Is it time to subscribe to a printer service from HP?

Ever since my dad brought home an...

What’s the best way of buying a phone today?

How did you buy your latest phone?...

MWC: What device highlights did you miss?

So, early last week I predicted that...

Is it now desperately uncool to be seen with an iPhone?

The iPhone is truly the domain of ‘Vicky Pollard‘ now. Agree?

Was today the date we can mark as the point Apple went fully mainstream?

How long can you, dear reader, seriously hold out using an iPhone when it’s patently clear it is a Fisher Price phone aimed squarely at your mum, your wife and the 12 year old who delivers the newspapers every morning?

23 COMMENTS

  1. You’re probably right fella, but it’ll sell by the shed-load – I imagine even you will have one by Christmas 😉 The most incredible thing I’ve seen tonight are people saying ‘Yeah, Apple haven’t really done much, but i’ll still buy one’. I just don’t understand the mentality, if your handset manufacturer of choice isn’t impressing you, walk away. I did it with Nokia, HTC and Apple, don’t reward lack of innovation with money!

    I think what frustrates me most is the truly brilliant minds at Apple can’t push the boundaries more, it’s thinner and lighter for sure. Where is the NFC? Why the silly new connector you need a £25 adaptor for? Why all the features taken from other phones?!? Siri is looking very Google Now and the ‘panoramic option’ has been on Nokia’s for donkey’s years. Do something new, something off the wall – give iOS a bit of a refresh past adding an extra row of icons. Apple are getting lazy, complacent and resting on their laurels.

    I’ve been accused of being an Android fan-boy, I’m really not – I’m a mobile phone fan boy, I love seeing new stuff, and being blown away by these tiny devices. Apple is just leaving me cold now – give me stuff I’ve never seen before, don’t tell me how good your earpiece is, or how much more more kids will smile in a photo taken by an iPhone 5.

    *shakes head*

  2. It’s a funny market isn’t it? A very expensive piece of technology, with a two year lifespan, being the preserve of the everyman. Trinkets marketed at enabling self expression being a paragon of conformity.

    I’m quite underwhelmed by the announcement. Will the demographics you list stand up and say wow? Perhaps those who follow the Apple trend, perhaps those who have found the iOS experience a liberating experience compared to their PCs which they don’t fully know how to use.

    The mobile market place (as you have pointed out in previous posts) is a very democratised one, and although your man or woman in the streets won’t know the ins and outs of mobile like a phone geek would, I think knowledge about mobile is democratising too. I get there feeling that there might be a degree of apathy towards this device in the mainstream.

    I can’t help but feel that android devices are in a position to excite the punter who walks into CPW, different shapes, sizes,colours, and form factors (like the note) pushing the paradigm of the two handed data device (with hilarious consequences, I saw a lady holding a phone conversation on a note, quite comical). Although the concept can always be refined, the mobile touch driven internet/media device is approaching maturity and I think price is will be an area where the iPhone 5 is vulnerable. There are some extremely valid 2011 devices knocking around at very competitive prices (including the 4S). Is the Apple cool factor really going to sway the average punter when a capable 2011 (or 2012 mid range phone) is half the price?

    sorry this comment was just disparate ramblings, I must admit i’m far too deep into phone geek territory to know what the mainstream want. But i’ve got to admit, there didn’t feel to be a lot of gusto

  3. Pffft. They have reduced weight and volume by a fifth while increasing battery life. That’s a huge improvement and technically much harder to do then include a new toy e.g. NFC that noone will use.

  4. Really? Surely by virtue of Moore’s Law that is the least we should expect.

    Let us not forget why the world sits up and listens when an Apple conference is held. Apple took a risk by using a multi touch capacititative screen, it made people think that the iPhone was a viable computing device (though programmes your mum can install certainly helped to) and it took years for other manufacturers to engineer these screens in with at the right cost, without infringing patents.

    Though virtues of economies of scale, the fact that they only deal in high value products and subsidy through content sales, bringing advanced components to market before it is remotely viable for its competitors (perhaps with the exception of Samsung) has become a core competency. As much as I don’t like the practical sacrifices that the new iPad made to include that retina display, currently only apple can bring that display to market in a device that costs £399. I guess many people expected this for the iPhone especially to compensate for the increasingly creaky iOS. It’s a tall order, but as the touch screen slab device enters true market maturity, many people want Apple to reinvent the smartphone

  5. I’m really puzzled by this concept that you need an adapter. The new iPhone has a new (much needed) dock connector. The only reason you would need to buy an adaptor is if you wanted to connect an iPhone 5 into a legacy piece of kit. That’s going to be a pretty small market.

  6. So in your world everyone who buys a new iPhone 4.2 is going to go out and at the same time replace every single bit of hardware that they have that connects to their old phone? Every single bit? I don’t think that this will happen any time soon.

  7. That’s not what I said. I said that you don’t NEED the adapter, only if you have extra hardware that you keep using then you will need it. But you don’t need it to make the iPhone 5 work. And just because many people have extra bits it doesn’t mean that most people do.

  8. You’re quite right. But it does apply to reducing the TDP and power consumption of the CPU (through a combination of lower power draw, multiple cores, and low powered companion cores), the integration of components from the motherboard to the SOC, delegation of tasks which would previously require a hardware component to a software component as CPU power increases, and the greater surface area created by the introduction of the 4 inch screen would certainly aid the quest to reduce the z axis.

    The iphone 4 design was built to house the less power efficient, less integrated 45nm cortex A8. The reduction of the size/complexity of this hardware is an almost arbitrary part of technological progress, this reduction in thickness is actually occurring across the whole industry, as is increasing battery life. I think my point still stands, based on 24 months of dynamic hardware advancement (since the iphone 4) which is available as off the shelf components to any manufacturer, isn’t the advancement the least the consumer should expect? As I mentioned early one of the elements of Apple’s competitiveness is making exotic hardware mainstream through encouraging economies of scale, I do not see it present in this device, it is not (to use a Jobsian phrase) “magical”

  9. uhh. Every music dock on EVERY piece of kit designed for ipods and iphones is now out of date for the new one? thats a pretty large market, along with add-on chargers, ALL the battery cases are useless for the new phone, Car docks, the lot.
    If you think that is a small market you need to go out an investigate the addon market for mobiles 🙂

  10. You Uerotrash are just jealous because you live in an insignificant little shithole of a country nobody cares about. USA owns your stupid asses lol…… iphone is old and tired but it’s great for old people who are afraid of new things.

  11. That is the stupidest headline I have ever read on the Internet — and believe me, there’s some stiff competition in that category. Oh no, I’m being seen with a terrific functional phone that does everything I want very well! THE HORROR. I should have gotten one of those many two-hander phones you need both hands AND a stylus to work properly!!

    “Apple hasn’t done much,” Kip Hakes? Really? You mean other than being responsible for the look and functionality of every smartphone on the market? Yeah, that Alexander Graham Bell — he hasn’t done much either. Certainly nothing innovative or world-changing.

    Cheeses Crisps, the commenter match the headlines for stupidity.

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here

Recently Published

Is it time to subscribe to a printer service from HP?

Ever since my dad brought home an HP LaserJet printer (version 3, if memory serves), I have been printing with an HP. Over the...

What’s the best way of buying a phone today?

How did you buy your latest phone? I'm asking because I'm thinking about what I should be doing. When I was living in Oman, I...

MWC: What device highlights did you miss?

So, early last week I predicted that next to nothing from Mobile World Congress would break through into the mainstream media. I was right,...

How Wireless Will Pave the Path to Neobank Profitability

I'm delighted to bring you an opinion piece from Rafa Plantier at Gigs.com. I think it's particularly relevant given the recent eSIM news from...

An end of an era: Vodafone UK turns off 3G services

I thought it was worthwhile highlighting this one from the Vodafone UK team. For so long - for what feels like years, seeing the...

Mobile World Congress: Did the mainstream media notice?

I resolved this year to make sure I wrote something - anything - about Mobile World Congress, the huge mobile industry trade show taking...