Posts by imaginarynumber

There was a time when if you didn't pay for a product, you were the product. Now you can spend a grand on a new phone and still be the product.

Apple are no different to MS or Google. All of them want to extract as much money from you as possible.

Pay for the product, become the product. Repeat and rinse.

Re: Pandora not Apple.

"Have you even actually read Apple's privacy policy ? Read it properly ?"

Erm, Apple do data sniff and use that data to flog targeted adverts from third parties via the news app, the stocks app and the App Store.

And it's no that long ago that Apple used to brag to advertisers about the fact that they knew more about Apple customers than anyone else. Their iAD platform used to allow punters to be targeted by gender/age/location/income/MUSIC PLAYED/apps owned and how and when those apps are used.

From

https://asciiwwdc.com/2014/sessions/510

"So if you were to promote a health and fitness app, wouldn't it be great if you could choose the audience who like to download health and fitness apps, or who like to download fitness and workout music."

Apple may be less intrusive than the likes of Google but the whole "what takes place on your iphone" is marketing bollocks.

Erm. The first iPhone didn't have GPS, hell, it didn't even have 3G. Google maps must have been barely usable when out and about.

Some of us were lucky enough to have grown up phones in early 2007. My 5" HTC had 3.5G, GPS and the TomTom app.

Re: Yah, Yah, Yah.

"In the GSM days, when GPRS was created to allow phones to do data,"

In 2002 Nokia released their first GPRS phone, the 7650. I downloaded the rather oddly named HTML browser (Doris by Anygraff).

By 2003 3G phones were available in the UK.

2007, Apple release a GPRS phone. A fool and his money...

Re: Yah, Yah, Yah.

" There wouldn't be Android if Apple hadn't invented the smartphone."

Strange... when the iPhone was released I had been using a Windows mobile T-Mobile Ameo for months. It made the iphone look like an under powered toy. I had a 5" touchscreen (vs 3.5"), the same amount of local storage (plus the option of using a Mini SD card), more RAM, a faster processor, 3.5G (vs GPRS), GPS (vs erm, nothing), stereo speakers, a removable battery, a "smart cover", a higher resolution camera (that was also capable of recording video), a front facing camera (also capable of video recording), a camera flash, Adobe flash, a desktop class browser (opera). touch gestures (eg double tap to zoom). Oh and I could download apps, either from apps stores or via my PC (vs erm, nothing).

Shortly after releasing the Ameo, HTC released the fat finger friendly HTC Touch which supported swiping etc. before the iphone.

IMO the only thing impressive about the iphone was multitouch- it wasn't however the first consumer based multi touch device- AFAIK that was the 2006 JazzMutant Lemur music controller. And hey, whilst kool, how often do users actually use multitouch?

I know that apple claim to have invented the touchscreen smartphone and even told the courts that they did in the first Apple Vs Samsung case, but to suggest that Android would not exist without iOS would only make sense if you deny the existence of other OSes such as Windows Mobile (which was pretty much a PDA with phone capabilities).

BTW Windows Mobile continued to out sell iOS(/iPhoneOS) for nearly 2 years.

Re: "Apple had no duty to disclose the facts regarding software capability and battery capacity."

My Vaio (by default) os set to only charge to 80%, however given that I do most of my computer work in the pub, I soon changed the default setting to charge to 100%

Re: No, No... It's The Liquid Sensors

Not sure about their laptops but sometime ago 3M warned Apple that the liquid sensors in the iphone could give false positives when the weather is humid.

Apple decided that it was financially prudent to ignore the sensor manufacturer's advice.

Re: Oops...to late? I think Apple just burned the last bridge completely

Works OK but does not receive security updates...

Probably fine assuming that it doesn't have internet access...

#flashbackDriveByAttack

Re: Er, this Doesn't Really Fix the Problem...

AFAIK, they will only repair Macs that are less than 4 years old and I imagine that they will find some way of weaseling out of many repairs- citing 3rd screen replacements or scratches on the lid, insisting that keyboard faults are constant rather than intermittent, etc.

You don't get to be the richest firm in the world by being good guys.

Re: Useless Apple

"There is still an elegance in the offerings from the Church of Jobs but having ascended to meet his own maker, the money-lenders entered the temple and now there is no one to cast them out."

Jesus wept- are you really blaming it on a Zionist conspiracy? Personally I see it as little more than the Reality Distortion field being weaker since Jobs kicked the bucket.

Oh, so "patent trolls" are bad, firms with very deep pockets that patent the obvious are good?

Patents have a value, why shouldn't they be sold by the holder to third parties, regardless of whether those third parties are trolls or not? In the case of patent trolls, they are simply trying to grab a slice of someone else's profit. Isn't that preferable to firms that try to use patents as an excuse to prevent other firms from actually selling products.

Surely the crux of the problem is the ease with which firms can gain patents when they are obvious or where the applicant decides to ignore prior art?

An example that springs to mind is "slide to unlock". Apple persisted to use it as a stick to beat competitors with even though they would have been aware that the Neonode NM1 had it years before.

It is difficult to sympathise with apple given their frequent and repeated abuses of the patent system. Lets not forget that they are currently using Qualcomm's IP and refusing to pay a single bean even though they had previously agreed the terms.

Re: Time enough to find another phone to video the first ?

She was with her boyfriend. I would imagine that his phone was used to film the burning iphone.

Re: Click Bait.

I guess that the staff from the Reg and the Graun can find a pub in London and have a pint whilst they stream the footage of the launch.

Re: How many of you do this sort of weekly maintenance??

I have never owned a phone that needs a protective cover.

I have never owned an iPhone.

Re: Why do people buy non-Apple products?

Sure, no one had ever used a grid'o'icons before Apple...

It is true that the iPhone was the first to use multitouch, however it was not the first to support finger gestures such as swiping and double tapping.

Multitouch, pinch to zoom, etc had been demonstrated by Jeff Han a year earlier and Jazz Mutant were selling their Lemur multitouch music controller two or three years before the iphone was released.

Other than mutlitouch iOS the iphone wasn't all that different to the other touchscreen phones back in 2007.

Re: *imaginarynumber

Indeed, one has to wonder to what extent the jury were swayed by Apple's whopping porkie-pie about being the first to release a touchscreen smartphone.

Re: If Sammy stole round corners from Apple, who did Apple steal straight sides from???

The 2003 HP TC1100 tablet had rounded corners as well

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_Compaq_TC1100

TBF to Apple, they did cite it as prior art in one of their patent applications.

Re: Rounded corners

Sorry but the rounded corners also applied to the shape of the device.

"The iPhone is radically different from the devices that preceded it. It has a

distinctive shape and appearance—a flat rectangular shape with rounded corners, a metallic edge,

a large display screen bordered at the top and bottom with substantial black segments, and a

selection of colorful square icons with rounded corners that mirror the rounded corners of the

iPhone itself, and which are the embodiment of Apple’s innovative iPhone user interface"

https://www.apple.com/pr/pdf/110415samsungcomplaint.pdf

It is true that Samsung used rounded corners on their icons but those corners were much less rounded. Apple argued that many of the samsung icons looked like Apple's, eg the use of a handset at a 45 degree angle for the phone app and the use of a cog for the settings app. IIRC they also complained about the boxes that Samsung sold their devices in and the use of "rubber banding" when you scroll to the end of a page.

I suspect that Apple fell for their own marketing, they even told the court that they had invented touchscreen smartphones.

"Before the iPhone, cell phones were utilitarian devices with key pads for dialing and

small, passive display screens that did not allow for touch control."

Re: IIRC, it was Cisco

Indeed, Cisco still owns the rights to the names iPhone and iOS (in the USA).

http://blogs.cisco.com/news/cisco_and_apple_agreement_on_ios_trademark

"I think the biggest single point is that Apple saw the "phone" as a computer that made calls, while most others saw it as a phone that could do the odd bit of computer work. As Andrew pointed out, the main "customers" of Nokia, etc, were the mobile networks and they were adverse to anything that would *use* those networks to any useful degree and with poor bit rates we had WAP to make it usable, but that was really a misery to use."

The iPhone was yet another in a line of PDAs with phone functions.

Vodafone sold VDA touchscreen smartphones.

O2 sold XDA touchscreen smartphones.

Orange sold SPV touchscreen smartphones.

T-Mobile sold MDA touchscreen smartphones.

Everyone of those Windows Mobile devices had (data hungry) HTML browsers (WM never had a native WAP browser)...

And let's not forget that iOS did not start outselling Windows Mobile until late 2009 (and within a year Android was outselling iOS).