Tag iphone

Mind your Mind Share

It is almost 6 years since Apple announced and released the iPhone. I still remember Steve Jobs mentioning that his goal for the first year was to get 10M iPhones shipped; at the time almost 1% of the global mobile telephony market share. The goal seemed totally unrealistic to anyone involved in the industry as […]

Location and Privacy

Yesterday a story about Apple’s unauthorised logging of timestamped location data on iPhones running iOS 4.x versions of the system software was published in several articles in technical and mainstream media worldwide. This is important, not only because of the ubiquity of location-based services available to consumers worldwide and the significance of location in safeguarding […]

Nexus One. A Message to the World from Mountain View.

It must have been sometime near mid-December when I first actually saw and used — albeit briefly — a Nexus One. A Googler, the owner, graciously let me use it for a bit after receiving it as part of the Google corporate gift that the device got — more a publicity stunt rather than an […]

The App Store is an ongoing karma leak.

From Paul Graham's excellent article on the iPhone AppStore:
The dictator in the 1984 ad isn't Microsoft, incidentally; it's IBM. IBM seemed a lot more frightening in those days, but they were friendlier to developers than Apple is now.
But the most worrying part, in my view, is that people (and especially developers) are keener on accepting the ludicrous terms that Apple is imposing on them than they were even a few years ago.

On the Motorola Droid

It should be no surprise that Verizon would invest in Android, given the onslaught that AT&T’s exclusivity with the iPhone has brought to everyone, despite the fact that Verizon’s network is superior to AT&T’s, the fact that it has a number of popular handsets and services etc. And while Europe remains the place where mobile […]

About the same, or even faster

John Gruber writes about hardware (i.e. physical) keyboards on mobile phones. I mostly agree with him on this one: they are, for the most part, useless and the iPhone is --- at least --- not hurt (in my view much better off) without one. There are, of course, some distinct advantages to having any form of physical controls on a device, including using the device without looking at it, but there are several drawbacks too, while at the same time the numerous advantages to having an on-screen 'virtual' keyboard more than make up for the lack of a physical one, both for design and usability reasons. In the end it's probably a personal preference thing, but I for one have been waiting for an all-screen, no-keyboard device like the iPhone for years and I'm sure happy it's here the way it is. Oh and by the way, I probably type faster (and more accurately) on my iPhone than I would ever type on a BlackBerry device or Pré with their miniature keys that seem designed for children and the relatively tacky feel; it took less than a few days after getting my iPhone to getting used to the auto-correction system and a few more days before my typing performance stabilised to an acceptable level for dealing with emailing etc. Finally, the auto-correction on the iPhone seems to work admirably well with Greek too [for those eager to remind everyone that Apple has a parochial mindset; it does, but it doesn't apply here].

Γιού Τέρν.

Μια φορά και έναν καιρό… Πριν από λίγο καιρό στο podcast που κάνουμε σε ημι-σταθερή βάση με τον Παναγιώτη, τον Γιώργο, τον Αστέρη τον Δημήτρη και εκλεκτούς προσκεκλημένους, μιλούσαμε για mobile internet. Από τη συζήτηση δε θα μπορούσε βέβαια να λείπει το iPhone, μια συσκευή που ανεξάρτητα από τα δικά της πλεονεκτήματα έφερε σημαντική ώθηση […]

For a hacker, the Pre is incredible

Great stuff. Perhaps I should start looking at the Pre as one of the candidate platforms for the Geo|Ads platform and the apps it is currently featured on. Since AthensBook 1.0.0 came out in early March we've been focusing on way too many things and looking at what Palm has to one of them --- besides registering for the early SDK access back in April, there were few reasons to focus on the Pre: it is only available stateside for now, and we're already focusing on providing current releases of our apps and ad SDK on iPhone/Android and Blackberry. Still, with Android still featuring a decade-old UI and no devices not being available in Hellas in any sort of mainstream way yet [soon that's bound to change of course] and with the BlackBerry OS seeming increasingly dated, perhaps the Pre should be getting some more developer love from us. If only we could get a device in this part of the world. =)

Straight from Microsoft's Rulebook.

Apple's rumoured upcoming software crippling 'segmentation' for the iPhone stinks of Microsoft's 'Windows Vista SKU' nastiness. But then again Apple is no stranger to controversy or bad decisions.

Nokia is The Past. Welcome to the Future.

I have written about Nokia and the need for the company to reinvent itself several times in the past. When the iPhone was announced in early 2007, I was lukewarm and slightly frustrated that the Mac, Apple’s former, at times sole and by far most important strategic product was complemented by a formidable ‘opponent’. I […]