Tag: apple

Hmmm iPhone. Really really want one….yeah I’d feel like a poser for the first couple of months, but it would be worth it.

Seems as though rather than make the same mistake as in 2001 when various websites berated Apple for getting into a bloated market too late, it seems said people are now attempting to undermine the iPhone with either what it doesn’t do or issues that could apply to existing mobiles (rather than a direct attack on the phone – which seemingly rocks).

The Nokia guy responded by stating that the iPhone is not 3G so not great. Others state it’s only on one carrier (Cingular) so not so great.

All a little screaming at the moon if you ask me, I have never really enjoyed using a mobile, I have got used to their increasingly bizarre ways of performing tasks; deleting texts when a phone call arrives, navigating through twenty screens to find my sent texts, not being notified that the memory is full (just failed sent messages), weird ways of organising lists, having to learn each model’s little traits such as convoluted locking mechanisms and clunky interfaces, the list could go on and on.

When it comes down to it, I want to do the simple things well, why this has been such a problem for mobile manufacturers, I don’t know. Now they are collectively bricking it at the prospect that a company has figured out the best way to perform the simple functions (voice, text, email, internet, music).

Although there are some pretty valid points some raise:

I can’t imagine keeping a screen clean where it’s the primary source of input. At least on the modern-day Treos you can enter pretty much anything via the keyboard and the 5-way input button.

Although to be fair the iPod doesn’t come with any protective/cleaning materials, they leave that to the baying mob of peripheral manufacturers.

Bet you someone will produce a finger sock.

Okay stick with me on this one, has anyone noticed that the iPod ‘shuffle songs’ seems to have an almost spooky ability to pick similar songs? You know rock or classical tunes only a couple away, or songs by the same artist close to one another. Ofcourse this could just the coincidence of ‘random’ selection (although true randomness in computers is debatable) however it just seems like the iPod ‘knows’ to play similar songs close to one another. Maybe this is the answer?

One of the biggest problems was battery life. If the drive was kept spinning while playing songs, it quickly drained the batteries. The solution was to load several songs into a bank of memory chips, which draw much less power. The drive could be put to sleep until it’s called on to load more songs. While other manufacturers used a similar architecture for skip protection, the first iPod had a 32-MB memory buffer, which allowed batteries to stretch 10 hours instead of two or three.
From here.