier worst nightmare simply because the amount of bandwidth video consumes. And leading that nightmare is Qik.
Simply put, Qik takes your mobile phone's built in video camera and transforms it into a webcam that connects to the Qik site where it will host live feeds of your video, as it happens. That's right, people can now watch you make a fool of yourself anywhere you go.
We were able to test the Qik service on our 3G connected Windows Mobile phone. The installation was quick and only required a few SMS messages be sent back and forth to authorize our account. Once configured just launch the application and your video will automatically appear on the Qik website. Video quality is acceptable and we only experienced slight delays due in part to our mobile connection and location.
Once you end your transmission the live video is then archived to the site for later viewing. Of course like any good site, they offer 2 different privacy settings for your feeds, public and private. At least this way not everyone in the world can see that you haven't cleaned up your room.
Currently in alpha, Qik supports a handful of Windows Mobile and Symbian phones with iPhone testing starting soon. We hope that future updates to the service will also include the ability to adjust video size and image quality. They do recommend an unlimited data plan and in the few days that we used the service we would also recommend it as well.
(my username on Qik is Qikstand)