Charlie sorrel of wired news reports on nine different ways that you could pimp up your latest toy, the iPhone. I am sure there are many more, given the fact that people from all over the world are developing applications and products to work with iPhone.
Looks like iPhone just became the latest tool for magicians! Check out the video below
In one of my older articles, (iPhone and the business user) I had discussed the importance of iPhone's adoption by business users. Now, after a month since the iPhone launch, businesses are still skeptical about iPhone's prospects in business. Thats not all , some CIO's are even going to the extent of dismissing iPhone as a serious business phone. Cade metz of Channel register reports on a discussion with four CIOs from across the spectrum of business : Google, Hasbro, Levi strauss and McKeeson and comes up with a unanymous answer : "iPhone is not for business". That might be a little too early, I think.
I stumbled upon a interesting article from BBC news website about a taiwanese company, HTC. It launched its touch screen phone a month before iPhone was launched with surprisingly similar features (please do play the video in the BBC page). It is only natural to wonder if some of the features were copied from the iPhone or if the iPhone's features were copied from the HTC. Readers might remember my previous post about apple's touch phone prototypes that go back as early as 1984. So, I feel that we should assume that both these developments happened independently.
Whatever be the case, it does seem that touchscreen smart phones and intelligent user interfaces is the direction in which future phones will move in. As Victor hugo put it, "No army on the face of the world can withstand the strength of an idea whose time has come".
I had written previously about the concerns around the iPhone batteries. This is obviously one of the hottest debated topics in the Mac circles. Taking this debate to a streatch, contributors of the PC magazine (For lack of better things to do) have made a calculator to estimate accurately (?!) when your iphone batteries are likely to die out. Here it is:
http://www.pcmagutils.com/cgi-bin/countdown.cgi
In United states and the rest of the world, people are crying foul over apple's decision to tie in with AT&T for the iPhone. Whether its the customers who do not want to switch over to AT&T because of their existing contractual obligations or it is the operators who want to contain the alarming churn rates, they say the same thing - "free the iphone". What most people are missing out here is the way apple chooses to position itself in the marketplace.
John Naisbitt, authour of Megatrends and Re-inventing the corporation, says, "With luxury goods, here is a paradox: Exclusivity is the name of the game, and if these goods become common and less costly, they lose their exclusivity - and their market," So, in essense, from a strategy point of view, it is in the best interest of apple to maintain the exclusivity.
On of the raging controversies surrounding the iphone's hardware design decisions is the iPhone's battery. As you are aware, iphone's batteries are soldered onto the main PCB and are not meant to be changed. Customers are going to be concerned because of this fact. For one, heavy phone users are not going to like this as they would not like to get stranded if the onboard batterry dies down and they cannot get back on to their phones by swapping a charged stand by battery. Second, this is possibly going to cause maintenance problems as well. If the battery needs replacement, chances are, you might need to replace the entire iphone as there is no way to seperate out the battery. We all know what a pain that would be - considering that we need to do backups from the iphone onto our PCs and from our PCs back to the new iphones.
Ofcourse, we need not be concerned about the problems as the phone itself is quite new and in all possibility, the battery should work fine for a year or so. After that? don't look at me. Apple has to provide an asnwer. It better be a good one since it has one whole year to think of one.
