iPhone
- Thread starter mikelove
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Yep, looks like there's no Flash player:
http://www.macrumors.com/2007/06/12/no-flash-support-on-the-iphone/
Which is downright stupid on Apple's part; not only does it make the iPhone less capable of running games than a 5-year-old cell phone, but for any, say, video sharing site other than YouTube (which apparently they've got a separate download workaround for) the iPhone would be useless as well. So Safari on iPhone is officially less capable than Pocket IE.
http://www.macrumors.com/2007/06/12/no-flash-support-on-the-iphone/
Which is downright stupid on Apple's part; not only does it make the iPhone less capable of running games than a 5-year-old cell phone, but for any, say, video sharing site other than YouTube (which apparently they've got a separate download workaround for) the iPhone would be useless as well. So Safari on iPhone is officially less capable than Pocket IE.
So this totally makes me wonder why on every freggin site, anyone praising the iPhone will say how much better it is then a WM phone. WM phones allow for all sorts of 3rd party sw but don't do well as a media player while the iPhone is great at video and music but when it comes to 3rd party sw forget it. For a while I was looking for a WM phone that would not only give me the full benefit of a WM phone but also act as an MP3/4 player. Even with the newest WM phones I am still not convinced that they take the place of a stand alone MP3/4 player. I will NOT buy an iPhone mainly cause I rely on Pleco and also like the fact that there are so many 3rd party programs made for WM.
So basicaly what I'm saying is that I'd be happy with a WM phone as well as an MP3 player.
So basicaly what I'm saying is that I'd be happy with a WM phone as well as an MP3 player.
I don't know of any Windows Mobile MP3 players yet that are quite as nice as iTunes, but I imagine Microsoft will be massively upgrading the media player in the next version of WM in order to keep up with Apple, maybe borrowing some ideas from Zune. But the difference in sound quality should be minimal, unless you're an audiophile, in which case you wouldn't want your MP3 player built into your cellphone (with all of the attendant RF interference) anyway.
There are a number of good (and free!) replacements for Windows Media Player for the PPC. I use Mortplayer for MP3s, which has a somewhat clunky interface, but is a really powerful audio player and completely free. I am completely satisfied with my PPC as an audio player. If I wanted to carry more music I might want to use something with more storage capacity, but so far I'm happy crowding Plecodict, various other programs and games, a fair sized photo album, a small library of reading material and my MP3s on my 4GB SD card.
There are free PPC applications for video, but I haven't tried any yet. I frequently refer to this well-maintained list of "Best Pocket PC Freeware":
http://www.aximsite.com/boards/applicat ... point.html
-Frances
There are free PPC applications for video, but I haven't tried any yet. I frequently refer to this well-maintained list of "Best Pocket PC Freeware":
http://www.aximsite.com/boards/applicat ... point.html
-Frances
Can't believe this, but I completely forgot about the <canvas> tag Apple put into Safari; this basically replaces the one reason why we actually needed Flash, namely, arbitrarily drawing lines / shapes / etc in response to user input. They're also working on adding SVG support, which would do the same thing, but I imagine that won't make it into the first iPhone release.
Anyway, this still means no Pleco for iPhone until there's a Pleco Online, but once that happens there's now a good chance that the iPhone could have access to more powerful features like handwriting recognition and stroke order testing.
Anyway, this still means no Pleco for iPhone until there's a Pleco Online, but once that happens there's now a good chance that the iPhone could have access to more powerful features like handwriting recognition and stroke order testing.
I started using my Treo 650 only as a PDA after it dropped one too many call on me. Now I use a plain old Motorola as a phone. The Windows Mobile-based phone aren't any more stable from what I hear. I also have a work-issued Nokia E62 smartphone, which I use strictly for email through GoodLink. It's very slow, and the keys are very stiff and hard to type on. I think there is no perfect smartphone as yet on the market.
Pleco Online is really more a question of when we get the licenses lined up than how long it takes us to develop it - web coding is something like an order of magnitude easier than writing a program for Palm or Pocket PC, we could probably have an early "beta" of Pleco Online ready a month or two after we had the licensing issues settled. So it's genuinely impossible for me to predict when it might be ready at this point, as the timing of the licenses isn't something we can even try to control.
I've heard a number of people say the E62's hardware quality is less than what one would expect from Nokia, but I imagine the E62's successor is already in the pipeline by now... but yes, I have yet to see anything even close to a perfect smartphone, and I don't think any keyboard-lacking $600 media-player-with-a-phone-attached is going to change that. (this being a jab at both the iPhone and the somewhat overhyped N95)
I've heard a number of people say the E62's hardware quality is less than what one would expect from Nokia, but I imagine the E62's successor is already in the pipeline by now... but yes, I have yet to see anything even close to a perfect smartphone, and I don't think any keyboard-lacking $600 media-player-with-a-phone-attached is going to change that. (this being a jab at both the iPhone and the somewhat overhyped N95)
Some initial iPhone reviews are out.
http://www.macrumors.com/2007/06/26/mor ... e-reviews/
http://www.macrumors.com/2007/06/26/mor ... e-reviews/
The lack of copy-and-paste is surprising, though fine-grained selection seems like a weakness of the iPhone's design in general. For example, without a stylus, a real keyboard or even a BlackBerry-esque clicking scroll wheel there's not really any good way to navigate to a specific web link; pull up PlecoForums.com in Safari and you'll have a borderline-impossible time tapping on the specific thread you want to read. On a more densely link-packed website like Yahoo it would be even more difficult; you'd have to do three or four of those finger-zooming operations to get to a point where you could reliably pick the link you wanted. Of course, within a month or so the market will likely be flooded with third-party iPhone styluses that correct this problem...
Mossberg's something of an Apple cheerleader, though, and it's rather telling that 2 of the other 3 reviewers listed on that page are former Macworld columnists - put the iPhone in the hands of a curmudgeonly John Dvorak or an uber-detailed review site like Ars Technica and the results will likely be very different.
Mossberg's something of an Apple cheerleader, though, and it's rather telling that 2 of the other 3 reviewers listed on that page are former Macworld columnists - put the iPhone in the hands of a curmudgeonly John Dvorak or an uber-detailed review site like Ars Technica and the results will likely be very different.
crivens200
秀才
Is it just me or is anyone else sorta underwhelmed by the iPhone?
OK, it looks cool, but functionality doesn't actually seem that extensive.
OK, it looks cool, but functionality doesn't actually seem that extensive.
[quote="mikelove" lack of copy-and-paste is surprising, though "
The cut and paste is so essential. With my TREO i use cut and paste from SMS messages to pleco very often.
But still, the portable mac os X must hold something good for us pleco addicted people in the future. But this first time around we probably have to stick with palm. maybe the less sexy linux based version from access will be a reality a bit sooner
The cut and paste is so essential. With my TREO i use cut and paste from SMS messages to pleco very often.
But still, the portable mac os X must hold something good for us pleco addicted people in the future. But this first time around we probably have to stick with palm. maybe the less sexy linux based version from access will be a reality a bit sooner
Oh it's a reality, developers already have access to a pretty solid-looking beta version and I believe they're showing it in something pretty close to a finished state at LinuxWorld in August. Whether or not anyone's actually going to license / deploy it on devices remains to be seen, though.
Spent some time playing around with one of these in the Apple Store today, here are some initial impressions.
First the bad. The keyboard is, unfortunately, every bit as much of a train wreck as I worried it would be. The lack of tactile feedback is a real problem, even if I eventually got to the point where I could use it accurately I don't think I could ever completely "trust" it - it's difficult to type a message quickly if you're constantly checking the screen to make sure it was recorded accurately.
Another big problem is entering very short words; there are too many cases where the mis-typed version actually turns out to be a perfectly valid word, "do," "go," ho," "no," "so," "to," and "yo" for example are very easy to mix up (ds and gthny all being clustered together) and since their system doesn't check for correct grammar there's really no way it can know which one you were trying to type.
This is bad enough with English, but if they ever put Pinyin input on this thing it'll be an absolute nightmare - 16 different two-letter syllables ending in 'a', 12 in 'e', etc... And no picnic for Zhuyin either, since the initials and finals in that are clustered together on opposite sides of the keyboard. In fact, because of the Pinyin issue I think if we ever did release a native version of PlecoDict for this we'd have to include some sort of stylus with it, there's just no way you're going to be able to look up Chinese efficiently using your thumbs alone.
I do have to wonder how Apple plans to market this in China given the difficulty of Pinyin input - absent some sort of proprietary keyboard layout, the best bet for them might be to just put a number pad on the lower half of the screen - cell users in China are already familiar with those and can type amazingly quickly on them. Or Apple may just skip the Chinese market for the first couple of generations, which for Pleco's purposes would actually be a very good thing
Some other points: the interface is very slick, though a bit limiting - when I got my first Pocket PC I spent a good day just fiddling around with control panels, loading third-party software, etc, but after about half an hour with the iPhone I think I'd pretty much run out of stuff to do. And what you can do generally takes too long - 4 or 5 taps to do something that would only take 1 or 2 on Palm. The lack of copy-and-paste (or even of easy delete options - doesn't seem to be a simple "clear" button in a lot of places where there should be) is annoying but you're not going to want to manipulate large quantities of text with one of these anyway.
The web browser is very solid, zooming feature is quite nice and almost makes up for the difficulty of tapping on links, though I'm still not sure if cramming a full-width web page onto a mobile screen is the best idea in general - I can get around Pleco.com in the ugly, narrowed version in Blazer on my TX a lot faster than I could get around it full-width on the iPhone. I'm sure a lot of websites will alter their designs to work with the iPhone (possibly even offering iPhone-specific versions), though, and that should improve matters significantly.
Overall impression: I like the fact that they're trying to improve the quality of smartphone UI, but I think they may have sacrificed too much functionality for the sake of aesthetics - like it or not, people are shifting more and more of their computer workload away from PCs and on to mobiles, and the feature-lacking iPhone is a step backwards on that front. The keyboard is such a functional disaster that I'm starting to think there may have been other reasons for it - nobody but Steve Jobs could get up and say with a straight face that this is actually *better* than the hardware keyboard on a BlackBerry/Treo/HTC-something-or-other, but given the number of patents held by Palm, RIM, et al on handheld keyboard designs I can easily imagine that Apple was either unable or unwilling to sign the necessary licenses and came up with the onscreen idea as a workaround.
On the business end, plenty of units still in stock, I have to give Apple some credit for doing a better job of ensuring adequate supplies than Microsoft/Sony/Nintendo did with their game console launches. The store (in SoHo) was surprisingly un-crowded, maybe half again as many people as would normally be there on a Saturday.
And my favorite iPhone joke of the day, taken from the Palm developer mailing list:
Q: How many iPhone software engineers does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
A: None, they never released a third party SDK.
First the bad. The keyboard is, unfortunately, every bit as much of a train wreck as I worried it would be. The lack of tactile feedback is a real problem, even if I eventually got to the point where I could use it accurately I don't think I could ever completely "trust" it - it's difficult to type a message quickly if you're constantly checking the screen to make sure it was recorded accurately.
Another big problem is entering very short words; there are too many cases where the mis-typed version actually turns out to be a perfectly valid word, "do," "go," ho," "no," "so," "to," and "yo" for example are very easy to mix up (ds and gthny all being clustered together) and since their system doesn't check for correct grammar there's really no way it can know which one you were trying to type.
This is bad enough with English, but if they ever put Pinyin input on this thing it'll be an absolute nightmare - 16 different two-letter syllables ending in 'a', 12 in 'e', etc... And no picnic for Zhuyin either, since the initials and finals in that are clustered together on opposite sides of the keyboard. In fact, because of the Pinyin issue I think if we ever did release a native version of PlecoDict for this we'd have to include some sort of stylus with it, there's just no way you're going to be able to look up Chinese efficiently using your thumbs alone.
I do have to wonder how Apple plans to market this in China given the difficulty of Pinyin input - absent some sort of proprietary keyboard layout, the best bet for them might be to just put a number pad on the lower half of the screen - cell users in China are already familiar with those and can type amazingly quickly on them. Or Apple may just skip the Chinese market for the first couple of generations, which for Pleco's purposes would actually be a very good thing
Some other points: the interface is very slick, though a bit limiting - when I got my first Pocket PC I spent a good day just fiddling around with control panels, loading third-party software, etc, but after about half an hour with the iPhone I think I'd pretty much run out of stuff to do. And what you can do generally takes too long - 4 or 5 taps to do something that would only take 1 or 2 on Palm. The lack of copy-and-paste (or even of easy delete options - doesn't seem to be a simple "clear" button in a lot of places where there should be) is annoying but you're not going to want to manipulate large quantities of text with one of these anyway.
The web browser is very solid, zooming feature is quite nice and almost makes up for the difficulty of tapping on links, though I'm still not sure if cramming a full-width web page onto a mobile screen is the best idea in general - I can get around Pleco.com in the ugly, narrowed version in Blazer on my TX a lot faster than I could get around it full-width on the iPhone. I'm sure a lot of websites will alter their designs to work with the iPhone (possibly even offering iPhone-specific versions), though, and that should improve matters significantly.
Overall impression: I like the fact that they're trying to improve the quality of smartphone UI, but I think they may have sacrificed too much functionality for the sake of aesthetics - like it or not, people are shifting more and more of their computer workload away from PCs and on to mobiles, and the feature-lacking iPhone is a step backwards on that front. The keyboard is such a functional disaster that I'm starting to think there may have been other reasons for it - nobody but Steve Jobs could get up and say with a straight face that this is actually *better* than the hardware keyboard on a BlackBerry/Treo/HTC-something-or-other, but given the number of patents held by Palm, RIM, et al on handheld keyboard designs I can easily imagine that Apple was either unable or unwilling to sign the necessary licenses and came up with the onscreen idea as a workaround.
On the business end, plenty of units still in stock, I have to give Apple some credit for doing a better job of ensuring adequate supplies than Microsoft/Sony/Nintendo did with their game console launches. The store (in SoHo) was surprisingly un-crowded, maybe half again as many people as would normally be there on a Saturday.
And my favorite iPhone joke of the day, taken from the Palm developer mailing list:
Q: How many iPhone software engineers does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
A: None, they never released a third party SDK.
I did, actually, and it really didn't seem to be much better even then. Not having used it for 5 days straight like he did, I can't state definitively that it doesn't get better with practice, but the lack of a keyboard "feel" really bothered me - maybe it's just a personal aesthetic thing but when I'm using a text input device I want to either see the keyboard (e.g. the onscreen one on a Pocket PC) or feel the keyboard, and with the iPhone I couldn't do either.
And many other reviewers have had similar feelings about the keyboard, both Pogue and Levy from the page you linked earlier were disappointed by it - Mossberg is if anything in the minority on that. Maybe it's something that some people "get" and others don't, but if that's the case Apple's going to have a lot of returned-and-refurbished iPhones on sale in a couple of weeks...
And many other reviewers have had similar feelings about the keyboard, both Pogue and Levy from the page you linked earlier were disappointed by it - Mossberg is if anything in the minority on that. Maybe it's something that some people "get" and others don't, but if that's the case Apple's going to have a lot of returned-and-refurbished iPhones on sale in a couple of weeks...
A thread reporting some other initial problems with the iPhone:
http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=322382
10 Things that "Absolutely suck" about the iPhone. (Yes I have one)
The fact that it's not capable of recording videos is kind of odd for a top-of-the-line multimedia phone. I don't know if a video recording capability can be added through a firmware/software update.
http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=322382
10 Things that "Absolutely suck" about the iPhone. (Yes I have one)
The fact that it's not capable of recording videos is kind of odd for a top-of-the-line multimedia phone. I don't know if a video recording capability can be added through a firmware/software update.
Seems like it should be something they could add in software, yeah - I can't imagine that would overtax the processor given all of the other media-intensive stuff the iPhone can do, and clearly the camera's framerate is good enough since the live preview mode is very smooth.
Lots of anti-iPhone stuff showing up over the weekend, actually, some of it downright mean but some rather insightful: for example, both David Pogue and Edward Baig from your earlier list of reviewers have iPhone-related books coming out soon and hence have a vested interest in the iPhone doing well. In a less incestuous branch of journalism than technology reporting this sort of thing probably wouldn't be permitted...
Lots of anti-iPhone stuff showing up over the weekend, actually, some of it downright mean but some rather insightful: for example, both David Pogue and Edward Baig from your earlier list of reviewers have iPhone-related books coming out soon and hence have a vested interest in the iPhone doing well. In a less incestuous branch of journalism than technology reporting this sort of thing probably wouldn't be permitted...