My lovely Sony-Ericsson T616 phone is just marvellous. I can use it all over the planet (more or less), it talks to all my other devices using Bluetooth so that I can sync calender and other data seamlessly. But it is old and falling apart. My ipod is a bit frustrating because I got one of the bad battery batch from long ago, and never got around to getting the replacement battery from the class-action suit. So it runs out of charge really fast.
But I’m not one for rushing to the new gadget until something really moves me, and so I’ve managed this situation quite well for some time now. Well, this could be the device I’ve been waiting for – Just announced by Apple at the CES in Las Vegas MacWorld in San Francisco:
Oh my. The iPhone!
It’s a phone – with no buttons! great! It can be used in many different regions, it’s also an ipod, and you can surf the web with it… It has a camera, and Bluetooth, etc…. The only thing missing from it is a radio. Why no radio, Apple?) And it runs Mac OS X!! It has rather lovely features, such as an on board accelerometer that detects when you rotate the phone to view a picture in landscape – it reorients the image for you. Sounds like more clever and sensible design from the folks at Apple. I can’t wait to try one. More on Apple’s site.
And as usual… it’s beautiful. Really beautiful. I do hope that it is not ridiculously expensive…
[Update: Oh, never mind… it’s just stupidly expenive. I’ll muddle along with what I’ve got a bit longer. Sigh.]
-cvj
Wow that’s great. i’ll buy this.
hey redsox fan…its basically a computer so stop complaining….if u think of it that way, you are basically getting an extremely cheap computer, that fits in your pocket and can call people on
stupid f**kers, that phone is f**king expensive. who wants a phone that is so expensive when you can jet jumped on the streets. its also a rip off because people say that it hasn’t been working. Anyways, i want it; but i also don’t want it. so screw it!
________________________
[Edited slightly ‘cos it’s a family blog đ -cvj]
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The iPHONE sounds pretty cool but does it have video?
As far as I remember, $499 or $599 depending on the storage capacities.
I think they have priced just that bit out of reach. Watch me be wrong.
all i want to know is how much does it cost?
I think the iPhone is really going to rock!
If you like visit my german languaged blog http://www.iphone-weblog.de
I don’t have a radio, but it has an ipod!! I don’t really listen to the radio anyway!!
I just got an iphone from sports illustrated. I keep it next to my football phone and my shoephone.
I wish they made the shoephone with a camera,
SPORTS ILLUSTRATED PHONES RULE!!!
this is the best phone made now the only thing we need is a i game make it nooooooowwwwwwwwwwwwww !!!!!!
Yes… everything. See the apple website. It is a wonder. A very expensive one though.
-cvj
Can the iphone take pictures?????? i mean it sound like its got everything, so why not??? =) Can it also do internet and email???? Over-all what can the iphone do totally?????
hey guys, is this phone out already??? if not, when’s it coming out?? i’ve been hearing and seeing a bunch of different things about the iphone…is this the actual one??:S
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Before anyone gets too excited. iPhone is a registered trademark of Cisco. Looks like fun and games in the intellectual property law arena ahead.
elliot
Maybe you should talk to your old friend Sean Carroll, who seems to be moonlighting as a PC Magazine editor.
Thanks… I know this about BBC radio, but it never occurred to me to think that the same would be true for television! Silly me.
Thanks damtp_dweller and pedant. I will look at it!
Cheers,
-cvj
Clifford,
Maybe you’ve been gone from these fair isles a bit too long to be aware of this, but the Beeb makes the great majority of their home-grown programmes available online once they’ve been broadcast on air. There may be some download restrictions depending on the area you’re trying to download from, but I had no difficulties watching Newsnight in Cambridge MA while I was there at the start of December.
The Newsnight piece about mobiles in Africa was actually excellent. I’d like to see some more specific data but it seems that a relatively simple piece of technology really has made a huge difference there.
Now if only we can get more Europeans and Americans donating their old phones to Africa instead of throwing them out as rubbish…
And this is the real impact of the iPhone and Apple TV on a variety of industries.
A minor earthquake, to say the least.
http://www.blackfriarsinc.com/blog/2007/01/nine-ways-apple-inc-just-changed.
The NYT preview – based on an hour playing with the device,
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/10/technology/10cnd-pogue.html
by David Pogue has the following which may answer Bee’s question:
X … Thanks!
-cvj
The Economist already has such a story:
http://www.economist.com/business/displaystory.cfm?story_id=E1_SRSJJTR
Excerpt:
“…(from The Economist) Companies are being started and successfully built in many African countries, especially in banking, retailing and mobile telephones. The regionââŹâ˘s economy is growing steadily (see chart 1) and could expand by 5.8% this year. In part this is because of a commodities boom and debt forgiveness. But more peace, political stability and better economic management have done their bit, too.
ââŹÂŚWhen Celtel, a mobile-phone operator, set up in Zambia eight years ago, it concentrated on the densely populated corridor between Victoria Falls (on the border with Zimbabwe), Lusaka and the industrial copper belt. This was thought to be the only area in which to do business. Yet in 2003, the company decided to invest in rural services, too, and was astonished at the result.
Although most rural customers had never used a telephone, they were keen to have one. This encouraged more people in the cities to obtain mobile phones to talk to relatives in the countryside. The introduction of Me2U, a service that allows callers to use text-messaging to send airtime credit to other mobiles, provided a further boost. Most people do not have bank accounts and the service has become a convenient and cheap way to transfer money. In villages it has also emerged as a substitute for cash, with people using airtime to pay for their shopping. Shopkeepers cash in their accumulated phone credits with people who make money by offering callers use of their mobile phones as a sort of public phone. Within the past two years, CeltelââŹâ˘s Zambian customers have grown from 70,000 to over 1m…..”
Hi,
No, I have not seen it because:
(1) I’d have difficulty watching a program of that name, đ and
(2) I live in the wrong country to get BBC2’s Newsnight and I don’t have the channel BBC America (if that channel gets Newsnight) in the cable package I get. (The next level up is too expensive.)
However, I am aware of those developments, and it has been fascinating to watch this happening… I’m hoping for a good long New Yorker (or other) article on it to digest it properly. (Editors, take note: I’d be happy to make the trip and write the story myself…)
Cheers,
-cvj
Clifford
Have you seen the ‘Geek Week’ spot on BBC2’s Newsnight this week. The contribution on Monday was, if true, one of the most cheering things I’ve seen in a long while. Mobiles are catching on bigtime in Africa (charge ’em up using solar power); in Kenya their spread through the country has been matched by a remarkable upsurge in economic activity, as people are empowered by long range vebal communication and take advantage of a novel mobile-banking form of money transfer. There was talk of leap-frogging a century’s irrelevant tech advance etc. If this isn’t hype, it’s great news. Doubtless even better with iPhone.
IMO, the iphone’s success will depend on how well the touch-screen works (the claim is that it is new technology, newly patented, though touch screens have been around forever).
See how thoroughly Apple has reworked what is a very traditional, familiar interface for making phone calls. My office phone, for instance, has myriads of functions I never use because of the arcane button sequences one has to use. The number of conference calls I’ve been on where someone had trouble muting their phone is countless. Apple has made it simpler. The Apple interface could have long ago been created for desktop phones, let alone mobile phones.
I started wishing since yesterday noon for a iPhone mathematics. Almost certainly the “user interface” to mathematics and physics can also be improved, I think. (I’m trying to read through Choquet-Bruhat-Morette-DeWitt et. al., so perhaps my thoughts are colored by that. đ ). I think the presentation of math and physics is still in the paper technology mode. Yes, there is a difference between the interface for using something and for understanding a subject and becoming operational in it. Still, billions of phones out there are a testament to the hold the traditional way of doing things has on us. The lesson of the iPhone is that there almost certainly is a better way of doing things.
Hi Carl,
sounds like real fun. We’ve had snow the last days, it’s been pretty windy and really nasty. My neighbor is upset because I parked halfways on his spot since I couldn’t see the line. My office is on the Glaswall side of PI with look over a small lake that belongs to a park. I frequently see people running there in shorts and T-shirt, no matter what the outside temperature. Not much bikers on snow though (ever tried? I did, it’s quite a challenge). Best,
B.
I feel so wimpy for complaining about bicycling in Seattle.
We had another rain and wind storm blow in. I got stuck in traffic waiting for people to crawl across the north floating bridge. (Waves were breaking over all four lanes.) A bicycle rider with a backpack pedaled past, though I don’t know if he was headed across the lake. It was 45F. The wind was blowing a steady 25 with gusts to 50mph, and an inch of rain per hour was falling horizontally, about 4 points off his port bow.
Translation: 7C. 40-64kph. 2.5cm/hour. [tex]\pi/4[/tex].
Works with an IMAP or POP3 server or so the webpages say.
Can one receive and send email with it? I mean, without using webmail or something? I admit, I’ve fallen for my BlackBerry. Totally addictive đ Best,
B.
PS: But it looks better than the BlackBerry. Mine isn’t even black, what a disaster.
Doh!
Thanks. Will modify.
-cvj
Actually, they announced it at MacWorld in San Francisco, not at CES.