Antenna location & GPS is what makes a phone smart?
I had a Treo. Bought an app. When I was on a call, the screen turned off.
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Former Apple Engineer Gives Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Original iPhone Introduction
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I had a Treo. Bought an app. When I was on a call, the screen turned off.
I bought the tilt as well after the iPhone came out, the guy at AT&T convinced me it was better because of those things you mentioned, plus it had GPS, higher megapixel camera, and upgradable memory. Apps wasn't really important back then (to me at least, I do miss drug wars). But it sucked at doing all those things, the camera would stutter just pointing it into a shadow, battery would fall out from a small drop. So many menus to go through just to get to texting, and texts were in that list format(here is a message from bob, he replied "ok" I forgot what I texted him, go back then go to sent messages, find his name... I took it back in a week and got an iPhone. Everything was silky smooth, didn't need a stylus just to scroll a list. It was never about what it could do but how it did it.
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They didn't say that it didn't have five bars right there on stage, they only hard coded it so that it would show if the radio rebooted. Other than that, the rest of the demo worked. It had to be in a specific order, but it did it in that order, so that isn't really lying. He didn't say the phone only works in this order, so I guess it's a lie of omission.
An Android manufacturer deceives people - Macrumors goes crazy
Apple deceives people - Macrumors hails it as a stroke of genius
Oh Macrumors... this is why the internet hates you
How as Apple deceiving? They showed how the product would work in normal use, and it did work like that. This in contrast to the Asian cellphone makers that influence tests in such a way as to show performance data that will not be achieved in normal use.
It's exactly the opposite.
As someone else already pointed out earlier. This is how all companies presenting new products do their introductions. If done well, these are tightly scripted events to circumvent still existing prototype issues that will be resolved at a later time. Nothing wrong with that, even if Samsung would do it (and the most likely do).
Like almost everything else they used, Apple didn't invent the face sensor.
In fact, Motorola had a patent on it dating back to 1999. The "sensor disables the touch sensitive input device from generating the input signal when the portable communication device is positioned in close proximity to a user and, thereby, preventing inadvertent actuations while the user holds the portable communication device against his or her head to facilitate communication."
However, a touchscreen disabling proximity sensor was such an obvious idea, that the ITC denied an attempt to ban iPhone imports for violating Motorola's patent on it.
Another sensor idea that Apple was not first at, was for screen orientation. Not only did some digital cameras have that, but there was an all-touchscreen phone back in 2003 that featured it (along with scrolling by tilting the phone, an idea that was reinvented later by Android makers).
I'm impressed. Everything looked so spontanteous in the original presentation when he selected the music, and casually made that phone call. He really was amazing.
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Same here.
That was a great read. I pictured myself as one of those engineers and could almost feel the stress. Now I have a much better appreciation of what it took to build this phone.
Bit OT. How much leak was there prior to the official announcement of the original iPhone in 2007? Was it really a huge surprise to the world when Steve Jobs took the stage to announce it?
I was happily using a Motorola Razr for like 4 years when it was announced It wasn't until I bought the 3GS that I started keeping up with Apple news.
Bit OT. How much leak was there prior to the official announcement of the original iPhone in 2007? Was it really a huge surprise to the world when Steve Jobs took the stage to announce it?
I was happily using a Motorola Razr for like 4 years when it was announced
It wasn't until I bought the 3GS that I started keeping up with Apple news.
The fact that Apple was making something called the "iPhone" was not a surprise. Nor even that it was being made by Foxconn.
The only thing they got wrong was the 12 million units. Actual sales of the first model were about half that. Perhaps they didn't sell as well as Apple had hoped. (Sales didn't really take off until the next model, which had both 3G and subsidies.)
Nor did many expect a touchscreen phone. A lot of fan concepts revolved around the same thing that Jobs originally wanted to do: an iPod based phone with a clickwheel.
However, some 2006 fan concepts came pretty close:
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Didn't Android really get a foothold at Verizon because they needed something to compete with iPhone?
Maybe you should read about Symbian before making ill informed comments about it. In fact, Symbian was the leading mobile OS, with 66% of the market in 2006, until iOS (yes, even ahead of Windows Mobile) came along.
Most Symbian devices (which are still developed) were not touch based devices, but they were still smartphones. There was a wide variety of apps available on the OS and the OS supported many different technologies, including Java. Hell, the web browser was based on WebKit, which we all know Safari is based on.
Even so, just like all of the phones sold by carriers in pre-iPhone, bloatware and carrier control (e.g. branding) was common. I only had one Windows Mobile based device (which was a piece of garbage and I promptly got rid of it within a week), but as I recall, there was significant AT&T branding on that thing... maybe not bloatware, but branding galore and "features" that you couldn't get rid of.
Sorry about that - - I didn't think anyone could possibly have been that naive about the staging that goes on behind almost all promotion and advertising in the modern world. I really thought you were writing an extended sarcastic reply as humor, so I added my own off the cuff comment to continue the joke. Now after finally realizing you were actually being serious, I extend both a full apology and my sincerest condolences.
You don't see the difference between a little smoke and mirrors at a product demo, to demonstrate the features and behaviors that will actually be in the shipping product, versus a hack that inflates performances numbers of products that are actually shipped and in customer's hands?
Really?
According to Wikipedia, that was a prank Letterman played on Simmons, with a firecracker (or something like that) hidden on the tablet.
Simmons apparently took it in good fun though if they had done something in that vein to Steve Jobs demoing a product, there probably would have been an eternal iTunes store ban on everything CBS.
You're right, demos are different from production claims.
Unfortunately, Apple DID inflate signal performance numbers in later shipped products, as they admitted during AntennaGate.
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I remember that, although I'm not sure I'm convinced that it was a malicious and purposeful deceit. There's some algorithm that is averaging the signal strength over a given interval of time and mapping that to a bar scale, and that algorithm needed to be changed. It's not as if someone found a piece of purposeful piece programming that basically told the phone "cheat on the signal strength." If I recall correctly, it was Apple who revealed that information, not an outside source.
I just don't think that that situation is comparable to a piece of coding that says "when you detect this benchmarking app running, overclock the processor." That seems like pretty cut and dry deception. Just not sure the "Antennagate" example rises to that level, at least in my opinion.
None of these things are "malicious". Purposeful, yes.
Having worked on handheld signal strength display algorithms myself, and studied those of other companies, I can tell you without a doubt that the Apple version was deliberately designed to show more bars than it should. Heck, even a non-engineer should be able to look at the chart and see that it had no dB linearity.
The only question is the same as with the Samsung benchmark code -- which is, was the code something that a (few) developer(s) did on their own, or was it mandated from much higher up?
From experience, I tend to think it's the lower levels that come up with this stuff on their own.
PS. Here's a text chart I made of the bar levels for the iPhone 4, the updated levels for the iPhone 4, and then the levels for a Blackberry.
Code:
-110 -100 -90 -80 dBm
|----|----|----|----|----|----|----|-----|
iOS4 1.....2...3.4.........5.................
iOS4x 1.......2........3..........4...........5.
BB 0......1......2......3.....4.........5..(Bear in mind that each 3dB loss is a halving of the signal level.)
Out of curiosity, would an iPhone be able to make and hold a call at -110dB? I remember several years back when Howard Forums was the hot spot for all things cell related and there were not many phones that would work in this range. At that time, Motorola was one of the best for RF performance.
Damn! Your mom is a hipster!!!!!!!!!!
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Thanks for posting this! Very interesting to go back to read the past rumors and speculation. So Steve Jobs and gang was able to keep the form factor completely secret until actual announcement.
I scanned through some of that old thread. Funny that some pointed out that Apple wouldn't release a phone with a touchscreen keyboard, and that only physical keys will work. I'll shamefully admit that I went and bought a Blackberry Storm in 2009 Because without even having tried the touchscreen on the iPhone, I just assumed that it would be a nightmare to type on as far as typing accuracy goes. I thought that clicky screen on the BB Storm wouldn't have that problem. At this point I still had almost no idea what the iPhone was about. It wasn't until one day I tried to use the browser on the Storm to look up some information that I realized how useless that browser was. As soon as the iPhone 3GS came out I dumped the Storm.
I scanned through some of that old thread. Funny that some pointed out that Apple wouldn't release a phone with a touchscreen keyboard, and that only physical keys will work. I'll shamefully admit that I went and bought a Blackberry Storm in 2009
Because without even having tried the touchscreen on the iPhone, I just assumed that it would be a nightmare to type on as far as typing accuracy goes. I thought that clicky screen on the BB Storm wouldn't have that problem. At this point I still had almost no idea what the iPhone was about. It wasn't until one day I tried to use the browser on the Storm to look up some information that I realized how useless that browser was. As soon as the iPhone 3GS came out I dumped the Storm.
