iPhone share of U.S. traffic hits 69%

ZnU wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@Port80.Individual.NET:

A case of the end user not understanding the technology they are buying?

Reply to
John Blutarsky
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By the way, I like the way you divide iPhone purchasers into two groups: "fanatics" and "one's that buy iPhones for fashion statements or other dubious reasons".

Because obviously no well balanced person could ever buy an iPhone for legitimate reasons.

Nope. No bias here.

Reply to
ZnU

MuahMan's chief debating tactic has always been "argument by making shit up".

This shouldn't surprise anyone. The some phenomenon exists in politics. Extremists always have far more in common with each other -- even when they're on opposite sides -- than they do with reasonable people.

Reply to
ZnU

On Sun, 28 Jun 2009 02:30:41 -0700, Sandman wrote (in article ):

I feel the same way. My ATV is one of the best entertainment purchases I've ever made.

Reply to
Fa-groon

Such a blinkered, sheltered life you fanbois lead.

Reply to
News

But again, that goes to what I said earlier- make the ToS SO restrictive that virtually everyone is in violation, and then you can kick off (only) the high-data users for their "violations" by selectively applying it when/where necessary. it's brilliant, and doesn't require very tight monitoring- just casual auditing of the highest users.

Kinda sorta- the PDA plans have that same restriction. Essentially it means you don't have guaranteed access to corporate email like Exchange, Lotus notes, etc. that might require funky ports besides standard POP, IMAP, or SMTP ports. I don't think AT&T currently employs port blocking, but I believe they used to. T-Mo REALLY used that until recently to handicap lower priced rate plans. Their "WAP" plan blocked all ports except email (even HTTP and HTTPS ports 80 and 443!) and ran all WAP/HTTP/S traffic through a proxy server on port 8080. This effectively killed all "forbidden uses"- no streaming, no Usenet, no P2P- the proxy server even blocked all file downloads over 1MB.

Exactly- so as I said, the heavy users can get bounced for the "violation" of streaming video instead of the "allowed" abuse of an unlimted plan. It was far easier for Elliott Ness to bust the mobsters for tax evasion than proving racketeering!

Those are iPhone ads. I was talking about smartphones! ;)

I'm sure it is, it probably just isn't cost-effective or even necessary.

Of course. I just have a hard time believing AT&T is paying Rogers anywhere near $15/MB for roamers. Why not have realistic data roaming rates set on a per country basis, like international voice rates? T-Mo has a $10/MB Canada rate and $15/MB "everywhere else." Somehow I doubt T-Mo is paying a Canadian partner 2/3rds of what they pay a carrier in Estonia or Albania!

That is what it means: the iPhone is going to use data "by itself" without you intentionally firing up Safari, Email, the app store, etc. Even playing games stored on the phone can use data if it's a "free" game that serves up ads from the ad server. If you're overseas and your iPhone (or frankly, your Blackberry, WinMo device, etc.) is set to poll for email periodically, as most are, and cellular data isn't disabled, you'll be staring down a huge bill next month! My wife and I easily each get 100MB/month of email alone. A one week vacation could net 25MB each, or $375 in roaming data EACH. The legalese is supposed to warn people that just because they didn't open Safari or the email program doesn't mean they didn't use any data. Visual Voicemail alone uses about 1KB per second of voicemail. A two-minute 120KB message received while you're in Canada costs nearly $2 to receive!

Being the untrusing sort, not only did I disable data on my WinMo phone and wife's iPhone when we were in Mexico, I even edited and misspelled the cellular data APN just in case some app didn't "obey" the settings!

Recently an AT&T spokesman told the USA Today iPhones average 400MB per month, while other smartphones average 40-80. It'd be pretty darn easy to bell curve that data and target your high 1%, 5%, 10%, whatever. Now that tethering has been "leaked" it'd be easy to note the differences in, say, July's data average this year vs. July's last year (to compare similar months with lots of new iPhone users who might use more data initially until the novelty wears off) to see if tethering is being "abused."

What this might do, perhaps, is backfire and get users to go back to separate devices like carry an iPod Touch or Palm PDA and a dumbphone to save $30/month.

True. I used to use a Nokia Symbian-based 3620 that was (old) AT&T Wireless branded (I used it unlocked on T-Mo.) It used to drive me nuts that everytime I opened the browser or tried to download IMAP email I got a "Connect to cellular data (charges may apply)?" prompt. (There was no way I ever found, short of reflashing the phone with alternate software, to disable the prompt!) In hindsight, it was a neat feature- AT&T Wireless, at the time, had no unlimited data plans (like T-Mo did.) All plans were pay-per-use or varying size MB "buckets," and the phone was set up to prompt for confirmation ANY time it attempted to use cellular data. If a smartphone had a similar prompt system that anyone could easily activate (perhaps a wizard in the initial setup that let you select "I don't have a data plan" and configures defaults set for that eventuality.)

No, because the iPod Touch can't make phone calls! You're forced to use a "junk cell phone" to avoid a $30 data plan. If AT&T didn't force you to buy data you could just you an iPhone with cell data disabled, and have a WiFi-only iPhone capable of making calls, and carry just one device.

True, but a "BT ear thing" is a much smaller device to carry than a "junk cell phone." I used to do the earpiece thing, but these days if I really need to check my calendar or look at an email, I just turn the speakerphone on briefly. It works in all but the noisiest places.

If you're using your 6700 as the "junk phone" (I doubt it!), you could use Google Mobile Sync as an ersatz Exchange server. Google Mobile sync "spoofs" EAS (Exchange Active Sync) which mobile devices like WinMo and iPhone (and presumably the iPod Touch) see as an Exchange server. (PCs don't, however- you can't use Google to sync the PC with the phone/iPod via Google's cloud server, but as long as the phones support EAS, like all WinMo phones and the iPhone, you can cloud sync them with each other.)

Personally I use Funambol- it'll sync PCs, smartphones and dumbphones with a cloud server, but it doesn't sync with the iPhone's calendar, only contacts. Free, reliable, universal cross-platform sync is still a bit of a Holy grail, unfortunately!

LOL!

Reply to
Todd Allcock

I'll stand by my prejudices, observations and distortions. I know about 13 assorted iPhone users including one family/business that has

5 of them. The users vary in competence from programmer to clueless and spoiled teenager. I always look for the real reason behind their selection. In some cases, it was easy. The boss or parent gave them one for Christmas. Some are obvious fashion statements as they have never used the Apps Store or even bothered to setup iTunes. Also, the lack of a functional belt holster promotes the "wave it in everyone's face" mode. Look at me... I have a smart phone, which makes me smart.

Obviously, the bell curve allows for a large number of sane and sober individuals between these extremes. Some of them perhaps use the iPhone effectively. A clue is how many apps they've downloaded and installed. Those that have approximately 2-3 pages of apps icons, would be considered fairly normal. The fanatics run out of room at about 5 pages. The clueless have the stock 1.5 pages. Just like I can tell quite a bit about a person by looking at their bookshelf, I can also deduce much by looking at the number and type of iPhone apps.

Personally, I think the main draw of the iPhone is the perceived ease of use. It's so simple a cave person could use one, as paraphrased from another obnoxious TV commercial. The iPhone looks simple, but to be used effectively, requires practice, RTFM, and diligent reading. There are also some limitations that aren't immediately apparent. For example, having to delete email one message at a time is rather limiting. So much for easy to use. The fashion statement buyers will never dive below the superficial easy to use surface. The fanatics will dig deep, writing apps, jailbreaking, and hacking at features. In between, most users are impressed with the look, tolerate the marginal design decisions, live with the tight ties to Apple, pay the price, and live blissfully ignorant of what they're missing.

What to do with your iPhone while NOT connected to the internet: Rearrange your icons. It's almost as much fun as a Rubick's Cube.

Yep. No sane person would buy an iPhone for legitimate reasons. I actually believe that. If you interrogate your friends and associates that purchased an iPhone, I think you'll find the motivation to be anything but productivity. Sure, productivity apps and other legitimate reasons play a big part in the decision, but rarely motivate the buyer enough to use the credit card. It's usually subtle reasons like "Joe in engineering has one. He's smart so maybe I should do the same". Plenty of other dumb reasons can be extracted if you ask the right questions.

One reason that AT&T hasn't blundered upon yet is the two for the price of one promotion that Verizon and others had on the Blackberry products earlier this year. It wasn't just the cost savings, which was marginalized by some useless mandatory options. It was "I want a Blackberry for myself. If I give one to xxxxxx, then I have an excuse to get one for myself". It worked because the various Blackberrys outsold the iPhone by a substantial margin during the first quarter

2009. (Current numbers will probably be the other way around).

Yep. I hate everyone and everything equally.

Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

as Arkady Darrell said, "A circle has no end."

Reply to
Elmo P. Shagnasty

You're insane. The phone has better hardware specs than practically any other smart phone on the market, a richer collection of third-party apps, better designed software, and integrates with the world's most popular digital media distribution platform... you don't think any of those are legitimate reasons to buy it?

First, while the iPhone has all sorts of useful productivity applications these days, it's primarily a "consumer media smart phone" not an "enterprise productivity smart phone". I don't particularly see how it's invalid to buy a phone as a mobile media device rather than to obsessively check company e-mail. (And I'm a little confused that this still has to be explained to people two years after the iPhone entered the market.)

Second, you're completely overlooking user experience. If you're like the other Apple detractors who have made arguments along these lines, you probably don't acknowledge its existence as a legitimate factor in purchasing decisions, considering it to be more about fashion than function.

But this perspective couldn't be more wrong. The truth is that a lot of other phones might technically have all the iPhone's features... but people use them much less because they're not implemented as usefully. In cases where statistics exist, they strongly support this. In some cases these features are implemented so poorly on other devices, and the vendor is so bad at communicating the use cases of the device to the consumer, that people are walking around with phones that have these features and *don't even know it*.

I suspect this back-and-forth between Apple and RIM has more to do with device upgrade cycles than with carriers' promotional offers.

Reply to
ZnU

email messages can be deleted in batches.

as opposed to the tight ties to verizon or another carrier that also has their own limitations, sometimes more so?

there are plenty of apps that do not need an internet connection, including reference apps, such as medical reference, dictionaries in various languages, translation apps between languages and one app which downloads most of wikipedia (approximately 2 gig's worth). email can be read and replied offline and sent when there is an internet connection again, along with plenty of games that work quite well without an internet connection and quite a bit more.

Reply to
nospam

Reply to
Todd Allcock

Oops, I just fired off a blank reply- sorry!

I'll try again...

There are plenty of legitimate reasons to buy it. There MUST be, since I bought one for my wife! ;)

However, in our case, we only bought it because it could be unlocked and used off of AT&T. We would not pay AT&T $30/month for data. And despite "the world's most popular digital media distribution platform" I find iTunes more of a roadblock than a "feature." Her prior smartphone could sync with any computer in the house, the iPhone syncs with one. Her prior smartphone could play video in several formats, the iPhone plays .mp4.

When it comes down to it, the ease of use, the UI, and the app store are the ONLY features she likes about the iPhone- everything else is a restriction that at best is an inconvenience, and at worse results in not using some features or capabilities.

In short, the iPhone is "easy" to the end-user, (her) and a hassle for her IT department (me)!

I agree- I just wish AT&T agreed here in the US. People that primarily want to use it as a mobile media device don't necessarily need or want a data plan "to obsessively check company [or personal] e-mail" but they have to take a $30 data plan with their iPhone, so they might as well use it. AT&T essentially charges users who want a good "iPod phone" a $360/year "tax" to use one.

The UI is great- the "user experience," however, is more than just the UI. The "user experience" includes, in my wife's case, obsessively emailing yourself documents before traveling since you can't natively store them on the phone for reference later, scrubbing the phone's face after every phone call to clean the smudges off it, "single-tasking" because you can't check email or surf the web while streaming a podcast or internet radio, or reading email but waiting until you're near a "real" computer to reply because you can't face the idea of typing more than a sentence or two on the on-screen keyboard (she's a long-time QWERTY phone user and claims she still hates the on-screen keyboard after seven months of use.)

It's not so much a testament to the "greatness" of the iPhone as much as a slam to other smartphones that despite these shortcomings, it's still her favorite phone of any she's ever used!

I think vendor communication is a key point. My oft-repeated anecdote illustrates this: after seeing the first iPhone commercial aired in the US (where "Mr. Hand" is watching "Pirates of the Caribbean", decides he wants calimari, finds a restaurant on Google Maps and calls it) my wife said "what's the big deal? Your phone does all that!" While that was certainly true, I had to tell her "So does YOURS!" She had no idea what her T-Mobile Dash could do besides email, a few preloaded games, text docs, and the occasional movie on a long flight. She never bothered with Google Maps (still doesn't, even on the iPhone) and didn't care even when I told her or showed her what "more" it could do. It was "too much trouble."

Agreed- Apple has already "programmed" us that the "new iPhone" will be out in June/July, and 1st and 2nd quarter sales drop off accordingly. The iPhone has a real boom/bust cycle.

Reply to
Todd Allcock

ZnU wrote in news:znu-84200C.17280328062009 @Port80.Individual.NET:

Just curious- which specs are you looking at when you come to this conclusion?

Reply to
John Blutarsky

there are a number of apps that solve that problem.

get her an iphone 3gs with the oleophobic coating. :)

true, but email is checked while listening to the streaming podcast, and if it's a podcast that's downloaded via itunes, you can continue to listen to it while surfing or using email or anything else. only games that generate their own soundtrack would interfere (and some have an option whether or not to override the ipod).

a real keyboard is certainly easier and i expect that will change with the hardware accessibility apis.

Reply to
nospam

Processor, RAM, screen size and resolution, 3G speed, storage, GPU, and the presence of features like accelerometers, light sensors, GPS and magnetometers.

Please note that I don't think comparing the spec sheets and feature bullet points of phones is necessarily the best way to pick one. In fact, I think it's generally not. But the sort of people who don't really "get" the iPhone tend to care more about tech specs than more important things like usability, so it's rather worth pointing out that the iPhone has pretty good tech specs too.

Reply to
ZnU

[snip]

I still don't really agree with the notion that it makes sense for a device like the iPhone to be without ubiquitous data access. As with the modern desktop computer, ubiquitous high-speed data is quickly becoming a defining characteristic of mobile computing.

There are numerous apps that solve this problem. I use Air Sharing. Apple is working on a first-party solution as well, in the form of an app that lets Mobile Me users view files on their iDisks from the iPhone.

I read e-books on my phone a lot, so I'm rather sensitive to this, and I have to say, the new screen coating on the 3GS isn't just a gimmick. It really works. I wonder how it'll hold up over time.

But if you download podcasts into iTunes (which you can now do directly on the device) you can play them in the background.

Background audio from third-party apps is, I think, the one edge case where Apple's otherwise generally advantageous policy against third-party background apps actually has negative consequences.

The horizontal keyboard in the e-mail and SMS apps in 3.0 has made these applications substantially nicer to use, and I find I'm using them quite a bit more as a result.

[snip]
Reply to
ZnU

Not with the stock email app on my iPod Touch 2G with 3.0 firmware:

Yep. The joy of BREW.

That's why I'm divorcing my PDA from my cell phone. I'm on Verizon and am rather disgusted with the almost arbitrary selection of features (mostly Bluetooth profiles) that they disable:

AT&T and Apple are no better, but the availability of 3rd party apps for the iPhone make it tolerable. Still, my patience is limited and find that carrying two devices with Wi-Fi is a lesser evil than one device with 3G wireless and predatory vendors.

I have most of that installed including one encyclopedia and medical reference book that total about 1GByte. Yes, I can read them offline. However, most of my favorite apps do benefit from connectivity. For example, eTrade's app for checking stock prices and financial news. Also, lots of games to play.

However, since I seem to be having some difficulty communicating today, I find it necessary to explain that my comment was not to suggest that the iPod Touch or iPhone is useless when not connected. It's just that it's generally more useful with an internet connection. The comment about rearranging the icons has two meanings. One is that it's an absolute PITA to get the icons organized in anything better than a random arrangement. When I insert an icon in between some other icons, they move out of the way in a non-obvious manner, such as one would observe trying to organize a Rubick's Cube. I suppose there's an app for organizing the icons, but I couldn't find one. The other meaning is a not so subtle hint that cleaning up one's desk, piling papers, and organizing icons is not exactly being productive.

Agreed. But rearranging the icons is almost as much fun. Perhaps someone should write a game, where the object is to organize the icons in a rational manner, without losing any or going insane in the process.

Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

USB keyboard for the iPhone and iPod Touch:

Available this summer (maybe) for about $150 list.

Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

well if you read it on the 'net it must be true.

and that link explains how. when looking at a mailbox, tap the edit button at the top right, tap the messages to select the ones you want to delete and then tap the delete button at the bottom left. a number in brackets increments, showing how many will be deleted. or, press the move button to move them to another folder.

it's a helluva lot better than what was in 1.x, where you swiped and tapped delete for every single message.

indeed.

"Time to market can take longer with BREW than with Java ME because of BREW's rigorous certification requirements."

and people bitch about apple's approval process.

the problem with arranging icons is that it's a bitch to do it on the device itself. i don't find it random; the icons go where i put them but it might displace one to the next page. i've taken to using the dock as a 'shelf' where i can move groups of 4 from page to page. otherwise, it's a serious pain in the butt.

it really should be done in itunes and synced, maybe like this:

Reply to
nospam

This is a keyboard for your desktop computer that has a build-in iPhone dock, not a keyboard for the iPhone.

Reply to
ZnU

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