January 09, 2007
All the speculation is over, the iPhone is real! And it looks spectacular!
It's not the money for me, it's the possibility of having to charge the damn thing twice a day. My cell phone is too important to me to have a dead battery and that already happens way too often now (even having to charge it every 4 days or so).
Yeah, it's super awesome! Oh wait...
Nate, try the current "smartphones" like the Treo I have. You need to charge it at least every night so this is nothing new.
Hab. Super-duper awesome!
So, what does that article tell me about who gets to use the "iPhone" name? It just says they "came to an agreement" but not what the agreement is.
mrflip, soku, and I were all talking about modern phones and other devices the other day. mrflip (much like Andy Rooney) is convinced that you could make a fortune selling stripped-down devices with minimal functionality to senior citizens (for instance). His anecdote about his grandmother's boombox is priceless (you should hear it some time, really). Anyway, there are people making money this way by selling very low cost phones to third-world countries. soku and I agreed that we'd certainly consider buying such a phone for ourselves.
I strongly suspect that if you took the time spent developing the color screen, mp3 player, FM radio, walkie-talkie, PDA, IM, and push e-mail capabilities and instead engineered a better actual phone you could have something that lasted for 2 weeks on a charge and never had a lick of white fuzz in the background. This is something I would buy. I had a slick Sony-Ericsson phone with all sorts of widgets but it couldn't make an actual phone call to save its life. It was a complete disaster. soku burned through 3 RAZRs before she got one that even functioned the first day and after less than a year she had to get a new phone entirely because that POS couldn't get through 5 minutes of conversation before unceremoniously dumping the caller.
So every couple years (as the old one would wear out) I'd go buy my grandmom a boom box so she could listen to Benny Goodman, Bing Crosby, or the weather. I would take the thing home, get it out of the box, and tape off all the buttons except "Play," "Stop," and "Eject." To these I would attach large labels with 1" tall letters; the others were entirely superfluous and would remain ignored. I'd tune the radio to one FM station and one AM station, and leave her totally in business: with a box that did everything she needed, nothing she didm't, and had buttons she could read.
Now you're telling me you couldn't take a Fisher Price Boom Box, change the colors, and make millions marketing them to oldsters?
My mom, meanwhile, has owned three iterations of exactly one cell-phone. She does not text-message or take photos on her camera and would not even if she new how. She does not care about ultra light weight or das blinkenlights. She only cares that it has 10 digits, a phone book (set up by mrflip.com tech support personnel), be build solid and fit in her purse. If they sold a phone with the largest possible buttons and the smallest possible featureset she'd buy that brand and never look back.
Funny flip - I have the non-CD version of the Fisher Price Boom Box. Yeah, the mics work - unlike the CD version - mine has two - for those who want to rock out with their friends and their favorite MC (Escher's mine).
I keep picturing the sweet cell phone from napoleon dynamite. That had neither blinking lights nor was lightweight. and gosh! with that non-internal antenna, it probably didn't have much background noise either.
So, since baby-boomers and those that made them are sort of a big market, why doesn't anyone market gadgets to them, with big buttons and ease of use? Pride?
Baby Boomers are too distracted by ads for Financial Management companies featuring Dennis Hopper.
Dennis Hopper? Fuck, I still can't believe that.
The senior cellphone is out there. You just have to read chinese to be able to use it.
An extra loud ringer...to wake mrflip up!
Christian Marclay's "Telephones" (1995) -- apparently Apple asked him if they could use "Telephones" for their ad; he refused; so they ripped it off. Sucky. more Marclay. (thanks for this and 80% of today's links, kottke)
GTalk for iPhone -- though I'm sure 7/11 will bring even more starry-eying wonders
Are you putting your old iPhone on sale, mrflip? I noticed you added some photographs on Flickr.
So the first gen ones are selling used for $350 -- which pays for a new iPhone 3G plus either the upgrade to 16GB or the vig on my first year's service contract. Worth it say I.
Watching the prices makes me wonder how to build a futures market or brokerage for some of the commoditized products. There already are for tickets; that's easy (minimal shipping, preexisting distribution structure). It's hard to see how to build one for a tangible product (significant transportation costs) with quality variations (need to proxy the signaling or accountability mechanism).
Who is going to buy a used first generation iPhone for that price when they can buy the new iPhone 3G?
My understanding is that the former are far easier to hack than the latter are.
What has mrflip hacked on the old iPhone and that is willing to hack into the new iPhone?
The old ones can be easily unlocked to work on any carrier; the new ones will be locked the fuck down, and can't be activated except by an AT&T rep in an AT&T store.
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Well, at $600 and a Cingular contract I don't see myself getting one any time soon. Still looks really cool.
posted by splatnikGanglion at 02:07PM CST on January 09