iRip-off?Follow

Nah, ***** it. I just stick with my oldass 60gb ipod and a cheapo phone

If I could replace my current mobile for free with one, I would. Maybe. The iPod touch looks neat, though. I don't need to pay 17 times as much for an identical appliance with a phone.

On a side note, if I'm on 53rd in a couple of weeks, fancy buying me a beer?

8525 > iphone. THough I may go pick up an 8925 at some point... It's shiny!

8525 > iphone. THough I may go pick up an 8925 at some point... It's shiny!

Ugh. I know I'm old and everything, but $300 for a Windows Mobile phone? I don't get it.

i can control traffic signals with mine?

basically its a tax write off

Tits. Let me know when you'll be around and I'll see if I can manage.

I thought you hated the city. Nobby's enough to drag you in, huh?

My friend who owns a small computer shop/repair business, show off his iphone to Jonwin Monday, when we went to pick up his computer. Now I need to come up with a good reason for a disable person, who doesn't work to own one. I love black shiny things.

Well, yes. They're basically banking on the hordes of mac users who think that by buying mac they're somehow showing just how non-conformist they are, to think "Look! It's an Apple. It must be superior to everything else!".


Aside from the appearance (the flat full touch screen), there isn't a single thing that the iPhone does that other phones don't also do. Most of them better. Especially when you get into the price range the iPhone is at. Having actually looked at the insides of an iPhone package under a high powered electron microscope (FA labs rock!), I can say with some certainty that it's not really that impressive...


poster professes no actual professional ability to tell what the hell he's looking at through said microscope other then "hey. that looks like a chip of some kind..."

Google maps was the kicker for making me want one.

The plan to brick freed phones in the 1.0.1 update was a stronger kicker not to buy one.

All I want is a really compact, reliable network appliance disguised as a cell phone. I use a Treo 650 at the moment, which bites. It's unreliable, crashes, hard to program on, and generally flakey. BUT It's the only device I've found that can provide an ssh terminal to me from pretty much anywhere.

The iPhone could have been the answer. Their money grubbing contract with at&t strikes me as monopolistic. The contract buy in is the sort of thing I habitually try to avoid. I'm in canada, so I can't technically even get an At&t contract. The choice deliberately *not* to provide a SDK (reversed eventually, we'll see what that means) meant that I couldn't bring up a Unix command line on the phone.

I'll pay what it takes, I want a device which is:

Free from contractual obligations.
Open, that I can write software for.
Open, that I can install software on. (and by extension any media I feel like)
Easy, with a good interface.

• for tools like google maps.
• for tools like ssh.
• so I can run emacs.
• to break the forums.
• from a farm house in croatia.

it might also act as a phone, but it's more important that it do sms.

But therein lies the problem. It's "pretty and attractive as a gadget", but doesn't perform well enough for the price you pay. The whole point of the device is that it's supposed to connect with various types of networks and make use of a variety of resources. Yet it actually does quite poorly at those things.

They promise accessing web content, making phone calls, managing online and local music libraries, and bunches of other network type stuff. What you get is something that can't really do most of those things, and kinda sucks even at making phone calls.



Um... The reason the phone looks great but doesn't really perform is exactly because it's marketed to those people. The Mac crowd is almost fanatical in its loyalty to Apple. They assume anything with the Apple logo is automatically better then anything else. Apple knows this. So they know that if they design a nice looking phone with the Apple logo on it, they'll all buy it, and even if it turns out to be a horrible phone, their loyalty wont allow them to admit it.


The insides of the iPhone really aren't anything special. It's got essentially a mid-tier chipset and functionality, wrapped inside a fancy exterior. That's it. Most of what you're paying for is the touchscreen. You could literally lift all the electronics out of the phone, put it inside a standard form factor and it would probably be a struggle to sell it for $150 at a retail outlet.

The phone I have does all of those things (although not google maps specifically, but another pretty much identical mapping service). It's done all of those things for a couple years now. I also sync my email and work calendar to my phone as well (so meeting scheduled via outlook show up). And if I wanted to, I could probably add dozens more specialized apps, none of which I really need, but I *could* put them on my phone. Seriously, almost every phone released in the last 2 years has all of those features (with differences being purely service based). Apple really didn't put anything "new" into their phone. They just marketed it in a way so as to make most people think they did.


Oh... And mine has a full keyboard too. So nyah!