"Alas, apparently it "pretty quickly" goes
"from 'wouldn't it be cool if' to searches for evidence that will back up these slightly off-beam theories. It's like science, except less scientific, since it's trying to wish something into existence, rather than accept that some things don't exist. (If you want to see it in action, have a look at this Macrumors thread, which goes from a little item on Gizmodo and spins off into 20-plus pages of forum-driven supposition, theory, fact-gathering and world-class generating of castles in the air.
Least it's world class
Is it wishing it into existence? Are there people closing their eyes, tapping their heels together while repeating the words, 'There's no phone like iPhone, there's no phone like iPhone? Possibilities are different from actualities. Probabilities are different from ealities. The whole part of rumors on MR is that the post can be about thoughts on things that don't conclusively exist. Amazingly, the human brain can also conceptualise things that don't exist also.
As Charles has
said: "Extrapolation can lead you up strange streets, especially when those streets are in cyberspace." I'd like, as I imagine many others, for the upcoming iPhone to be more feature-packed than it may well be. A simple answer being to just waiting out that version, and get the next, or use your current device, or just get something else.
I do have to take the OP to task in a few minor errors on his behalf:
- the thread started Feb 20th, as the plan was to accumulate iPhone information, and it quickly got other stuff tacked on, with a
wide range of things discussed (see the @SkyBlue, reivew of the last few pages of the thread0.
- It started with 2 links to the broadcom.com site and a possible viable alternative chip to Infineons SGOLD3 - the
BCM21551. If you look close enough at the 1st post
here - I edited the post the last time May 21st, and thought that was clearly enough made by saying at the top in bold:
Edit: It's been a long thread, but as of May - the announcement looks to be at WWDC at the latest, with the release starting by late June (By August for UK :/ 2.0 Software has been pegged to late June). There's an outside chance it could be May announcement, June release, due to a build-up in production by June. Has Gizmodo outed Apple's release date? 20th May 2008.
I'm not sure how I could have referenced a Gizmodo post from May 2008 in February otherwise
Was the Gizmodo
article little? In the scheme of things, yes. What was it talking about? Let me see... oh yes, the 3G iPhone announce date being WWDC, and availability then, not much later on in the year. Nice [image=http://gizmodo.com/assets/resources/2008/05/iphone-3g-nextmonth.jpg]graphic[/url] too. It kind of balanced out the "bad news" that Piper Jaffray had given just before.
Of course, the Guardian Tech team isn't unpartial itself to
using a Gizmodo article to make comments on, such as saying that Apple was sending out a "very clear message: The iPhone is for dummies. It's not for gadget freaks, who only represent a tiny minority of the market." after hacked phones were getting problems after an iPhone update in September 07. We'll get back to the picture Jack used in a while**.
We'll see about whether it actually gets availability right after the keynote, but it was more accurate than previous rumors. And as the thread was about the iPhone, it would be kinda silly not to miss out on the story. Hence the edit also of the 1st post, so if people just went to the 1st post, they'd get an inkling of the current state of affairs as of May 21 08. Simple enough really.
-20 plus pages - yes. It's now 30-plus pages of
"forum-driven supposition" - yes - (where supposition is defined as messages expressing an opinion based on incomplete evidence. That's kind of what MR is here for)
-
"theory" - check
-
"fact-gathering" - check
- "
and world-class generating of castles in the air" - I kind of take offence at the use of the
phrase as it seems a dig by the OP. It kind of indicates an elaborate plan (i.e. a castle) without a solid foundation to rest them on to quote from
here. Unobtainable goals and ambitions? Maybe the OP has started setting his hopes too low. But presumably "common sense" should prove me wrong, as it was purported to by Baron D'Holbach's Le Bon Sens"
(1772).
I take some solace from
Henry David Thoreau who said: "If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them." "Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies", as R. W. Emerson said. So what are the sandy foundations? Maybe the baseband chip, anticipated to be from Infineon, and recently rumored to be true? Afterall, that was what the thread started about
We await a teardown.
So, is the OP's "guide" useful?
1)
"What Apple produces never has as many bells and whistles as fans forecast." Quite true. Apple overdelivers in relation to it's promises, Apple underdelivers to fan's collective cumulative predictions. C'est la vie. No need to get too grumpy about reviewing Apple kit by extrapolating personal experience of some teething problems to the Apple community at large though... "Apple cleaves to the belief that something is finished not when you can't add anything, but when you can't take anything away."
Funny that, as the Wired
article I read seemed to make out it was a mad dash primarily to get features working (along with the phone itself) not finish taking irrelevant features out... (The Steve Jobs quote being "We don't have a product yet" more so than 'We need to pare the features we're aiming for down'. It's hard to tell if you don't have inside information about the company. You'd imagine they had to reign in their goals for features at some point - they have enough meetings to get this sorted. A peak at their design process is available
here as mentioned [/url] here[/url]. Something to
ground the blue-sky thinking - including
"paired design meetings" -
Every week, the teams had/have 2 meetings. One in which to brainstorm, to forget about constraints and think freely. As Lopp put it: to "go crazy". Then they also hold a production meeting, an entirely separate but equally regular meeting which is the other's antithesis. Here, the designers and engineers are required to nail everything down, to work out how this crazy idea might actually work. This process and organization continues throughout the development of any app, though of course the balance shifts as the app progresses. But keeping an option for creative thought even at a late stage is really smart.
All very de Bono. The Pixel Perfect Mockups, 10 to 3 to 1, Paired Design Meetings and Pony Meeting all interplay between the taking away and keeping in/adding process. The article by Helen Walters with comments by Michael Lopp, senior engineering manager at Apple kinda help those without a normal insider viewpoint.
- So, the v1 iPhones doesn't
currently do "voice dialling, speed dialling, video, doesn't offer camera options, can't forward SMS, and doesn't offer multiple selections. We're
pretty aware of what it can't do at MacRumors... I don't however necessarily need to go to the modmyifone's
"full list" to find out.
2)
"The user interface (UI) receives far, far more attention than people ever expect."
That's a unique selling point for Apple, and a primary differentiator now that there is convergence in the visual look of the iPhone with it's (upcoming) touch screen rivals. We know the UI gets a lot of attention in the demo, and we can find out/know that the UI has a lot of work going on in the back-rooms.
WM tried to shrink the screen and keep the interface v. similar. Apple altered the UI to fit the smaller touchscreen size specifically, giving an OS designed for that form factor, rather than crowbar'd in.
3)
"It will only include surprising new technology if it's been standardised but neglected a while."
Hmm, fairly likely, but a heck of a get-out clause. Define "neglected a while", or standardised. It could all but rule out anything other than something that has been hidden and also worked on flat out, without any pauses between invention and release to the public.If you're including the iBook's wireless, and say 801.11n (which hasn't finished standardisation) then it seems it's a bit of a less useful comment to make in a guide.
4)
"It will cost more than you might wish."
Of course. They're a company wanting to make profit for their share-holders. It'd be silly for them not to. Of course people will wish something was cheaper than it was, or want a better deal.
5)
"The leaks and rumours in the rumour outlets are, by and large, wrong - or at least so plentiful that it's impossible to tell the correct from the daft."
By and large incorrect, or at least inaccurate. Yes. Impossible to tell the correct from the daft? Blimey, that's a bit of an admission from a Technology correspondent, that they can't tell at all, "the correct from the daft".
"just because someone overheard someone...doesn't make it true." - There's a cracking iPhone rumor that springs to mind...
CA's predictions "the meat" - "What can we therefore expect in iPhone 2.0?"
3Mpixel camera. - My view it'd be >=3.2. 5Mp is standard these days for many smart phones. It's not that much more expensive parts wise
Video - "it can already do this". >A given.
WiMax - "chances at about 5%" >I'd imagine something like WiMax might pop up on the laptops 1st, then the iPhone, then the iPods.
3G connectivity > A given.
Better Bluetooth profiles. > most likely. BT support is lacking in the current iPhone as it stands.
Voice and speed dialling > A software update, as mentioned. I'm sure they could bring more to the table though.
What won't be there:
SMS forwarding - "Americans don't understand SMS" (
Gartner estimated 189 billion mobile messages sent in 2007 in N. America, forecast to reach 301 billion in 2008.)
GPS "Expensive, sucks power, imprecise, and isn't standard on the vast majority of phones, so Apple isn't losing by not using it."
Say whaaaaaaaaaat?++ Take another look at the WWDC poster. Read out loud. Think. Repeat. Go find the ++ section.
A cheap one - > Inferring a cheap iPhone. Unfortunately it isn't mentioned whether this means subsidised handset cost, just a PAYG option, a no string attached cheap iPhone. No mention of what "cheap" means. Easy enough to pop to Tesco and see what they have on offer...
The reality is that I've just spent ages watching the company, and know what it's like. Come back in a couple of weeks and we'll see if I'm right, won't we?
For those "eager to join in the fevered speculation about the hypothetical new phone" - they could just jump straight into a forum, or elsewhere. This post is kinda coming back before WWDC, to get a first inking of where those predictions lie. Or the users can just skim the top tech pages tonight/tomorrow morning till 6pm BST.
** The picture shows that hacked 1.0.2 iPhones could have: Carrier Choice, Cheap roaming, IM, , Retrogaming, Command Line, Remote esktop
Global Positioning,Voice Recorder, Office Reference, IRC, eBook Reader, Delete Menu Items, File Browser
Wonder how many we can tick next to for iPhone v2 running OS 2.0 eh?
++Imagine what a Touch would be like with GPS. Or a laptop. As stated previously, it doesn't have to be integrated internally this time
- it could be an external module attaching via the dock connection of the
iPhone. I agree there are possible
arguments against it - Speed, expertise to integrate, software required, antennae positioning, battery life consumption, size... Nokia provides one
solution - A Bluetooth GPS Module. Nokia seems to be into GPS
apparently
It isn't a fair comparison of like with like though. Is he talking hardware, or subscription fees, end cost to the consumer, or the actual cost of the parts, or cost for design of software creation for GPS on the iPhone? Imprecise? - As opposed to the My Position 1km radius you can get on Google Maps?
GPS, videophoning++
Are the predictions snubbing both of these? Yes at least to the GPS - "Expensive, sucks power, imprecise, and isn't standard on the vast majority of phones".Not on the majority of phones, but then smartphones aren't the majority of phones, but it's on lots of smartphones, and is planned to be on lots more, eventually the majority you might even venture...
Of course, back in 2004, smart navigation was, satellite navigation
was falling "dramatically in
price"...
"Nor does satellite navigation have to be built in. That growth in computing power means that handheld computers, such as Palm or PocketPC machines, can handle the task of giving directions too."
"Socially, satellite navigation also has a new profile. It has moved up from "very optional and slightly dubious extra that implies you have money to burn and get lost a lot" to 'nice thing to have on board'."
From the chap who
said in 2004, that
"Wearable computing is going to envelop and alter our lives in subtle ways over the next 10 years". We do indeed now have suits with integrated headphones, and buttons. Some things come to pass it seems. My venture is that GPS is one of them come v2 iPhone. It won't be perfect, there are headaches and problems on all sides (not least being how to deal with the antennae).
But we have to bear in mind that "
Somewhere, there's a perfect application for this technology" You'd think that to have GPS as an option to plug into the iPhone, or have it as part of a car dock, would be really useful - you know, an affordable GPS for your car that works...
Afterall, in 2003 Charles was reviewing an "affordable GPS" product that linked to a Pocket PC. Charles himself rated it "a success, a product worth buying; and in itself that shows how far this category has come in the past year."
"The £250-odd price [of a TomTom Navigator 2] is worth it if you regularly have fights over map-reading, or have to head for unknown locations. It would also mean that breakdown drivers would reach you sooner. And who could argue with that?"
GPS in Detail
The N95 8GB is a best seller at O2, and other currently sold devices like the BlackBerry 8310, BlackBerry Pearl 8110, BlackBerry Pearl
8120, BlackBerry 8310, O2 Xda Orbit 2, O2 Xda Stellar, and the Nokia E90 all seem to have GPS as far as I know in a brief check recently.
Who else will be having GPS, in the worldwide market, that might be a iPhone rival between now, and the v3 iPhone? Well,
"coming soon" you have the
HTC Touch Pro - eGPS for
business
HTC Touch Diamond - eGPS
Smartphone with GPS
HTC Touch Dual Pro - eGPS
(How cool is the HTC lineup?
cool! (eGPS may get delayed as per CSR's warning, but the below are slated for eGPS)
- LG Vu - on AT&T - No GPS, but it does do live TV. And haptics. And 2 way video chat. And AT&T's video-share (1way video 2 way audio).
- Sprint's Samsung Instinct -
GPS, touchscreen, haptics, Sprint TV...
- Blackberry Bold - it's mounting a "Bold defence against the iPhone",
right?
Don't Blackberry's have
GPS capabilities? ~"Many BlackBerry® smartphones now feature built-in GPS capabilities and work with the BlackBerry® Maps application, as well as a range of other location-based applications and services". Of All the Blackberry's shown
here You can find a few that have
GPS[/b]
3x Curves (8300 no, 8310 yes, 8320 no)
2x 8800 (8800 yes, 8820 yes)
3x Pearl (8100 - no, 8110 yes, 8120 yes in U.S.)
5x 8700 (8700g no, 8700f no, 8700v no, 8707g no, 8707v no)
2x 7130 (7130g no, 7130v no)
2x 7100 (7100g no, 7100x no)
2x 7200 (7290 no, 7230 no)
So that's 3/4 out of 17, not including the Blackberry enabled devices (some of which, like the P1i can have Skype on their phone (excluding Fring).
Hmmm. So RIM might be a competitor of the new iPhone. i wonder what the Daring Fireball, has to say about that? Well, they have quoted Crackberry.com's “Top 10 Reasons the iPhone Is No BlackBerry”. Why is the iPhone no Blackberry (inferring enterprise level solutions, a high end smartphone etc)? "A few items are reasonable — e.g. video recording,VOIP for Wi-Fi, and GPS — but they’re also exactly the sort of things the iPhone seems likely to support in the not-so-distant future." When exactly would that not so distant future be for Apple? 2009? When GPS for
European phones has been there then for several years? The iPhone lineup is a bit more easier to go through I can tell you.
Let's go back to the N95: What did Nokia say about the
N95?
"Key volume devices for 2007 included the Nokia N95, Nokia’s flagship products for technology enthusiasts, the Nokia N73 and the Nokia N70". Nokia launched Maps 2.0 which the N95 can use in May 2008. The N95 brought in GPS, and with a firmware update, got better -
review here from 2007 or something from
here perhaps.
It's expensive for a phone, but for a combined phone/camera/MP3 player, video player and satnav system it is cheap. The N95 isn't the end of the story. The pace of technology is such that phones will continue getting better and cheaper and you will always wish you had waited another three months. But now and again one just has to stand back in awe at what has been compacted into such a small space.
The use of geolocation was apparent to some in June last year:
e.g. here.
Gartner's views on smart phones?
here
Sales of smartphones doubled in N. America in Q1 2008, outstripping the category's growth in the rest of the world, according to a report by research firm Gartner.
"Worldwide smart-phone sales were 32.2 million, up 29 percent from a year ago, but half of that increase was due to the surge in N. America. The global market-share leader in the category was Nokia Corp., with 46.7 %. However, its market presence is minimal in the U.S., and its models that don't fit well into the U.S. concept of a smart phone. The Nokia phones can run a variety of applications and have advanced hardware features, but mostly lack the alphabetic keyboards and touch screens that characterize iPhones, BlackBerrys and Palm Inc.'s Treo and Centro phones. "
Smart-phone sales in North America alone were 7.3 million units, up 106% from the Q1 2007. RIM, with a U.S. market share of 42% was the main beneficiary.
Hmm, maps, GPS, maps, GPS. A phone, a PND, a mp3 player an internet device. A phone, a PND, a mp3 player an internet device. A phone, a PND, a mp3 player an internet device.
Who is making the most out of mobile content? O2 were doing pretty well
last year:
Breakdown for 2007: 3 - £184m, , T-Mobile - £154m,
02 - £400m, Vodafone - £303m, Orange - £200m
I hope you can see why a GPS Maker might be "scared sh*tless" as Gizmodo
reported? I'd imagine because Apple does actually want to get into GPS, LBS, PND etc etc.
Nokia
Because the giant Nokia does, in a big way. Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, CEO at Nokia revealed fairly recently during a Nokia investors day that the company has already sold almost 4 million units of its Nokia N95 Smartphone at the end of 3Q 2007. So that's Nokia selling ~4 million GPS enabled phones in a quarter? (In comparison to ~1.73 million iPhone in q1 08(5.3% share of the worldwide smart-phone market.)).
When we look at it with the eyes we have now, when regarding pedestrian navigation, map services, digital maps, we are even more
excited about the opportunities than when making the decision
In the fourth quarter of 2007, mobile phone sales in Western Europe totalled 55 million units, up 2% from the 4th quarter of 2006. Features such as music players, GPS and cameras proved to be significant attractions.
From
Yahoo News: Mark Loughran, sales director of Nokia UK ~May 8th 2008: states that Nokia should sell 35 million GPS-enabled smartphones in 2008.
We expect to ship about 35 million GPS-enabled Nokia devices in 2008, which is equal to the entire GPS device market in 2007
So that's ~10 million more than the rumored full producitn run of the v2 iPhone.
The Nokia Maps software is widely used on the N95 - it's a top 5 most used applications I read. (Can't find the source right now but I have down here that "median use case is about 3 times a week." Nokia shipped >9 million Nokia Nseries, ~ 2 million Nokia Eseries devices during the 3Q 2007. They saw a double digit increase in sales from their Mobile Phones, Multimedia and Enterprise Solutions business groups. "In the Multimedia business group, net sales in 2007 increased 34% to EUR 10.5 billion". The NSeries was driving sales.
"Net sales were driven by a robust converged device market supporting sales of Nokia Nseries multimedia computers during the year, led by the Nokia N70, Nokia N73 and Nokia N95. Net sales increased in all regions and were strongest in Latin America and North America, followed by China, Europe, Asia-Pacific and Middle East & Africa."
We know business is booming for Nokia, right? From
here
"Nokia sold 110 million phones in the latest quarter[Q4 '07], and business is booming"
"Worldwide sales of mobile phones to end users in the third quarter of 2007 reached 289 million units, a 15% increase from the same period last year," says Gartner, Inc. Nokia acquired Navteq for $8.1 billion (pending regulatory approval in the European Union apparently). And
Gate5. All in all, location, LBS, PND is in, and it's converging to get GPS onto the phone.
Google
says so. After all, they're "very excited about the promise of location technology to drive innovation in the mobile industry".
(They've bought up Where2Technologies, ZipDash as acquisitions amongst others, to help out with Location, and Maps. so heck, they could even mash up their
Sketchup with model building in Google Earth, linking to the iPhone via Google Earth/Maps on the iPhone. Pie in the sky
my RSS. Maybe Google's move from their old blog is a subtle hint. Perhaps Google might just want GPS, and geolocation on an Android phone in 2008/2009. If Google wanted to create a rival to Yahoo's Flickr, some private skunkworks progress, and then integration into Google Earth, Google Maps, and linking in with the work from Panoramio - it'd be interesting...
So who isn't interested in what Apple might do on Monday, and as the thread here suggests,"& Beyond"? Simon Armitage's
article for example, pointing out his favorite things - "4 gadgets from the past 2 decades that I value for their indispensable brilliance"
hone, mp3 player, debit card and SatNav.
Maybe CA might want to quote Roughly Drafted's
take: 5 phases of media coverage that apprently hit the Zune and other products such as the iPhone - Fantasy, reality, zealotry, inevitability, distractibility next time.
As a sidenote, Dave Winer, like Charles, had/has problems with/a grudge against Leopard. But for CA. 6 months ago, Leopard didn't make him
purr either. (Network problems, probably router issues
amongst other things it seems. Running on a Apple computer 3 years old as of December 2007, so that'd make it at the earliest, a 2004 model (e.g. iMac G5, PowerMac G5, iBook, or PowerBook). Must have been a bummer to have seen WWDC 2005, if CA has bought the Apple Mac late 2004. Maybe it's time to get a newer model? The
Intel transition has done wonders, and the
Intel chips are
going great guns. Anyhow, at least Winer likes
iPhones.
In the end, where are the sources, research articles saying that GPS is "Expensive, sucks power, imprecise, and isn't standard on the vast majority of phones"? As the wiki phrase goes -
Citation Needed. Anyhow, let's not
snipe eh? We can all
keep this in mind. Wonder if it is still
building Castles in the MacBookAir? Might be nice to tell me next time CA.
Who knows, we could be wrong, maybe we should be ruling GPS out of hand for a v2 model that'll be here for say 6 months or more with no hardware changes potentially, but with competitors coming out with phones continually after the v2 iPhone release.
Videophoning
Obviously, Videophoning could be a problem if Apple was to have a front facing cam, for various reasons such as
lag or jerkiness...
But there could be benefits - after all you could use it to
consult with a doctor, - "The potential benefits are huge."
iChat, videoconferencing? No wai....
http://www.9to5mac.com/ichat-everywhere http://www.crunchgear.com/2008/06/07/breaking-apple-to-launch-ichat-for-windows-on-monday/ Rumors till we see it.
http://www.engadget.com/2008/06/07/loads-of-fake-apple-shots-hit-the-web-3g-iphone-pre-wwdc-editio/ kinda dampens them
Only a few hours to go.
User Interface
HTC Touch - A video here - it's interesting to compare the latency shown by the Touch Diamond, with the iPhone currently.
Video
here Article
here.
background on issues.
(TWUIK = this
http://www.tricastmedia.com/twuik/)
