iPhone share of U.S. traffic hits 69%

Bummer. You're right. There's no direct connection between the iPhone and the keyboard. Sorry.

I like to substantiate my allegations. URL's are a good way to do that. (The only problem is that I can usually find links to both sides of any point of contention). When I'm not sure of myself, I just submit more than one URL. Quantity is a good substitute for quality.

Yeah right. I'll admit that it's easier, but still a PITA. Even with the new and improved method, I still have to mark each message to be deleted individually. I have 1500 messages in my spam folder. Wanna guess how long that's going to take? Just how difficult is it for Apple to implement a "select all" feature?

One small step for man, one giant step, etc. Yeah, it's easier, but it's still one message at a time.

Also, Verizon has zero interest in getting apps approved (i.e. no revenue stream) so they're understandably laggard. On the hardware front, there's some hope with the third or forth attempt for Verizon to pretend they're interested in being "open" will survive:

3-4 weeks delay is about typical and good enough. I think most of the complaints are about feature limitations by Apple and some apparently arbitrary decisions.

Yep. If it were easy, it would be no fun.

Very nice, but they made a mistake. When they moved a row of 4 icons to the 2nd page, the icons below where the icons were formerly sitting were moved up. In my never humble opinion, there should be NO such automatic fills.

Personally, I've been using multiple desktops in Linux since the stone age of Xfree86. Each desktop has it's own purpose and contains only icons needed for that purpose. It would not be too difficult to do the same with the iPhone. The problem is that it might also be necessary to allow multiple identical icons on different pages.

98% may be approved within a week on average, but right now they're over 3 weeks behind.

Some random numbers that might be of interest, or with luck, marginally related to the topic under discussion:

The 5 best selling Smartphones for Q1 2009 are: 1. Blackberry Curve (all 83xx models) 2. Apple iPhone (all models) 3. Blackberry Storm. 4. Blackberry Pearl (not including flip) 5. T-Mobile G1 "RIM Unseats Apple in The NPD Group's Latest Smartphone Ranking. Buy-one-get-one promotions helps RIM increase U.S. consumer market share in first quarter of 2009"

US households with only cell phones Q3 and Q4 2008: 20% [Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention]

US Subscriber Stats: Q1 2009 Total Subs at end Net additions of Q1 2009 Verizon 1.3 million 86.6 million AT&T 1.2 million 78.2 million Sprint-Nextel (182,000) 49.1 million T-Mobile 415,000 33.2 million [Source: CTIA]

"iPhone 3G Price Decrease Addresses Key Reason Consumers Exhibit Purchase Resistance"

"When it comes to their reasons for not purchasing an iPhone, 18 percent of consumers who have not purchased an iPhone cited the expense of the data plan..."

"Nearly Half of Mobile Phone Users Eschew Multimedia Features and Use Handsets Solely to Make Calls"

"ONE IN THREE IPHONE 3G BUYERS SWITCHED FROM OTHER CARRIERS TO JOIN AT&T"

"Newest iPhone model costs $179 to make"

"How People Really Use the iPhone"

Interesting study on the allegedly intuitive user interface, which turns out to be not so intuitive for beginning users. I recognize some of the blunders and mistakes that I experiences while learning to use the beast.

"iPhone More Reliable than BlackBerry, One Year In. An Analysis of Reported Malfunctions in iPhone, BlackBerry and Treo Handsets."

Just a summary as the associated report is missing (and costs money).

Source?

Non-removable batteries provide better battery life. This is not anything anyone, particularly Apple, has attempted to make a secret of.

In practice, the iPhone's reception is pretty good. I was thinking more of its large number of on-board sensors (which enable a lot of interesting new interaction capabilities), its powerful processor and GPU, its relatively large amount of RAM and flash, and its large high-resolution screen.

Not unless you've figured out how to get one to carry analog video, audio, and various sorts of control signals, no.

Fortunately, the cable used happens to be the same one Apple has used with every iPod made in the last half decade or something, so it's pretty easy to find one. Hell, if you're at a friend's house without a charger, they probably have one.

Few tiny consumer electronics devices are. This is a natural consequence of a) increasing miniaturization and b) the relative decline in cost of initial manufacturing vs. repair (primarily as a consequence of the former being easier to automate).

I would be astounded if these weren't the two most common failure modes for virtually every phone.

[snip]

This whole thing is a strawman, given that absolutely nobody has claimed everyone buys the iPhone as a productivity device.

Mind you, I run a small business and use mine rather extensively in conjunction with that. But the lack of a physical keyboard on the iPhone is a rather dead giveaway that it's an "iPod phone", not a "e-mail phone".

You're welcome to your opinion, but in this instance it puts you in the extreme minority.

[snip]

If I'd known I was starting a discussion with someone who got excited about putting a registry editor(!!!) on this phone, I really probably wouldn't have bothered.

Your priorities are so far outside of mainstream consumer *or* business user priorities that you might as well be posting from an alternative universe.

[snip]

i agree with that. there should be a select all/select none, but my question is why are you deleting so many from the iphone? i have spam routed to a folder which gets deleted automatically after a couple of days. i never look at that folder on the iphone. there's nothing there that i want to look at.

98% are approved within a week.

i don't mind the auto-arrange, however, there really needs to be folders. having 11 pages of apps (in 3.0) and flipping among them is stupid. sure, spotlight can search by name but c'mon, folders just makes sense.

that starts to get confusing. i doubt they want to deal with aliases of apps, at least at this point. they need to do folders first.

all of the ipods had non-removable batteries and i'm sure that was a decision made very early on.

that's strange. i can easily get a decent signal on the opposite side of a house, probably 40 feet over and up a floor, with roughly the same number of bars on the indicator as on my laptop. the base station is the actiontec that verizon hands out.

the dock connector was born with the 3rd generation ipod which had to support both firewire and usb, along with line out, remote control and other signals. the same dock connector has been used for all subsequent ipods other than the shuffle. when the iphone appeared, it was only logical to continue using the same dock connector, and most accessories worked. the pinout is available from apple and *lots* of third parties make products of all kinds, including a breathalyzer. a

5 pin usb port offers absolutely no advantages whatsoever.

almost. the original iphone had a standard headphone jack but it was recessed 'for stress'. adapters appeared, but it was replaced with a normal one in the iphone 3g. the t-mobile g1, however, *doesn't* have a normal headphone jack at all. that's just stupid.

replacing the battery in the iphone 3g is easier than the original iphone, but it's not really designed to be opened up.

it seems that the sensors are a bit too sensitive, and for some reason, the prices of broken ipods on ebay go for not a whole lot less than refurbished from apple or good condition used, sometimes more. but that's ebay i guess. i gave up trying to find one there.

Most phones have pretty crappy multimedia features, so this is unsurprising.

Mind you, this analysis ignores the cost of distribution, marketing and R&D, the last omission being particularly egregious.

Interesting. It's in the nature of gesture-based UI that it's somewhat less discoverable than UI driven by commands specifically presented on the screen. I don't think this is particularly problematic, however, as the gestures (or so I've found, showing the iPhone to technophobic users) are extremely intuitive once explained. Unlike more abstract sequences of commands, once users learn them they don't forget them.

(And I really wish there were publicly available usability studies like this for more platforms/software. Objective usability data would make the sort of advocacy discussions I engage in much more interesting and useful.)

Good find. Nice to have objective verification of my opinion that the Treo is a piece of crap. (Was a pierce of crap? Palm seems to be moving on.)

Generally the way you'd have an iPhone set up, it would only be showing you the most recent 25 or 50 messages or whatever. (The IMAP-based search function will happily let you search for and view older messages, of course.)

This seems more reasonable, frankly, than having 1500 messages displayed in your phone interface.

[snip]

While that's fair, the iPod Touch seems to do just fine with only WiFi for connectivity. As a parent of school-aged children, I've talked to many a iPhone-toting parent who've bought Touches for their kids instead of iPhones to avoid data plans. Kids play music and text- they don't do email or do much browsing. Now obviously one can argue that "nobody got hurt"- the kids have their iPods, Apple still sold a product, and AT&T didn't "waste" an iPhone subsidy, but the customers themselves, while satisfied, aren't enthusiastic.

That's almost as much of a kludge as emailing documents!

That's a little better, other than forking over the $99/year for MobileMe, of course, and presumably requires connectivity.

Perhaps Apple wlil sell it in an aerosol can for users of older iPhones.. ;) I tried a scren protector, but my wife didn't like the feel- I couldn't really blame her- there's something nice about the smooth glass that's lost when you cover it in cling film!

True- but I was referring to streaming.

Navigation too, when available, but my wife has no interest in using the phone for navigation, so it won't matter to her.

Until Apple comes up with an official solution for the random WiFi/BT "grey out", I'm not risking a two year-old out-of-warranty phone by upgrading it! (Which is bugging me because I really want to try 3.0, but I'm not even sure there's a Windows Pwnage tool yet, anyway...)

not really. all you do is run the app on the iphone and double-click an alias on the computer to wirelessly mount the iphone as another hard drive, then drag whatever you need to the iphone. the numerous apps that do this display all sorts of content, including microsoft office documents.

there is.

Sorry. I'd rather not post names of people and companies that might be affected. However, you can get a hint at what happened by looking at the FCC report page for the original iPhone (FCCID: BCGA1203) at:

Note the submission dates column. All the tests are the same date (03/09/2007) except for one. The GSM EGPRS report was submitted two month later. This is usually an indication that everything passed except the data modem section. After repeated attempts and failures, an EDGE modem was substituted until the problem could be fixed. The user manual date is also two months later, which implies that there were operational changes made resulting from the modem substitution.

Having replace the battery on a iPod Touch 1G and three other iPod Touch 2G's, I find the benefits of this technological innovation to be rather lacking. More specifically, I find it crude, cheap, stupid, and user unfriendly. Batteries are the number one failure mechanism in portable devices and nearly hermetically sealing the battery inside labels the device as almost throw away.

Incidentally, the 1G was my first attempt and near failure. I ignored the advice on several web sites and YouTube videos and used a metal screwdriver to pry open the case. Inside the metal back is a stainless metal strip, with projections that snap into the aluminum frame. I managed to mangle the strip sufficiently that it would not snap back together. So, I ordered a replacement back ($16) and found that the replacement was also difficult to snap back together. I could get partial closure, but still had a slight gap. In desperation, I decided to apply brute force. With two pieces of thin wood on each side, I crunched the case together with considerable force using a channel lock pliers. I had visions of broken glass, but managed to get it snapped back together. Such primitive methods of assembly are not my idea of quality construction, reparability, and technical innovation.

Agreed. Those are new and innovative. However, I don't find that any of those enhance my cellular experience or add much to my productivity. Incidentally, that begs the question, it the iPhone a PDA with a cell phone attached, or a cell phone with a PDA attached? Yeah, I know it's a matter of perspective, but with the tail wagging the dog, it becomes important when the tail is more important than the dog.

Kinda reminds me of the DB-25 connector for RS-232. 25 pins to do the job when only 3 to 5 pins are usually used. Most of those features are used occasionally. USB sync and power are used heavily. Two connectors would have been better.

I bought 10 of the USB to iPod cables on eBay for about $1.50/ea. Crude copies of the real Apple cable but functional. The problem is that I also bought a few 117VAC to 5V USB connector chargers, which will not charge either the iPod or a RAZR V3m cell phone. I'm not sure if this is a technical innovation, design screwup, or protectionist modification.

Nope. I have access to repair statistics for some brands of cell phones. Mechanical case damage is number one. Number two is connector damage. Broken LCD's are common but way down the list.

Yep. The term used was buying one for "legitimate reasons". For a business user, that would be productivity. However, for a consumer device, it would be considered an entertainment appliance, which is not exactly considered productive.

Actually, the lack of a stylus is what separates the types. I can "type" quite rapidly and accurately with a stylus. I do tolerably well, but much slower and less accurate using the iPhone. With a built in keyboard (Treo 650 and Palm Pro), typing is painful and difficult. I should probably try one of these:

but suspect it's nothing more than a small finger on a stick. Yummm.

True. The greatest good for the largest number, which tends to produce mediocre products for the GUM (great unwashed masses). My expectations are both higher and different. Frankly, I'm disappointed with the iPod Touch and iPhone. I bought one expecting something closer to my expectations and preconceived prejudices. It's not bad, but it's certainly not perfect.

I don't see the problem. Hacking the Windoze Mobile registry is no big deal if you know what you're doing. Is there some requirement that the iPhone needs to be totally stock? I haven't done a jailbreak on my iPod Touch yet, but probably will eventually.

I didn't write that web page to get "excited", especially about a registry editor. I wrote it to help others that have the same phone. It seems the Verizon disowned the phone on arrival. They would only support the very first original buggy firmware version and refused to even recognize the existence of two subsequent firmware releases. Requiring a registry editor to tweak the sound settings is rather disgusting and certainly not recommended or exciting. What's nice is that such a registry editor exists that allows me to make such changes.

Really? I thought that Apple products were the preferred platform for hackers and fanatics. If I wasn't buried in PC's, I would probably buy a MacBook and run Unix from the bash shell prompt. I almost expected the same from the iPhone. However, these are my idea of entertainment, not productivity. I just want using and maintaining the iPhone or iPod Touch to be easier to use, less clumsy, less error prone, and easier to maintain (battery replacement). There's nothing hackerish in those requirements.

I can do that if my ISP supported IMAP4. However, they currently only support POP3 meaning I have to download all the spam before I can delete any. With IMAP4, I can delete it while it's still on the server. Even though the mail is sorted and marked as spam by my ISP, it still gets downloaded. Fortunately, it all ends up in a seperate folder. However, the Mail application on my Ipod Touch 2G v3.0 doesn't have a way to expire the folder, vaporize anything, or do any housekeeping.

Incidentally, I get about 30-50 valid messages per day (including mailing lists). Even with spam filtering, I still get 20-50 spam messages per day.

Nice. One of my friends wrote two game apps. One took 2 months. The other was 2 or 3 weeks. However, that was in March or April, when the delays were longer.

Folders would be nice. Lots of other features from the OS/X desktop would be nice. Might as well throw in the kitchen sink. However, I suspect Apple's philosophy is to keep things simple and minimal. The present system is workable but will soon be overloaded as the number of apps increases. Methinks some kind of heirarchial apps directory structure would be nice. Folders will work, but tend to hide too many things. A simple tree structure would be good enough.

True, but I can't just let the spam accumulate on the phone at the rate of 30-50 spam messages per day. There should be a way to vaporize it. As it stands now, my ISP only supports POP3, not IMAP4. With POP3, I have to download all my messages before I can delete them. I'm going to switch over to my Gmail account, which suports IMAP4. Decide what I want to download first and vaporize the rest on the mail server. It's still a pain marking 1500 messages, but at least I don't have to download them. Maybe a different email application.

Looking at the Settings page, the choices are 25, 50, 75, 100, 200 messages. I have it set to 100 recent messages.

except that apple announced to the world in january 2007 that the first iphone would be edge only, two months *before* the first fcc submission.

you said that according to the repair data you have for some cell phones, mechanical case damage is number one, followed by connector damage. with a sealed battery, neither will be an issue. plus, most cellphones get replaced every couple of years anyway.

remote and audio/video out are also used quite frequently, particularly in car docks where both charging and integrating into the car audio system is nothing more than popping it into the dock. the same applies for home docks and home stereos. two connectors would be nowhere near as easy to connect and remove the ipod/iphone.

So, when a co-worker emails her a document she wants to reference later, she just has to run home, save it to our PC, run Airshare on the iPhone, and drag it to virtual iPhone drive, rather than tapping the attachment directly in the email on the iPhone and selecting "save." I concede defeat! That's not kludgey at all! ;)

Thanks. I stopped checking iClarified after the WiFi/BT fiasco scared the bejeezus out of me. Good to know I'll be ready to go when Apple addresses the bug.

and if you read that link, it was from the march event where they demoed 3.0. approval time varies wildly. some people get approved within days and others who submit at approximately the same time wait several weeks. maybe some apps require more scrutiny.

it already is overloaded. they just upped the maximum number of app pages from 9 in 2.x to 11 pages in 3.x, and in 3.x, apps need not show up on a page because they can be accessed via a spotlight search. so with a 32 gig iphone, you can load up an awful lot of apps, perhaps thousands of them, and as long as you can remember the name of the app so you can find it in a search, you can run it. hopefully folders will appear soon, since what they have now simply does not scale.

I don't see any evidence there strong enough to cause me to disbelieve Apple's claims that they didn't initially roll out 3G because 1) battery life was worse (which was true even with the more efficient chipsets they shipped a year later) and 2) AT&T's 3G network build-out wasn't all that far along.

That report you linked to in the other post actually shows battery problems as the second *least* common problem type, and shows battery problems to be substantially less common on the iPhone than on the other leading smart phones it looked at, implying that there may be a significant reliability gain from an internal battery as well.

[snip]

The iPhone is a mobile communications device, "communications" going far beyond voice calling these days. In point of fact, as used by typical consumers, computers are primarily communications devices and, increasingly, vice versa.

I don't see the justification for having two separate connectors that both need to be hooked up for full functionality. I suppose if you had both the fully-functional dock connector *and* a mini-USB port that only charged/synced there would be no particular disadvantage to that, but it doesn't seem like it's all that beneficial either.

[snip]

You can't really mix flip phones with brick phones here, I think. Flip phones are probably far more likely to break at the hinge, while the screen, folded inside, is relatively protected. In contrast, brick phones have exposed screens and no mechanical parts larger than a button that can fail. (And the iPhone doesn't even many of those buttons.)

[snip]

It's not just the "great unwashed masses" who are impressed by what Apple is doing usability-wise with the iPhone.

The point is more that no mainstream user would ever have the slightest interest at all in doing this, and someone who does is clearly not a mainstream user. Now, there are some people who, despite being well outside of the mainstream in terms of their computer skills (and use) nonetheless understand the priorities of mainstream users very well (these are the people who give us advanced new devices and software that appeal to mainstream users, largely), but they're fairly thin on the ground around here.

[snip]

Jeff, seriously--no belt holster is what condemns a phone? I can't think of anyone I know, iPhone user or other phone user (I use a 1st gen Razr) who uses a belt holster. I don't use a headset/earpiece, so yes, I hold it in my hand.

I'd love to use a smartphone (iPhone, Pre, or other), but I have two limitations: my SO uses AT&T, so we're stuck on that plan; I don't want to pay the freight for an iPhone. So I stay with my Razr.

Steve