0

On screen keyboards do take up screen space, which to me, DOES make it inferior. I don’t want a keyboard taking up what I see on screen. And I want tactile feedback with my keyboards. And I don’t want even more of a grease and fingerprint magnet than I already have with my touchscreen phone. You’re gonna be wiping off that screen every five seconds.

Apple’s choice to make it on screen has nothing to do with the progression of technology and all the absurd talk of tactile keyboards being some type of archaic input device worthy of the Smithsonian and bla bla bla. It’s just personal preference and nothing more. I mean, how many ways can you make a keyboard? You either have a physical one, or a touchscreen one, and that’s it. There are no other options. Besides, on screen keyboards have been available for years now on Windows Mobile and with third party apps. People act as though this is some new-fangled technological breakthrough that the “mighty Apple” has graced us with. Give me a break. There’s nothing unique and wonderful about Apple’s choice here. “It’s on-screen!” BFD.

The iPhone is a slick device from what I can tell, but the the way they implemented the keyboard is/will be the worst thing about it; and since messaging and emails are such an important part of my lifestyle, what Apple did with it (not to mention, two years with AT&T) is a complete deal breaker for me, especially when I consider that I can do everything and more with my WM phone and upcoming WM devices than the iPhone will do (even if the UI is cool and no matter what the Mac-nazi’s say).

  0

  0

It is hard for me to believe that Steve will sit back and not have revisions for the phone that include 3g etc. They are smart enough to know that most markets in this country don’t have it available to use. Why make it one of the central features when it is not available to most of the people who will buy them? Motorola should have taught them a valuable lesson with the razor. They released a phone that does not have a lot of options and sold millions of them. There is a reason that the ipod has kept market sustainability. Apple has been smart with adding features and updates etc. They will do the same with the iphone.

Most people who use smart phones have there business phone and a razor (me being one of them). I own a mortgage broker business and all of my brokers have two phones. It is no coincidence that most are planning to buy the iphone when it launches.

  0

  0

I think the iPhone is revolutionary, because if it wasn’t no one would be talking about it. Sure it doesn’t have 3G, and it’s not enterprise “per se”. But I have a lot of talented people that work for me and we’ve already solved those minor issues. Apple did not aim this phone, or any of their products, for the enterprise market. Just take a look at their commercials. But there are a lot of people that love technology out there and they are fed up with being sold the same technology for generation after generation. So what they do is check out those new products for themselves. You know what products I am talking about… the ones that people say “Those can’t do…” And when the iPhone ships, I believe the only arguement left is the whole thing about 3G. Personally I don’t think the iPhone is perfect (needs more space) but it’s a great step in the right direction.

Guys get used to technology changing and get used to the keyboard that we’ve been using to make it’s way to the smithsonian and stay there. Apple did away with the floppy in late 1998 and people were going crazy as if the world had just ended. Apple is phasing out the keyboard on mobile devices and Microsoft is doing away with the keyboard with Surface. The signs are there, technology is moving forward. You can choose to pay your bills via snail mail or you can pay them online.

  0

And you’re under the impression that it’s voice messages attached to emails. It is not. It is simply being able to navigate your voicemail randomly. That has nothing to do with any technology on AT&T’s end. It’s how the iPhone navigates the voicemail that’s on AT&T’s servers. And it’s exactly what’s missing from other voicemail systems I’ve used that forces you to go through your voicemail serially. At least that’s what Apple’s website seems to imply.

  0

You seem to forget that visual voicemail is NOT apple’s product, it’s AT&T’s and is most likely based on lucent’s platform. I wouldn’t be surprised to see it on other at&t phones in the future.

As for the voicemail not being sent as a .wav, how do you think it’s going to be sent? maybe not .wav, but I’d bet it’s some similar PCM encoded format.

If you think that visual voicemail is anything other than an e-mail with message attached, I think you’ll be sadly mistaken. Guess we’ll need to wait till June 29 at 6PM to see who’s right

  0

Fine, don’t get it. But don’t pretend some hacked together technology is equivalent.

  0

This phone will revolutionize how people look at and expect phones to run. I can only imagine when Steve Jobs pulls the stick out of ass and allows people to program apps for it what this phone will be capable of. Watch and see. Companies will not allow them to grab the lead like they did with the iPod. They will copy and follow this phone which will force apple to continue to update and change the technology. If this works, as in the case of the iPod, companies will spend so much time catching up that they will never overtake the iPhone. It is the big “IF” that is the question.

  0

voicemail in your e-mailbox HAS been around for years, a simple google search will prove that.

Octel’s unified messaging product is just one of those products.

  0

And Jibi is right, the support is there, it’s just turned off. And because Windows is so vulnerable to spyware, viruses, and trojans, they have to turn off IMAP and POP. Our IT department is not willing to let our PCs be vulnerable just because we Mac users need IMAP, even though our computers are still invulnerable to such dangers. They keep telling us the attacks are coming, and I keep waiting for the first one to happen to motivate me to buy “protection.” Until then, we Mac users suffer because of the inferior technologies MS foists on their customers. And the rest of the world has to go wanting because of a general lack of security thanks to the “standards” adopted by the corporate world.

  0

Just a unsophisticated mac user trying to get some simple feedback…

What, no reponse to the Keynote iPhone (corporate) demo?? i’m hoping for something pompous!

  0

Exchange is designed to promote Microsoft hegemony in the workplace. Not to be useful to people, or do what they want. It’s patently obvious why it won’t work. Now, if Exchange supported POP or IMAP (removed a version or two back) the iPhone would be able to at least pull down email. But I bet you can use Safari via Outlook Web Access to get to your email, so it’s possible to get to your mail anyway. At least the new beta version of Safari on my Mac can properly use OWA completely for the first time.

  0

Also the demo in the Keynote with the 3rd party app that gave access to a corporate contact database (through safari) seemed to me as a pretty strong statement that they were going to try and cater the iPhone to the corporate world

  0

Wow, your insight into RIM’s OS plan is astonishing. I mean, you must know the whole product roadmap to make a statement like this, yeah? Too bad you’re dead wrong.

I’m confident your Apple fan boy dreams will be swiftly crushed in due time. Hold on to them while you can though, it’s endearing.

  0

The iPhone biggest problem like previously stated is going to be price. Why in 2007 would I buy a phone that doesn’t have 3g. Apple is known not to release good product in their first release. There is a lot to love about the iPhone but there are just as many things not to love.

I was thinking about getting one as my personal phone since I can’t have a camera phone on my job nor do they support imap/pop3 accounts. What makes the decision harder is that through my company we can get the HTC Tytn without a camera and then I can update to WM6… Who needs 2 phones then besides the fact that the blackberry 88** series is just sexy…

As for first week sales I think they will do about 150,000 b/c stars and others who have $5-600 to blow will get it to test it out… or people will buy it for the 30 day trial and test it out…

Truth be told I don’t think $5-600 is a lot for all the included features just needs 3g, slide out keyboard, and of yeah be called the HTC VOX… Now if that was out I wouldn’t even consider the iPhone!

  0

As for voice to text, that would be great. If it worked. But I can only imagine how wrong it will get some things when the person leaving the message is on a bad connection.

How will it know the difference between “There’s a bad moon on the rise,” and “There’s a bathroom on the right?”

  0

**off topic** Another cool technology thats being touted lately is voicemail-to-text. Companies like SpinVOX have announced products (quite slick I might add) that will take your voicemail, transcribe it to text, highlight phone numbers(and make them dialable). For people that are in meetings, and can’t listen to their voicemail, this will be a cool feature.

  0

There has been so much hype on this device that we need to let 6/29 come and go and see how the market accepts the device. Time will tell as it always has in the past.

  0

- “All that hype for an MP3 player? Break-thru digital device? The Reality Distiortion Field is starting to warp Steve’s mind if he thinks for one second that this thing is gonna take off.”

- “Better bring that price down or you wont sell any of these babies”

Comments from clueless readers after the 2001 iPod introduction.

  0

All that being said, I have had an iPod replaced just within the warranty period, and have actually purchased three…and when the current iPod dies I will have another!!!

  0

  0

So people are supposed to accept that from their pointy-headed sysadmins? Not gonna happen.

I love hearing from Admins about how security conscious they are but yet they run Exchange and support Windows XP.

I’ve worked for very large companies, some at the core of the internet backbone infrastructure, and they have ALL had IMAP and POP access to email.

This whole issue is a red herring in any case. Admins will do what their boss tells them to do, and their boss is going to be buying an iPhone eventually.

Why? Because it plays video and is an iPod and has a FULL browser (minus Flash) and also does email. Not to mention a much better voicemail experience which can’t be discounted in the corporate world. I hate checking VM because you have to wade through message after message. RAV (Random Access Voicemail) means I can totally ignore the messages I don’t want to listen to, especially if I suspect they are from Admin in the basement telling me why he doesn’t want to support my new toy.

  0

  0

I think AT&T will bundle an all-inclusive unlimited data plan which will undercut all Verizon and Sprint…T-Mobile is dying already. The ‘bundle’ is common knowledge by now, yes. I think the ‘bundled plan problem’ everyone is fretting about is not a problem at all, when you consider that the price will beat the market competition… that’s the unexpected part to the ‘bundle’.

Yeah, I know, without 3g and MMS how great is unlimited data…not so amazing yet…

But as others have stated, either the iPhone 1.0 will have HSDPA hardware included, just not turned on (i.e. Treo 750, 8525 too right?) or they will include HSDPA in iPhone 2.0….available before the Christmas buying season in 16GB and possibly 32GB flash sizes as well…just enough to entice new buyers…and just enough to entice the early adopters of iphone 1.0 to upgrade…gotta stay current.

Not that Apple has been known to stretch out upgrade cycles to nauseating lengths, but always smartly and strategically moved…this first year will be different though, with Apple pulling out all the firmware and revision stops to gain market share…

One has to ask, what would happen to the AT&T network with an massive influx of unlimited data users on a still fledging HSDPA network anyway?

Come spring…everyone will have gotten used to the new interface, it will be accepted as the mouse, and the new iPhone 3.0 will work so smooth and seamless with Exchange, HSDPA is rolling and full-strength, and corporate buyers start second guessing their RIM data plans to see how much they are paying against Apple/AT&T one size fits all plan…

Ah, all guess work…

Jobs, just don’t kill the iPod, cuz I want a 200GB version now (al least 120GB…and no I don’t care about waiting for flash either, and I’m not going for iPhone 1.0…there will still be millions of iPod hungry buyers out there waiting for our touchscreen, fullscreen HDD based large capacity torrented content holders

  0

  0

Big company administrators, atleast the ones I have spoken to quite candidly on the subject in recent weeks, do not have the IMAP or POP protocols exposed in their DMZ (some do have these enabled internally), as they are well-knwon high-level security risks. Thus, there’s no disabling of these protocols involved to prevent the iPhone but rather the iPhone’s limited inclusion of these protocols, aimed at commercial IMAP services such as Yahoo and some ISPs and small company mail environments, that will prevent the iPhone from touching it’s fingers in the sandbox of large corporations who are conscious of ISO and various other common-sense-security best practices.

Do you really think that any random large company, who has spent a large sum of ‘x’ amount of dollars on defining and building an information security infrastructure over the last 3-7 years since it’s become such a popular topic in the industry, will really open up natively insecure protocols and expose them over the internet just to make an allowance for the iPhone to work with its built-in mail client? I highly doubt it.

As for your comment about all internet traffic going through the BES; once again, for compliancy-conscious companies, it’s not a bad idea to have an audit trail for any sort of data communications. But alas, if it’s not locked down via policy, anyone can change their default browser to use BIS and avoid the corporate MDS …oh, and the browser on RIM devices is getting a slight upgrade within the next OS (4.3.0) and a rumored complete overhaul (full HTML) with the OS release after that (which should be 5.0.0), but we’re saving that for another day and another post.

  0

Plus, all internet goes through the BES server installed at the corporate office.

Big company admins are suddenly going to lock out IMAP/POP? To stop the iPhone, so they don’t have to “support” it? A joke. As if they could do such a thing, or could justify spending the hours to do it.

Admin: I hates me the iPhone. Screw those mactards! I blocks them.
CEO: Admin, check out my new iPhone. Can you help me set it up?
Admin:

That’s how its gonna be, fellas. Get used to it.

  0

  0