Discussion
mcflurry said:
They had plenty in stock in Regents Street yesterday, although after using the iTouch I don't want one anymore. Maybe a Nano instead 
I thought the same after playing with a touch yesterday. The interface is *really* nice and the "flick/scroll" action very smooth, but I just don't think it's worth £200, especially with only 8gb. I think it's a case of wait and see if anyone hacks the iTouch enough to function as a PDA as well - then I would consider it.
dxg said:
mcflurry said:
They had plenty in stock in Regents Street yesterday, although after using the iTouch I don't want one anymore. Maybe a Nano instead
I thought the same after playing with a touch yesterday. The interface is *really* nice and the "flick/scroll" action very smooth, but I just don't think it's worth £200, especially with only 8gb. I think it's a case of wait and see if anyone hacks the iTouch enough to function as a PDA as well - then I would consider it.
Apple are losing their hacker-friendly image already with this one... it's clear to anyone with any commercial sense that AT&T have noticed the ease of development for the iPhone and realise that a full GUI VoIP app is not far away.... and the iPod Touch has the same OS and frameworks as the iPhone (AFAWK) so no problems there. We're already creating full GUI iPhone apps without an official SDK.
The funny thing is that the EMEA / far east market (excluding Japan) has larger GSM demand, yet demands 3G (and 3.5G > HSDPA / HUDPA or whatever it's called)... yet Apple are letting the smaller USA GSM market (with only two players - AT&T and T-Mobile) call the shots. USA AT&T are scared shitless that the iPod Touch could be cracked like the iPhone, and regular 'USA Blokes' could buy an iPod Touch and use it as a VoIP device on many of their metropolitan-wide Wifi networks.
However, given the iPhone revenue model, Apple have more to gain internationally by selling the iPhone with 3G than they have from locking down the iPod Touch and extending the same lock to the iPhone for EMEA markets - in fact if they keep the iPhone 2G / EDGE but lock it *really* well along with the iPod Touch, then they will IMO destroy the goodwill from the fanboys and restrict sales to those who are happy with their chosen network suppliers. And IME most of the people who buy high-end phones or use smartphones in an advanced way are very specific about their choice of network (here in the UK) or demand that for £300 or more the phone should be SIM-free.
There's little risk in Europe right now that the iPod Touch could cannibalise sales of the iPhone due to VoIP apps becoming available on the iPod Touch. Simply put, Wifi is not pervasive enough in Apple's major EMEA markets. There are some Euro cities where Wifi is universally free but not many. London is NOT one of them. The USA may be a problem but Apple could sell more iPhones in EMEA markets than the USA simply because the iPhone is GSM and the USA market is fragmented between CDMA and GSM. Perhaps Apple have ruled out 3G and therefore realised that EMEA is not a big enough market to really attack? The lame UK-only launch (when I'd guessed at least France and Germany as well) suggests that. Italy would be an enormous market for iPhones due to the (generalised) Italian attitude towards mobile phone fashion - but Italy doesn't allow locked-down single-network contracts by law, so all iPhones in Italy are hacked imports (good business for those who speak good Italian and fancy a punt, and can get good quantities of 1.0.2 firmware iPhones from the USA, by the way....)
Back to the original question - the iPod Touch is a full-on Mac (more or less) in the same way that the iPhone is. As a result it has far more PDA potential than the old Newton (which was revolutionary) and has all the potential of being a real player in the PDA world..... but it seems pretty clear that Apple are either playing very safe and feeling their way very slowly here.... or don't give a shit and have no intention of entering the PDA market. Which would be utterly retarded given that their iPhone software is well and truly hacked now and I'm sure competitors are preparing rival devices for production right now. Will they have Apple's legendary GUI excellence? Probably not. But will they be cheaper? Probably yes. And if they're available on all networks.... and run Linux, for example (easiest port if you're going to rip off the Apple underlying OS) - then they will be picked up on by the third-party software community immediately and be a serious PDA / phone competitor, especially if they can integrate with iTunes (which would *really* worry Apple, IMO)...
If so, the iPod Touch will be a 'consumer electronics' device (spit, spit, spit) for everyone except the hackers. And given the iPod Touch's resistance to hacking attempts so far, Apple are serious this time, it's not like the Apple TV that even amateurs can break into. Unfortunately I'm not an embedded or cellphone firmware engineer so I rely on the guys who are - once I can get into the unix userland and Mac frameworks I can play. But so far the iPod Touch is posing problems that the iPhone didn't.
And that'd be a shame. It would make a great PDA. I doubt that Apple have thrown all the Newton code away (though the iPhone and iPod Touch are smaller, and don't have a stylus, nor the same sort of touchscreen...)
Personally all I need for my iPhone to be a usable main-mobile device is some sort of hardcore-encrypted (i.e. big key, not trivially crackable except the NSA with some huge computers) text editor, so I can store all my passwords / bank account details / network logins / PINs / web shopping details, etc. My memory is bloody good but I'd prefer to have a different login / password for each shop / credit card, and then lock the whole bugger up with an enormous key that'd take more time than the age of the universe to crack theoretically. At least then if a particular shop or bank get cracked, I don't lose everything. And yes, I'm having a go at writing one at the moment. My development skills are a bit rusty now from too long doing business analysis and I have to learn Objective C and the (reversed) Apple frameworks but it can't be that hard. There's an open-source text editor there already, all I need to do is sling a proper encryption method in and call it before the object save-to-disk method...
(yeah, don't start about quantum computing, I know, and I know it's not an issue I need to worry about just yet)
cyberface said:
And that'd be a shame. It would make a great PDA. I doubt that Apple have thrown all the Newton code away (though the iPhone and iPod Touch are smaller, and don't have a stylus, nor the same sort of touchscreen...)
It would be an absolute travesty if Apple don't follow through on this. If done right it should make THE great PDA of recent years. But it does seem like they are avoiding going anywhere near anything that might even smell like "Newton 2".Even with multitouch (I assume Apple just patented their application of it, not multitouch in general) any skunkworks linux thing is going to be no better than the Nokia N700 internet devices. Having spent several years of pain running applications coded by some 15 year old kid in Bratislava (Symbian, Palm, WM - they are all the same quality in the end) leaving the application development up to third parties just doesn't work at a corporate level. Blackberry proves this. Integrated applications are what people now expect, WM6 has enough of this to mean you don't need to load up with TP apps anymore, and the stability that this delivers is apparent.
But if we look at Newton, great though it was, the problems were apparent, seamless integration is what we want now. And even with rose tinted specs on, the Newton was not good at all at this. Apple can't go back to the model of devices running compeletely different, entirely beskpoke, OSes. The iPhone shows the thinking here. Like the way your Mac does stuff ? Hey, the iPhone does it much the same.
MS know this too, WM6 tries to pretend it is a bit like Vista (and fails, mostly).
If Apple were to produce a PDA, the apps would have to be theirs, and come as standard. And effectively be the same apps as you could run on your Mac. Take notes on your iPhone Notes app, seamlessly integrate with the same Notes app on the Mac. Add some cuttings from a webpage to a particular project folder, then scribble on them on your iPhone on the tube. You would need no more functionality than Newton Notes 10 years ago. Just sharable. That would be enough for me to move platforms in a flash.
MS has sort of got this, with OneNote Mobile (which oddly has no ink support). It works very well.
I do wonder if a stylus and multitouch would work together ? Perhaps it would need to be contextual.
cyberface said:
dxg said:
mcflurry said:
They had plenty in stock in Regents Street yesterday, although after using the iTouch I don't want one anymore. Maybe a Nano instead
I thought the same after playing with a touch yesterday. The interface is *really* nice and the "flick/scroll" action very smooth, but I just don't think it's worth £200, especially with only 8gb. I think it's a case of wait and see if anyone hacks the iTouch enough to function as a PDA as well - then I would consider it.
Apple are losing their hacker-friendly image already with this one... it's clear to anyone with any commercial sense that AT&T have noticed the ease of development for the iPhone and realise that a full GUI VoIP app is not far away.... and the iPod Touch has the same OS and frameworks as the iPhone (AFAWK) so no problems there. We're already creating full GUI iPhone apps without an official SDK.
The funny thing is that the EMEA / far east market (excluding Japan) has larger GSM demand, yet demands 3G (and 3.5G > HSDPA / HUDPA or whatever it's called)... yet Apple are letting the smaller USA GSM market (with only two players - AT&T and T-Mobile) call the shots. USA AT&T are scared shitless that the iPod Touch could be cracked like the iPhone, and regular 'USA Blokes' could buy an iPod Touch and use it as a VoIP device on many of their metropolitan-wide Wifi networks.
However, given the iPhone revenue model, Apple have more to gain internationally by selling the iPhone with 3G than they have from locking down the iPod Touch and extending the same lock to the iPhone for EMEA markets - in fact if they keep the iPhone 2G / EDGE but lock it *really* well along with the iPod Touch, then they will IMO destroy the goodwill from the fanboys and restrict sales to those who are happy with their chosen network suppliers. And IME most of the people who buy high-end phones or use smartphones in an advanced way are very specific about their choice of network (here in the UK) or demand that for £300 or more the phone should be SIM-free.
There's little risk in Europe right now that the iPod Touch could cannibalise sales of the iPhone due to VoIP apps becoming available on the iPod Touch. Simply put, Wifi is not pervasive enough in Apple's major EMEA markets. There are some Euro cities where Wifi is universally free but not many. London is NOT one of them. The USA may be a problem but Apple could sell more iPhones in EMEA markets than the USA simply because the iPhone is GSM and the USA market is fragmented between CDMA and GSM. Perhaps Apple have ruled out 3G and therefore realised that EMEA is not a big enough market to really attack? The lame UK-only launch (when I'd guessed at least France and Germany as well) suggests that. Italy would be an enormous market for iPhones due to the (generalised) Italian attitude towards mobile phone fashion - but Italy doesn't allow locked-down single-network contracts by law, so all iPhones in Italy are hacked imports (good business for those who speak good Italian and fancy a punt, and can get good quantities of 1.0.2 firmware iPhones from the USA, by the way....)
Back to the original question - the iPod Touch is a full-on Mac (more or less) in the same way that the iPhone is. As a result it has far more PDA potential than the old Newton (which was revolutionary) and has all the potential of being a real player in the PDA world..... but it seems pretty clear that Apple are either playing very safe and feeling their way very slowly here.... or don't give a shit and have no intention of entering the PDA market. Which would be utterly retarded given that their iPhone software is well and truly hacked now and I'm sure competitors are preparing rival devices for production right now. Will they have Apple's legendary GUI excellence? Probably not. But will they be cheaper? Probably yes. And if they're available on all networks.... and run Linux, for example (easiest port if you're going to rip off the Apple underlying OS) - then they will be picked up on by the third-party software community immediately and be a serious PDA / phone competitor, especially if they can integrate with iTunes (which would *really* worry Apple, IMO)...
If so, the iPod Touch will be a 'consumer electronics' device (spit, spit, spit) for everyone except the hackers. And given the iPod Touch's resistance to hacking attempts so far, Apple are serious this time, it's not like the Apple TV that even amateurs can break into. Unfortunately I'm not an embedded or cellphone firmware engineer so I rely on the guys who are - once I can get into the unix userland and Mac frameworks I can play. But so far the iPod Touch is posing problems that the iPhone didn't.
And that'd be a shame. It would make a great PDA. I doubt that Apple have thrown all the Newton code away (though the iPhone and iPod Touch are smaller, and don't have a stylus, nor the same sort of touchscreen...)
Personally all I need for my iPhone to be a usable main-mobile device is some sort of hardcore-encrypted (i.e. big key, not trivially crackable except the NSA with some huge computers) text editor, so I can store all my passwords / bank account details / network logins / PINs / web shopping details, etc. My memory is bloody good but I'd prefer to have a different login / password for each shop / credit card, and then lock the whole bugger up with an enormous key that'd take more time than the age of the universe to crack theoretically. At least then if a particular shop or bank get cracked, I don't lose everything. And yes, I'm having a go at writing one at the moment. My development skills are a bit rusty now from too long doing business analysis and I have to learn Objective C and the (reversed) Apple frameworks but it can't be that hard. There's an open-source text editor there already, all I need to do is sling a proper encryption method in and call it before the object save-to-disk method...
(yeah, don't start about quantum computing, I know, and I know it's not an issue I need to worry about just yet)
Whats apps are out for the iphone now?
cyberface said:
dxg said:
mcflurry said:
They had plenty in stock in Regents Street yesterday, although after using the iTouch I don't want one anymore. Maybe a Nano instead
I thought the same after playing with a touch yesterday. The interface is *really* nice and the "flick/scroll" action very smooth, but I just don't think it's worth £200, especially with only 8gb. I think it's a case of wait and see if anyone hacks the iTouch enough to function as a PDA as well - then I would consider it.
>>>patience, grasshopper<<<
I do need a new iPod[1], though - so it won't be JUST expensive eye candy.
[1]I work away a lot, have recently broken my 20GB 4th gen iIod, and there's only so much shit hotel television a chap can watch. Music plus good book equals happy
Edited by CommanderJameson on Monday 24th September 12:26
CommanderJameson said:
cyberface said:
dxg said:
mcflurry said:
They had plenty in stock in Regents Street yesterday, although after using the iTouch I don't want one anymore. Maybe a Nano instead
I thought the same after playing with a touch yesterday. The interface is *really* nice and the "flick/scroll" action very smooth, but I just don't think it's worth £200, especially with only 8gb. I think it's a case of wait and see if anyone hacks the iTouch enough to function as a PDA as well - then I would consider it.
>>>patience, grasshopper<<<
I do need a new iPod[1], though - so it won't be JUST expensive eye candy.
[1]I work away a lot, have recently broken my 20GB 4th gen iIod, and there's only so much shit hotel television a chap can watch. Music plus good book equals happy
TheLearner said:
CommanderJameson said:
cyberface said:
dxg said:
mcflurry said:
They had plenty in stock in Regents Street yesterday, although after using the iTouch I don't want one anymore. Maybe a Nano instead
I thought the same after playing with a touch yesterday. The interface is *really* nice and the "flick/scroll" action very smooth, but I just don't think it's worth £200, especially with only 8gb. I think it's a case of wait and see if anyone hacks the iTouch enough to function as a PDA as well - then I would consider it.
>>>patience, grasshopper<<<
I do need a new iPod[1], though - so it won't be JUST expensive eye candy.
[1]I work away a lot, have recently broken my 20GB 4th gen iIod, and there's only so much shit hotel television a chap can watch. Music plus good book equals happy
...yet
>>>evil laugh<<<
NickFRP said:
So the itouch has a bluetooth chip in it?? and is disabled.. If so then it will surley be able to be used as a voip
Nobody is really 100% sure as it's really easy to integrate bluetooth and wifi in to a single chip these days and being short range an on PCB/in chip antenna is quite possible. Even the guys as macfixit are scratching their heads. Logically though you don't reinvent the wheel so it should have the capabilities of the iPhone (minus the phone bit). It's also apparently got the best audio chip in it compared to the 'classic ipod'. But if it does have a bluetooth IC in it and people get the sucker going. It's a full on PDA. Bolt it to a bluetooth PDA keyboard, headset/phones, printers... you name it.
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