Comments on: Surfing In Antarctica

By: Charlie Fulton

Charlie Fulton — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 04:45:03 +0000

Great post. You have a new reader.

By: Elhana

Elhana — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 14:35:45 +0000

Problem of iPhone is that it is an evening wear which claims to be able to dive, but as soon as you try to – you hit the fence. Yet it is nice looking and easy to use.
If you actually want to have a party at the bottom of the ocean or a space flight, then it is not for you, sorry. Go get Maemo/Android. Some people say it’s ugly tho.

If your original intention is to loose weight, you’d go to a doctor, not to Apple.
When you buy an expensive phone and find out it’s not much different from a 50$ one you are trying hard to find a good reason you did it – some people find apps like “Lose It” etc and live happily, others face the truth.

By: fd

fd — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 13:04:47 +0000

I share your mixed feelings, exactly the reason why I think the iPad will be big is because it encourages small app development. Instead of having big bloated apps we’ll see apps that do one thing well & people will use these apps in innovative ways.

By: Peter Bierman

Peter Bierman — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 19:45:33 +0000

Mark, I think you’re right that Apple’s ability to market the iPhone has been paramount. But I think most of the effort spent marketing it was done during the design phase, where many decisions were made to make it more attractive to customers who wouldn’t previously have considered buying a PDA.

By: Garrett Birkel

Garrett Birkel — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 22:33:24 +0000

Mark, the Treo 650 was a great device – no one’s disputing that. I myself thought the Palm Vx was the shizzlick for many reasons, the biggest one being that the battery lasted a month with nominal use.

But Dan’s point is still perfectly clear and valid: The iPhone’s ease of use compels one to integrate it much more thoroughly with daily life. And suddenly, you realize you are doing things that you always thought were difficult or impossible.

An interesting measure of this ease of use is the time it takes to accomplish a task. For example, just the other day I needed to go to an electronics store after work, but I had no car.

Without thinking about it, I pulled out the iPhone, went to ‘maps’, searched for ‘electronics’, poked the closest flag to my GPS marker (HSC electronics supply), and hit ‘directions to here’. Then I hit the ‘bus’ icon. The phone told me to walk two blocks, then get on the 4:15pm #55 bus for $2.00, then stay on it until I got to Lawrence Expressway, then to get off and walk south to the marker. My arrival time was listed at “5:06″ pm and I wasn’t sure they’d be open, so I hit the marker again and poked the phone number, and asked the sales clerk. Then, to make sure I recognized the place, I hit the ‘street view’ button and got a good look at the building.

This whole operation took me LESS THAN A MINUTE, talk time included, and I did it just standing on the sidewalk.

How much longer would I have had to stand around squinting at a Treo 650 and poking it with a stylus, assuming this operation is even possible? Every second added saps my desire to even attempt it.

Once I got on the bus, I used the iPhone to look up PDFs of spec sheets for voltage regulators, and made a parts list, so I could shop efficiently in the store. While I was doing that it played me an NPR broadcast.

Until you’ve had one for a while, the full impact of the device may not be apparent.

By: Mark

Mark — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 22:21:15 +0000

My wife lives and dies by her Treo 650 (yep, she still does, to this day). It’s with her always, being generally a nice size and shape and offering compelling functionality. It’s so much a part of her that she feels completely lost when she forgets it at home. And of course the Treo was a very popular and successful device until Palm stumbled a bit–it was fast and responsive, had 10′s of thousands of very good apps available, and short of lacking a pretty, multitouch interface was at least as functional and enjoyable to use as the iPhone. In fact, some people say that there’s still no smartphone that offers as much PIM capability as the PalmOS–and many of them are running those same apps in Classic on the Palm Pre.

So, I would say that Apple’s accomplishment wasn’t in the design of the iPhone or the iPhone OS, but in their ability to market it so effectively. I don’t mean to get contentious or to say that the Treo was ultimately as good a platform as the iPhone. I just hate to see Apple presented as having reinvented mobile technology or having done something magical in the space.

By: Daniel Jalkut

Daniel Jalkut — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 21:54:44 +0000

Mark, it’s a fair point. But my point (not well underscored) is that none of the handheld platforms until now has been compelling enough overall to actually merit BEING in my pocket all the time.

I had a Handspring Visor over 10 years ago, and I used it a couple times before leaving it on the shelf.

Some of the credit here goes to the developers who sprung up to embrace and make awesome apps for the phone, but a lot of it goes to Apple making the UI extremely responsive, the profile of the device slim enough to fit in my pocket easily, and to have it doubling as a phone and therefore not competing with my other pocket device for space.

By: Mark

Mark — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 21:35:30 +0000

You do understand that a number of platforms (e.g., PalmOS on the Treo) had similar dieting apps long before the iPhone was released (and certainly before there were apps for the iPhone). And so, this isn’t something that Apple magically made possible.

By: Andy Lee

Andy Lee — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 05:50:31 +0000

I’m going to give Lose It a try — thanks!

By: James O'Leary

James O'Leary — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 15:05:57 +0000

The interesting part about the impact the iPhone has on people’s daily lives to me is that Bill Gates had predicted in _1996_ that something very close to what the iPhone is would revolutionize computing by making it ubiquitous. He called it the Wallet PC, but hey, close enough. (see http://www.bit-tech.net/bits/2006/02/08/road_ahead_billgates/4)

Tie into this Steve Jobs’ famous observation that Microsoft has “no taste…in a big way”. Their inability to design something that was beautiful, accessible, and easy to use has kept them (at least so far) from succeeding in a market that their founder knew was key and revolutionary 14 years ago.