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Apple To Unveil iPod Cellphone Next Week?
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Tue Aug 30, 2005 07:59 AM
from the i'll-believe-it-when-it-calls-me dept.
from the i'll-believe-it-when-it-calls-me dept.
Mictian writes "Apple Computer is planning to hold a major press conference next week (September 7th) in San Francisco and the rumours say that it will be the unveiling of a new iPod cellphone (NYT). The phone would incorporate the popular iTunes software, be built by Motorola and marketed by Cingular Wireless. The companies have declined to confirm or deny the report, which would fit Apple's past pattern of being secretive to maximise the splash on announcement day."
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Yet more rumours (Score:4, Informative)
Not even... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Not even... (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, that makes perfect sense. No, it really does.
Re:Yet more rumours (Score:5, Insightful)
If Apple's getting anything out of this, they're hoping more people may buy this instead of a Shuffle.
"cuz like, I need a new phone anyway"
Parent
Re:you could always.... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:you could always.... (Score:5, Informative)
AFAIK T-Mobile is waiting for the deployment to be completed before they begin marketing the service, but there's not going to be any additional charges for it beyond what they charge for GPRS today. They have just begun to sell the v330 [tmobile.com], which has EDGE support (I use an unlocked v551).
As far as T-Mobile's coverage, I will note that the higher-frequency band (they're on 1800 or 1900MHz in the US, Cingular uses 850) does cause the signal to drop out sooner inside buildings than Cingular's - for some reason it happens a lot in supermarkets - due to faster attenuation of higher-frequency signals. But other than that, I don't have problems in metro areas. Rural/suburban areas are a different story, I've heard...
Parent
World turning upside down (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:World turning upside down (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:World turning upside down (Score:3, Funny)
Fantastic! (Score:5, Insightful)
Fix your damned voice communications before you introduce more junk into handsets. I have a perfectly good MP3 player, but I still lack a useful phone!
Re:Fantastic! (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Fantastic! (Score:3, Insightful)
I dunno if that's a camera or a camaro, but hey, I'll take my photo-taking, fast-moving, phone-calling machine any day. Now if only my phone had an electric razor..
Re:Fantastic! (Score:5, Funny)
*shakes head*
Parent
Re:Fantastic! (Score:3, Funny)
Man, what's with all these people and their broken grammar? I believe you need to use "their," not "they're," in your sentence. Otherwise ./'ers with nothing better to do will just make fun of your post. I know I did.
Re:Fantastic! (Score:3, Funny)
What is this "dotslash" that you speak of?
(Slashdot's Razor: Never make fun of someone else's error, or you will make an error in your post too.)
Re:Fantastic! (Score:5, Interesting)
Motorola actually do make decent phones for talking to people on. My V3 RAZR has excellent clarity and (for me) a decent battery life. It comes with loads of other crap on it that I don't use, yes, including a camera, but it's easily the best mobile I've had (which list includes Nokias, Ericsson both pre and post Sony, and Siemens).
Most of the time when I get a dodgy-sounding connection, it's the other person's phone or just poor signal. But that isn't the fault of the handset developers, because most people I know have older phones, and live in areas with poor signals.
I've briefly tried current offerings from Nokia and Sony, and they also seem fairly clear when used in areas of good reception. Where they could definitely be improved, IMO, is that they're often too quiet, and that outside noise leaks in too much. Not sure how they might tackle that, but then I'm just a games programmer. Your mileage may vary, of course, but it does seem like handsets are improving in those core areas as well as the useless attachments...
Parent
Re:Fantastic! (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Fantastic! (Score:3, Interesting)
Also, SIMs make it *much* ea
iphone.org (Score:4, Interesting)
-- hytmal
Re:iphone.org (Score:3, Interesting)
Branding (Score:4, Insightful)
Not a terrible idea (Score:5, Insightful)
Gadgets really shouldn't require contracts.
The 2G iPod Shuffle (Score:5, Interesting)
- It is a small unit with minila but reasonable capacity via Flash
- Smaller than a pack of gum, more like a piece of gum stuck to your cell phone
- Now Suffle detractors get their screen and basically a free ride on the battery life of a much larger capacity battery too
- Still priced at a minimal premium
I have also read that the software people have seen is a music player only, not iTMS integration for buying tracks, so this will sync with
- iTunes
- Address Book
- Calendar events?
- To Dos?
sounds good (Score:3, Funny)
More space than a nomad.
Sweet.
Secretive (Score:2, Interesting)
Should read:
The companies have declined to confirm or deny the report, which would fit Apple's past pattern of being secretive to maximise the splash on announcement day, and sue everybody who brings out the real news for being correct and taking away the spotlight of apple.
100 songs? No way! (Score:5, Interesting)
au revoir Verizon (Score:3, Interesting)
If Apple/Motorola do release an iPod phone, and it's good, I'll ditch Verizon in a heartbeat. And I'll send them a letter telling them how much I resent their effort to control what kind of tecnology they'll allow on their network. They want to gouge me for songs the way they gouge you for ringtones. Screw that!
Almost there... (Score:3, Funny)
Say it with me... (Score:5, Funny)
WiFi equipped iPod only way forward... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:WiFi equipped iPod only way forward... (Score:4, Informative)
a) A video iPod, yet sales of portable video devices have not taken off, unlike MP3 players before the iPod was first launched.
There were [meaningful] MP3 player sales before the iPod? Really? Where? Who had them?
The cell phone / mobile phone networks are in a mess and not global, while WiFi is a global standard.
Say it with me: regulations, regulations, regulations. Cell phone networks are a mess and non-global because most countries strictly control which radio frequencies are available to telecom carriers for mobile communications, and many countries license incompatible frequencies. Take something as simple as GSM, for instance. In the United States, GSM is licensed in the 850MHz and 1900MHz bands, while in most of Europe, it's licensed in the 900MHz and 1800MHz bands. Mobile carriers have no control over this: it's the government regulators' decisions. Geographic problems affect network technology also. The U.S. has GSM and CDMA as its major digital technologies; parts of Asia are strongly CDMA, while Europe, Africa, and the Middle East are GSM.
It also isn't true to say that "WiFi is a global standard." Even with WiFi, some areas of the world (think Japan) regulate some of the bands that WiFi occupies differently than other countries. What is true of WiFi is that there isn't a [strong] competing wireless network technology alongside it, e.g. there isn't the CDMA/GSM division in WiFi. That is, until WiMax takes off.
The future lies in VoIP.
Maybe, but that's a more distant future than the next 3-5 years. Decent VoIP transmission requires significant bandwidth; this rules out the cellular network de facto for the next few years. VoIP over WiFi requires something that WiFi lacks: meaningful QoS. Know why you don't see business switching to wireless VoIP by the truckload? QoS. Even without the QoS problem, there are plenty of other still-present deficiencies in WiFi that make it currently unsuitable for VoIP. Security is one of them; we just this year finally got a good, workable, robust wireless security paradigm in the form of 802.11i. So far, I've seen zero wireless VoIP handsets that support WPA2. Most companies won't trust their voice communications to WEP, and rightly so. Conservative estimates give 3 years before 802.11i and its affiliated technologies really bunker down and start to take root.
Syncing with any Mac or PC would be wireless too which would be sweet.
Everybody keeps complaining to Apple about not having any wireless options in the iPod. Well, there's a good reason they don't: speed. It takes 10-15 minutes to fill my 4G iPod mini over FireWire; that's with FireWire's 400Mbps non-peak-throughput speeds. Bluetooth 1.x crawls along at about 1Mbps in really good conditions. The best WiFi we have is the 125Mbps "Super G", although actual throughput is only 30-45Mbps at best. Now, let's say that instead of a 4G iPod mini, I have a 60G iPod with color display. How long is it going to take me to fill up my 60G iPod over my 125Mbps WiFi connection? Long enough for me to decide it's not worth it.
Consider that a music playing PHONE is not original
It's not done really well by anybody yet, in the same way that MP3 wasn't done well by anybody before the iPod (and with the exception of the iPod, still isn't). Sure, many people can "figure out" the current MP3 phones after significant hassle, in the same way many people could "figure out" the early Rios and Nomads, but like the MP3 player market, sales have shown that when it comes to portable entertainment, the public does not want to be hassled. If you disagree, Apple has a US$4B yearly iPod business for you to argue with.
perhaps with a 2MP digicam on the back too.
Apple [fortunately] only does technology that it knows it can do really well. Cameras consist of a lot more than a plastic lens and an OEMed CCD. Apple is very unlikely to get [back] into cameras; there's more in cameras than they know about, and anyway, just about everybody already has a decent (e.g. >2MP) digital camera, plus three or four others in their cell phones, PDAs, shoes, etc. The iPod really doesn't need a camera.
Parent
Revolutionary (Score:5, Insightful)
Makes my ears BLEED! (Score:5, Funny)
Other Announcements (Score:3, Funny)
Unfortunately, there is no evidence of this but that fits with "Apple's past pattern of being secretive to maximise the splash on announcement day."
Consider... (Score:5, Insightful)
Apple innovates the cellphone? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Apple innovates the cellphone? (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Lets use the iPod as an example of why this is bad (Score:3, Interesting)
The Apple phone should be ALOT like this.
It should be a phone. It shouldn't be a web browswer, PSP, or run my house. It should also be a data point. I should be able to do nothing more than pair my mac with my iPhone and it should just work from that point on as a data point (in the absense of anything faster / cheaper).
I'm in two minds weather you should be able to input any real data at all. I have never really used the PIM functions of my phone other than to read them. If I want to change/add/delete an entry I usually fire up the closest Mac, do it on that, then resync. The only thing I can really see me doing is adding a new phone number, and dialing and, at a push, SMS (but thats soooo 90s technology).
In that respect I could see the iPhone being almost a clone of the iPod Mini, just with a menu system aimed more at PIM data, and a jog wheel that doubles as an old style phone dialler - (no touch buttons would really make it stand out).
Apple have played and won in the music player market, because they understand that people that own MP3 players own computers too. Now that line isn't as clean in the phone market, but its not that far off - and for those of use that do own both, a phone that is designed around this paradigm is what is really missing from the market (not a phone that can access my iTMS account).
Of course this phone won't be anything like that, so it will fail. It will be another Motorola monstrosity that does everything in its power in make Cingular more money at the expense of usability, battery life and my patience. As such it will be another fish in the sea, albeit a fish with Apple branding.
we shall see... (Score:3, Interesting)
From TFA: Apple Computer is preparing a major announcement next week, dropping hints of something as critical to the company's future as the release of the original iPod in 2001.
Which is hysterical. Apple hyped the hell out of that announcement, and afterwards, everyone was just saying "An MP3 player? That's it? There's tons already" at best and "No wireless, smaller than a Nomad. Lame" [slashdot.org] [slashdot.org] at worst. No one realized that one key feature--a great UI--would set it apart and allow Apple to dominate the industry. Who would have thought at the time that it would re-define Apple as much as the iMac did 3 years earlier?
So, this new announcement is only half of the story. The other half is the effect it will have on (((whatever))) over the next few years.
Pictures and specs (Score:4, Informative)
Maybe apple insisted on a click wheel with numbers in it (like touch button rotary... :) )
http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000887049175/ [engadget.com] mod up and share, cheers
Re:#1 (Score:5, Informative)
First, they sell Motorola phones, and Motorola partnered with Apple to build it. Also, they're a GSM carrier, and they seem to sell bleeding edge phones a little bit quicker than other carriers. Motorola probably built the first version as GSM because more carriers use that protocol. I love Verizon, but ditched 'em for Cingular because Cingular gets cooler phones faster. Granted, the coverage isn't as good, but hey, geeks love toys.
Parent
Re:#1 (Score:5, Insightful)
I contend that Apple partnered with Cingular because they are the largest carrier in the US, now that they merged with AT&T, and because Cingular would allow Apple to sell a phone that didn't get it music by buying from an over priced Verizon music store. Sprint, Verizon, etc sell Motorola phones too (yeah, Sprint only sells CDMA Motos) but the GSM carriers will sell whatever they think is gonna bring in the customers.
Parent
Re:#1 (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re:#1 (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re:Another rumor (Score:2)
Re:uhm.. IPHONE.ORG ? (Score:2)
Re:Disk drive? (Score:2)
It's probably a port of the iPod interface in software, with the iPod shuffle's hardware player, tied into Motorola's cellphone. Nothing too complicated really, and it fits with the need for Apple to get more flash ram, now (as moving parts plus cellphones equals dead device).
I'll still get one, even if it means my Treo 600 will have to take the backseat for a while.
Re:Only Fools... (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, no, I don't NEED this, but then I don't need a music player at all. The fact is though that I don't like carrying around a bunch of gadgets everywhere. Right now, I leave the iPod at work most of the time because I only have so much pocket space, and dragging it home together with my cellphone and wallet is a PITA. Don't even ask about my digital camera, which stays at home most of the time gathering dust. If I were a woman, something
Re:Cassette recording quality (Was Re:Only Fools.. (Score:3, Funny)
Re:LiPhone (Score:3, Insightful)