iPhone share of U.S. traffic hits 69%

I'm not condemning the iPhone. I'm just suggesting that there's room for improvement. There are belt holsters available, but I don't like what I've seen. They're either plastic frames, which are generally not secure enough, or velcro sealed cloth/plastic/leather bags, which are awkward to use. I could sew my own holster, but prefer something better.

It's the price of being a nerd. My belt looks like a Batman utility belt. Cell phone, PDA, flashlight, and pedometer. I would use my shirt pocket for an iPhone except that my shirt pocket is stuffed with a pocket protector and eyeglasses. I've resorted to carrying my iPod Touch in my back pocket but would prefer to have it on my belt. (Note: If I go somewhere that requires looking respectable, I leave all the junk in the car).

My solution is similar. I'm using a variety of junk cell phones (each with their own unique problems) and the PDA part of my Verizon XV6700. I'll switch to the iPod Touch 2G as soon as I figure out how to sync it on multiple computers without wiping all the data. I wouldn't mind an iPhone, but don't really need the 3G data plan.

I don't think I believe that. First, the "modem" ASIC is way more than just a modem; it includes a whole pile of other functionality, including hardware multimedia assists. The only quick redesign possible would have been to replace a 3G chip with a functionally equivalent 2G chip, i.e. from the same manufacturer, Infineon (if they'd used another manufacturer for 3G they would have replaced it with a 2G chipset from that manufaturer instead). Yet Infineon had no 3G chipset available at the time. They only annouced the future availability of their 3G chipset in February, 2007, and weren't even shipping samples until the fall of 2007, more than a year late compared to their early development NDA estimates as I understand it. There is no way anyone, even Apple, could have considered shipping a volume product in Q2 2007 using an Infineon 3G chipset since Infineon didn't have one.

Second, removing 3G from the phone would have involved more than just swapping the baseband chip. 3G WCDMA can't use the same power amplifiers as GSM because of the much higher linearity requirements, and at the current state of the art only single-band WCDMA power amplifier chips exist so the 3G iPhone would have required 3 of them (in addition to the single-chip 4-band GSM power amplifier in there in either case). Those 3 chips are fairly large, too, since they run hot. If they'd removed 3G from the phone in a hurry I would expect to see the empty board space where those 3 chips used to be, yet the

Since the 2G iPhone uses a chipset from a manufacturer that had no

Dennis Ferguson

On Sun, 28 Jun 2009 23:26:28 -0400, ZnU wrote in :

What non-removable batteries actually provide is more efficient use of space, making for a slightly larger battery in the same phone form factor, which can provide slightly more capacity. The difference is relatively small, and the downside is pretty big, making it a poor tradeoff for the consumer, only a good tradeoff for the manufacturer.

For example, it's handy to be able to keep a battery in the charger so you don't have to keep your phone on a charger for long periods of time

-- just swap batteries, and you're good to go.

USB can be made to carry pretty much anything digital, and claiming otherwise directly contradicts claims of superior Apple engineering.

Really? What other such relatively expensive devices do you know of where battery replacement is as difficult?

It's actually a natural consequence of planned obsolescence.

On Sun, 28 Jun 2009 23:43:08 -0400, nospam wrote in :

The number of bars is meaningless -- there is no standard for what a bar means, even within the products of a given manufacturer.

and the battery should definitely last 18 months.

third party companies can replace it for less. compare that to the price of a new battery for a typical cellphone. people end up getting a new phone instead of replacing the battery.

then you have alignment issues. a single connector solves all that, and besides, the dock connecter was designed long before they thought of the iphone or had any idea how successful the ipod was going to be. it appeared just 18 months after the first ipod shipped.

they are now

from that article, the chip they use requires it, and presumably that chip is in other devices too.

On Sun, 28 Jun 2009 20:02:19 -0400, nospam wrote in :

To be fair, there's a similar issue for J2ME -- many current handsets now require apps to be signed for full capabilities to be enabled.

Duh. Brain damage. I fired up USBView.exe (Microsoft USB Viewer) and found that the rated current consumption of my iPod Touch is 500ma maximum. The cheapo China power supply will only source 330ma. Oops. Time to find a bigger USB power supply.

On Sun, 28 Jun 2009 23:25:59 -0700, Jeff Liebermann wrote in :

You could easily get IMAP4 by forwarding your mail to a Google account or simply by having Google host your email, as I've suggested before, but you apparently prefer to harp on your ISP. ;)

I disagree -- folders are an essential and well-understood paradigm. All that's needed to overcome any hiding issue is a decent search capability, another essential and well-understood paradigm.

On Sat, 27 Jun 2009 11:38:59 -0400, ZnU wrote in :

It's actually not hard -- the capability is built into the infrastructure.

That's only one part of the problem. The other part of the problem is lost revenue, and AT&T also cares about lost revenue.

On Sat, 27 Jun 2009 11:13:00 -0600, David Moyer wrote in :

That is too funny!

Do you really think anyone but you believes that?

While I fully expect them to be vastly over-represented in wireless groups on Usenet, the truth is only a very small fraction of people actually own and use multiple cell phone batteries.

Last time I checked, analog video and analog audio weren't digital. It's true that video and audio could be output digitally, but this would mean more sophisticated electronics would need to be put into accessory devices. And the RIAA/MPAA would probably freak out if you didn't include some sort of encryption, which makes things even more complicated.

It will be interesting to see how Apple approaches this problem now that they've signed on with the micro-USB EU charging standard. My guess is they won't just abandon the dock connector, since there are quite a few third-party iPhone accessories that use it and new SDK features in iPhone OS 3.0 are probably going to result in a substantial number of new dock connector accessories as well.

So they have one user-replaceable part instead of zero. That doesn't exactly make them "designed to be repaired".

There isn't anything especially deliberate about the obsolescence of modern electronics devices. Initial manufacturing is highly automatable because precisely the same physical steps are followed each time, which is something robots are very good at. Repair is not highly automatable because it typically still requires some level of human judgement to determine what needs to be done, and not every repair follows the same physical steps. Human labor is expensive, especially skilled human labor.

Only because the EU is threatening to make it mandatory on all phones sold there.

While I certainly welcome standard connectors, I prefer it to be by marketplace consensus rather than governmental decree. Apple has very good reasons to use the iPod dock connector on the iPhone (and if/when they add micro-USB it'll be in addition to, rather than instead of.)

With large doses of "YMMV" when it comes to what is big/small. For example, on the newer Mac laptops, it appears that getting rid of the replacable battery has raised battery life from roughly 5 hours to 8 hours, at zero cost in weight, etc.

Even easier (no battery pulling required) is to plug it in before you go to bed. Afterall, most humans need at least 6 hours of sleep, day in day out.

Citizen Hyper Aqualand.

The Factory used to charge $87, as your local drugstore lacks the gaskets and pressure chamber to properly reseal & recalibrate the watch afterwords. Hurley Roberts now does it for $68-$130 +battery, depending on how many seals it needs.

US Divers Monitor I and II Dive Computers

These batteries are potted in (EnviroGel) and are similarly considered a 'Factory Replacement'; ballpark $75-$100.

Precisely like how in digital photography there's advocates of "bridge" cameras that emulate a digital SLR, yet these have a non- removable lens, so one is forced to also buy new glass every time you want to upgrade the sensor.

-hh

(...)

I'm wrong and will concede the point. I'm afraid that I'm guilty of recycling (or starting) a rumor. I'll double check with my source, but it appears that you're correct. I wasn't aware that the 3G chips were not available at the time.

At the risk of compounding my misinformation... there were rumors that the iPhone was initially offered to Verizon, who rejected it because of Apples's requirements to essentially control distribution and pricing. That would have required a CDMA phone with an EV-DO (or

which suggests that there may have been a CDMA version. There's no evidence that such a CDMA version was type certified. Does this sound credible, or I will I need to apologize again?

Incidentally, thanks for mentioning that the chips were from Infineon. Apple likes to remove the chip identifiers in their FCC ID photos, making identification difficult.

The majority of iPhones only last one year, because fanboys have to replace their toys with the latest model each year.

-- Mark --

If Apple believed in "power to the people" they wouldn't be lobbying the US government to make it a crime to jailbreak iToys.

-- Mark --

On Mon, 29 Jun 2009 10:31:45 -0700, Jeff Liebermann wrote in :

You've done exactly that.

I respectfully disagree.

On Mon, 29 Jun 2009 13:18:18 -0400, ZnU wrote in :

It's a significant number, and by no means the only advantage. Arguing otherwise is just plain silly, yet another Apple Excuse.

All audio and video in handsets are in digital format, and most are unprotected.

I didn't think so. Thanks for the gracious concession.

I respectfully disagree.

On Mon, 29 Jun 2009 10:27:45 -0700 (PDT), -hh wrote in :

Apples and oranges comparison -- you have to compare the same generation of battery technology and power management to draw any valid conclusions.

Doesn't work if you forget to do it. Swapping batteries is much faster and more reliable. And there are other advantages as well.

Thanks for proving my point.

There are of course disposable compact digital cameras, but the better ones have superior lenses to dSLR cameras that can't be matched even at many times the price, aren't subject to real obsolescence, and have compelling advantages of cost, size, weight, and handling. In other words, not a good analogy.