11–20 of 177 posts
It disappoints me that nobody does this. Every attempted "competitor" I've seen that stands against the iPod Touch either costs more than the touch or is reviewed as unusable garbage.
That's not really true. Mobile devices around that time were designed as peripherals of the PC, so you could download apps to PC and install them by cable-syncing. Palm apps were just .PRC files.
It really wasn't too complicated and was a far sight from buying shrink-wrapped software in a physical store. It's just a shame that Palm, MS, and other platforms left this stuff to third-party websites instead of making it a more seamless experience for users and a more profitable one for them.
I was surrounded by people with strong ambition and vision, at UIQ, Symbian, at our owners Motorola and Sony Ericsson, who wanted to build the iPhone and knew how to build the iPhone long before the iPhone was announced and before they knew anyone else was doing it.
We knew all about capacitive displays, finger-touch and so on. To be honest my own vision was tainted by Flash-based UIs and the mechanics of that, but the Flash demos I was trying to enable were fancy iPhone-like UIs. The artists had the design ascetic that was the iPhone to a tee.
But the phone manufacturer upper management were essentially very traditional hardware manufacturers with traditional channel relationships and techie vision was never given much attention.
Not taking away from Apple, not saying actually I could imagine it having turned out any different. Its simply that Apple didn't have the management constraints. Apple created new teams to make new products. The entrenched phone makers made existing teams punch out variants and incremental refreshes of the same tired formulae.
I imagine it was much the same in Finland too.
The big question is, without Jobs, will Apple settle into defending what they have - and punching out variants and incremental refreshes of it - or will they have fresh ambitious restarts?
There's a very strong argument here but the claim appears to rely on the author's expansive definition of "smartphone", in which he encompasses app stores, cloud servers and networks. Perhaps he has a point about the difficulty of investment in taking on these well established players in the field, but I don't feel it's entirely accurate to claim that smartphones themselves cannot be successful. A new phone with a ba…
If anyone thinks that the mess in the Play Store and the development environment of Android doesn't leave a bad taste in your mouth they should really re-consider thinking that Android is going to be around forever. I would like to ditch this platform the first moment I get. There are a lot niches that are not addressed by market players today, and the overlap between them can wedge a dent in the market. Google has serious weakness in hardware, and it looks like they will never get over that hump. Can you honestly expect them to optimize performance and battery life, if they can't even make their own devices.
Niches like:
Open-Source/Flexible development environment
Sustainability
Emerging Markets
Actual Innovation
Disruptive technologies and emerging markets shouldn't be counted out either. Nor should finding ways to monetize open-source. People, developers especially are increasingly looking for open platforms/devices, that market is NEVER going to get smaller only bigger.
Imagine actually being able to use Javascript or Python or Clojure for your apps, or scripts. Will you actually discount a platform where you can program without managing a thousand configuration files or worry about the gatekeepers(Google/Apple). See these problems aren't necessarily problems in Linux(not to say there aren't other drawbacks).
The great(maybe not?) thing about innovation is that if your to busy looking at the technology today your going to completely miss out what is coming next. - At least it's great if your competing.
I can't help thinking about what Jobs says, "Experts" are clueless.
>Experts—journalists, analysts, consultants, bankers, and gurus can’t “do” so they “advise.” They can tell you what is wrong with your product, but they cannot make a great one. [1]
[1]http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-20117575-37/what-i-learned...
People seriously underestimate the power of a great product. Products that don't rely on massive feature lists that mean nothing a day after buying your device. I regret falling into this trap and wasting precious time instead of thinking about creating a better product experience. But again this is easier said than done.
> Challenge: you are now competing with the iPod Touch. It disappoints me that nobody does this. Every attempted "competitor" I've seen that stands against the iPod Touch either costs more than the touch or is reviewed as unusable garbage.
Maybe this speaks to Tim Cook's operations wizardry? If no one can get components at the same quality or price as Apple then they're stuck either selling a crappier device for the same price or a good device at a higher price.
If you can't beat Apple in hardware price or hardware quality then you'd have to win on software cost or software quality - sounds like a perfect place for Android. It's likely that the companies with the resources to do this have decided that the market is too small or they don't want to cannibalize their phone sales. Otherwise you'd think HTC or Samsung would be releasing Android-based media players.
"I owned a string of PalmOS devices during this period. Their ‘app store’ was literally boxes of software in a store which you had to install from your computer. No different than 1980s PCs." That's not really true. Mobile devices around that time were designed as peripherals of the PC, so you could download apps to PC and install them by cable-syncing. Palm apps were just .PRC files. It really wasn't too complicated…
Sorry, but you don't seem to be offering anything new here. We know there are large capital costs for hardware businesses. We know network effects exist for phone applications. We know UI performance is a key issue in smartphone adoption (currently). Maybe "It's Hard To Build A Smartphone In 2013" would be a better title. But to suggest people will be using iPhones and Androids in the year 2050...Yikes. I pray that f…
The way I read this article, It is less about building new smartphone but more about the next technology shift that is going to change the direction. Basically, as oft repeated Ford statement goes, 'if you asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horse'. So, at this point, smartphone business is settling into a faster horse business. So, I would really expect the next big thing to be not a be an iPh…
Maybe Amazon will debut them on 60 Minutes prior to cyber monday 2014!