iPhone

[gato]

The user posts on Washington Post's blog are overwhelmingly positive -- even about the keyboard. Apparently, the automatic correction software works very well.
http://blog.washingtonpost.com/fasterfo ... d=sec-tech

It's good to hear that video recording can be added via software. Strange that they didn't have MMS ready for this initial rollout, either. I guess they figure you can just use email.

Well, let's hope they get one that can do Chinese text entry out soon so I can try it out.

My work's IT dept has decided to hold off on supporting the iPhone because its problem synching with Outlook: calendar apparently can't sync over the air and emails sent via phone can't be synched over the air, either.

 

[gato]

A video of someone typing on the iPhone. Doesn't look half bad.
http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=323682
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKfhxMpEGpM
Fast iPhone typing

 

[mikelove]

Yeah, some people in the store seemed to be chugging along with it nicely too - for English at least it probably depends on the person, but I can't imagine I'm the only one who'll have trouble with it, and given the ubiquity of BlackBerries I don't get the sense there are a significant number of people who are similarly dissatisfied with hardware keyboards. And the Pinyin issue is as much a design flaw as anything else, absent a stylus I just don't see any way they're going to be able to get that working well with a QWERTY keyboard.

Really I think Apple's mistake here may simply be that they're touting the iPhone's text input capabiltiies too much; if they'd just come out and call it a multimedia-oriented phone with a big, clear screen but not insist that it's equivalent to a BlackBerry/Treo/Q/E62 for e-mail, they'd get hardly any complaints about the keyboard. Everybody understands that mobile devices come with tradeoffs, they pretty much have to, but insisting on the superiority of an onscreen keyboard sounds eerily reminiscent of the old 1-button-mice-are-better-than-2-button-mice argument; make the design decision for aesthetic/branding reasons if you want, but admit those are the reasons and don't pretend it's also functionally superior when it clearly isn't.

 

[gato]

Yeah, Apple claimed that PowerPC was several times faster than Pentium before they switched over. They sound like the kid who thinks he's always right no matter what the reality is.

 

[panamajack]

nciku.com

While it's certainly not Pleco by any stretch, I think this site (particularly the simple handwriting recon) shows the potential of web apps for the iPhone and other smartphones.

Of course, the site doesn't render perfectly in Safari (much better with Safari 3 though):

http://nciku.com

 

[mikelove]

Interesting take on the online dictionary concept, some of the same community-driven ideas we've been thinking about actually. The content is kind of weak, though, and I'm not sure if they're going to get enough contributors to change that - everyone seems to think that just by hanging their shingle out there on the web they'll get people to generate all of their content for them, but with something like a Chinese dictionary that's decidedly Not Fun to work on it's hard to create a lot of interest. Adding a Wikipedia article on your favorite 18th-century French general is considerably more enjoyable than drafting a concise explanation of the proper uses of 而... The few people who are committed enough to the idea of a free online Chinese dictionary database to put in the time required are much more likely to work on an established / avowedly open-source project like Adso, where they know their work will always be free and will be widely redistributed.

For our own website project I'm pretty well settled on the notion that we'll need paid contributors if we want to get a useful amount of new content - certainly a community can supply feedback / notes / corrections etc but I don't think you're going to get a database of 50,000 example sentences just by asking people to write them for you.

 

[panamajack]

iPod touch / iPhone future

So last Wednesday saw the introduction of the iPod touch, which is basically an iPhone without the phone, complete with wifi, multitouch screen, and yes, no SDK ! :cry:

However, Apple just doesn't have the same weak excuse that allowing 3rd party apps will crash this non-phone. I'd wager that that an SDK for the multitouch version of "OSX" will be released at next years Macworld developers conference.

By then we'll roughly know if the UI has truly taken off or not in relation to other smartphone platforms. Eventually I see Apple selling qualifying (aka quality) 3rd party software directly through their iTunes store ... but only after they iron out the vast majority of problems in the mobile OS first and gain some marketshare second.

 

[gato]

By then we'll roughly know if the UI has truly taken off or not in relation to other smartphone platforms.

Interesting that the iPod started as just a music player but is becoming more like a PDA.

Apple said that it was chopping $200 off iPhone's price tag to gain market on the cell phone market, but maybe it's also thinking of the software market. After all, that's long been the strategy in other hardware markets like video game consoles. Sell the hardware cheaply and make money on the software.

 

[panamajack]

Sure, with many/most handhelds, the user experience is way more about the software than the hardware !

Apple has been very slowly, deliberatively doing a massive u-turn from the days of the Newton, re-inventing first a persons digital entertainment hub (the iPod) to a full fledged communications devices.

The 'touch with have multi-lingual support as they're doing a worldwide release. I'll be very curious to see that in action.

 

[mikelove]

The iPod touch is an interesting development, yeah - I suppose it was inevitable that the iPod would become more PDA-like, but this is a bigger leap than I had thought they'd take this quickly. Still, with people getting accustomed to having their organizer/e-mail functions on cell phones, the best way to reintroduce them to non-phone PDAs is by building them around media players, something phones don't and (without sacrificing portability and/or battery life) really can't do that well. Also a nice insurance policy for Apple in case some new technological development (like Google's imminent spectrum buy) shakes up the cell phone industry and diminishes the value of their relationship with AT&T; the current iPod touch may not include Bluetooth, but you know the could easily add it in the future if they decided they'd make more money off of selling those for use with non-AT&T phones than they would from selling iPhones.

I don't think they're cutting prices to make more money on software, though - Apple has never really been big on that razor-and-blades model, they've always been about making most of their profits on the initial platform purchase; hence Macs cost (slightly) more than PCs but OS X upgrades cost (slightly) less than Windows ones. iTunes was never meant to be a profit center, it was just a way to sell more iPods.

 

[panamajack]

I guess what I meant to say was that iPods have been successful to this point due to their software/OS, not the hardware, much of which had already been done by any other m-p-san player.

 

[mikelove]

Actually I'd say the hardware and specifically the click wheel is the iPod's biggest selling point - I have yet to see a scrolling system on another MP3 player that works as well. Including the iPhone, the finger-scrolling business is very intuitive but it's not as quick or as precise as the click wheel. Certainly iTunes is another big factor, though.