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Time:
18:28 EST/23:28 GMT | News Source:
ZDNet |
Posted By: Robert Stein |
Microsoft has long prided itself on its open partner ecosystem and cited it as a key differentiator from Apple, which provides all of the hardware and software for its products.
But that equation may be set to change, based on a somewhat cryptic comment from CEO Steve Ballmer in a note he sent to employees on July 23 about President Kevin Johnson’s surprise departure from the company.
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#1 By
23275 (68.186.182.236)
at
7/24/2008 6:47:31 PM
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MJ...MJ...MJ... what is a fella to do?
How about what MS may actually be doing is pointing out how the OEM's tanked the PC experience post DoJ ruling by crufting the heck out of the average consumer PC with garbage supplied largely by MS's competitors and the enemies of individual privacy? I bet MS is giving the OEM's some incentives to keep the garbage off and improve the experience. Like: "Hey, show me some numbers and we'll make you whole if you deliver a great system free of the crud"
Apple-like my giddy aunt. Who in heaven's name would want to be that? I mean my God... for really busy people, the iPhone is nearly useless - we have to call, email and otherwise communicate on the fly and that requires that we "feel" our phones. Regardless of features and interface, people like me need to be able to use a phone without looking at it or thinking about it. If I had to look at my phone each time I needed to perform a simple task on it, I'd powder it against a brick wall in under an hour.
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#2 By
1896 (68.153.171.248)
at
7/24/2008 9:23:24 PM
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Out of curiosity what phone do you use?
I am intrigued by "we have to call, email and otherwise communicate on the fly and that requires that we "feel" our phones".
I have used all MS powered phones since the Motorola 200 and I have always had to look at the screen.
I know that a lot of writers do not look at the keyboard, and no, I cannot do it, so I am wondering if this is what you mean.
As for the iPhone being useless I disagree; the first program I add to my Windows phones is Pocket Informant agenda because the built in calendar, contacts is very "basic"; as soon as this software will be available for the iPhone I forsee big improvements.
Again there are people who would use only Blackberry, other Symbian etc. so for me it is just a mattter of personal preferences. Being an open mind I a m looking for Windows Mobile 7 but in the meantime I am using the iPhone much more than the HTC Diamond.
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#3 By
23275 (68.186.182.236)
at
7/24/2008 10:51:00 PM
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#2, I use a Motoroloa Q 9m
In addition to a qwerty keyboard, it has a D-Pad bordered by two opposing and sideways facing T's which each are raised and broken down into three areas. Without looking and I rarely do, while holding the device in my left hand and using the opposing thumb of that hand, I can easily find what I want to do. Far left is green - far right is red. Left of the D-Pad is home, and right of the D-Pad is Back. Above these are left and right mouse button replacements, which correspond to actions and options. The D-pad is of course for mouse movement. The interface is amazingly logical and design not for the eye, but the hand. While there is a Black-Berry esque scroll wheel and back button on the side, I never use them.
We of course use Exchange Active Sync through the air to our own Exchanges with Direct Push and the phone has never been connected to any PC via a cable. Autodiscover answer files at the edge transport make configuring it and managing it simple, user free and automatic.
Our cars and company vehicles all have bluetooth 2.0 built-in, so hands-free operation is pretty amazing and done by voice. I say call "name" and confirm it, and it calls the name in my address book on the phone. I can see on the dash, who is calling in next to where I have to be next - also from the phone's appointments and the address in it feeds the vehicle's nav system. It has late start capabilities, so I can enter and exit the vehicle on the fly and the call and nav information are handed off with the call. Documents are joined with the appointments of course, and I email to shared WSS 3.0 libraries, any changes from the phone itself, as we have email enabled them.
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#4 By
23275 (68.186.182.236)
at
7/24/2008 11:05:09 PM
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cont from #3, above.
We test nearly all phones and distributed among our staff, family and customers is quite a number of them. We have found that the very busy guys reduce phone use to muscle memory and processing emails, answering and making calls is a matter of sightless and instant movements of the thumb.
For example, I know how to call key guys on our staff without thinking about it at all. My thumb just knows the steps and all it needs to know is the starting point, which does not change. That is easily found on the Q by placing the thumb on the D-Pad a slipping it slightly to the upper right "contacts" from the home screen. This I do all the time without looking.
The keyboard itself has a small raised dot over the D/5 key, which is another tactile spot I use all the time. Now... to write this, I had to think about it, but the fact is, in day to day use, I never do. My hand and thumbs just know the layout. Using an iPhone would be horrible for me and many like me. I've tried quite a number of touch screens and none of them work for me.
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#5 By
12071 (203.185.215.144)
at
7/24/2008 11:28:10 PM
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I'm just glad I'm not forced to used any phone created by you Lloyd. If it resembles anything even remotely close to anything produced by the Windows Mobile team (which it would be given your love for everything Microsoft) I'll be glad to never even see it let alone be forced to used it.
Getting rid of my Windows Mobile device and getting an iphone was an absolute joy and I have no problems calling, emailing and otherwise communicating on the fly. In addition I can also browse the web and enjoy the experience as oppose to the crap that's available on Windows Mobile. The iphone is by absolutely no means perfect - it's a long long way from that, but compared to the competition it's in a field of it's own for usability.
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#6 By
82766 (202.154.80.82)
at
7/24/2008 11:40:52 PM
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Chris... this is a typical response about Windows Mobile that gets my blood boiling.
Is it Microsoft/WM's FAULT that AT&T / Sprint / "other American" providers (from what I've been told) etc put crap on *their* phones? No it is not.
A *clean* WM phone is a joy to use... and there I say, welcome to the world outside of American phone providers!
I currently use a HTC Kaiser and its an utter joy to use. I've unlocked numerous v1 iPhone's down under (and upgrading them to v2 recently) so I've obviously had a damn good play with the iPhone. Other than the large screen, I wasn't actually that impressed.
I'm not going to list all the issues *I* have with the phone but lets just say, *I* think it is an extremely over hyped consumer product that is a poor effect from Apple.
General rant... I'm seeing comments/opinions/blogs all over the internet which to me, people saying that effectively want Microsoft to "go internal" that is, NOT sell their OS to any OEM, NOT sell their CE/WM OS' to any OEM and so on.
I'm getting the general feeling that people want Microsoft to do everything themselves!! This just blows my mind... I cannot believe that people are really thinking this - without actually writing it.
This post was edited by MyBlueRex on Friday, July 25, 2008 at 00:10.
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#7 By
23275 (68.186.182.236)
at
7/24/2008 11:56:37 PM
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Chris... I don't force any team member to use any one phone. I pay for whatever they want to use. They have each gone through quite a variety of them, and yes, we have iPhone customers, too... but oddly... they also maintain other phones that they call from, as the iPhone's call qaulity is poor (their words, not mine). I also pay for all mobile phone bills via a company account - regardless of how they are used, or how much and not one of my guys has seen a mobile phone bill in many years. The same is true for their rigs - they decide what goes into them - not me. They are so valuable as people and engineers, that if they wanted an electric soap-dish, I'd be working on finding one.
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#8 By
23275 (68.186.182.236)
at
7/25/2008 12:03:15 AM
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Browsing the web on such a small device is okay for about the firs ten minutes - then it seems lame. When I want to surf I want to see a lot more than any phone will let me. I've done it on the iPhone and other phones using Opera mobile and the cool part wears off quickly for me. I'm glad the iPhone works well for you. If you were on our team, neither it, or the monthly bill would cost you a dime and what you use would be your choice.
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#9 By
72426 (71.94.8.164)
at
7/25/2008 4:22:09 AM
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#2 am intrigued by...
Outside the Apple Marketing/Mindwashing, there are advantages to using a real keyboard on a phone, even using T9 on a cheap flip phone most people can type entire paragraphs without having to look at the screen. You simply can't do this on an iPhone...
A further demonstration of why the iPhone fails in this area is simple things that a free phone from Wal-Mart will do, like Voice Dialing, click the button on your bluetooth earpiece and say "Dial 555-1212" and the phone does it. No looking at the screen, fumbling with the phone, and is something you can do safely even while driving down the highway.
This also isn't a Windows Mobile vs iPhone debate, as Windows Mobile does have voice dialing and other features, but as I said even a free Samsung or Motorola 'generic UI' phone has the basic of Voice Recognition and Voice Dialing. Some even do Voice Texting, so you never have to pull your phone out of your pocket for anything except using the camera or viewing videos/pictures - things that all the other phones also do, even though people seem to think the iPhone 'invented' multi-media on a phone too.
So this goes beyond just tactile, as it about usability, something people that don't know better, praise Apple for. Heck even my friends Samsung R500 freebie phone supports AD2P bluetooth and has a Mini-SD slot, and he can literally bring the phone into a room or his car and hit a button on the side of it without opening it up and stream the music to the car or home stereo. This is simple, no drag unlock, click, click, find music, click. Also the phone supports voice dialing from the car system, for people with fancy cars that don't like Bluetooth headsets.
The iPhone is designed around a UI that DEMANDS the user look at the screen not only for typing, but making calls, or every basic feature, when other companies have designed phones to just work without having to 'take user attention' to do so. iPhones are horrid for people that use their phones while driving because of this...
The look at me, UI concept is ok for a device that you normally would be looking at, like a video player, TV, heck even some MP3 players have cute interfaces that demand the user to look at the screen to effectively use.
However, for a phone it is a horrible UI concept and shows that even as 'elegant' as the interface is on the iPhone that Apple doesn't 'get' User Interaction concepts very well.
(PS I am aware that you can now get 3rd party applications to do voice dialing on the iPhone, but it should be an integral part of the UI concept and the Phone, not a freaking add on or 'after thought' to the UI...)
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#10 By
79018 (74.70.9.133)
at
7/25/2008 7:56:07 AM
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There a crucial scene in the film “The Departed” where one of the lead characters makes a call with cell phone in his pocket, try that with a touch screen phone.
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#11 By
2960 (70.177.180.170)
at
7/25/2008 9:01:31 AM
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Bop. Bop. Bop. Post Test. Is this thing on...
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#12 By
2960 (70.177.180.170)
at
7/25/2008 9:07:19 AM
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"Browsing the web on such a small device is okay for about the firs ten minutes - then it seems lame."
This I whole-heartedly agree with!
I intially purchased an iTouch. I took it home, set it up, downloaded my music (at least what 16GB would hold - and after a LONG wait due to the slow RAM), and then set up and played with the web a bit.
It took me about 3 hours to develop the worse case of buyers remorse I've ever had (well, except maybe for a car once).
Did I like the device? Well hell yes. It is very, very cool after all.
But after living the limitations of 16GB of space, and the interesting but, realistically useless, web surfing, I took it back to Best Buy. For all thier faults, you just gotta love their return policy in these (rare for me) "Oh, shit what have I done" moments.
I instead picked up a 160GB Black Classic and have been happy every since.
It holds all 200 of my CD's (plus another 50 or so in MP3 downloads from iTunes and Amazon), at 192k VBR which is more than sufficient, AND I have 130 full-length feature films loaded as well from my DVD library.
Yes, the screen is smaller, but it is sufficient for it's intended purpose. And it looks wonderful.
TL
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#13 By
2960 (70.177.180.170)
at
7/25/2008 9:10:32 AM
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BTW... the addition of a simple "Answer" button on the side of the iPhone would go a long way to resolving some of the useability complaints.
I don't own an iPhone because of the cost of the iPhone. I don't own one because it's only supported by AT&T and their plans are seriously overpriced (as are most phone plans IMHO).
It's a damned phone. There is NO reason for a phone to cost so much to use in this day and time.
TL
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#14 By
11888 (70.49.130.71)
at
7/25/2008 10:30:36 AM
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If you think AT&T is expensive, browse over to Rogers.com and see what we're expected to pay in Canada for the iPhone. Yet people bought them all up!
If anyone has any phone suggestions I'd like to hear them.
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#15 By
1896 (68.153.171.248)
at
7/25/2008 11:26:14 AM
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#3: Thanks, so it is as I thought.
As for browsing the Web I could not agree more; I never used any phone to do that or, less than ever, to watch movies?!?! Still I read that a lot of people do so, again, it comes down to personal preferences. A lot of people sleep on very soft mattresses; I could not do it, I would wake up as the "Hunchback of Notre Dame".
#10: I do not work in the same fields of the peopl portraited in "The Departed" so I do not have those "special needs". :-)
Btw if you use the headset clicking on the switch in the wire allows you to end the conversation or to recall the last called number; if I rememeber correctly it works on every phone: MS, Nokia, Aple etc.
#13: The HTC Diamond costs almost $800. Personally I do not use Carriers branded phones; I do not like someone dictates me what I can use on my phone and what not.
Furthemore I travel a lot; one week of roaming charges when I am in Europe would costs me much more than a Sim-free phone.
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#16 By
15406 (216.191.227.68)
at
7/25/2008 1:36:45 PM
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#7: You claim that you have customers who have an iPhone and another cell because the iPhone call quality is crap. Wow. That's loyalty for you. Even though their iPhone is supposedly as crappy as you claim they say it is, they still maintain the phone and the service plans while not using them. They must really love Apple to do that.
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#17 By
23275 (68.186.182.236)
at
7/25/2008 2:11:15 PM
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#16, Yes, we do. Doctors who are also women, to be specific. In fact, I do not know of one iPhone user that does not also have another phone. That can be driven by many factors.
You also have to understand that our work has allowed us a closeness to the wireless industry in the US that is unique. Our customers include large wireless communications engineers who design, build and sustain the wireless infrastructure and our software and services support that effort. As such, we interface with the engineers from all of the carriers - large and small regional wireless companies. Excell Communications - is the client, BTW.
www.excellcommunications.com
The iPhone users "are" Apple/Mac fans. They appreciate the designs and they are heavy iTunes users. They tend to use their iPhones for as much media as anything else. AT&T plans and associated costs, being high, drive their use of other phones - simpler Nokia devices, mainly - and from other carriers. I have seen on more than one occasion, a customer with an iPhone on their desk while they were making a call on their second simpler phone. And yes, we talk about these things with customers. We spend a great deal of time listening to customers and devising solutions, which help them. We do poke good natured fun at one another and all platforms. It's a natural and candidly, healthy part of the dialog. Most customers say about phones this: "I use what you use" They came to that positon over time - not overnight. I use a smartphone, because I am a business user - so the communication, affordable group plans and tight integration with our platform and apps are more important than media is. That is not unusual. On the media side (mobile) I use a Zune - because it is the best value - three devices, three PC's and unlimited centrally managed access to media content for three users - that makes better sense for me. Heck... Byron Hinson of this site, uses our hosted Exchange and an iPhone 3G. I passed him the connection information and he was up in seconds (using Microsoft SW - ActiveSync on his iPhone). Like I said, we support what people want to use - staff and customers. How is that a bad thing? Oh.. many people we serve have two to three different cars, too... same sort of thing really...
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#18 By
23275 (68.186.182.236)
at
7/25/2008 2:16:54 PM
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#16, one last thing... in LA - Lower-By-God-Alabama, saying things like You claim... will get you your hat handed to you in under a nanosecond... just so you know the rules down here if you ever visit. It's just our culture and being a gentleman also means making certain those around you are, too. And yes, the call quality stinks in some cases - iPhone to iPhone calls, most especially. I've done it and heard the difference and in 2G versions, it was not good at all - perhaps that has changed, but it would be a costly test/experiment.
***We test all forms of calling - among many carriers and from many VoIP systems to different phones... so when a customer says: "it's doing x,y, or z.. from a, b, or c..." we can advise. Then we consult with Excell who can tell us where and what towers/carriers/protocols are used - so we can give a good answer and understand how it will improve (or not).
This post was edited by lketchum on Friday, July 25, 2008 at 14:17.
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#19 By
1896 (68.153.171.248)
at
7/25/2008 4:46:34 PM
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#18: "De gustibus not disputandum est", so I agree that, as some people drive dfferent cars they use different phones.
What I can state is that I see no differences in the quality of calls among iPhones, MS powered phones and Nokia ones.
I have used those phones here in the US and abroad and overall the quality of the service here in the US is indeed poorer than in Europe and in the Far East but this is a carriers issue.
As for the original issue, Ballmer speech, I would love to see MS finally begin to deliver updates to the OS directly to users and not letting them at the mercy of Carriers or hardware manufacturers, not sure which one is worse.
While I can understand, up to a certain degree, that carriers and manufacturers prefer to push peple to buy new equipments because there is where they make money their greedness not only backfire on them but also badly hurts MS.
WM 6.1 added an "Update" option to the OS but nothing has ever been pushed through it.
I really hope that WM 7 will finally fix this and add a real "touch capable" OS so they will be able to satisfy both people with your requirements and people, like me, with different priorities.
This post was edited by Fritzly on Friday, July 25, 2008 at 16:49.
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#20 By
23275 (74.164.208.252)
at
7/25/2008 6:03:23 PM
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#19, No accounting (or not) for taste, it comes down to that - in your case priorities trumping immediate access to core features that are higher up the list for users like myself. I think what will happen is both platforms will evolve toward the center and end up looking a lot more like one another than not. The same has happened in the OSes themselves - where choice is coming down to the machine style one wants relative to price, and available software, which is increasingly moving to the cloud.
I guess what chaffes me/many, is the idea that iPhone/OS X are "the" standard. Hardly.
They are compelling to some for reasons that are not important to all - hence their market position. I don't know much, but I know what I see. I have seen Apple move to x86 Intel hardware which is much less expensive and more powerful than PPC HW was, and I see Bootcamp which enables the running of Windows and applications natively. I also see MS ActiveSync.
So every time I see an Apple product, I also see a software license (or two, or three) purchased, or licensed from MS. XP/Vista, MS Office for Mac and probably PC, too and ActiveSync on the iPhone. Now... since it all comes down to software... and MS is the maker of the software... it is easier to see why Apple's fans are a bit touchy when it comes to these subjects. We support them all, because supporting the users of the technology is what matters most.
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#22 By
11888 (70.49.130.71)
at
7/26/2008 3:40:15 PM
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You'd think by now that Apple would figure out that a broad beta period is a good idea instead of releasing a relatively untested product on customers.
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#23 By
12071 (124.168.172.141)
at
7/26/2008 10:07:10 PM
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#6 "Chris... this is a typical response about Windows Mobile that gets my blood boiling."
It gets your blood boiling? Seriously? Were/Are you part of the Windows Mobile development or management teams? I'm asking because I'm curious as to what makes you so passionate about Windows Mobile to the point of getting your blood boiling.
"Is it Microsoft/WM's FAULT that AT&T / Sprint / "other American" providers (from what I've been told) etc put crap on *their* phones? No it is not."
No it's not - then again i'm not in America so I don't know what AT&T, Sprint etc put on their mobiles. I've had two Windows Mobile devices ever since "upgrading" from Nokia (I initially bought it as I loved having the pda functionality as part of my phone):
- O2 XDA IIi - this was loaded with a single application from O2 that was on top of an otherwise clean WM2003SE. After loading up Calligrapher on the phone it was relatively usable and I quite enjoyed it aside from it's occasional crash/soft-reboot which as time went on turned more and more into a "remove the battery" reboot. The major issues that I had with it were that X didn't close the app down so simply opening up a few apps would eventually lead to the battery losing power very quickly as the apps were still running in the background, the inconsistent UI across the apps and the heavy use of popup menus to do anything at all basically and that browsing the web using IE was an absolute joke. I mean, I thought IE on the desktop was bad but at least it's usable, the crap on Windows Mobile shouldn't have been there to begin with. And that is not the fault of any provider other than Microsoft.
- HTC TyTN II - this was running the WM 6.0 OS (hello! seems someone borrowed a few ideas here and there!) which was much better than 2003SE but the same basic complaints were there and internet accessibility was just as pitiful (unless you bought Opera Mobile which sort of made it useable but even then it wasn't worth using - it's apparently better with their recently released 9.5 version but I haven't tried it)
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#24 By
12071 (124.168.172.141)
at
7/26/2008 10:07:33 PM
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cont.
"Other than the large screen, I wasn't actually that impressed."
Oh don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that everyone should get an iPhone - to each his own, my only complaint was that I wouldn't want to be forced to use Windows Mobile ever again. After using the iPhone (as imperfect as it really is - i mean come on! how hard is it to get copy and paste in there! i know they're trying to provide a simple, logical ui way of doing it but it's my number one complaint!) everything on WM seems like a struggle to do. Things are in different places across applications, things function differently across applications. I don't know how much of the iPhone you've really used given that you've had to hack it to get it working in Australia (v1 that is) and hence wouldn't have any of the data options and hence no email, no google maps, no web etc but it's really easy and fun to use. That's obviously not for everyone. Lloyd, like several people i know, want to use their phones without looking at them - that's great, but I've never had that request and I would never sent a message to my friends let alone work colleagues or clients that I've typed in the dark. I love the fact that I can access the web, that i can open up google maps, search for whatever I happen to be looking for and have it show me all the places near by that I can go to. And that all of that is done through a consistent, simple, easy to use interface. I was never sold on anything Apple, in fact the ipod is the first thing I've ever owned from Apple and I was quite stand-offish in regards to it... until i used it. Everyone is different in what they want, but from a usability point of view I think Apple is on a huge winner here - and given the number of sales and knock-off's/look-a-like's/whatever you want to call them - I'd say many other agree.
"I'm not going to list all the issues *I* have with the phone but lets just say, *I* think it is an extremely over hyped consumer product that is a poor effect from Apple."
In a way, everything from Apple is over hyped - Steve is their one man marketing machine :) On the other hand, as I said, from a usability perspective, compared to the competition they're way in front even now without going into how in front they were when the v1 iPhone came out compared to the "competition" (ha!) at the time.
"I'm getting the general feeling that people want Microsoft to do everything themselves!! This just blows my mind... I cannot believe that people are really thinking this - without actually writing it."
Why don't you ask them? Blogs have comments sections for a reason.
I've read a few of those myself and from what I understand of them they seem to believe that if Microsoft have control over both the software AND the hardware (like Apple) then they would be able to create the "MOST AMAZING PHONE EVER CREATED" (tm). I disagree with that logic - the fact that Microsoft cannot keep a consistent UI across their own applications proves that the device that they would come out with would be like an OpenMoko - it would be able to support tons of features and look/feel like it was designed by blind engineers.
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