Tag: iphone

AT&T to customers: Drop dead

Ahh, AT&T, you’ve under-provisioned your network and all those iPhones you are more than happy to sell contracts for are making it easy to, you know, do stuff. And you apparently didn’t count on that. For three years running. The result: lots of data in your under-provisioned network. Who do we blame for this oversight? Why, the customers of course:

The carrier has had trouble keeping up with wireless data usage, leading to slow load times and dropped connections. It is upgrading its network to cope, but AT&T’s head of consumer services, Ralph de la Vega, told investors at a UBS conference in New York that it will also give high-bandwidth users incentives to “reduce or modify their usage.”

Translation: usage caps and overage charges, here we come. You iPhone users need to be hobbled like the rest of our customers! It’s like AT&T is fundamentally determined to go into a death-spiral the second ‘Merican iPhone users can go to another network. Which, it appears, is most likely to be T-Mobile. Sure took a long time for Fucktardia to figure out that Verizon is built atop an incompatible network, didn’t it? But just why is AT&T so dependent on iPhone? Weren’t they turning a profit before? Yes, but:

iPhone accounted for roughly 68 percent of [AT&T’s smart-phone/3G] sales [that make up the lions share of overall sales revenue]

[-and-]

Wireless revenues were up 37.2 percent, driven by “messaging, internet access, access to applications and services,” or [the iPhone]

These are very data users (and the attendant revenue spike) that AT&T is both dependent on and has resolved to infuriate. The plan, in a nutshell, is

“Gentlemen, we’ve run our brand into the ground on the back of notoriously poor service, especially in the dense urban environments where our 3G network actually, you know, exists. Lets really, really take it to the next level by nickel and diming these same users in the last year or two of their contracts. That way, north of 40% of our new revenue streams will head for the exits the second exclusivity ends.”

Great plan. So long, AT&T. Been so nice knowing you.

All that said, it’s still unclear to me why Apple doesn’t just buy Sprint, turn it into a dumb-pipes company, and reap the ridiculous profits that result. Mayhaps they (still) will.

Apple:Sprint::Google:Verizon

Why doesn’t Apple just buy Sprint? While they use fundamentally different 3G technologies, it seems to me that Sprint’s WiMax and Clearwire based 4G service lines up better with an iPhone/iTouch world than do any of AT&T or Verizon’s planned services. Such a union certainly makes radically better sense than the total platform switch into a technological dead end that would be involved in switching to seemingly everyone’s favorite prediction hobby-horse: a Verizon-based iPhone network. First off the idea actually works because Sprint’s already rolling out an essentially platform agnostic 4G wireless network, while AT&T is basically testing improvements on its lock-in 3G network and merely promising a similarly proprietary 4G (using LTE, which is also what Verizon and T-Mobile’s current plans map) in select major cities sometime in 2011 or later. Given a choice, do you really think Steve Jobs selects another vendor-tied (and vendor-constrained) proprietary network over a dumb pipe, especially if said pipe can be had for a song and especially after seemingly four decades of dealing with AT&T, the company that can’t even handle MMS, much less tethering?

But, more importantly, an Apple with Sprint suddenly has what the platform has wanted all along: dumb pipes. The phone becomes an app, and many users could/would get by with an iTouch +Skype or GoogleVoice, instantly becoming a product for which there’s (currently) no comparison, really. Then Apple starts building 4G modems into its desktops, laptops, AppleTVs, tablets, and etc… And BOOM: An always on, fully wireless, nationwide distribution network. It puts Apple directly in competition with the other content providers, which seems to me to be where they’ve been going for a while now. Sure, they are still a hardware company, but more and more of that hardware is purpose built to provide access to the Apple’s ever increasing supply of content. It positions them to own, and I mean own the mobile phone space in a way that would end the very term “mobile phone,” as you market connection to the network at a flat rate for unlimited data that covers your mobile and home phone, cable bill, movie downloads, and has potential add-ons like iTunes based rentals and an all-devices app store all the while utterly eviscerating the current mobile telco’s market that rests on $4000/byte SMS, crippled phones, and so forth. They wouldn’t know what hit them, and have shown no capacity to compete in a market shaped in those terms. Makes Apple’s sudden interest in new datacenters start to come into focus, doesn’t it? That’s certainly not the move of a dedicated hardware company…

Add to that mix Sprint’s money- and customer-hemorrhaging performance of late, Apple’s pile of cash and credit, and then stir in this natural future-products synergy…and you’ve got an interesting development cycle going forward. I think the answer may well come when the tablet ships. If Sprint is provisioning the network service to that device, then look out AT&T. You are a very few years away from utter collapse.

In this way, Apple would be Sprint’s white knight in much the way that Verizon hopes Google/Android is theirs. What both of these phone companies don’t seem to realize is that the light they are currently seeing at the end of their tunnels is the dumb-pipes truck bearing down on them.

That’s why they’ve got 75,000 applications — they’re all trying to make the Internet look decent on the iPhone.

Microsoft CEO and Asshat, Steve Ballmer who might just want to compare the average web display experience on a desktop install of Explorer to an iPhone Safari. Seriously.

The Other End of Orthogonal

Gruber (and others) muse that Microsoft’s competition for Windows 7 customers is with its own Windows XP and with apathy. Most notably: not with Apple/Macintosh. Which is true. Apple has repeatedly stated through words and actions that they have no particular interest in the sub-$500 PC market. They barely have an interest in the sub-$1000 market. True, Apple has a few “hobby” projects in that space, but not a major business push.

But, and it’s a big but: the other end of an orthogonal relationship is the collision point. What happens when there’s sufficient processing power to do the vast majority of cheap-PC stuff on a phone or tablet? Microsoft’s continuing failure in this market is as obvious as Apple’s ongoing and growing success in it. True, you’re never going to word process on an iPhone, but a tablet: could be. Like many, I’ve already found an iPhone sufficient for huge swaths of what I formerly used laptops for while traveling. For many business travelers, it’s probably already there. A truly functional tablet could well eliminate most folks’ entire need for a laptop; certainly, the net-book industry would close almost overnight.

So it seems likely then that Microsoft (and the cheap PC market) will be utterly decimated when Apple (or somebody else) solves the tablet market. Think it through: a wildly successful tablet (or an iPhone type device with far greater capabilities that that of today) would obviate the need for a “real” laptop, would also neuter the crap experience of the cheap PC; who would want a table-bound POS when you could have a doodad in your lap that does everything said POS does and more, only with real usability and ease. Such a development would leave only the high-end market for people that need serious computing power or some other fairly specific, high-end task like a giant monitor. Microsoft is in precisely none of those spaces. Apple is in all of them, and not just in: they’re dominating and defining them in a way that makes follow-on innovation seem more like poor imitation, and gaining a foothold is that much more difficult. Curious that the only one they’re not in is the one they publicly disregard while (quietly) planning to destroy… almost like there’s  a plan afoot.

Chauncy Gartner

A series of remarkably uninformed (yet typical) maunderings coming out of the Gartner Group. First, we have:

Google’s Android will have more than quadrupled its market share by the end of 2012, market watcher Gartner has claimed. But Symbian looks set to remain the dominant smartphone OS for several years to come.

Android’s market share stood at a paltry 1.6 per cent during Q1 2009, but will grow to 14.5 per cent by the time Q4 2012 […] The main reason for Android’s market share growth will, Gartner VP Ken Dulaney told website AppleInsider, be because “unlike Apple, they [Google] license their OS to multiple OEMs”.

I see. And it’s also safe to assume that, even with this remarkable and unprecedented market growth, the apologist claims will remain that Android is optimized for the “next” generation of smart phones.

But let’s address the nonsense about OEMs. While that was somewhat true (or at least arguable) for personal computers, it will never be true for phones, or at least not in the near future. Android is at a serious disadvantage precisely because it has to support a panoply of devices, each with its own strengths and weaknesses which each affect the user’s interactions with the phone(s) in unique ways. This is precisely why the iPhone is so polished: Apple has put real effort into making its weaknesses seem normal, or at least liveable and the strengths seem transformative (even when they’re only relatively iterative improvements or even just a fresh coat of paint on a given feature present in other phones). With even a handful of platforms to support, the OS can no longer be tuned in this way…every little quirk or petty slow-down seems like the end of the world, especially when you’re just trying to call Granny or find that photo. Apple’s rapidly growing marketshare with its one and only phone and solitary, much dislike carrier seem to back this up in spades. This is what they’re achieving with AT&T as a partner! Imagine what they could do with dumb pipes.

You’d assume at this point that Gartner, though wrong, would have more or less shot its idiotic claim wad right there. You’d be wrong:

Windows Mobile’s share will grow from 10.3 per cent to 12.8 per cent during the same quarters

How? Windows Mobile 6.5 is universally regarded as a stunning failure, with it’s predecessor being no better (ie, it can’t soldier on for a decade á la XP while Microsoft figures out how to fix it). During the time Microsoft spent developing 6.5 Apple released the iPhone. Three times. Microsoft has no chance. Verizon is aligning with Android, Motorola dropped Microsoft long ago. HTC is hemorrhaging money on the back of Windows Mobile; they’re its largest vendor. If Microsoft/Windows Mobile is even in the top ten of this list come 2012 I will buy and then eat my hat.

Shake It Up

Hate to break it to these guys: shaking a developing Polaroid is just like tapping the unopened top on a can of something carbonated. It’s just something to do while you wait around for equilibrium (can) or chemical reactions (Polaroid) to occur; these user-actions aren’t actually doing anything.

But, even if we accept the (wrong) notion that shaking a Polaroid picture does something: Why in the name of Christ would one want to implement said delay in the “development” of a photo on an iPhone? It’s beyond reason. It’s like paying to have the iPod app “warm up” for a few minutes when you launch it, complete with some simulated tubes glowing more and more brightly on the screen. Or making the YouTube app disappear slowly into a central dot when you close it and periodically lose vertical hold while you engage in spectation unless you beat the side of the phone a time or two (this app would also need a distant voice screaming not to hit the TV, you’ll break it! after each required series of phone-taps).

Other than that: great product, boys. Positively bully!

Shake It Up

Page-tearing

Princeton has been running a Kindle-DX trial, in which several classes were selected, and the students in those classes were issued a Kindle-DX pre-loaded with the reading material (and whatnot) associated with that class. The article contains both the predictable and the WTF-able.

The predictable: Kindle is different than a book. It doesn’t have page numbers, for instance. Look at this magnamity in action:

[the professor] has permitted his students to use location numbers in their written work for the course

Wowie, that’s big of him. When future historians revisit “India: A Land of Contrasts” from this class’ 2009 collected output they will, however, face some cross-referencing challenges. This does, though, get at some fundamental usability issues with Kindle. The book has been reformatted and (obviously) needs to be repaginated (and actually repaginates on the fly if you visit an endnote and then return, for instance). I get that. But it would be a minor thing for Amazon to add a “Give me the page number from edition X” feature; you could presumably even generate page references from several editions if you wanted to. Seriously. Why isn’t that already there?

You can’t really mark up a Kindle. You can “fold” pages down and create a bookmark; you can (at least on the “real” Kindle, not the iPhone app) highlight text, search text, add notes, and do other stuff along those lines. But, without recourse to a straightforward touch-based interface, students report consternation in that many of these markup features are either lacking or extremely inconvenient:

“It’s clunky, slow and a real pain to operate.”

[-and-]

the annotation software was “useful but not as easy or ‘organic’ feeling as taking notes on paper.”

[-and-]

“A huge benefit to the Kindle is having large quantities of reading available at your fingertips and not having to print and lug around books and articles,” she said. “Some disadvantages are the necessity to charge the Kindle and the impossibility of ‘flipping through’ a book.”

The underlying theme of these comments leads us inevitably to the WTF-able (emphasis added):

Much of my learning comes from a physical interaction with the text: bookmarks, highlights, page-tearing, sticky notes and other marks representing the importance of certain passages — not to mention margin notes, where most of my paper ideas come from and interaction with the material occurs

Indeed, I think most students learn by tearing up the pages in a book. How else am I supposed to undermine the progress of my classmates? I ask you, how am I supposed to fuck them over on a Kindle? Water? Sharp objects?

As somebody who recently read Infinite Jest on the iPhone Kindle app, I feel some of this pain. Searching is actually non-existent on the iPhone version, so count your lucky stars you Kindle-DX users. Conventional page numbers are not there in any version of the device. But you can flag portions really easily. Too easily for my tastes, actually; I flagged pages by accident on several occasions. You can jump around reasonably easily, and the numerous endnotes were a dream; no using two bookmarks and flipping back and forth, finding the entry in inevitably tiny text…Kindle handles it all for you, even though it somewhat disconcertingly (at first, anyway) returns you to the space after the endnote, not to the page-view you had previously. With DFW, the endnotes are often quite, uh, lengthy, and some re-contextualizing to where you were is often a must, thus requiring a page-back, page-forward move to get back into the previous format of the page. But, with one or two exceptions, the Kindle performed perfectly in navigating multi-nested notes and always sorting out where to go to after. Seriously, read (and lug around) the annotated War and Peace and then the Kindle Infinite Jest. See which endnote approach you prefer. And, of course, there’s the constant availability and no-light readability.People never seem to mention those with “real” Kindles. Oh, wait, it doesn’t have a built in light-source. And it’s a separate, unitasking gadget to lug around, and so not really ubiquitous in the sense of something you have with you all the time, no matter what. Is it different: to be sure. Is it in many ways better: without a doubt.

So, does that mean this whole e-Book idea is kaput? I seriously doubt it. Everything they specifically complain about in the article comes down to interface, design, and performance. A more capable reader, some kind of tablet, let’s say, coming from a company with legendary interface success, a company familiar with portable computing and always-available networking, a company that can manage a large internet-attached “store” of some kind, such that copyrights can be honored, and that furthermore could put applications, or “Apps” into circulation such that this tablet would be useful for many tasks beyond just book reading and tip-calculation. Then add in a pre-indoctrinated user-base. Why, that company would really be onto something. Too bad nobody is positioned like that.

MM$

I never quite got why iPhone users were so hell-bent for MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service). Just send an email, for chrissakes. More characters, send pictures or whatever else you want (though, on an iPhone, the flexibility to send anything as an attachment is admittedly more limited than at a desktop). While you presumably add a bit more potential latency into the transaction, you’re not guaranteed instant delivery on a text anyway. Likewise, if you’re that concerned, email to a text gateway (though, with AT&T, that just about guarantees a many-hour holding time for said message). Jeff Carlson hits the nail on the head in this TidBITS article:

While MMS has many of the same properties as and more limitations than a rich, HTML email message, there’s less friction in using MMS. This is intentional, as MMS is a huge boon for carriers in terms of profit margins, which are very high. A 1 MB email message containing several photos would cost nothing to send on an iPhone (included in the flat-rate data plan), whereas a 100 KB MMS message requires a messaging subscription plan or incurs the $0.30 fee without. You can see which the carriers would prefer.

MMS seems utterly designed to:

a) make money for the carriers

2) shoe-horn something more akin to email onto older, crappier phones

-and-

iii) make money for the carriers

What’s the rumpus, iPhone owners? I understand the belly-aching over tethering. But MMS? Who cares. It will only serve to degrade an already tottering network. Stick it to The Man. Send an email.