[El Gato]

Originally Posted by Dark Helmet 

"Rather than Wifi"? Stupid

I said wifi is WAY more important to me than 3G as TODAY 3G is not common, it is expensive and not a standard.

With WiFi I can be anywhere in the world and surf etc for FREE. Even sitting at home or in the office to have the iPhone switch to WiFi on the fly is great.

3 years from now 3G will be nice.

Oh and I have had 2 smartphones. I currently have a pearl which i love but the iPhone beats 95% of it.

Exactly. Wifi is far more prevalent in the U.S. than 3G is. I can hop online at my house, office, girlfriend's pad, sister's house, parents' house, downtown coffe shop, airport, train, etc. all through wifi. 3G service is nowhere to be found in my area.

Added to that is the only wifi that I pay for is at my own house, so basically I can get free internet wherever I go - and with the City-wide initiatives here in Northern California the coverage is only going to increase for everyone.

For this reason alone, I can see why Apple went the wifi/edge route instead of including 3G right off the bat. I'm sure that Steve knows what's going on in the European market and you can expect that the European release will include 3G. This also allows Steve to trot out in 12-18 months time and say "Look, the iPhone is now 3G capable! Time for all the early adopters to upgrade."

What pisses me off though, is that Cingular is still going to require you to pay for a data plan when, with wifi, I doubt that I would use it all that much.

[Dark Helmet]

Originally Posted by El Gato 

Exactly. Wifi is far more prevalent in the U.S. than 3G is. I can hop online at my house, office, girlfriend's pad, sister's house, parents' house, downtown coffe shop, airport, train, etc. all through wifi. 3G service is nowhere to be found in my area.

Exactly. I have WiFi at my house. 90% of my friends houses, my work, the coffee shops, the airport. Heck even if I am on vacation in the middle of nowhere in the Caribbean I will find Wifi before 3G.

So the only time I am out of luck and have to use that horrible old edge is when in the car. I don't have a car and use the subway and there is no cell service there at all.

Heck even many trains have Wifi. Even if they all don't the odds of finding Wifi is better than finding 3G.

[CharlesS]

Originally Posted by Dark Helmet 

I didn't say the iPhone has awesome VALUE next to cheap phones. What I mean is that its interface, hardware and strategy is what makes all other phones look stupid.

No, it doesn't, because if all you need is a $50 phone that makes phone calls and has a phone book, then buying a $500 phone is what is stupid.

It is also not 10X the price of similar phones. The only phone that comes close is the high end Sony w950 and it isn't half of what the iPhone is and is $1000 - $1200.

If you know anything close to the iPhone out today please let me know where I can find it and especially for the 10x cheaper you mentioned.

I've got an idea. Why don't you just reply to what I actually say instead of straw men?

[Dark Helmet]

Originally Posted by CharlesS 

I've got an idea. Why don't you just reply to what I actually say instead of straw men?

How bout I don't bother with you and you go back to your "non-stupid" wicked technology $30 Nokia while I set money aside for the iPhone.

[ink]

Some may not fork over $500 for it, but everyone wants an iPhone.

It's a brilliant strategy on Apple's part, and it's going to take off like wild fire. It's not perfect, but it's a HUGE step in the right direction for personal communication devices. Ideally it would do VOIP, allow for 3rd-party software and have GPS, but 'cmon -- it's nascent tech. Give it some time to grow.

The RmVeAVwl devices are so toast.

[CharlesS]

Originally Posted by Dark Helmet 

How bout I don't bother with you and you go back to your "non-stupid" wicked technology $30 Nokia while I set money aside for the iPhone.

No no no, I said please not to reply just to straw men.

[Troll]

Originally Posted by El Gato 

Exactly. Wifi is far more prevalent in the U.S. than 3G is.

...

For this reason alone, I can see why Apple went the wifi/edge route instead of including 3G right off the bat.

Why do you say wi-fi/EDGE instead of 3G? Do you think those are binary choices? Do you think that if you put 3G into a phone, then wi-fi or EDGE must be taken out? That's not the case. 3G phones can all do EDGE as well.

The iPhone should have wi-fi, EDGE and 3G - like any number of other phones that you can already buy. Heck, if Apple wants iPhone to be on a par with Nokia and Ericsson in June, it will need to have wi-fi, EDGE, 3G (UMTS) and 3.5G (HSDPA) - kinda like the Nokia N95 already has.

[Troll]

Originally Posted by Dark Helmet 

"Rather than Wifi"? Stupid

I said wifi is WAY more important to me than 3G as TODAY 3G is not common, it is expensive and not a standard.

UMTS is a standard. HSDPA is a standard. What are you talking about 3G not being standard? 3G is common. I don't know where you get that from. As of 2005, 80% of Europe had 3G coverage. It's probably close to 100% right now. The US also has some 3G coverage already. Most networks in the rest of the world are already moving onto 3.5G (HSDPA).

Originally Posted by Dark Helmet 

With WiFi I can be anywhere in the world and surf etc for FREE. Even sitting at home or in the office to have the iPhone switch to WiFi on the fly is great.

You seem to be confused about what wi-fi, EDGE, and 3G are. I don't understand why you think it's a binary choice between 3G and wi-fi! You seem to think I'm suggesting replacing wi-fi with 3G.

I absolutely agree that wi-fi is a necessity and that it's great to surf for free when you can find an open network. I'm not suggesting you take wi-fi OUT. Nor am I suggesting that you take EDGE out for that matter. The problem with this phone arises not when you have a wi-fi connection; it arises when you DON'T have a wi-fi connection. The Internet part of this phone will be near useless over an EDGE connection whereas if it had 3G, it would still be useful.

[El Gato]

Originally Posted by Troll 

Why do you say wi-fi/EDGE instead of 3G? Do you think those are binary choices? Do you think that if you put 3G into a phone, then wi-fi or EDGE must be taken out? That's not the case. 3G phones can all do EDGE as well.

...

I say wifi/EDGE instead of 3G because 3G is not that widespread in the U.S. yet. True, it's not a binary choice and the iPhone could (and I believe future revisions will) have all three, but this is Apple we're talking about. They're not going to include a technology just for the sake of including it (FM transmitter in your iPod anyone?).

So a Nokia N95 has 46 different ways to get online, what does it matter if only 2 of those are actually feasible for me?

[Troll]

Originally Posted by El Gato 

I say wifi/EDGE instead of 3G because 3G is not that widespread in the U.S. yet. True, it's not a binary choice and the iPhone could (and I believe future revisions will) have all three, but this is Apple we're talking about. They're not going to include a technology just for the sake of including it (FM transmitter in your iPod anyone?).

So a Nokia N95 has 46 different ways to get online, what does it matter if only 2 of those are actually feasible for me?

That would be fine if Apple were just designing the iPhone for you or even just for the US market.

But they're not. Jobs is going for 1% of the global market. That's what he said. He wants 1% of the 1 billion phones sold in the WORLD. The US market for GSM phones is 1 tenth that of the European market and a tiny fraction of the global market so it makes no sense to design the product for the US market.

To me, the most plausible reason why they left 3G off this phone is because they wanted it to be thin. 3G chews batteries more than 2G.

[Hash]

Originally Posted by Troll 

Rather than ... wi-fi??

Methinks someone who is calling all the other phones stoopid doesn't actually know what the other phones are capable of. How many smart phones have you actually used?

Nokia already sells phones with wi-fi, 3.5G, a 5MP Zeiss camera with 3x optical zoom, email push, etc. etc. Heck, you can even get a Nokia 3G phone with GPS (real GPS) built in. And that's just Nokia. Those are not "stoopid" phones. Their interface is maybe not as good as the iPhones, but they are more capable technologically than iPhone. Apple are hyping this phone when they talk about how far ahead the technology is. The interface technology is ahead of the pack but the rest of the package is actually behind the competition.

Nokia | Nseries

They do not have the same multitouch, no keys GUI approach a la iPhone way.

[TETENAL]

And customers don't want their phone to be thin?

I'll take a thin quad-band GSM phone over a bulky UMTS phone that chews away battery power any time. I say it again: nobody gives a crap about UMTS. It's incredibly expensive. That's the main difference you notice. Video telephony? Television on your phone? I have never seen anyone make use of this. Yes, UMTS phones sell in Europe, but they are GSM/UMTS combo-phones, and most people who can figure out how to do it turn UMTS off to save battery life. Non-UMTS phones sell just as well (like Sony's walkman line).

Quad-band GSM was a reasonable choice of Apple for their first phone and EDGE almost reaches UMTS speed in transfer rates. Jobs said in the keynote that they plan to make UMTS phones in the future. When the technology is ready for it.

[kamina]

I expect quite alot from the iPhone, and will probably end up getting one. Here's a few notes though:


- 1% of mobile phone sales is not alot. Smartphones only make up for a small portion of mobile phone sales, and though that percentage is slowly increasing it's maby a better area to base sale expectations on. ALOT of people don't want / need a smart phone. They want a cheap device to use for calling and sending sms messages.

- The US market is small. Apple will be able to test bugs without having such a large userbase. Kind of like post beta testing...

- US mobile users have not been using mobile phones for a very long time, and have completely different way's of using a phone then most people in other countries. We've had mobile phones for a long time here, and gone through many "changes". I, as all my friends had our first mobile phones over 15 years ago (before GSM was deployed anywhere). Here 3G is common, and people use it in places where there is not, and will not be wlan. I don't think this will be an issue as Apple will surely add 3g before it launches here... I just hope Apple understands that the small market in US is in no way representative of the big market outside the US. In 2000 71% of the finnish population (from newborns to the oldest) had a mobile phone. At the end of 2005 this figure was 103% (calculated from amount of subscriptions compared to population)...

Most countries don't have a similar system where you get the mobile phone from the operator. Here you can get it like that, but it's not especially common (it ends up being more expensive on the long run generally).

[talisker]

Originally Posted by Troll 

To me, the most plausible reason why they left 3G off this phone is because they wanted it to be thin. 3G chews batteries more than 2G.

That's true. My Sony Ericcson has the option to turn the 3G connection off, and use the normal GSM connection. I use this option most of the time to preserve battery, unless I want to browse the web, where 3G gives a huge speed boost.

The best solution would of course be to design a phone that didn't eat the battery when using 3G. If this is technically not possible, perhaps the phone could switch 3G on or off as required automatically. i.e. for normal calls and on standby, 3G off, when using the web browser, video calling, watching tv etc, 3G on.

One thing that I wonder about is that there seems to be great interest in the iphone's ability or potential ability to download TV shows etc to be watched on the phone. While I'm sure Apple will come up with a superior implementation of this, as far as I know the existing ability of many 3G phones to play streaming TV and video hasn't really been popular.

[Dark Helmet]

Originally Posted by talisker 

That's true. My Sony Ericcson has the option to turn the 3G connection off, and use the normal GSM connection. I use this option most of the time to preserve battery, unless I want to browse the web, where 3G gives a huge speed boost.

Mine did that also and when I turned off 3G the battery lasted so much longer even when I wasn't using 3G services. Problem is it was such a pain to dig though all those menu's to turn it on that the time I would save for a quick web surf wasn't worth the time it took to turn it on.

The iPhone is 3mm thinner than the smallest smartphone on the market (blackberry pearl) and I can't even comprehend how they get 5 hours of talk out of it.

The pearl is 3.5 hours talk which it definitely does live up to but it doesn't have a GIANT screen with a flashy OS and all those nifty censors and such.

If the iPhone was 3G it would have to be thicker and the battery still wouldn't last very long.

There is no g3 phone on the market that I have seen with a good battery life for the size of the iPhone and manufacturers have struggled with this for years as consumers hate 3G's battery life.

Another thing I would like to point out is even though Sony Makes some of the best smartphones out there many of them don't even support EDGE nor are they Quadband. If these are the phones are selling like hotcakes at $1200 today to the high end business clients I know the general prosumer isn't going to care about G3 for at least another year.

[Hash]

A bit different question: how powerful is Arm processor? It is definitely very power-efficient. I recall that nVidia was rumored to receive an order from Apple for mini video chipsets. Could it be the processor behind the slick graphics? It also makes iPhone a possible handheld game machine

[Kerrigan]

Mac users can be, ironically, so hostile to new releases. This all reminds me of last year when the MacBook was released, and people started throwing fits because they thought it wouldn't run Vista. Seriously, they will look for a flaw that very few people would actually care about, and then blow it up into a big deal.

[Dark Helmet]

Originally Posted by Kerrigan 

Mac users can be, ironically, so hostile to new releases. This all reminds me of last year when the MacBook was released, and people started throwing fits because they thought it wouldn't run Vista. Seriously, they will look for a flaw that very few people would actually care about, and then blow it up into a big deal.

The sad part is it fully runs Vista stupid graphics and all.

[Troll]

Originally Posted by TETENAL 

And customers don't want their phone to be thin?

I'll take a thin quad-band GSM phone over a bulky UMTS phone that chews away battery power any time. I say it again: nobody gives a crap about UMTS. It's incredibly expensive. That's the main difference you notice. Video telephony? Television on your phone? I have never seen anyone make use of this. Yes, UMTS phones sell in Europe, but they are GSM/UMTS combo-phones, and most people who can figure out how to do it turn UMTS off to save battery life. Non-UMTS phones sell just as well (like Sony's walkman line).

I agree. I don't want TV or video telephony. In fact, I wish Apple would take that crappy camera out of the iPhone. They can even take the iPod out of it. But what I do want is the email feature, the Google maps stuff and the web browsing. That's why I want UMTS. Not for TV and video telephony but because EDGE is too slow for Google maps and web browsing and heck Skype would be good too. I've used EDGE and UMTS one after the other. Comparing the two is like comparing a 56k modem with ADSL. That's not "close" imho. No operator is going to spend money on an EDGE network now. My understanding is that with more than a handful of phones using EDGE on the same cell, your bandwidth drops significantly.

Let's put a pin in this discussion until the iPhone is out. My feeling is that the web features will be unusable on EDGE and this is based on two years of EDGE use but let's see how it turns out.