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Portables (Apple) Businesses Communications Hardware Apple

iPhone Release Date Is June 29 515

Posted by kdawson from the lines-form-now dept.
willith writes "Apple has placed three iPhone commercials on their Web site today, and each ends with a tag: 'Coming June 29.' This puts to rest the question of when the thing will hit the streets, but there are still worries about allocation — AppleInsider is reporting that the supplies at Cingular/AT&T stores may be relatively tight." And some fanatic sites are already parsing the ads for such enigmas as the "mystery app."
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iPhone Release Date Is June 29 More

iPhone Release Date Is June 29

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  • Editorial Request (Please Read on June 28th) (Score:5, Insightful)

    by rueger ( 210566 ) * on Sunday June 03, 2007 @09:31PM (#19376667) Homepage
    Please, please, please Slashdot editors, can you have mercy and only post eight or ten fan boy raves about how amazingly wonderful their shiny new phones are, and how the iPhone is going to Change The Face of Communications in Our Lifetime?

    I mean, it's a phone for God's sake, not a cure for cancer.

    • Re:Editorial Request (Please Read on June 28th) (Score:5, Funny)

      by ratnerstar ( 609443 ) on Sunday June 03, 2007 @09:37PM (#19376711) Homepage
      Doesn't cure cancer? Apparently you're not familiar with the mystery app!

    • Re:Editorial Request (Please Read on June 28th) (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 03, 2007 @09:55PM (#19376853)
      I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Mac fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a iPhone for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder. 20 minutes. At home, on my Razr, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this Mac, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.

      In addition, during this file transfer, Netscape will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even BBEdit Lite is straining to keep up as I type this.

      I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various Macs, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a Mac that has run faster than its Wintel counterpart, despite the Macs' faster chip architecture. My 486/66 with 8 megs of ram runs faster than this 300 mhz machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that the Macintosh is a superior machine.

      Mac addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use a Mac over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by ceejayoz ( 567949 )
      They're making up for panning the iPod as 'lame'.
    • You're a brave poster, sir or madam.

      Never in the history of slashdot has one relatively ordinary product received so much publicity based on so little actual information. Honestly, it was better when this site wrote off the iPod as a doomed device :)

      Meanwhile, here is a guide to pro-Apple moderator psychology to help you cope through the savage moderation clusterf*ck your post will currently be experiencing:

      The Mind of the iMod:

      1. I love Apple blindly

      2. I will flame anyone who criticises Apple

      3. I will fl
    • The iPhone is not going to change the face of communications, but it already shows some serious potential to restructure the wireless industry, and perhaps I dare say, it's about time.

      The US wireless market is such a strange beast that the vast majority of its users have very little clue how it works. In general, US phones are sold "subsidized" with 2 year contracts, or stripped down models sold "full price" with prepaid service. However, even the "subsidized" prices are, at many companies, not often an actual discount; very commonly, mid to high end phones are sold "at cost" (per obtainable wholesale prices) with two year contracts, and at a ridiculous markup without.

      The first area in which the iPhone is revolutionary is its abandonment of this strategy. While the phone is requiring the two year contract, the subsidy concept has been removed. The single line of fine print speaks volumes. "Use requires minimum new 2 year activation plan." The use of the word "use" in place of the word "price" indicates a reversal; whether or not this is good for the consumer remains to be seen, but the fact that the pricing is not related to the contract is inherently a benefit for customer understanding. It seems (anecdotally, working at a wireless store) that most customers have little to know comprehension of the subsidy system, and often "value" a piece of phone hardware at $50 or less, based on the price they paid. With fixed pricing, there may be two direct consumer benefits: first, no more confusing hardware pricing or rebates, no conditions, nothing to mail in, no questions. Second, replace or change your phone at any time, just like a computer, ipod, or appliance, without having to wait for your service obligation to be fulfilled enough to get another discount.

      Yeah, the price is higher. At the moment. The iPod was introduced at similar price; the iPod Nano 4 gb, closest in features to the original now sells for less than half the price the original was introduced with, and has better battery life, smaller size, color screen, and (in some opinions) a cleaner interface. Do we doubt that will happen with the iPhone?

      Phone "subsidies" are a scourge on the US wireless industry. Perhaps they should be more like cable boxes and modems, leased and owned by the telco's, or perhaps they should be more like landline phones, merely commoditized at all but the top end. A typical house phone sells for more and has less features than a typical cell phone, as it is.

      The other side of this coin, especially considering the possibility that the iPhone may be offered as a prepaid or hybrid, is that we may see this as the beginning of a new style of billing. Imagine a future in which per minute/per kilobyte bandwidth rates are lowered to a reasonable point, at the expense of all the "unlimited bundles" we sell now. Imagine if "a minute is a minute no matter what" but calls cost a penny a minute, data a dime a megabyte. It could happen, but only if the profit model of the industry changes. With Apple taking on an unprecedented hardware support role (in the standard consumer sphere; Vertu and B&O have done it before) it frees up the network/bandwidth providers to be just that. Utilities. Like water or electricity.

      I'm not saying that the iPhone will bring about all this in a single fell swoop. But contract independent pricing, profitable retail prices on smartphones, consumer friendly high end hardware, and distributed support costs, could spell the start of a real revolution in this particular backward industry.

      (By the way, does anyone here remember, from history, a time when power companies like Edison distributed and supported everything from the grid itself to the motors and lamps you ran on it? What broke that model?)

  • Linux (Score:3, Funny)

    by Brando_Calrisean ( 755640 ) on Sunday June 03, 2007 @09:37PM (#19376709)
    Okay... but does it run Linux?

  • They know how to deliver, the pipeline to the stores will be full.

  • links (Score:5, Informative)

    by larry bagina ( 561269 ) on Sunday June 03, 2007 @09:44PM (#19376761) Journal
    the embedded video links kept dying on me a few seconds into the ads. Here are direct links to the videos:

    • 1 [apple.com]
    • 2 [apple.com]
    • 3 [apple.com]

  • The two potentially big problems with it I see are:

    1. Lack of tactile feedback in the UI. I.e. you have to look at it and concentrate on the UI to use it.
    2. The fragility of the touch screen.

    • Re:I'd give this thing at least 6 months in the wi (Score:5, Interesting)

      by furball ( 2853 ) on Sunday June 03, 2007 @10:18PM (#19376975) Journal
      I disagree about the fragility of the touch screen. If children's devices (Nintendo DS) can have a touch screen, I don't see why adult devices should be concerned about the fragility of such a thing.

      As for the tactile feedback, I think you're underestimating the UI mechanisms used to use the device. The most pressing activity on a phone is dialing. If you can solve the ease of dialing issue, you can make everything much easier. If you look at the demo of the Google map, you'll see what I'm talking about. It makes dialing easy. No current phone does this right now. None.

      About the only way this could get easier is if they start scanning your voice mail for phone numbers to associate with the visual voice mail .... hold on. I need to go write a business plan.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Rakshasa Taisab ( 244699 )
        Why are people so obsessed with dialing?... How often do you actually do that?

        You got pretty much everyone you know whom you're likely to call already in your address book, and the few times you actually need to enter a phone number will be when you didn't look it up on through google.
        • At least prior to getting a smart phone. don't have much trouble remembering phone numbers, and you need to use them when using a normal land line. Well, with a regular cellphone where I could feel the buttons I could blind dial with no problem. Thus I found it easier to just punch in the number real fast. Now that I have a smart phone I use a phone book, simply because the lack of tactile feedback makes dialing harder. Certainly something I miss though.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Gabrill ( 556503 )
        What makes you assume that children have a monopoly on dropping phones, squeezing by tight spaces (warehouse in my case), and friend's hazings? Not to mention bumpy four-wheelers, bouncing horses, oopses while repelling, crowds that jostle, and yes, kids that swipe the phone to see how cool it is?

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Breakfast Pants ( 323698 )
        It isn't so much the fragility of the 'touch' part as it is the 'screen part. Notice the nintendo DS folds up. Every PSP I have seen has been scratched to hell.
    • And the lack of a platform that people can develop for freely. And the inability to swap cards so you can use whatever provider you want.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by furball ( 2853 )
        I don't think lack of a platform that people can develop for freely ever made a difference. The Motorola RAZR, a completely terrible phone, did not sell amazingly well because consumers looked at it and said, "Wow, this phone is amazing. It presents a platform that people can develop for freely."

        It sold really well because it was marketed well.

    • Re:I'd give this thing at least 6 months in the wi (Score:4, Insightful)

      by ubernostrum ( 219442 ) on Sunday June 03, 2007 @10:38PM (#19377081) Homepage

      Lack of tactile feedback in the UI. I.e. you have to look at it and concentrate on the UI to use it.

      I've been thinking about this, and I really can't see anything to be concerned about. Several things come to mind:

      • Does the mouse on your computer provide tactile feedback when you move the cursor over a button? Trackpads or pointers on laptops? Do any other touchscreens (e.g., in grocery store checkout lines) do so? Do any PDAs with touchscreens provide tactile feedback? I can't think of many, if any, that do, and that doesn't seem to have hindered them.
      • How often do you actually use a phone without looking at it? Even when I'm just hitting speed dial buttons I'm usually looking at the phone to double-check that it's calling the right person. Especially relevant: how often do you use advanced features like web surfing or text messaging/email without looking at the phone? Unless you've got a screen reader in there, don't you kind of have to look at it to use those features? Ditto for watching video on a handheld device.

      I'll wait until I actually see one in action to pass judgment, but I'm a lot more skeptical of the "no tactile feedback" argument than I used to be...

      • No, but few of us use our computers while driving, walking, cooking, or involved on another task.

        And voice recognition while decent is not perfect. And I find it often more dangerous fuss with a hands free kit or sit there repeatedly having to tell voice-recognition. No, "try again" not that, no, "try again"...no..."try again"

        Where as my phones that had large tactile surfaces I could have the most common number programmed and simply press and hold "1", or "2" and easily dial the corresponding person with l

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by espressojim ( 224775 )
        I have the cingular 8525 phone. It has a touch screen.

        When do I look at the buttons while I'm using it? Whenever I'm going through one of those phone based menus: "Press 1 for english". Older phones, I'd keep the phone by my ear and press the buttons. I could generally be doing something else, and not pay much attention to it. Now, I have to either put it on speakerphone (bad at work), or be ready to pull the phone away from my ear, hit the button, then get the phone back into position.
      • Your mouse doesn't provide tactile feedback when you move the cursor over a button, indeed. but it does indeed provide some feedback in the form of the 'click' sound that gives mouse clicking its name. Granted, trackpads that support tapping don't provide much in the way of feedback either, and I like them plenty (provided they're big and mounted shallow, like my iBook's).
    • It depends how the screen is made, and how you carry it. My original gameboy is still in perfect condition. I have never carried it my pocket, but have never taken great care of it. That mean is has spent most of it's life (10-5 years?) stuffed in various boxes, often with metal objects.

      OTOH, my Palm and some of my phones with exposed glass have gotten broken. Now, these broke with significant force, never just by dropping, and they still worked for quite a while. My iPods, which are carried abound t

    • The two potentially big problems with it I see are:

      1. Lack of tactile feedback in the UI. I.e. you have to look at it and concentrate on the UI to use it.
      2. The fragility of the touch screen.


      I don't think the Treo would be a terribly popular phone if either of these was a serious issue.
    • Tactile feedback is a non-issue.

      I was concerned about the lack of tactile feedback on my CarPC 8'' monitor when I build the machine about a year and a half ago.

      After you get used to it, you don't miss it. It's just fine without.

    • I want to see what the Iphone looks like after it's been thrown in a bag with some car keys, loose change, and sand... then shaken hard for a few hours.

  • Traditional? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Profane MuthaFucka ( 574406 ) * <busheatskok@gmail.com> on Sunday June 03, 2007 @10:01PM (#19376879) Homepage Journal
    From TFA:

    However, there is an odd shot in the newly released "How- To" iPhone ad, where the screen goes from the traditional 11 icon view, to a new 12 icon view. (See below).

    It's a pet peeve of mine that people use the word "traditional" for things which were invented very very recently. Traditional things are generational things, handed down from one generation to another. You can't make it artificially, and you can't make it quickly.

    Reminds me of this brand new Irish Pub that just opened up down the road from me. As I am an alcoholic, I was right there belly to the bar on the SECOND day they were open. I was amazed to see that all the walls of the brand new bar were full of photographs of customers having good times with their friends, in this friendly neighborhood establishment. Amusingly, for a neighborhood bar, it was surprisingly inaccessible. You couldn't really walk to it, as there were no sidewalks, just rows and rows of parking spots. I wouldn't want to walk there anyway, because the traffic from the Bed Bath and Beyond next door is crazy.

    So, these photos were all over the walls of this pub, showing hundreds of people having an amazingly good time. I was really jealous of those people who showed up at this brand new bar, on the first day it was open. They were the lucky ones, having had the opportunity to both create tradition, and have a good time doing it too. But still, it was a good feeling to see that my neighborhood bar had created in just one day what some pubs in Ireland are apparently still working on after 300 years or more.

    I think that the new Irish bar next door really captured the tradition which my neighborhood strip mall holds in such high regard. I'm not sure that these little icons on a phone can measure up to that.
    • that when it comes to technology, you can't use the word "generation" in the usual sense either.

      Consider that a mere 24 years ago the Motorola DynaTAC would be the equivalent of your great-great grandparent, were we to equate it in human years (4 "generations" - and even then, some might argue that we're beyond 4th generation cellphone technology).

  • as other things like the xbox 360 and ps3 as you need to do paper work / sign up for cell phone service and that takes a lot longer then selling other things.
    also that will make selling them on ebay a lot harder. The I-phone may even have a forced data plan.
  • Woo hoo! It is so sweet to see my old favorite local restaurant from SF (Pacific Catch) in one of the commercials!

    Man, I used to eat there twice a day sometimes.

    Mmmmm Hawiian Poke Tuna. Mmmmmmm. Sweet potato fries. Mmmmmmmm.

    MMMm.

  • Activation Plan (Score:2, Insightful)

    by milamber3 ( 173273 )
    Whoa, wait and minute. I thought that Apple made a big fuss about not allowing the Cell companies to lock users in to long term contracts with subsidized phones and that was why were were going to pay 500+ for the iPhone. The end of the commercial indicated we have to sign a 2 year minimum plan with AT&T. I certainly don't want to pay out the ass for this phone and still get locked into a company.

    • Nope (Score:5, Informative)

      by debest ( 471937 ) on Sunday June 03, 2007 @11:22PM (#19377349)
      Right from the beginning, at the speech made by Jobs at MacWorld, he mentioned that the iPhone was going to be sold for $499/$599 with a two-year contract with Cingular (now AT&T). This is on par with other high-end devices on all carriers. They never said that the price was going to be for the unemcumbered unit.
    • The only thing we had ever heard fro certain was a two year plan - anything else was speculation. You didn't treat speculation as gospel, did you?

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by fangorious ( 1024903 )

      I thought that Apple made a big fuss about not allowing the Cell companies to lock users in to long term contracts with subsidized phones and that was why were were going to pay 500+ for the iPhone.

      They said it would carry a 2 year contract during the initial announcement at MacWorld in January [macworld.com]. They did say no price subsidies, though. The running theory has been the combination of high purchase price and a 2 year contract must mean really cheap plans (like free unlimited data), but I doubt that will happ

  • It's not about being revolutionary! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Man in Spandex ( 775950 ) <prsn@kev.gmail@com> on Sunday June 03, 2007 @10:41PM (#19377099)
    Was the iPod revolutionary when it came out? AFAIK the Dell Jukebox was also around at that time when the iPod came out. The difference? Not much when you compare the features. They both had similar battery life, they both played both played music for your ears. Where is the difference then? The Dell Jukebox would make your ears bleed! What I mean is, you don't have to be revolutionary to beat the competition. Just take what others are doing wrong, and do it right, or in a way that you think people will enjoy. The iPod wasn't/isn't successful because of marketing only. It does a great job at being an mp3 player and not a piece of shit that you battle with just to get it working.

    What about the iPhone? It's the same concept if you ask me. There are pocket pc's and blackberries that have many features that the iPhone promiss to offer its customers and whatnot. The difference is more in the interface and how you'll use it rather than discovering new features.

    I say this cause I see a lot of people commenting on the iphone and saying that "X" and "Y" devices do what the iphone does.

    AFAIK, a Geo Metro and a Lexus IS350 can both go from point A to point B and reach the maximum allowed speed limits on (almost) any road you'll be travelling on. The difference is the experience you get out of driving those cars.

    • Was the iPod revolutionary when it came out? AFAIK the Dell Jukebox was also around at that time when the iPod came out. The difference? Not much when you compare the features. They both had similar battery life, they both played both played music for your ears. Where is the difference then? The Dell Jukebox would make your ears bleed! What I mean is, you don't have to be revolutionary to beat the competition. Just take what others are doing wrong, and do it right, or in a way that you think people will enj

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by thesandtiger ( 819476 )
      The click-wheel on the iPod was what was "revolutionary," IMO. MUCH easier and quicker to use than any of the other interfaces I've seen on any player before or since.

      What sold me on an iPod was when my friend, who is a DJ and has rips of every bit of music he owns on his iPod and has filled up the 80GB version, was able to get to *any* song I mentioned within 30 seconds of my mentioning it, and usually quicker than that. On the other players I've owned, it was a fucking chore to find a specific track, and

  • How To (Score:5, Insightful)

    by RalphBNumbers ( 655475 ) on Sunday June 03, 2007 @11:17PM (#19377313)
    I think the "How To" commercial does a pretty good job of showing why I expect the iPhone is going to do well.

    They visually explained how to use every major feature of the thing in a 30sec TV spot.

    Most people neither know or care about UMTS, or HSDPA, or AGPS, or any of the other high tech acronyms that certain /.ers obsess over having in their phones. But if they can see how an iPhone can be used for all their calls/mail/web/music&movies in 30sec of watching TV, *that* they'll like.

    Technology has progressed to the point where a well thought out interface matters more than having the latest and greatest bullet points on a spec sheet some months before the other guy. The bottleneck that needs to be addressed these days isn't generally in the machine, it's often between the user and the machine.

  • What are the terms (Score:2, Interesting)

    by fermion ( 181285 )
    More than the price, I want to know the terms. One of the articles clearly stated that the phones would be available at the ATT stores, which one would infer meant that ATT is in fact controlling the price. Typically this means that they will sell at or near their cost, for a two year contract. What is that cost going to be? Also, typically, one can shave a year off the contract for $50.

    And then there is the question of what plans are going to available for the phone. The standard data plan is not go

  • Europe? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Tom ( 822 ) on Monday June 04, 2007 @04:28AM (#19379199) Homepage Journal
    Anyone got any insight into when it'll launch in Europe?

    Cingular isn't exactly a large provider over here. ;-)

  • First time a demo was used in a commercial (Score:4, Interesting)

    by gsfprez ( 27403 ) on Monday June 04, 2007 @11:20AM (#19383247)
    Seriously. When was the last time the actual product was demoed AS the commercial?

    Hell, when was the last commercial you saw so clear and simple so as to be produced at nearly zero cost? The have a dude holding the phone, and showing you how it works. Then there's a graphic at the end with the date.

    Compare to the blackjack commercial with the magic hands. WTF? The whole commercial pimps its card-like design by the hands? is there any indication of how useable it is? You barely even see the *actual* product for a few moments.

    My mom owns an iPod now that i've given her one - she fscking loves it. She uses it everywhere. I didn't get her a sansa or something else 1. because she's got a mac and every other music player is pretty much fsck-all useless if you have a mac 2. she understood how to use it in 15 seconds.

    She has called me exactly one time because she forgot how to make a new playlist in iTunes. Once sorted out, she's been using it - with 100% no techincal support from me.

    Compare to her sprint whatever the fsck it is phone. She's got no way to sync up her phone's phone book with her mac, and its impossible for her to DO anything with the pictures it takes - they're all stuck inside the phone.

    Just looking at the iPhone commerical - its obvious that my mom could use 100% of the functions on the phone. Its simple and it works seamlessly on Mac and Windows.

    When it comes to technology for day to day use - i want technology designed well enough that my mom can use it because i no longer live in her basement. I don't have the time nor the inclination to figure things out that just simply shouldn't be so complicated. I have stuff to do, and figureing out the minutae of some damn sycning issue is not one of the things i need to do.

    It amazes me how many don't get it. Well designed things may cost more - the cheapest thing you can buy is not always really the best answer. My life is considerably less stressful by following this one rule.

    Buy the best, or be content with what you have.

    (btw: i drove a beater early 90's accord until i could afford a Impreza WRX STi - and now, i enjoy it immensely, as opposed to having a long list of shitty half-baked cars)

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