Apple iPhone

[elSicomoro]

Of course, you paid out the nose for that phone too.

[wolf]

Originally Posted by sycamore

Of course, you paid out the nose for that phone too.

I don't think so. You didn't own that phone, after all. You were granted the ability to use it by MaBell. I remember when we had to return the old phones or pay for them.

I wasn't paying the phone bill in those days, but I think the phone bill represented a smaller percentage of overall household expenses before the monopoly was broken.

[elSicomoro]

Originally Posted by wolf

I don't think so. You didn't own that phone, after all. You were granted the ability to use it by MaBell. I remember when we had to return the old phones or pay for them.

That's what I'm talking about though--you rented the phone and could wind up paying hundreds or thousands of dollars for it in the end.

[mbpark]

1. There are STILL people leasing their phones from whatever company took over for Ma Bell, be it AT&T Part II, Verizon, Qwest, or whoever else. These are mainly elderly people who don't know any better, and this has been documented over and over (how people paid thousands of dollars for those phones at $5-$10 a month).

2. The iPhone is on the EDGE network because AT&T (nee Cingular) caved into their demands. Verizon is a lot more demanding about reliability of network devices, and control of marketing/sales.

3. Unfortunately, the Treo killed the idea of having users develop their own C/C++ programs for the iPhone. Cingular, and every other carrier, must get a ton of calls from people who install programs on their phone, and have their phone crash on them because of it. They also have a lot of "hack" programs for the Treo that sometimes cause instability with PalmOS (not that it's a hard thing to do, PalmOS is a POS). Windows Mobile comes in a close second on this one.

The Treo is a nice device, but they've hacked PalmOS 5 so much that it can become highly unstable with the addition of many PalmOS programs. The phone software runs in the same address space as the user programs, and many a Treo has been "bricked" by PalmOS programs. Cingular, seeing this, didn't want the risk unless Apple could absolutely prove that the add-in software would not crash the basic phone software. This may not be obvious to many people, but they've spent (read: lost) millions supporting the Treo due to the fact that the OS is unstable.

Hence, Apple "sandboxed" the apps by running them in Safari. Safari has seen a lot of work to make it much safer, so much so that they've actually delayed MacOS X Leopard to get this right.

The Blackberry runs many of its programs in a Java sandbox, so they don't affect the actual phone software. The iPhone does not have Java (initially).

Expect that or a special Objective-C runtime sandbox in iPhone 1.1 (soon!) that runs the iPhone apps in a special area with many limitations.

Otherwise, it's a nice device if it's your thing, but I'll wait until version 1.1 or 2.0.