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Traden4Alpha
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Joined: September 20th, 2002, 8:30 pm

iPhone 5 madness

September 22nd, 2012, 1:06 pm

QuoteOriginally posted by: farmerQuoteOriginally posted by: CrashedMintMaybe somebody needs to take some money and build antennas, but it seems to me like a worthwhile investment, especially if you start in highly populated areas.GSM still sucks compared to CDMA, even 10g or whatever they are up to. And the GSM voice codec is still a massive waste of bandwidth compared to g729 or possibly even silk or some others. I don't know what the latest voice compression standard compatibility is for towers. But I can guess 60% chance they would double existing bandwidth by using a better codec.So buy a iPhone on Verizon, it's CDMA.
 
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Traden4Alpha
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Joined: September 20th, 2002, 8:30 pm

iPhone 5 madness

September 22nd, 2012, 1:19 pm

QuoteOriginally posted by: CrashedMintQuoteOriginally posted by: rmaxQuoteOriginally posted by: CrashedMintQuoteOriginally posted by: rmaxI do have an iPhone 4s, and it is OK. There are somethings I like (some of the apps) and somethings I hate (e-mail/sms/phone/contacts integration). It does work though out of the box and seems to integrate. I do not want to spend 15 hours patching and organising a sodding phone. I just want to use it.iPhone 5 does not seem to improve on this. I thought and iPhone4S was better than an iPhone 4 (this is my first iPhone), but I have yet to see the improvement.To use CM's analogy. It is bit like the Earl of Sandwich got bread and ham, and then decided that he could charge double if the bread has seeds.Maybe seeds make it better than adding an entire suisse cheese on that sandwich which appears to be the strategy of the competition?The funny thing is that Apple is generally attacked for being all about design and optics, yet when they don't change the design they are attacked for being stale. But why would they change the design? It's not like Porsche is updating their 911 yearly, or Leica their M, or Bloomberg their terminal. At some point they found a design that works for them.I have no problem with the design not changing. Taking Arne Jacobsen - his designs are pretty timeless. What is odd is that people are rushing out to buy something that has not changed that much. That is what I don't get.I'm not sure they are actually rushing. My guess is that there is a constantly high number of people buying iPhone, but in the months before the new one they will simply wait. So basically we're seing June, July and August's customers right now.I think this is a big part of it. There's pent-up demand from people with older iPhones and there's pent-up demand from disappointed Android/Blackberry/Winphone users. What's interesting is that early-adopter demand for the 5 seems about double that of the 4S.In many ways, the iPhone 5 is a significant upgrade with 2X the CPU power, faster wireless, larger screen, better screen, better connector, and a bunch of other smaller improvements. Personally, I don't want a larger screen but the success of phablets suggests there's enough people who do like a bigger display to warrant that change.
 
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Polter
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iPhone 5 madness

September 22nd, 2012, 2:20 pm

QuoteOriginally posted by: CrashedMintIn addition most people are terribly afraid of "viruses" but they know that you simply don't have them on the iPhone. Well, never say never (to be fair, malware not all kinds viruses and of course it's not just Apple -- it's just that app store model doesn't provide the kind of security some expect it to):http://www.kins.no/filer/Filer%20juni%2 ... r_embedded
Last edited by Polter on September 21st, 2012, 10:00 pm, edited 1 time in total.
 
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farmer
Posts: 61
Joined: December 16th, 2002, 7:09 am

iPhone 5 madness

October 2nd, 2012, 1:15 pm

I just looked at a pic of the iphone 5 for the first time. I have a theory on the maps application. The most common use where Apple's small screen was unusable was in mapping. My theory is they are trying to offer an app that overcomes this, rather than draws attention to it. Maybe they are developing a mapping display that easily rotates 360 degrees. That way, you can you use that long skinny screen in whichever direction you need it most.
 
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Traden4Alpha
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Joined: September 20th, 2002, 8:30 pm

iPhone 5 madness

October 2nd, 2012, 1:31 pm

QuoteOriginally posted by: farmerI just looked at a pic of the iphone 5 for the first time. I have a theory on the maps application. The most common use where Apple's small screen was unusable was in mapping. My theory is they are trying to offer an app that overcomes this, rather than draws attention to it. Maybe they are developing a mapping display that easily rotates 360 degrees. That way, you can you use that long skinny screen in whichever direction you need it most.Apple had little choice but to replace the Maps app. Google wasn't adding the same key features to Apple Maps as it was adding to Android Maps.
 
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CrashedMint
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Joined: January 25th, 2008, 9:12 pm

iPhone 5 madness

October 2nd, 2012, 2:58 pm

QuoteOriginally posted by: Traden4AlphaQuoteOriginally posted by: farmerI just looked at a pic of the iphone 5 for the first time. I have a theory on the maps application. The most common use where Apple's small screen was unusable was in mapping. My theory is they are trying to offer an app that overcomes this, rather than draws attention to it. Maybe they are developing a mapping display that easily rotates 360 degrees. That way, you can you use that long skinny screen in whichever direction you need it most.Apple had little choice but to replace the Maps app. Google wasn't adding the same key features to Apple Maps as it was adding to Android Maps.Actually you could have the old Maps auto-rotate so that the angle of the phone matched the real world. Very useful.That being said the Maps disaster is a total mystery to me. It's being rumored that Apple's contract with Google was valid for one more year, however this contract didn't include vector maps (looks prettier, loads faster) nor turn by turn navigation (apparently very popular). Also Google Maps was sending loads of high value data to Google (nothing sinister, but simply the user queries as well as the user positions, very useful to estimate traffic for example). At the same time Google Maps was almost not branded and didn't include ads. It's quite certain for any new contract Google would have demanded this. Long story short, Apple had to make the cut.Now the weird part: Apple's maps has tons of extremely visible problems. For example the Statue of Liberty in New York is weirdly skewed. Heidelberg, Germany's biggest tourist destination is invisible under a ginormous cloud. The app has no information on public transport for Tokyo, a place were everybody who's not private helicopter rich will rely on the subway.These flaws are totally obvious. Probably the first query for "Statue of Liberty" was done within the first minutes of iOS 6 availability. It remains an utter mystery to me why they didn't fix that?
 
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Traden4Alpha
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Joined: September 20th, 2002, 8:30 pm

iPhone 5 madness

October 2nd, 2012, 4:00 pm

QuoteOriginally posted by: CrashedMintQuoteOriginally posted by: Traden4AlphaQuoteOriginally posted by: farmerI just looked at a pic of the iphone 5 for the first time. I have a theory on the maps application. The most common use where Apple's small screen was unusable was in mapping. My theory is they are trying to offer an app that overcomes this, rather than draws attention to it. Maybe they are developing a mapping display that easily rotates 360 degrees. That way, you can you use that long skinny screen in whichever direction you need it most.Apple had little choice but to replace the Maps app. Google wasn't adding the same key features to Apple Maps as it was adding to Android Maps.Actually you could have the old Maps auto-rotate so that the angle of the phone matched the real world. Very useful.That being said the Maps disaster is a total mystery to me. It's being rumored that Apple's contract with Google was valid for one more year, however this contract didn't include vector maps (looks prettier, loads faster) nor turn by turn navigation (apparently very popular). Also Google Maps was sending loads of high value data to Google (nothing sinister, but simply the user queries as well as the user positions, very useful to estimate traffic for example). At the same time Google Maps was almost not branded and didn't include ads. It's quite certain for any new contract Google would have demanded this. Long story short, Apple had to make the cut.Now the weird part: Apple's maps has tons of extremely visible problems. For example the Statue of Liberty in New York is weirdly skewed. Heidelberg, Germany's biggest tourist destination is invisible under a ginormous cloud. The app has no information on public transport for Tokyo, a place were everybody who's not private helicopter rich will rely on the subway.These flaws are totally obvious. Probably the first query for "Statue of Liberty" was done within the first minutes of iOS 6 availability. It remains an utter mystery to me why they didn't fix that?If I had to guess, Apple decided that the new Maps would be part of iOS 6 and couldn't undo that decision in time. The other issue is that for all the complaining on teh interwebs, the new Maps is probably 90-99% functional even if it is not as detailed. The internet is far too efficient at making the exception seem like the rule.
 
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farmer
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Joined: December 16th, 2002, 7:09 am

iPhone 5 madness

October 2nd, 2012, 4:20 pm

QuoteOriginally posted by: Traden4Alpha90-99% functionalYou should hurry up and trademark that before Apple does.
 
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Traden4Alpha
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iPhone 5 madness

October 2nd, 2012, 4:22 pm

QuoteOriginally posted by: farmerQuoteOriginally posted by: Traden4Alpha90-99% functionalYou should hurry up and trademark that before Apple does.I think Douglas Adams beat me to it with his Encyclopedia Galatica entry for Earth: "Mostly harmless"
 
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CrashedMint
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iPhone 5 madness

October 2nd, 2012, 5:37 pm

QuoteOriginally posted by: farmerQuoteOriginally posted by: Traden4Alpha90-99% functionalYou should hurry up and trademark that before Apple does.well it is probably 99% functional. It's just that it's a HUGE data set.Still, why not fix obvious mistakes? Why not get things like big cities and major sights right? It's obviously that if you mess up the statue of liberty in your mapping app people will find out immediately and make a big fuss about it. It's not even just "probable" it's 100% certain. This obvious oversight feels very much un-Apple.
 
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Traden4Alpha
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Joined: September 20th, 2002, 8:30 pm

iPhone 5 madness

October 2nd, 2012, 6:36 pm

QuoteOriginally posted by: CrashedMintQuoteOriginally posted by: farmerQuoteOriginally posted by: Traden4Alpha90-99% functionalYou should hurry up and trademark that before Apple does.well it is probably 99% functional. It's just that it's a HUGE data set.Still, why not fix obvious mistakes? Why not get things like big cities and major sights right? It's obviously that if you mess up the statue of liberty in your mapping app people will find out immediately and make a big fuss about it. It's not even just "probable" it's 100% certain. This obvious oversight feels very much un-Apple.It's hindsight bias. I'd bet they did fix ~99% of the tens of thousands to millions of "major sights" that exist around the world. Out of 60,000 Apple employees, I'd bet that at most a few hundred (maybe 1,000) worked on Maps so the now 100 million users of iOS 6 outnumber Apple's people 100,000:1 at finding mistakes.In fact, I doubt that Apple (or any company) could ever create good maps without feedback from millions of users. There's simply too many places in the world for the employees of one company to map everything (and maintain the map, too).
 
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CrashedMint
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iPhone 5 madness

October 2nd, 2012, 7:55 pm

QuoteOriginally posted by: Traden4AlphaQuoteOriginally posted by: CrashedMintQuoteOriginally posted by: farmerQuoteOriginally posted by: Traden4Alpha90-99% functionalYou should hurry up and trademark that before Apple does.well it is probably 99% functional. It's just that it's a HUGE data set.Still, why not fix obvious mistakes? Why not get things like big cities and major sights right? It's obviously that if you mess up the statue of liberty in your mapping app people will find out immediately and make a big fuss about it. It's not even just "probable" it's 100% certain. This obvious oversight feels very much un-Apple.It's hindsight bias. I'd bet they did fix ~99% of the tens of thousands to millions of "major sights" that exist around the world. Out of 60,000 Apple employees, I'd bet that at most a few hundred (maybe 1,000) worked on Maps so the now 100 million users of iOS 6 outnumber Apple's people 100,000:1 at finding mistakes.In fact, I doubt that Apple (or any company) could ever create good maps without feedback from millions of users. There's simply too many places in the world for the employees of one company to map everything (and maintain the map, too).No it's not hindsight bias.If you do a new maps application you obviously need to start somewhere and then use the gathered user data to make it better. It's what Google's been doing ever since. You will of course have some mistakes an incomplete data in version 1.0, but you need to at least check for major errors. Here's a screenshot of the mislocated Flatiron building. How hard can it be to at least check the biggest landmarks of one of the most-famous (?) cities of the world?That's simply stupid.
 
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Traden4Alpha
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iPhone 5 madness

October 2nd, 2012, 8:36 pm

There's about 500 cities with populations > 1 million, I'd bet that each one averages 100 landmarks (in the eyes of the locals). And there's thousands of smaller cities that might have one to a dozen local landmark. So there's probably 10,000 to 100,000 landmarks around the world that Apple might get wrong and cause snickering on the internet. Of course, only the locals can recite these landmarks (most people can only remember landmarks in hindsight), so Apple would need employees in every city who can list (and prioritize) all the locations, check the Maps app, have the knowledge to know if the map pin is right-or-wrong, and then make corrections as needed. It's a very big job.As I said, 100,000,000 people each with their own local geographic knowledge will always be able to find mistakes (even "big" ones) in a map produced by <1000 people living in just a few places.
 
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CrashedMint
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iPhone 5 madness

October 2nd, 2012, 8:42 pm

QuoteOriginally posted by: Traden4AlphaThere's about 500 cities with populations > 1 million, I'd bet that each one averages 100 landmarks (in the eyes of the locals). And there's thousands of smaller cities that might have one to a dozen local landmark. So there's probably 10,000 to 100,000 landmarks around the world that Apple might get wrong and cause snickering on the internet. Of course, only the locals can recite these landmarks (most people can only remember landmarks in hindsight), so Apple would need employees in every city who can list (and prioritize) all the locations, check the Maps app, have the knowledge to know if the map pin is right-or-wrong, and then make corrections as needed. It's a very big job.As I said, 100,000,000 people each with their own local geographic knowledge will always be able to find mistakes (even "big" ones) in a map produced by <1000 people living in just a few places.I am completely with you that it's impossible to get Maps right in version 1.0. I also completely agree that a lot of people will easily find mistakes and that sites like gizmodo who exclusively exist to complain about Apple would complain about something. That being said: To not map the Statue of Liberty correctly is simply sloppy. It's not some street in some country it's the statue of liberty. It the thing that people search for just for fun in the store when they're trying out the 3D mapping feature. And to not include public transit in the Tokyo map is just obviously stupid. After all we're talking about a really large, really wealthy company here which could have easily did some market research.