Posts by fireman

S60 is not for touch

The whole point of the iphone is that you DON'T have to unlearn and relearn anything!! Their interface is something called 'intuitive'. New word.

Okay, I'm being an idiot and confrontational.

But my point is this, S60 has _mainly_ been used for non-touch phones over the years. Not only that, but S60 is not as user friendly as it might be. It's not bad, but it's not amazing either. It's just what we've all gotten used to over the years because it's all we've really had for smart phones. Other than winmo of course and lets not talk about that.

Your points above seem to suggest that somehow MS and other companies don't change because they are scared their users won't be able to use their new interfaces....I don't think that is the case at all. There are many reasons they don't change stuff too much (see vista) but they always want to improve user experience as much as possible. Windows 3.1 to Windows 95 anyone?

When folks bought the iphone did you hear anyone complaining about how it didn't look or behave like their previous phone OS? Because all I heard was people saying how much easier to use it is and what a relief it was that someone had made such a decent job of it.

Surely then if Nokia released an updated OS designed specifically for touch that was AS good or....wait for it....even BETTER that Apples attempt then surely people would be shouting about how brilliant it is - not how it's familiar it is. Familiar is only normally quoted as an advantage when people move to an OS that is even worse than the one they're currently using. For instance, when users moved from a Nokia to Samsung or Motorola (Samsung/Motorola being unfamiliar but not better and possibly harder to use than Nokia).

Yes S60 (the front end to Symbian?) is good but its nowhere near as good as it could be. Don't stay in the past, innovate and improve things even if it means users have to be happier with their new 'difficult to learn' OS. Which wouldn't be the case actually would it because if it was difficult to learn it would be any good, would it.

Yes Nokia is a big ship that turns like an Oil Tanker which is why I'm so grateful to apple (as much as I dislike the way they do business) because it it wasn't for them we'd all still be using 6310i's or K810i. Funnily enough Apple is also a very large company (at least in terms of revenue) but still manage to produce great _new_ (in every sense of the word) products.

HTC really isn't very good

I have an HTC HD and the interface is one of those where the lag is so great (sometimes) that I'm not sure if I've actually 'pressed' the screen or not. Unfortunately the windows mobile OS 'surfaces' quite a lot and although it's not all bad it really wasn't designed with touch in mind. Stylus anyone?

It has the specs alright (which was what I was seduced by) but the implementation is not all that great. And it's get a chunkster, although as smart phones go quite slim I suppose.

A work colleague has an iphone and the things he always shows off is the apps he downloads (often for free, or so he tells me). To us, at work, it seems the apps are certainly one of the strongest points of the iphone but no mention in the article?

The trouble with the iphone is apple. It's not the device that divides people, its the company and the people who own iphones. I think it annoys the techies in us that a device that isn't as feature rich as others still manages to lay waste to everyone else's sales figures. In the Geek world it is fashionable to dislike apple because they don't let you play mpeg2 encoded files in an AVI container natively. And this is perhaps because Apple like to give users a consistently good experience....or so they say....and these sorts of 'fibs', or lies, do wind people up.

But really, it's not Apples' devices or Apple, it's what happens to people after they buy them....they become terribly self righteous.

Still, El Reg should rise above this.

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arse and elbow

"Apple is aiming to get off the back foot"

Why do you think Apple are on the back foot? Because they don't have street view? Is this one of those jokey posts...?

"Google...made great play of the ability of the G1....to display Street View" What does this tell you? Maybe they didn't have much else to show off? I don't know....I mean the phone looked pretty good (for geeks! did you see the differences between screens??!) but I guess google have invested quite some time and money in street view so want to push it out there.

The forum post you mention talks about IMAP. IMAP is not push. The device polls the imap enabled mailserver every 15, 30 60 mins, or never (i..e manually). For the record my iphone works perfectly well. Obviously some users will have problems various features, there are always bugs. This doesn't mean to say apple have removed the fetch functionality used to retrieve email from IMAP servers.

"iPhone, and Android, are forced to use standard protocols over TCP/IP connections"

OK, most stuff works over TCP/IP (or maybe UDP/IP). And anyway, I'm not sure if mobileme uses a standard app level protocol or not but the system does use technology that sends a 'wake-up' packet(s) to the device (over IP) in order to inform it of changes (i.e. new email or contacts update). I doubt this is a standard app level protocol but I don't know for sure.

"owners lording it over their iPhone-touting mates with a cool...feature"

I don't think that the G1 will impact Iphone feel good factor much. I don't really think they attract the same kind of buyer. G1 is much more of a techie device, open; quirky, rough around the edges. It may be able to demonstrate some cool things but then so can an N82. Nokia maps and QIK work on N82. Nothing like nokia maps or QIK on iphone but I don't see the N82 boys lording it over the iPhone crowd. Obviously the G1 is a different kettle of fish to N82 but have you seen the user interface? Someone shows me google streetview? I show them London Cam, and that's before I get started on the user interface, which apple make top priority and with good reason.