Nearly one in four people who thronged Apple stores from Tokyo to San Francisco told Reuters on Friday they were ditching BlackBerries, discarding Nokias or even giving up Google Android-based phones, hoping for something better.
I cannot believe this was shot with the same object that makes phone calls. What a time we live in.
Today, it seems there is only one cloud icon in the universe and it’s four circles with a flat base. I like it.
Sprint today reported its best ever day of sales in retail, web and telesales for a device family in Sprint history with the launch of iPhone 4S and iPhone 4. We reached this milestone at approximately noon CT/1pm ET.
Gregg Keizer is an idiot:
Preliminary teardowns of Apple’s iPhone 4S have confirmed what rumors claimed for months: The new smartphone is powered by the same dual-core processor used in the iPad 2.
Clearly he hasn’t watched the October 4th keynote, or looked at the specs page on apple.com. I wonder how much he gets paid to write articles like this, and this one, which I linked to yesterday.
Ben Brooks:
Like many other AT&T customers, I am having great trouble getting my new iPhone 4S activated. It is stuck on the screen that reads [“Could Not Activate iPhone”]
Apple’s brand equity is constantly being drained and squeezed by their original launch partner. You’d think that AT&T would get their act together now that they have two compeitors with the iPhone.
“You might ask, ‘Why should I believe them, they’re the ones that brought me MobileMe?'” Jobs said to loud laughter from the crowd as he touted iCloud. “It wasn’t our finest hour, just let me say that. But we learned a lot.”
Apparently not, at least by the volume and variety of complaints users have posted to Apple’s support forums for iCloud.
It’s the first day; of course there are going to be a few issues. Clearly there was a huge traffic spike, and Apple has caught up with demand.
Why does Gregg Keizer get paid to write this crap?
The four ways: compensation, leadership, innovation and focus.
Long story short, RIM is screwed.
The traffic was around twice what we would see on a typical Wednesday evening. There was as much traffic as we would see for a major sporting event (such as England playing in the World or European cups). Such volumes have never been seen before for a software upgrade.
Translation for the kids: Apple accidentally the internet.
Marco Arment:
There’s no longer anywhere to store files [on devices with iOS 5] that don’t need to be backed up (or can’t be, by the new policy) but shouldn’t be randomly deleted.
This is something I also noticed when I was reading through the iCloud developer guidelines. There needs to be a way to cache data locally, for an indeterminate amount of time, and which doesn’t need to be synced. That used to be the (App Name)/Caches/ folder, because it wasn’t synced to iCloud and wasn’t “cleaned up”.
Update: Hacker News user euroclydon makes a very good observation:
Seem like the Dropbox app will have this quandary but on an even larger scale.
Horace Dediu, calling out Gartner’s crappy reporting:
Note how the message changed over time. At first the effect was thought to be temporary (presumably due to “hype”). Three months later the “hype” was leading to “hesitation” in the channel. Three more months and there was “a hit” on Mini-notebooks but only for those needing a second or third device for “consumption”. In the fourth report it seems that “consumers” (vs. business users) are really interested in this. The fifth report suggests that the effect is “minimal”. The latest report suggests that this is a “localized effect”.
Apple shipped 28.7 million iPads in 15 months [1]. That’s some “localized effect”.
I’ve been using the iOS 5 betas since June and I’ve found a few features which aren’t widely-publicised (they aren’t as cool as a dramatically less shitty notifications system).
Just two regarding iOS 5, specifically.
Regarding his experiences at Amazon:
We’re talking about a guy who in all seriousness has said on many public occasions that people should be paying him to work at Amazon. [Bezos] hands out little yellow stickies with his name on them, reminding people “who runs the company” when they disagree with him.
And at Google:
The Golden Rule of platforms is that you Eat Your Own Dogfood. The Google+ platform is a pathetic afterthought. […] Google+ is a knee-jerk reaction,
This was originally posted on Google+, by the way.
It’s kind of incredible when you think about it. Competing phone-makers have had more than a year (a lot more considering the leaked photos of the iPhone 4 prior to its release) to best this design, and yet no one really has. As frustrating as it is to say this, no other phone on the market comes close to this level of craftsmanship, materials, or considered design.
A great review from Josh Topolsky. Much of this review is quotable, and I’m resisting putting his conclusion here. Read the whole thing.
I copped a Wired subscription to test this out, and it seems to work swimmingly. I can see using this extensively on my iPad, but almost not at all on my iPhone. Time will tell, of course.
“Enhance!”
This article suggests it’s because of where Apple’s revenue currently lies. I think that’s part of it, but I think Apple sells enough iPods to maintain them. Perhaps it’s a cooling or power issue.
The iPhone 4S lacked that “new toy” feeling I was hoping for when I got a chance to pick it up briefly. The sad truth is that such Apple events are the equivalent to Christmas day for adults, where you’re hoping to get surprised by what’s under the wraps. The iPhone 4S fails in that front.
Peter Pachal, in a post titled “How Apple Could Have Stopped the iPhone 4S From Being a Dud”:
Okay, the party’s over, we’ve recovered from our Apple hangovers, and the verdict is in: The iPhone 4S is lame.
Apple, today:
Apple today announced pre-orders of its iPhone 4S have topped one million in a single day, surpassing the previous single day pre-order record of 600,000 held by iPhone 4.
Apparently, “underwhelming” and “lame” breaks records.
Although Apple makes the phone and the operating system itself, and although every app is sold through the App Store, the system is far more open than the Mac ever was: there are more than four hundred thousand iPhone apps written by outside developers. Some are even designed by Apple’s competitors […]
Because the iPhone App Store has more apps available in a single destination, that makes it more open than a computer with multiple distribution points where any application can access the entire file system?