RIM had a complete internal panic when Apple unveiled the iPhone in 2007, a former employee revealed this weekend. . . “Imagine their surprise [at RIM] when they disassembled an iPhone for the first time and found that the phone was battery with a tiny logic board strapped to it.”
RIM Thought iPhone Was Impossible in 2007
47 Comments
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2010-12-28 10:07 pm
2010-12-29 10:53 pm
Touchscreen phones DO have a terrible battery life. It’s part of why they are terrible as phones.
What RIM didn’t understand is that Apple would manage to sell it to people anyway. They didn’t learn the iPod Shuffle lesson.
Edited 2010-12-28 09:24 UTC
The iPhone is revolutionary because of what it did to the market. The device in and of itself is FAR from innovative.
Grab any PalmOS 5.4 device (Tungsten E2 or something), and be amazed at just how much the iOS works, functions, and feels exactly like PalmOS.
You obviously don’t know what innovation means (some help: it has to do how good a thing sells which has to do with a product as a whole).
Oh, I see. Apple did only copy Palm with the iPhone ..
And a Tungsten feels like iOS? You mean because both have a screen? I guess that explains Palm success story ..
*LOL*
We should keep on posting some more undeniable truths about Apple and their products. How about:
– They never innovate. Like MS, they’re the typical followers, coming to market after everybody else has released a similar product.
– Their success is solely based on “loyal” (translated: stupid) customers, that buy regardless of value (just because Steve says so).
– Most of use would have rather liked to stay with Windows DRM and incompatible online music shops, limited rights to burn music, complicated sync software, etc., but people where forced to buy from iTunes because of marketing brainwashing (Steve Jobs is actually a very talented hypnotist).
– The ergonomics of Nokia, Motorola, WinMo, etc. phones where almost as good as the iPhone’s in 2007. People just didn’t knew that because nobody told them so. Actually, all those companies were only millimeters from releasing their own user centered phone OS that was actually made to be used (and not only to show off features that were badly implemented).
– Apple has no clear vision of a product. They’d rather put everything and the kitchen sink in a product no matter how bad software support or user ergonomics are. That’s why there are tonnes of third-party apps – these are actually just bug fixes dressed in green.
– The iPod was not innovative. It just happened to sell well because – well .. ? (Maybe because they started selling it on a Friday?)
– Since Apple has no ideas and does not innovate, they simple resized the iPhone and called it iPad. How boring!
Not what I said.
Palm almost singlehandedly created the PDA market. Palm basically invented the smartphone, and was incredibly successful with it. How fast Apple fanboys forget on whose innovations the iPhone was built. The iPhone wasn’t created in a void.
Anyone without a ZOMG-APPLE-WTF-SPARKLES!!!1!!-mentality can see the deep similarities between PalmOS and iOS. iOS is basically the PalmOS adapted for finger input – which is good (I have an iPhone), but hardly as revolutionary as so many blindly make it out to be.
Thom, you talk as if there can only be one innovative company. Both Palm and Apple innovated in the smartphone space.
What Palm did was innovative. They (Palm & Handspring) created the smartphones. Their main focus was business & power users.
What Apple did was innovative too. They made smartphones appear simple and attractive to regular users. It wasn’t just marketing. They invested a lot of time, money and effort into making the iPhone intuitive. iPhone was the first phone designed with the internet in mind. It had a browser that was superior to the majority of desktop browsers at the time. That is a very big deal. It was the first phone to ditch a physical keyboard to allow a much bigger & higher-res screen.
Each of these separately might seem small. But together they created a device that was a huge leap forward from what was available on the market, or what anyone else was working on.
ps. I own a nokia, not an iPhone. But I can still appreciate that the iphone was really impressive. I watched the video and was pretty amazed with how smooth and easy it looked.
This story was actually not about PDAs.
Actually, they were not successful at all. Success is not measured by being first or making the most inventions. If you are not able to bring something to the market that appeals to customers on the long run, you’re out. That’s what happened to Palm.
And? It was also build on the innovations in microprocessors technology, software technology, display technology, etc. Do we now mention IBM, Sharp, Sony, Borland, the MIT, the Frauenhofer Institute, etc. every time we talk about a tech gadget?
What about the underlying *nixoid kernel of iOS? Shouldn’t we therefore praise the inventors of *nix?
And was Palm building it’s products without building on innovations from others, too? What about those?
Furthermore, do you know the Apple engineers personally or how do you know what kind of products they were thinking of when the build the iPhone?
This was about innovation, not revolution. Innovation is very rarely revolutionary: It’s about bringing a new mixture of mostly well known elements (including non-technical things like price or support) successfully to the market.
About the level of innovation: I can’t remember concurrent PDA makers making statements in the press when Palm released a new product. Do you remember Balmer laughing desperately in an interview when Palm released the Tungsten because he knew that WinCE will not cut it anymore?
I think it’s funny that this article is about the reaction of RIM which is interesting because it tells us a lot about the state of cell phone / smart phone software and OSs in 2007 and the mindset of industry leaders at that time and yet – you try to talk about Apple, trying to downplay what they did ..
Absolutely right.
And when we talk about the Palm PDA, how different was it’s basic user interface from the original Mac. It has a grid of icons, and similar UI elements to the Mac & LISA.
Did that mean that it wasn’t innovative? Of course not.
I’m not downplaying what they did. I’m downplaying what Apple fanboys THINK Apple did.
Crucial difference.
You should IMHO take a long hard look into the mirror.
“Apple-hater” doesn’t cut it because in the end, it’s not about Apple. Fanboyism alike, it has more to do with the urge to tell everybody how he/she has to see the world or what should be considered important and what not.
I guess most people in this forum have this problem to some extend (me included), preventing any good discussions ..
Not quite true, since the basis of the article was RIMs belief that smart phones weren’t capable of anything more than PDA-type functionality.
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Just curious, would you consider Commodore to be successful? On the one hand, they created the world’s most popular computer ever and basically made home computing mainstream. On the other hand, they basically no longer exist.
Success is fleeting, just ask Apple. Back in the 80s, they developed an innovative platform with a GUI that re-defined how people would interact with their computer. It was ground-breaking, people raved about it. It created opportunities for developers to do new and different things. It virtually created the concept of desktop publishing and other things we take for granted today. In fact, the then-CEO of a particular Seattle-based software company referred to it as the future of computing and they launched a suite of business applications for it. People around the world logged into BBSes to post messages about how superior it was. It was destined for success.
And yet they still fscked it up and nearly tanked the company. Seems their CEO at the time confused their first-to-market success with validation of his my-way-or-the-highway attitude of how the market should work. A scrappy but aggressive and well-funded competitor had a vision of a more open, accessible platform that ultimately surpassed the Apple product. Even worse, that competitor was originally a partner.
Of course, it didn’t happen overnight. Took a few iterations of the product before it really caught on, and it never really offered quite the same quality of user experience as Apples product did. It did, however, offer consumers a much wider choice of solutions of varying price/performance/feature points than Apple was able to offer. This company also embraced OEMs and developers much more openly than Apple did. Seems that this choice and flexibility ultimately won the market over user experience. By a very wide margin. Cost the Apple CEO his job.
Success is fleeting. If you’re going to dismiss Palm so smuggly, remember that they not only made the PDA mainstream, they succeeded where Apple had failed with the Newton. Most modern smartphones have some heritage in the original Palm Pilot. There’s nothing wrong with that, the Palm Pilot, much like the original iPhone, was the right product at the right time with the right combination of features and usability for people that didn’t even realize they needed it. The Treos during their prime were second only to Blackberries as the corporate platform of choice.
Secondly, remember Apple’s history. The iPhone was an innovative product, it re-launched the “smart phone” and earned a first-to-market advantage for doing so, and deserves the success it has achieved. It also rightly smacked the other mobile manufacturers upside in doing so. However, this is a very small market right now relative to the growth it offers. Apple’s revenue is a drop in the bucket for what this market is going to ultimately represent a few years down the road.
Is Apple’s current success representative of their ability to reach a wider market, or are they limiting themselves to a limited market versus Android’s less-then-perfect but more accessible approach, and RIMs bulletproof enterprise appeal? Apple is staking their future on mobility products, as opposed to the Macs where they were content to dominate a smaller segment of the market.
Considering the iPhone has been on the market for only four years, and they are running against some much more entrenched and/or aggressive competitors, I think it’s wrong to dismiss Palm so easily versus Apple’s success. Apple would actually be smart to not only view their own history, but Palm’s as well, for examples of how to blow a market lead and learn from that. The future is yet to be written.
Not soley, but largely. Apple makes something and you’ll know about it. Largely free marketing. Dell makes something and very few people will know about it. BUT, this is due to their recent track record of making good, innovative products.
Now, go back to 1997. All of apple’s products sucked badly. There were still Apple fans convinced that they were better,faster, more stable, more secure, more compatible, easier to use than anything else, despite all common sense. If Apple tanks and starts producing crap, the marketing advantage will go away, but there will still be a large crowd that argues for their crappy products.
Nokia, Blackberry and Palm’s phones had better erganomics, IMHO. I would also argue most average people that bought the first iphones were not familiar with Palms or nokias. They didn’t have the same level of wow as the iphone. But they rapidly improved the product from just a “Gee wiz” factor to a better phone pretty quickly.
Thank you. Very polite!
Believe it or not: A successful marketing strategy is part of a successful product (some techies hate that because they live in an idealistic cloud where better things succeed automatically (although for them better sometimes simply means having a slightly faster CPU or GPU, bringing not much real value to the customers – but this is another story)).
Dell decided a long time ago about their main business concept (mainly hardware assembling and hardware inventory management for business customers). They didn’t invest in software and hardware innovation is bound to what Windows supports (or not), hence they have to live with the fact that they are just another PC assembler selling WinTel boxes (or Android phones) like anybody else that went this way. Not very astonishing that the press does not cover them more: What they do is easily substitutable.
So did all the WinTel boxes at that time, starting from cheap unreliable hardware, the usability nightmare of Windows95 and the crappy base concepts of WinTel boxes.
There were still Windows fans convinced that they were better,faster, more stable, more secure, more compatible, easier to use than anything else.
Let me guess. You never owned a Mac, did you? How can you judge?
(I had the dubious pleasure to support some WinTel boxes at that time and know what I am talking about).
One learns to live with the fact that other people have other preferences and so calling people stupid for choosing what they think is right for them is – well – stupid (and arrogant).
You can’t be serious (not even Nokia thinks that). I have and use a Nokia. Ergonomics is IMHO horrible. The current market trends (everybody copies iOS / Android) should tell you what the big masses thinks about usability of Nokia and the like ..
Yeah, my point is that Apple’s marketing strategy is pretty much this: Announce product. They do some advertising, but it is really a lot less than anyone else would need to do and I think its pretty unnecessary.
How many people know that dell now makes cell phones? Not many. But really Dell was just a non Apple company that I could think of that sucked at introducing and marketing new products. Creative Labs, HTC, Samsung, Sony, HP, Palm all lack the built in marketing advantage that Apple has.
I’m not engaging in a silly argument about the state of affairs more than ten years ago. My original statement stands for itself. But safe to say, I was not naive about the state of affairs with either company and had extensive experience using and developing for both platforms.
One learns to live with the fact that other people have other preferences and so calling people stupid for choosing what they think is right for them is – well – stupid (and arrogant).
Had, past tense of have. Specifically referring to the state of affairs in 2007. Not now. As I said in my post, Apple rapidly improved the Iphone post launch. But at launch, yes I would have preferred a phone with a different operating system and a physical keyboard that made my use of it easier, and had a choice of well thought out applications. As you are pointing out, the tables have turned. Now, I wouldn’t touch Blackberry, Nokia, Old school Palm Treos. I’d prefer Android, or even Iphone. I don’t think it would be close for most people with normal use cases for smart phones ( there are still some black berry addicts who’s use case still makes it best for them on blackberry).
Let alone that Nokia supports as many different cell phone operating systems at a time than Apple supports actual “current” phones.
Just that should tell everyone something.
I wonder how you’ll manage to explain that an iPad is anything but an iPod Touch on viagra. It’s more comfortable to use, sure, but there’s nothing which an iPad can do and an iTouch can’t.
Edited 2010-12-28 17:06 UTC
So sales figures are now the sole factor that determines whether or not something is innovative? I’m going to take a wild guess that you don’t apply that same standard to Windows…
Reading for comprehension isn’t your strong suit, is it? That, or you actually can’t grasp the difference between an OS (iOS) and a hardware device (Palm Tungsten)…
Yeah, why bother with rebuttals that have actual substance? Juvenile snark is much more persuasive, especially when it’s based entirely on lazy/flimsy strawman arguments.
Innovation is bringing something new successfully to market. “New” can be anything, from an invention up to a business model for an existing product. The iPhone was new in several ways: it was a new product line for Apple, it had a new way of contracting. It brought a new OS to market. It had a new emphasis on touch input, etc. etc.
Mind you that there is a distinction between innovation per se and the level of innovation (e. g. the level of innovation for a new additive to an existing medicine that make it more pleasant to swallow is small but still an innovation if the new mixture sells better than the old one).
This distinction means nothing. Because any phone / PDA (and any consumer device) is both: a package of hardware and software. A distinction does not make any sense (where not talking about generic PC hardware boxes here). A Tungsten without an OS is simply unusable and comparing that with any other hardware is like comparing a brick to stone.
The iPhone had some innovative ideas here and there. The finger input was somewhat innovative, but built upon almost two decades’ worth of stylus-based input, and multitouch research dating three decades back.
For most of the rest, the iPhone was “simply” an improvement over existing products, and most notably, took most of its cues from PalmOS. I put simply between quotation marks, because of course, it’s not simple to improve a product all-round. However, an improved version of a product that had existed for ages is not an innovation. Such a product’s constituent parts may still be innovative, but that doesn’t make the product as a whole an innovation.
What many Apple fanatics are saying about the iPhone is basically akin to stating that the most recent Fiat Grande Punto is more innovative than the first car just because the Grande Punto is better in every way, or that the wheels on a Mercedes S Class are a bigger innovation that the first wheel ever invented, simply because they’re so much better.
That’s an idiotic way of looking at things.
Edited 2010-12-28 19:25 UTC
Innovation has nothing to do with success. It has to do with changing the market. For example, you could easily say the Amiga was extremely innovative. Sure it was successful for almost 10 years, but then Commodore died and it bounced from owner to owner after that. But look at what became of the Amiga, before it, Multitasking was something only mainframes could do, it made others want to compete with it’s graphics and sound capability.
While this definition still fits the iPhone, it’s not so much the iPhone itself, but the cult of Steve that pushes it forward. Really, as other posters have said, touch screens kind of suck for cell phones, especially when you want to put it in your pocket. But because it’s shiny and flashy, people bought it up. Only the Cult of Steve could suddenly say “Yes, and we have great new features that no one else has like (semi) Multitasking!” Uhm, yeah, that’s been around for a while there, Steve…
That’s probably what irritates me the most about Apple’s marketing. They release an update and talk it up like it’s never been done before and that they are such game changers. But really, it’s been done before.
Nope, sorry, not even close. Being successful with a product has absolutely 0 bearing on whether or not a product is innovative. Being successful in a market does not mean a product it innovative.
A product can be innovative, and a market failure (Palm Pre/WebOS, for example).
A product can be a huge success in the market, and just be a rehash of something else (no innovation).
Innovation and success are completely separate properties with very little correlation between them.
Right there, you prove that any further discussion is pointless, as you cannot see the difference, thus making it impossible to carry on a meaningful discussion.
Next, your going to have us believe that comparing Android (OS) to iPhone (hardware) is perfectly valid.
Hahaha, it’s so true. Notice the way that iFanboys never mention PalmOS when they’re mindlessly-repeating the myth about how unusable smartphones were before Apple swept in to “rescue” us with the iProducts.
Though the comparison isn’t entirely fair… even PalmOS had cut/copy-paste functionality, allowed multitasking, and let you to install apps by just opening the URL to a .PRC file.
Yes, of course! Those stupid customers ..!
Are you seriously arguing with me on the fact that people don’t buy iPhones for their phone qualities ?
Look at an average touchscreen phone, from a phone user point of view. It’s big. It’s heavy. It’s fragile. It has a poor keyboard. It has terrible battery life. Its notification system makes you want to kill yourself. So does its fantastically uninformative home screen which makes the simplest task incredibly slow.
Touchscreen phones are terrible as phones. People buy them for browsing the web, multimedia stuff, and above all for the ability to kill time and show off simultaneously. They happen to make phone calls and send texts, but that’s an auxiliary feature.
RIM probably saw things this way. What they didn’t get was that some people were not actually looking for a phone when they buy a cellphone – and that Apple targeted precisely those customers.
Edited 2010-12-28 16:46 UTC
You assume that you (and you alone) know exactly what a phone should be used for and hence what’s important and what not. You know that you sound envious when you talk about people showing off and killing time, do you?
As for me, usability features like the address book implementation on the iPhone alone makes it a far better phone than the Nokia I currently use.
And about RIM: It’s the company that sold their phones mainly because of their e-mail capabilities, not because they were good phones. I don’t need to insult RIM customers because they bought a phone that performs better as an e-mail terminal than as a phone.
Go in primary school and ask a kid what a cell phone is. Common denominator will be a wireless device which makes phone calls. In high school, you’ll get texts as an extra feature. These features are well-accepted as the core features defining a cell phone. E-mails, video calls, photos, internet, they are all nice to have, but they do not define the phone, at least as of today.
(Though I heard that in the US e-mailing from a phone is more common, so maybe it’ll be listed as a core feature of a cellphone by kids, though I doubt it)
My mind is not twisted enough to believe that when someone says “I dislike”, it means in fact “I like”. It’s something I’ve often heard in the mouth of teenage boys trying to understand a love interest without having enough actual information to base their thoughts on, and it generally has ended badly for them. Now, if thinking that makes you feel better…
And it’s precisely usability which makes me prefer my current Nokia over any touchscreen phone. The most beautiful aspect of usability is that there isn’t a single user to satisfy.
About address book, here’s an example of well-thought usability in that area on my nokia phone (running symbian) :
-Take the phone out of your pocket and unlock it
-Type the first letters of a contact’s name (either first or last, it doesn’t matter)
-The contact is automatically selected, a little arrow directed to the right informs you that options are available by pressing the right arrow.
-When you do so, you get a list of common interactions with that contact : making calls, writing texts, MMS, mails…
I have only pressed a few keys keys and remained on the home screen all the time, but I have already access to the most common tasks of my phone already through a simple and highly efficient interface. Symbian is sure clunky in places, as an example the settings panel is horrible, but its home screen is just made of pure genius. It does perfectly what a home screen is here for : giving an overall view of what’s happening, and giving (very) quick access to the common functions of the phone.
They’re not that bad as phones, if you’re more into texting than talking and consider the keyboard-based ones (the clickable screen of the Storm did not convince me). I tried a friend’s one, and though I dislike the UI, I must admit that their idea of putting some space between keyboard keys make sense when you want to avoid mistyping. The drawback being that their edgy shape hurt fingers more.
Ding-ding-ding-ding, someone who gets it! In other words, the iPhone appeals largely to a market segment so lame that no other smartphone maker was willing to condescend to it.
Despite the 3 years of overblown gushing from iFanboys, the iPhone still has almost no presence among business who use handheld devices to do real work (instead dicking around on twitter and facebook all day).
Due to its better support for Exchange ActiveSync, we have more iPhones an iPod Touchs among our staff than we do Android-based phones. They just sync better with our Zimbra server, and provide nicer e-mail apps. Android 2.1 and above is much better, and you can install other e-mail/sync apps, but it’s not as easy to setup as an iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad.
And the BlackBerry devices are a pain, due to the extra layer (BB Enterprise Server running on Windows Server) required for the sync services.
We add about 2 staff iPhones per month, usually switching away from BB devices.
BB devices have gone downhill since the introduction of the original Storm. And they’ve been stagnant for several years before that. Right now, the only reason they are still used in business environments is due to momentum and currently installed user base.
See, this is the kind of thing I don’t get when people analyze Apple’s products. Sure, touchscreen phones have worse battery life than phone with smaller screens – that is kind of obvious, and I don’t think anyone would claim Apple’s success thus far has been due to superior battery life…
Its that last part, “It’s part of why they are terrible as phones”. So your reasoning is thus:
1. Touchscreen phones have poor battery life in comparison to more traditional designs.
2. More traditional phones function well as phones.
Conclusion: Touchscreen phones are terrible phones.
1 and 2 have nothing at all to do with each other, and neither logically lead to your conclusion. Yes, I’m sure you have other reasons why you don’t like touch screens, and probably lots of what sound like rationale reasons why iPhone’s suck in comparison to whatever-it-is-you-prefer, but Id rather not hear them, because you are just grasping for reasons to support a conclusion you’ve already reached.
I grow tired of the whole “zealotry” argument when it comes to explaining Apple’s success in the market. Lets look at some real reasons why iPhone was successful:
1. It had good enough battery life. Apple was smart enough to realize that if you put enough functionality in the device, the tradeoff was worth it to most users. 6-8 hours of hard use on a charge was good enough for most people.
2. They figured out a way to make touchscreens work well enough that the gain in usable screen area offset the lose of a hardware keyboard. Most users prefer having a nice big screen if given the option.
3. They used high quality materials (aluminum backplate, glass screen, etc.). It costs somewhat more, but since they were building a device that did not compete on cost anyway they could pad their margin and still make money. Most user prefer a device that feels solid and has no flex in it if given the option.
4. They spent a lot of R&D on miniaturization of the logic board. They realized that in a device like this the size of the logic board is one of the most critical aspects of its design – if you can managed to build a successful device with fewer components you can gain cost advantages once you reach high enough volumes.
5. People wanted more than a phone, and the mass market wanted more than a smart phone. If they made it more about entertainment than productivity it would open it up to the larger consumer market. Existing smart phones at the time were mostly about email, communications, and line of business apps. iPhones were about music, video, and the web. Some people needed the former, but most people wanted the later.
I could go on, but my point is really that Apple understands design tradeoffs very well, and they understand what market they want to target and how to do it. You can’t rationally explain the success of iPhone’s through zealotry, that simply ignores boatloads of evidence to the contrary. They designed a device that a lot of people wanted, and they did so through disciplined marketing and a excellent engineering.
On the other hand, they certainly do some things that rub a lot of people the wrong way. I’m not trying to cheerlead for Apple or anything like that, but I believe in giving credit where credit is due. The original iPhone at the time of its release was truly a ground breaking device, and trying to claim otherwise is simply ignoring reality. Market success certainly bears that out.
To sum it up, there are better phones than the iPhone, but no one cares because no one buys phones anymore. The reason they don’t buy phones IS the iPhone. If that isn’t a testament to its success I don’t know what it…
Not really. I developed my point of “touchscreen phones are terrible phones” in more details in another post of this thread. If you want (but it looks like you don’t), I can go in more details about each argument, in this case I’ll be more precise about this one.
Lasting long on battery is in my opinion a desirable quality of a cellphone, because it’s something you want to carry around anywhere and keep on all day. Being able to do without the power adapter if you forget it when visiting a relative (and I don’t know about you, but I do that often), without having to change much the way you use your phone in order to make it last longer, is a desirable quality.
More than being able to comfortably browse the web or watch videos in full screen, since those are auxiliary functions of a device whose fundamental goal is to make and receive phone calls and texts.
Now, you might say that the fundamental goal of an iPhone is not to be a phone. And I’ll agree with you on that. In my opinion, the iPhone is a wonderful web browsing device, and an okay PMP only waiting for the disappearance of iTunes to become a great PMP. It’s a perfect device for being a geek on the go, or for showing that you have a lot of money to spend on shiny gadgetry (e.g. if you’re an executive and want to display prominently your status to employees who have a lower place in the company’s hierarchy). It just horribly sucks as a phone. And my point was that RIM could have stayed focused on that. That’s all.
And 3h30 is good enough for a laptop, once you’ve got the proper usage patterns. That doesn’t make a laptop equipped with a PixelQI screen and an ARM processor, being good enough for work but able to last a whole holiday on battery, less desirable. Because again, forgetting my power adapter or going in a place without a working power socket would be less penalizing.
For making calls, the screen of the nokia 3310 was already sufficient ^^. For texting (or even e-mailing), you do not benefit from the large screen at all, since the keyboard ends up eating even more screen estate than a physical keyboard (needed due to the lack of haptic feedback), leaving you with only a few lines of text when you want to proofread yourself.
For phone use, a 4″ screen is overkill. Again, there are things which the iPhone does, like web browsing, for which this is indeed better.
The problem is that it only *feels* solid. Something as heavy as an iPhone 4 will have a large amount of energy to dissipate when it falls. Their gorilla glass may be relatively solid compared with other glassy materials, but plastic is sturdier because it’s more flexible and does not have the horrible unorganized internal structure of glass. A lot of older phones had removable plastic shells which could dissipate some energy in the event of a fall, but the tightly built iPhone does not have anything like this.
For ages, the most robust electronic device in an average household was the phone, by a very large margin. Earlier cellphones perpetuated this. Now, being cool gadgetry seems to become more important than being sturdy for some people, and iPhones and other high-end Android devices illustrate this
That’s industrial nitpicking
For the moment where you can have someone pay $700 for a device made of a small amount of components costing a few dollars each, you already win in the long term, once the salary of the people who worked on the device is paid back.
Indeed. Again, iPhones are terrible phones, but they excel as portable entertainment devices.
The zealotry part does exist though. It’s when Apple and their fans claim that they have revolutionized the tech world when they have just taken several existing tendencies (tablets, PMPs, touch screens) and merged them together. They did not invent a lot of things, they just sold the right set of already existing services, in a well-implemented way.
Edited 2010-12-28 21:09 UTC
Sure it is. But it is a trade off. My point was simply that although you seem to place battery life extremely high on your list of must have features, most people don’t and thus the majority of the market is fine with a 6-8 hour talk time and a few days of standby time. At the time of the iPhone introduction, I would be willing to bet that Nokia, RIM, etc. would not have believed that a device with such poor battery life could possibly be successful, yet it was…
Likewise, I agree that an iPhone is not optimal as a phone – but it has proven to be good enough for most people.
There are 13 and 14 year old kids walking around with iPhones, and not rich kids – just your typical middle class suburban teenager. Sorry but it doesn’t rank anymore as a status symbol anymore…
So your argument is that RIM should have stayed focused on making the best possible phone? RIM never made a good phone in the first place. While I agree that iPhone’s are not particularly great phones, BlackBerries are arguably even worse. Sure the battery life is better, but that is about it. Sound quality generally sucks, the keyboard is great for texting buy sucks for making calls, etc. Nokia made great phones…
Regardless, none of them are even trying to make phones anymore – since that isn’t what people are buying.
I would argue that as far as battery life for “modern” phones go, Apple is already pushing the limits of existing technology. More battery life is always better, but considering what it does an iPhone has absolutely excellent battery life.
Fair enough. iPhone’s are not the most durable devices – I can’t argue there. But again, it is a trade off.
Yes, exactly. That is my point. The gadgetry (or as I like to call it “features”) ARE more important to most people than sturdiness or usability as a phone.
You win A LOT more when it starts costing you half as much to make the device you still sell for $700… You can hate Apple for it all you want, they are masterful when it comes to volume manufacturing. The point is everyone else tries to make the same device so they can sell it at the same or lower price point – in the end they can’t make the same device. There are good alternatives, but except for a select few of them most simply feel cheap and shoddy compared to an iPhone – and the sad fact is by most accounts it costs Apple less to manufacture an iPhone. As long as no one else can manage to build a device that is acceptable enough to the market to rival it, Apple can just keep the price point the same while they gradually shave their costs lower and lower. They will eventually lose that advantage, but not before they make a whole helluva lot of money…
Sorry, but that is the nature of revolutionary products. They tend to not be something completely new, they are usually just existing things merged together in a new way. Its the “new way” part that makes them revolutionary. Apple invents very little – innovation != invention.
Well, globally we agree, there is just a point where I think my bad English has spread incomprehension between us : what RIM and others thought before the introduction of the iPhone, which was the point of my original post.
In my opinion, as they were all phone manufacturers (to some extent), they have looked at the iPhone from a phone perspective. And then they have thought “ha, this sucks”. In my opinion, they have overlooked the fact that Apple did not intend to sell a phone, but rather to sell a spawn of the mythical all-in-one portable device.
Apple were betting on the fact that most people prefer a single multimedia device to carry around, which is okay in each area, rather than several highly specialized devices which are very good in each area.
The commercial win of the iPhone comes, in my opinion, from the fact that other vendors did not look hard enough at what was there – because as phone manufacturers, they had a pretty detailed vision of what a phone is, and did not thought that a phone could be merged with some already existing device. Phone cameras show this way of thinking : they generally do not pretend to be a full compact camera, just something to take a snapshot of your life and send it to people. It’s a different product, which is integrated with the phone idea. Whereas Apple integrated the phone idea INSIDE another idea.
Don’t know if I made myself clear ^^’
Yes, fair enough. I don’t think we land far apart in the grand scheme of things.
I have to say, what I hate most about the iPhone isn’t the fanatics… but how Apple has proven that you can sell a substandard product to the masses and they won’t give a damn because it’s COOL!
It’s a horrible “phone”
A semi-decent “media player” (battery life being what it is, and needless to say “iTunes”)
Horrible “Camera” (did it even support video recording?)
Subpar Web-Browser (Ignoring the mobile aspect**)
And the “Apps” are mostly just profit markets (meaning MANY do very little).
** I know that the iPhone renders websites very well, but don’t claim that it rendered BETTER than a desktop (it is, after all, just safari lite). My point is simply that if you want to browse the web, use a computer.
My ideal cellphone is a CELL PHONE (unfortunately, I can’t find a small, thin, and light phone that doesn’t cost more than the free contract phones [the iPhone is way too big + no keys])
I have a Palm T|X that I use when I need to use “an App”. Sure, they’re not as flashy as the iPhone’s apps, but the battery life is much better and the construction is superior. (Heck, I could load songs into it, but my MP3 player is smaller and easier to “part with” than my TX)
I have a Digital Camera that supports much higher quality photos than the iPhone could ever dream of with more features than the iPhone will never be capable of.
Now, I understand the idea of a cameraphone… I actually like it. What I don’t like is people considering it a viable alternative to the quality that a REAL camera (or digital variant) can create. A camera phone should only be used when you “don’t have a camera”. The new usage to read some form of barcodes is rather absurd (it’s little more than “secret marketing” where the “incrowd” knows what the “secret” is… so scan this barcode today!)
But everything else is just “lower quality accepted because of portability.”
And THAT is why I hate iPhone’s. Because they’re selling largely substandard products to the uneducated rabble and then the rabble act like it isn’t the quality of constituent parts that matter, but the quality of the product as a WHOLE.
As a whole, there is no denying the iPhone is good at what it does. But that should not be reason enough to dismiss the glaring inefficiencies that it presents. Hell, the iPad is a superior web-browsing device than the iPhone will ever be, but is inferior to a tablet pc.
I will never get a smart phone because I don’t WANT a “smart phone” I want something without the bells and whistles that don’t do anything and instead boasts high functionality with a long battery life and decent portability.
But currently the only way to get the features I want is to separate out the devices into specialized sects.
*yes, I talk too much*
Edited 2010-12-30 03:18 UTC
Most people actually do buy real phones. Even Symbian has a bigger market share than Android and iOS, even though Nokia now is the only company selling them. The press, though, is completely out of touch with reality.
Not in the US… Here most people do end up with “phones” as opposed to iPhones/Android devices. But they don’t buy them – they get them free with their cellular contract. Either that or they get bundled with pay as you go plans. That isn’t buying a phone. They are rather like the toys you get in your cereal box…
For people who simply don’t want or care about internet access or email, they are fine – but they are not “buying” them, they are settling for them. They still sell well because if you don’t want to pay for a data plan there is little point in getting a high end device… The unwanted cost of a data plan is why they still sell well, not because people actually want them.
As for Nokia, they do well internationally, but in the US their star is fading rapidly. For example, AT&T has 4 “standard” Nokia models they offer – all of them are “feature phones” free with contract. T-Mobile has 3, again all free bundle phones. Verizon does not even offer Nokia phones at all, neither does Sprint. So across the 4 major carriers in the US, not a single one of them actually sell a Nokia phone directly on their website. You can get them of course, I’m not saying they don’t exist – but no one is promoting them anymore.
Internationally, most of their sales for for models like the 1100, which probably costs about $15-$20 to make by now and don’t sell for all that much more than that. Volume isn’t everything…
This is what I don’t understand about the current smartphones: why does is it an either/or situation with hardware keyboards? It seems like you can get touchscreen-only phones with 3,4,5″ screens, or you can get keyboard phones with 2 or 3″ screens. Why is it so hard for phone manufacturers to make 2 versions of each phone: one with a keyboard, one without. Same size screen, same CPU, same amount of RAM, same everything else.
It’s like manufacturers think that adding a keyboard makes it an entirely different phone, with a requirement of having a completely different set of specs.
Just add a freakin’ keyboard already!!
The HTC Desire and HTC Desire Z, and the Sony-Ericsson Xperia X10 Mini and Mini-pro are about the only phones that do this right (same specs, one with keyboard, one without).
Yay, you can get a touchscreen phone with an almost 5″ screen, but you lose half of it to the onscreen keyboard, so what’s the point?
Because like it or not, the device is designed to work most of the time without any need for a keyboard. Most touchscreen devices try really hard to eliminate any kind of complex user input for most tasks, only resorting to it when there is simply no choice.
The trade off is that when you need a keyboard it isn’t ideal, but when you don’t need one you have 2x the usable screen area (like when your watching a video, playing a game, browsing websites, etc.).
Why on earth would you want to make a device with a hardware keyboard that runs software that was designed from the ground up not to use it? You either get half the screen or the device is twice as big or twice as thick (slider) – there is no realistic middle ground.
Right..because one doesn’t type emails, texts, forms in websites,notes, phone numbers etc. These aren’t complex interactions, these are basic forms of communication.
One interesting statement I read was that when moving from hardware to software keyboard one just types less subconsciously because it is such a hassle to do so with a software keyboard despite the desire to do so.
Ultimately these devices just become dumb terminals for consumption of services instead of being powerful mobile communication and creation devices. It is true that smartphones and their associated services already skew in the consumption direction but there is no reason to cripple interactivity needlessly for those that want it…
Edited 2010-12-29 00:43 UTC
…That are supported on modern touchscreen smartphones, but they are not ideal for such usage. Neither is a phone with a hardware keyboard…. Either way the user forced to use a non-optimal form of user input for the sack of portability…
The same was said about PDAs… It isn’t the lack of a hardware keyboard, it is the lack of anything close to a real keyboard. Many people (like me) prefer a software keyboard because of the advantages it offers, some others, like you prefer a hardware keyboard because of how you prefer to use your device – but neither form of user input is ideal. I even hate most laptops because of the compromised keyboards you usually find on them, so I’m certainly not immune to this…
Hey, if you like hardware keyboards I’m not going to convince you to change your mind… My only point is the device makers have decided it is a whole lot easier to standardize on software keyboards since every single solution they have come up with to date has made at least some small but significant portion of their users unhappy. If some of your users are going to be unhappy with it anyway, you may as well use the method that allows you the most flexibility (it can be changed easily on the fly) and the lowest long term costs (fewer moving parts, easier to manufacture).
In a perfect world, each phone would come in two permutations: with and without a keyboard. Afterall, there’s nothing stopping you from using an onscreen keyboard on a phone with a hardware keyboard, so you aren’t losing anything by adding a hardware keyboard.
On those keyboard matters, I wonder : why hasn’t anybody released a touch phone with a tangible virtual keyboard already ? Something where the screen would distort itself so that you can feel the keys before pressing them.
This way, one would get the best of both worlds : a good keyboard for typing tasks, and a large screen for entertainment. Plus I’m sure that such a flexible screen would have wondrous applications in the entertainment area.
Is it that hard to do ? I can think of some ways to implement this, though I’m not sure they would all work in practice. AFAIK, Apple had registered a patent on something like this, though they never used it to date.
Edited 2010-12-29 11:48 UTC
That’s just it. You don’t need to use a small screen, or add a lot of thickness. Just look at the HTC Desire Z; it’s almost indistinguishable from the HTC Desire.
Plus, a lot of the super-thin phones are very uncomfortable to use due to their thinness. Would it really be that bad to add a few extra mm for a keyboard?
Buy it. If you and enough other people do than it might be successful. Currently, however, Z sales are pretty minuscule compared the the regular desire. It is thicker, and a few ounces heavier, but the main problem with it is the keyboard is pretty weak by most accounts, and the slider mechanism (like virtually all of them) is flimsy and prone to breakage. I’m just saying…
If it was available, unlocked, for less than the current $500 CDN, or if it was offered by Rogers in Canada, than I would. Unfortunately, there’s no way I can spend even $200 CDN on a phone; and Rogers doesn’t have any Android phones with keyboards.
I’ve been playing with it at the bell stores, and the keyboard is quite nice to use. Much better than the one on the wife’s LG Eve.
It’s not a slider, it’s a hinge. Unless people are dropping them, I don’t see why it would be an issue.
We can’t actually see what the former RIM employee has to say since the link in the article is broken. I hate having to follow a link to a link to a link just to read an article…
http://macnn.com/rd/187933==