You have to give it to Apple, they are the masters of marketing. It does not matter if all these functionalities existed long before before, they make it seem like a new invention.
Just like Mac books, the iPhone will have a small market share but will be very profitable for Apple.
When you combine old inventions in new novel ways, that create a better product, your are inventing something new. And this results in not necessarily a small or insignificant inovation. In my opinion Apple innovates in a big way.
Apple's ideas may look obvious and their decisions my look easy to decide after the fact, however, the same can be said for a winning chess move after its made. This is an easy fallacy to make.
"If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants." - Isaac Newton
I've read that when he used that phrase it was intended as a pointed insult to the recipient of the letter, Robert Hooke, who had claimed priority on some of Newton's ideas and was famously short.
While many believe that was the sentiment being expressed by Newton in his letter to Hooke, some researchers have suggested that he was actually using the phrase "on the shoulders of giants" as a veiled insult of Robert Hooke, who was a rather short man. Newton had a reputation as somewhat of a petty and vindictive man whose ego clashed with those of his rivals in the scientific and mathematical communities. One of these rivals was Robert Hooke, who had been involved in a long-running fued with Newton over which one had discovered the inverse square law. Although Newton's letter to Hooke appeared courteous on the surface, some historians have concluded that he cleverly employed the phrase "on the shoulders of giants" to ridicule Hooke's lack of physical stature and imply that he lacked intellectual stature as well.
Having said that, the employee interviews always come across as extremely scripted. When they aren't using superlatives and stating facts that aren't necessarily facts (the thinnest notebook, etc.), the videos are great. Oftentimes, the bad elements take up too much time in the videos, but this video balanced it nicely.
Not IPS, but then it is nearly 2 years old. 311 ppi.
There's been a bunch that have been in the 200-300 range but apparently they don't count as 300 is the magic number (assuming you are holding your phone a specific, yet unspecified, distance from your face).
That is an exception. I am talking about front facing camera which existed years ago, flash (as in the light :)), 5 meg camera etc. I am not in anyway trying to belittle what they have created. But you should remember these are the same guys that made a really big deal about cut and paste.
Really? For me it sucked when they added it to iPhone - scroll down, read something interesting, and while your finger pauses before you can scroll down, there's a stupid dialog bothering you. Android cut and paste has never taken a pause in scrolling to mean cut and paste for me, and I;m glad I upgraded.
How many phones have a display with better than 800:1 contrast ratio[1]? All the resolution in the world doesn't matter if you can't actually see it. The Nexus One, in comparison, has a 100,000:1 contrast ratio[2].
"All the resolution in the world doesn't matter if you can't actually see it."
A 100,000:1 contrast ratio doesn't do you any good when you can't even see anything in sunlight. OLED may give a great contrast ratio, but any direct light (ex: being outside during the day, a common usage senario) means that you can't see anything anyways.
Don’t know what’s going on with QuickTime – maybe a fallback if your browser won’t play h.264? Does it work on Chrome without QuickTime?
(– edit: Three people [who downvoted me] seem to think that formulating a reasonable hypothesis and asking reasonable questions because of conflicting information is already too much Apple love. Or maybe they just think I’m lazy for not doing the research myself? Oh, well. Check out my other grandkid comment in this thread to see how testing my hypothesis worked out.)
I run midori [1] on a freebsd machine, it works somewhat well (audio problems) with html5 video on youtube.
Quicktime is not a fallback, it's still the standard.
They seem to do some evil browser sniffing (I have no confirmation but that’s how it looks) and indeed use QuickTime as a fallback if you use any other browser than Safari.
Apple, listen: Thou Shalt Detect Features, Not Browsers! :)
I have midori identifying as safari - it works well enough for google to at least not give me crap for using something different, and I still see the "you need quicktime to view this" stuff.
One missing detail: On Ubuntu the native multimedia plugin actually pretends to be Quicktime, so that Linux users aren't locked out of Quicktime delivered material.
(For me the video was quite low quality, possibly it doesn't fake the bitrate management stuff correctly and just gives you the lowest quality available)
I just walked into our office lunch room where a bunch of non-technical / non-gadget people were talking about the video conferencing capabilities of the new iphone . . .
I think that feature is going to be a monster commercial success that every other phone immediately copies.
Will probably be the only point that we hear about on the local news / etc rather than Steve's consolidated 8-points . . .
I don't get it.
Videoconferencing is insanely old and never took off.
First there was ISDN video conferencing.. apart from the job at a telco i did once i've never actually seen one that was used.
Second, the first UMTS mobile i got had video conferencing, that's really a long time ago (Motorola V980 btw.) and many UMTS phones shipped with the second camera for years now. Yet, noone ever used it. Atleast i've never seen or heard of someone, although technically i could have done that with most people i know for years.
Is it that this feature was never available in the U.S.? Or why is this news over there?
Also, i've probably overread some feature that distinguishes it from the old UMTS way.
We must remember that at the same time other computers had switches and LEDs, the Apple II had keyboard and video-out.
It had slots and you could turn it into anything you wanted (including a PC-compatible), something you couldn't do with later products but that's another story.
The difference is that the quality of the 3G video calls was usually really crap, and most people thought that it cost a lot of money (well, in some cases it did).
Just look at Skype, it's really popular, also with video calls. Video conferencing for business is also big enough that Cisco bought Tandberg for $3B. It just has to be good enough and easy enough to use that people won't have to think twice about it.
The interesting thing here is that they are touting open standards (SIP, SRTP etc). If this gets traction outside of the Apple-sphere (which must be their intention), it might spell trouble for Skype as a proprietary, closed platform.
If wifi calling "just works", then this, combined with Skype being demoed as a multitasking app, _might_ be a big "fuck you" to the telecom operators. Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but it'll be interesting to follow.
The important feature is that on the iPhone it will actually work. Also, there will be enough distribution to actually establish video calls on a regular basis (because both ends have an iPhone).
I had a motorola e1000 with video chat. The difference this time might be that I will actually have other people to talk to.
Not that I particularly want video chat, and I would be surprised if it does catch on that much. A nice aside every now and again, but it is not going to replace what we have now.
This would seem useful if you could do it over 3G. As someone mentioned, that's been done in Europe for something like 5 years.
Otherwise, being able to video chat over wifi -- skype (and ichat, though ichat seems much more picky about firewalls) has done that for years, too. Yeah, true, now you'll be able to do it without your laptop (but still have wifi), but it's not like it's some kind of revolutionary leap...
Also, now that they aren't using the already existing technology UMTS, but they have been preventing Skype video calling for years (iirc).
When they do video calls, why didn't they just enable skype and instantly have a much bigger userbase and also that would potentially include videocalls between all platforms skype runs on.
Edit: Well, ok. The former iphones had no second camera.
And they _have_ enabled Skype, and even demoed it running in the background when introducing iPhone OS 4. So I'm guessing that they will allow video camera support for Skype as well, although you can never know with Apple.
It worked on my 6-7 years old sony ericcson with 3, back in Europe. Plus, it was free for any 3 users and didn't require WIFI but 3G. I never used it. Maybe jobs will manage to change people habits, though, and times are different. When I had that (bulky) phone skype was not offering video conferencing yet.
I don't have to search for wifi at home or in the office, and that's where I spend most of the time.
Even so, I'm pretty sure Apple has thought this through, making it quick and easy to discover if someone is online, and even invite them through push notifications.
They did mention that they "had some details to work out" with the operators, which means that we will probably see video calls on 3G at some point in the future.
At home and in the office are also exactly the places where I'm also at a computer which runs skype and can already video chat. No compelling advantage there.
It's a bit easier to move around your home with a phone, so I'm guessing this is going to be used more frequently just because it's more convenient. Same with Skype now that the iPhone supports multitasking.
I live in "Europe" (France to be exact) and wifi is extremely easy to find if you live here. Two of the three biggest ISPs here turn every customer's wireless router into an access point to share with other customers. The result is free Wifi within 500 meters of almost any residence in the country.
In addition, two of the three carriers offer unlimited Free wifi to these access points with the iPhone plan, even if you're not an ISP customer. So you're doubly covered.
I checked the iPhone plans of the UK and Germany, and they both offer free Wi-fi access with the iPhone plans.
Regarding your other point, I think it was clear from the UI of the phone call that a voice chat icon will appear when video chat is available and you can switch to it at any point.
You're absolutely right, but I think video calling is actually very tightly targeted. If you watch Apple's launch video, it's all about family members who love each other but are separated. (Eg. it's not 20-somethings video calling each other to find out where tonight's party is..) And on that admittedly narrow front I think it'll be a smash hit. Right now when my wife or I are away from home, we record videos on our iphones of the other one with the kids (JUST like in their video) and have the kids say hi to the other parent.. and then email them to each other. :)
I'm sure you have. I was just referring to the iPhone 4's video chat. Carriers will determine when it will work over 3G. I expect European carriers will take the lead as they did with the tethering.
Except you have to call first to verify that
whoever you are calling is on wifi.
My guess is that you won't need to do that: if both sides are using Face Time capable devices and are on WiFi they will get videochat option, if not — it will be deactivated.
In Europe where wifi is something you have to search for and 3G
is something which is everywhere, this renders the feature
absolutely useless.
Nobody has Wi-Fi in their homes and offices? Must be some different Europe from where I am. Sure people do have computers with Skype installed at those places, but iPhone video chat will give much more flexibility. It would be pretty tough to show "look what my cat is doing!" using iMac or even Macbook compared to just switching to rear facing camera and pointing it at the cat.
I think the big difference will be in experience on the iPhone. Older systems were plagued by low resolution, crappy compression and lag / latency due to network routing issues (proxies etc.).
Judging from the videos, the iPhone 4G uses hardware to encode/decode the VGA video in H.264, which makes for low latency and high quality of that part in the processing chain, and by using standards like STUN/TURN, allows for mostly direct (p2p) connections between IP endpoints, thus using the best possible path for the media, with the result being low latency.
It will be interesting to see if Apple can coax the carriers into QoS for the video, once it travels over their 3G networks.
And it's also interesting that Apple chose pure SIP, rather then the IMS SIP that carriers have been trying to cook up over the last (almost) decade.
[EDIT] Digging some more, Apple is working with the carriers to get their networks ready for video calling, which probably means that they will offer QoS, for a price. Prepare to pay for the privilege...
Wap is insanely old and never took off. Until the iphone and 3g.
Technologies need to mature and reach a level of performance and usability before they go mainstream. This is what's happening with iPhone & videoconferencing now. This is it's time.
I guess you meant UMTS, not WAP.
Anyway, time will tell.
So, for those video calls people have to use iPhones at both ends although it would be easy to do that interoperable? I am wondering what the word "open" meant on one of Steves slides sigh
On the following slide, he listed a bunch of open standards (SIP, SRTP, ..), which they presumably use. If they hold true to their word (remains to be seen), other handset operators will be able to build similar support into their handsets.
Actually, i disagree to call H.264 "open" which is also on that slide. I mean, you are right, there is a list of open protocols, he could've also added tcp, ip, dns, ntp, etc. to it. It just seems so contradictory when Steve dedicated a whole slide for the word "open" and in the end presents an iphone-to-iphone technology.
As I said, it remains to be seen how open it will actually be. But at least all of these standards are either completely open or available for licensing, so unless they have added some "secret sauce" on top (for instance that iPhones will only ever talk to other iPhones through Apples discovery service) then it's a good starting point.
AFAIK, H.264 is an open standard. That it's patented and not royalty free doesn't make it closed, it simply makes it non-free. Another example is the G.729 voice codec, which has lots of open source implementations, but to use it you will have to buy a license. Open source PBX vendors like Digium provide licenses to those that need them. It's not an ideal situation, which is why G.729 is not as popular in the open source world, but it's still better than Skypes proprietary protocol.
"Open Standard" means patent royalty free. You'll find plenty of Apple pundits like Gruber who'll dispute this due to Apple getting behind H.264 for web video, but Apple themselves (and standards bodies like MPEG or W3C) don't use the term incorrectly. Apple have sailed pretty close to the wind though, using phrasing like "open and standard technologies" and then including technologies that are standard, but not open standards.
I thought I caught them referring to something that wasn't as an "Open Standard" in the keynote but I've not had time to check, but certainly they've been very careful not to previously. (I think the phrasing might have been "open industry standard").
But in, for example, Thoughts on Flash, the phrase "open standard" is used repeatedly to refer to HTML5, CSS, Javascript etc. and portrayed as a very good quality for these things to have but when H.264 is mentioned it is referred to just as an "industry standard".
Also Skype, along with Broadcom and Xiph, are working on a royalty-free voice codec at IETF and have offered their codecs and patents as the basis for that work. For video Skype use VP7 and Google hasn't made any big announcement but it's clear they're positioning VP8 as a Video Chat codec as well as for Web Video within the WebM container. I see Apple's announcement mostly as a half-hearted spoiler for that, kind of like Microsoft's OOXML versus ODF.
I guess the meaning of open can have different interpretations . Same difference as in "free speech" and "free beer". Should have clarified that i understand open as in open source, fully open, free to use by everyone for free. Half baked openness is not good enough for internet standards, IMO.
Just goes to show how important it is to make technology accessible. How many people were willing to buy an ISDN line and $500+ of hardware to make video calls at both ends? The phones with video conferencing were usually very off-putting to use with bad GUIs and poor quality cameras. Even Skype, which is fairly easy to setup and use, has only really caught on in the last few years.
Apple saying that it will submit video-conf stuff as an open standard indicates that it is in Apple's interest for other makers to implement this feature in a similar fashion.
Agreed. It will probably be what pushes various grandparents of my children into getting iphones (given that my partner and I have them). The reduced friction of it vs getting out the laptop, starting up skype or iChat, etc., is a huge win. The friction of wifi is a bummer but exists for our current video solutions too.
Why is videoconferencing so great? What does it add to the meeting to be able to see someone's face? Does it really add so much information that it is worth the hassle of having to stare at your damn phone while calling someone?
I love how Apple focuses on emotion -- those family FaceTime videos were so moving. Intersection of Liberal Arts & Technology, indeed. Well done, Apple.
They did that back in 2004 when iChat AV was introduced, and AV didn't disrupt or shift habits away from traditional audio and text.
I think video conferencing is a great feature no doubt, but it's largely too intrusive for most people. Certainly making it more accessible and standardized will help some however, even amongst the most savvy early adopters (and MM+ of college students with MacBooks), video chatting has remained a niche.
iChat AV has always had an interesting usability / interaction issue.
Because the camera is located on the display bezel, and not in the middle of the screen where the video window sits, you can't ever make full eye contact with the person you're talking to. It makes the entire conversation feel a little "off".
I've always thought this was a subtle yet important reason computer-based video chat never took off, and was super excited by patents that hinted that Apple was going to put the camera behind the display.
Hopefully the new iPhone 4 camera is close enough to the display to make eye contact possible.
Interesting bit there at the end. Just by being human I can say we are quite capable of telling if someone is looking at a point a couple of inches from our eyes from across a table (can usually tell which eye they are dominant in and which of your eyes they are looking at). So if your face is in the middle of other screen and they look down at that image instead of at the camera, the question becomes will the resolution of your image of them be enough to tell? I bet it will be easier to tell if they look back and forth between the camera to the image. And better video quality and distances to the phones will, of course, make it easier to see the lack of true eye-contact.
So, in addition to just holding your phone further away, maybe everyone can aim their own phone's camera so that the image of them on the other phone has their eyes as close to the camera as possible. One might just find that people start gravitating to that "off center" camera aiming without thinking about it (since it would minimize the other person's eye-jitter). Anybody reading this done much hand-held video calling? Where are the thresholds on these variables?
I agree with this. It wouldn't surprise me the least if existing associations to a "phone" will make video chatting a lot more comfortable for people; myself included.
Anyhow, how long do you think it will take your average female to get ready for a FaceTime phone call? It's for this and other behavioral issues that video calling will always be nice but never necessary. At least that's my prediction for the next 10 years.
The offset between the iPhone camera & screen is several times smaller than a laptop with a built-in camera, & if you have a separate webcam, it can be even worse.
So I'd say the iPhone is an improvement, at least.
Maybe not for most people. But there is a large segment of people (primarily younger than the readership of this site) who use iChat AV _all_ the time, and they wouldn't do so if they didn't all have Macs with iSight cameras and iChat AV.
Old people are slow to change and sometimes never do. As we get old, we've got to remember that the failure of a product to change our ways of behaving is not proof that it will not, over the long run, change everything. Our resistance to change will be solved actuarially.
My company/startup uses iChat AV for video conferencing pretty much daily. Huge fan. My wife uses it with friends and family. My mom and my sister use it several times a week.
I think he's observing the videos about the distant family where the dad doesn't see his kids being fixed by the iPhone 4. It's creepy. So is the Apple guys with the big eyes who keeps talking about a slightly better screen like it's a revolution.
Perhaps it's because it's a very obvious statement? Apple routinely purport its products are perfect, that every detail is a facet of the best craftsmanship on Earth, use gaping-mouth words ("sooo perfect") and giggles of joy. Apple markets its products as technology beyond cutting-edge: they are superhuman, perhaps built by aliens and bestowed upon us mortals, things that change our lives and do more than technology is ever expected to do.
I am not trying to exaggerate here for cheap comedic effect. I seriously believe anything less would be very not-Apple.
Because cynics would realize you are exaggerating and perhaps think less of your product for it – maybe your product can’t stand on its own, so you have to exaggerate to make up for that. Apple is betting that most of its ad watchers are not this type of cynic.
Like that "what is iPad" commercial that says "all the world's websites". They made the best tablet going, so why do they still feel the need to cross the line between touting and lying?
All the websites are available of course. Whether or not you can make use of the Flash content is a different story. At least to Apple it's a different story...
The fact that Apple is always doing the same kind of marketing won't make me stop being amazed at how they purport an iphone as The Panacea. It's almost ridiculous and a little bit insulting to the intellect. I just don't like that kind of marketing nor think is at all intelligent. Just my opinion.
Yes, I'm both laughing and crying at the same time, but I've slowly accepted that this is how certain people "compete" here, and how they, in addition to comments, "express" themselves here on HN.
-4 is the lowest a comment can go. I suspect it's to prevent the author from losing too much karma. At worst, he can lose 5 karma from a single comment that the community doesn't like.
Is it just me, or is Jonathan Ive the only Apple exec able to convincingly recreate Job's reality distortion field?
Every time one of these videos comes out, a bunch of guys are paraded out, each one trying to imp Job's style, vocabulary, and delivery, but each one coming across as some guy trying to copy someone else, rather than exude their own sense of style and originality.
To be even less charitable and more cynical, it comes across as a bunch of corporate suits with succession on their minds, all believing that Job's unique style and power of persuasion are necessary to sustain Apple when he eventually steps down, and that the most likely candidate to succeed him will be someone who most effectively recreates those traits as CEO.
But if so, they miss the mark, in that those traits can't be copied. They can't exist if they're not authentic, if they don't originate from the strength of a unique individual's vision, passion, and frame. You don't get those by mimicking someone else in the hope of increasing your odds in the corporate succession game.
Without looking them all up on Wikipedia, I'm sure they are all highly accomplished in their own rights, driven and passionate about what they do, thankful to have amazing jobs at the coolest company in the universe (Google excepted; not taking sides, but that's a debate for another thread), and have even contributed to and influenced Steve Jobs' vision and direction at times.
But none of them is Steve Jobs, and never will be, and the harder they try the more obvious that is. Only Ive comes across as someone with as strong a sense of individuality and frame as Jobs, and that's because of all the execs, he tries the least to mimic Steve, if at all.
He has nothing to prove, having lead designed practically all of Apple's products since Steve returned to Apple, and acts like it. The difference is subtle, but to me, very apparent in videos like this.
EDIT: To unharsh on those guys a bit, they're much more successful than I, and probably 99% of all other human beings are at this point. So /salute to them for that.
But that makes me wonder even more why they seem to feel the need to try to recreate Jobs' style, instead of developing their own. Surely, to get where they are, they have an abundance of talent and a wealth of experience, all of which should contribute to a strong frame, and the lack of a need to copy someone else's.
To reduce Jobs down to the essentials, I think it's really his frame, and his ability to frame Apple's products, that is the crux of his RDF and marketing ability. But there are equally effective ways to accomplish that without aping his vocabulary (pro tip - only Jobs can use the word 'exciting' to describe Baudrillardian consumer products without a hint of irony or corporate BS jargon; no one else should even attempt it).
I wish these guys would realize that and find their own path, be their own person.
This is very interesting indeed. I would love to see Ive step into the CEO role after Steve. Mainly because he is nothing like steve. I don't think Apple really needs another Steve Jobs to be successful. I think a good successor should be different and bring his/her own personality to carry out the vision of the company.
I have been pondering over this for some time now. I think all companies have a finite time, mainly because i think of companies like dynasties/kingdoms. They are run by a few key individuals. When they fall, the fate and direction of the company can change significantly. It's what happened to Microsoft over the last 10 years and it can happen to Apple. Although a leader with a unique view and style can give the company a new lifeline.
The only exception to this I think would be Google. They seem more autonomous/robotic in some sense. It's really hard to nail down the recent success of the Google with any key individuals.
Yeah I get the same feeling, not about copying or anything but they don't really convince, they don't really have that kind of persuasion Jobs has. Apart from Ive, and even with Ive he's persuasive in "one to one", but his talk feels too intimate, it doesn't really work when you're not alone in front of your screen. But in any case, Ive does come off as believing every single word he says with all of his being, the same way Jobs does. And that is convincing.
I had this strange idea today when I read that Jobs invited Ive to the stage at the end of the keynote when he introduced video chat.
Is Ive a possible future CEO of Apple? Job’s successor? Is that at all plausible or possible? He doesn’t get much time on stage, in fact I can’t even remember when and if he ever was on stage last.
Pretty much everyone else you see in those videos is on stage quite often. They are doing ok, better than many execs of other companies would, but I think you are quite right: they are all pretty bland. Except Ive, that is.
Is that a totally stupid idea? Does it make any sense at all? Ive is obviously ‘only’ a hardware guy – but would that matter?
Steve Jobs is the best 'Creative Director' ever. You can argue the merits of such a title or how it fits in a corporate structure, but I personally think CD skills trump MBA ones.
If you're looking for the best captain for a ship, the job application should probably focus on abilities that supersede spreadsheet proficiency.
Yeah, I think everyone wonders that too. I have no idea what Ive's other skills are.
Maybe he is best left as Apple's lead industrial designer, and maybe that's what he loves and wants to do more than anything else.
Or maybe he also has the leadership skills, communication skills, vision, judgement, and business sense to succeed Jobs. I have no idea, and honestly don't ever expect to until years after the succession actually occurs.
I'm not an Apple investor either, so it's all academic to me anyway.
I note Jobs' discourse on Apple being at the intersection of engineering and liberal arts, with an emphasis on industrial design. This is very unusual in the computer business, and I think it's a key indicator as to where Jobs wants to see his company going after he leaves the helm.
Ives is clearly the Chief Designer. And he's being called out for something.
My guess is that in the absence of Jobs 2.0, Jobs 1.0 is trying to inculcate a design-led culture within Apple, and sees Ives as the most likely successor to keep his particular design aesthetic front-and-centre. In this scenario, it doesn't matter too much who handles the business of marketing, manufacturing, and developing the products -- as long as they continue to be design-led and follow the same basic aesthetic goals. Which is not simply to make high-end PCs or smartphones, but to make stuff that is pretty and pleasant to use.
(Here on HN, we're mostly technophiles. It's important to remember that most of the public are not -- and they prefer beautiful objects to ugly but functional ones. Beauty is an important market, as Apple's market cap demonstrates ...)
One thing I wonder a lot is how much time Jobs might be or begin to spend coaching a successor. Even if Ive doesn't have the leadership chops, he could be standing in the heir position and learning as fast as he can.
In Ive's case, the British accent helps. Hearing him talk about his design decisions is captivating in the same way as David Attenborough narrating nature.
Yes, Ive's accent, and his ability to speak in specifics about his designs adds invaluable authenticity to what he says and how he says it.
I'm not sure why the others don't seem to have as much of the latter, unless it's because they only managed the team that built the OS or the A4 or whatnot, instead of actually coding or designing it themselves.
Of course, Jobs doesn't actually do that either, but has always managed to talk as if he did.
This is true. But I've always assumed that these guys were basically geeks who aren't natural speakers, and probably wouldn't be terribly convincing either way.
I won't put quicktime on this machine, so I haven't seen the video. Do they mention the speed of the processor in the video? I'm suspicious of the actual processor speed since it wasn't mentioned in the coverage I saw of the event, and it's not mentioned here: http://www.apple.com/iphone/specs.html
They always remind me of Rolls Royce in that respect, merely asserting that 'adequate power is available'.
I think the interesting thing is where they go from here. Apple being Apple, perhaps we'll have two years of iPhone 4 whilst they get the next OS X ready, plus probably a big rollout of iPhone 4 tech into the iPad next year.
Two years from now, it'd be nice to see displays on both sides of the phone, stereo cameras for free space gesture recognition and some kind of high bandwidth peripheral bus like Wireless USB3.
Apple's competitive advantage has always been hardware-software integration, and user experience. In all of apple's products, I've always notice they try to widen the moat with their hardware and design capabilities (ie: reengineering of the MBP batteries, unibody chassis, multi-touch screens on phone/tablet, a4 chip, etc).
And if you look at Apple's iPhone Design page, it is devoted to mainly hardware upgrades and the marketing focuses on user-experience benefits of such upgrades. And these improvements just so happen to be in areas that aren't easily replicable by competitors like Google (because their expertise is in software).
Exceptional marketing and advertising strategy as usual. They talk in the advert like they invented video calls. Even my old phone has both front and back cameras. Now that the resolution and technology has caught up with wifi and whatnot, it definitely looks more usable now though, no lag at all and full quality video in the advert.
I wonder about the contract terms of this device, otherwise for $200 it is affordable, and I will be upgrading.
I was really hoping the hardware we "accidentally" saw wasn't the final phone case. Maybe I have to see it in person, but the original iPhone design looks far more elegant. All the bands, square seams and panels in this design really seem more HTC than Apple.
HTML5 is a documentation spec, not a video encoder. I think you knew that, but language is surprisingly precise, so before commenting I wanted to ensure that we were talking about the same thing.
Having got that out of the way, the HTML5 spec for the VIDEO tag is a bit tenuous at the moment. Though the API is laid out in full, there are essentially three competing encodings vying for the default: Ogg/Vorbis, MPEG-4, and VP8. Only Mozilla supports Ogg as other parties feel uncertain about its defensibility in a patent war against MPEG-LA. MPEG-4 is not F/OSS, ergo Mozilla isn't supporting it. Google has purchased and opened VP8 in hopes that it will become the open standard, thereby assuaging Mozilla's and the F/OSS' community's fears, though Apple has yet to be sold on VP8's defensibility again MPEG-LA.
To wrap this up, if you do a little digging you'll find that Apple used the MOV container to hold an MPEG-4 video. This is just fine and dandy in the current state of the spec, though it would have been nice for Apple to use a different container format.
As noted in other comments, Apple is only serving the HTML5 video tag to Safari. Even other webkit-based browsers that support H.264 get the proprietary plugin fallback.
Also, both Google Chrome and Opera support Ogg Theora video, not just Mozilla. The only ones claiming to be worried about patents are the well known supporters of open technology at Apple and Microsoft.
That might be right. Another factor might be that they often have videos with a lot of solid white/black space, which makes is easier for the encoder to allocate the bits to the parts of the picture that the viewer is focusing on.
The advert is in its entirety incredibly cheesy and pretentious to the point I could barely sit through some passages, but fact remains: what they mention about the phone is real and actual; it's an ace product, inside out, and no doubt the technically finest, most sound and solid smartphone available on the planet. Metal frame and glass cover - good lord!
Jeez. Why do you think that ultra-durability is to make it easy to change the batteries? Ultra-durability is for the situations when I drop my phone by accident and instead of breaking it, it survives the drop.
And I don't understand certain folks' obsession with changeable batteries. You need to have those stupid opening compartment for batteries which always breaks down. I also remember that when my Blackberry used to hang, I would have no choice but to remove the batteries so that I can reset it. The on/off switch has always worked if my iPhone gets stuck up. Says a lot about how solid iOS is.
Because that's the only way to parse the durability of glass being mooted by the fixedness of the battery. Maybe you meant "until I can swap the battery, I don't care what changes they make to the case" or something similar? It's genuinely a confusing point as currently phrased.
I parsed it as "The overall lifetime of a phone is generally limited by the death of it's battery rather than the glass. If the battery could be replaced, the durability of components would be more of an issue."
That's how I parsed it. Not sure why you are being downvoted, except perhaps people being annoyed because the inability to replace the iPhone battery is an old complaint that they've all heard before. But I think it's a legitimate point.
I'd take a non-removable battery any day of the week, over one that I can pop out any time. I've never opened the battery door on my Nexus, except to turn the thing off from a gnarly overheating freeze. Every time I dropped my HTC Magic, the battery cover would come off, the phone would fly in one direction, and the battery would fly in the other. What does that mean? The phone turns off!
The iPhone 3G was the most durable phone that I ever owned. I could drop it during a phone call (happened once) and picked the thing up a second later to continue talking. You lose a great deal of 1) internal space and 2) structural integrity when you make the battery removable. Having a non-removable battery means that you can skip implementing all the rails and pieces to hold the door on, the frame to hold the battery, etc... gives you a bigger battery overall and more room for other goodies, and/or a smaller phone overall.
Their statement implies that with this glass the phone is going to stay usable longer than its existing revision. However Jobs himself said that the battery in the current iPhone is non-removable, because he expects everyone to upgrade before it reaches the end of its life.
Just read what Apple says - "and more scratch resistant than ever" - meaning that this glass is meant to protect against casual scratches, and not against the glass breakage during accidental drops.
The point being that the time it takes to scratch the heck out of 3GS glass is more than a lifetime of its battery. I've been carrying my iPhone in the same pocket with keys, coins and god knows what else for several months now and it still has NO scratches. Hence the original comment - the lack of ultradurable glass is not exactly a problem with existing generation of the iPhone.
Just like Mac books, the iPhone will have a small market share but will be very profitable for Apple.