Via Flickr
If you see someone whipping out an iPhone at the next table or across the room at your next social gathering, chances are you’re looking at a member of the modern leisure class. When the iPhone made its debut last summer, people camped out in front of Apple stores across the United States to be among the first to experience Apple’s groundbreaking communication device. When Apple updated the phone and released its next gen gadget in more than 20 countries last Friday, again Apple retail stores and cellular provider outlets around the world received hordes of customers clamoring for the new phone — and Apple sold a paper million of them in three days.
Five days into the launch, all models of the phone were sold out in 21 states in the US and people were still lined up, waiting upwards of three hours to buy a phone in markets where they were still available. Steve Jobs called public reception of the new iPhone “stunning.”
Who are these people? A technology analyst for Piper Jaffray, Gene Munster put out a report this week estimating numbers and interests of the early adopters of iPhone 3G based on a survey done with 280 people waiting in line to buy the phone in New York. Earlier this year, another trends analyst, M Metrics published a report saying iPhone users tend to do more entertaining things on their devices — such as watch video and visit social networks — than those who own other smartphones. AdMob similarly confirmed that, at the time, iPhone users were still a relatively small part of the overall mobile phone market in the US, though, according to Munster’s research the percentage of iPhone users is growing.
A look at what’s popular on Apple’s iTunes AppStore sheds more light on the pursuits of iPhone users: every single one of the top ten free and paid applications downloaded from the AppStore in its first week in business — more than 10 million, according to Apple — is a game or entertainment/social networking application. That is, except for the free Weather Bug coming in at #8, which, I’ll surmise people may be looking to for confirmation of their plan to spend the day at the beach or somewhere equally leisurely.
Apple has big plans to storm the beachead of Microsoft’s hold on the Enterprise market and sure enough, the Mac moved past Acer into 3rd place among PC makers in the US market during the 2nd quarter of this year. But Apple’s share of the desktop market remains below 10% and the iPhone’s initial integration efforts with Exchange have run into significant headwinds at the Enterprise level.
For now, it seems pretty obvious the iPhone is a darling of those with time to spare.
Written by Lonnie Lazar on July 17th, 2008 with no comments.
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Just the other day, Boy Genius Report discovered that it had been visited by a few folks whose web browsers identified them as users of a yet-unreleased iPhone OS 2.0.1. Given the timing, it looks pretty clear that Apple will soon push out the update, which should mainly address bugs. Thank heavens — the OS needs it.
It appears that the iPhone software has some big issues to resolve. In addition to the boneheaded syncing scheme Lonnie highlighted a few minutes ago, every one I know who has installed the new OS onto their existing iPhone or iPod touch has noticed significant downgrades in performance and stability. I don’t have a 3G, and all my associates have the previous version or a touch, so I don’t know if these issues plague the new phone or not.
The worst of these problems is that the iPhone now fairly frequently won’t allow users to answer the phone when the screen is locked. When you get a call, the familiar “slide to answer” graphic pops up. But when you actually slide your finger to the right, the button gets stuck, and the phone locks up completely. At that point, the home button does nothing, the Hold button does nothing, and you basically need to perform a hard reset.
And that’s bad. Any time you have a phone that works well at everything but making phone calls? You need to take care of that problem NOW. Anyone else experiencing stability issues?
Via BGR.
Image courtesy Mushroom
Written by Pete Mortensen on July 17th, 2008 with no comments.
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With the first ones: Tetris, Scrabble and Sudoku.
Tags:
ea electronic arts game games iphone scrabble sudoku tetrisea,
electronic arts,
game,
games,
iphone,
scrabble,
sudoku,
tetris
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Written by Chris on July 17th, 2008 with no comments.
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The backup/synch process for iPhones takes a really long time and may turn out to be worthless for restoring a bricked device, according to emerging reports.
Blogger Erica Sadun wrote the other day about her frustrations with Apple’s synch and backup protocols in the iPhone 2.0 firmware and wondered why on earth she has to wait for entire applications to backup every time she synchs her phone with iTunes, instead of having iTunes backup only changed Document and Library data.
Writer Rob Griffiths also complains, “I can connect my phone, let it run a full backup and sync, disconnect it, let it sit on the desk for three minutes, then connect it again…and get hit with another hour-long backup cycle.”
And what’s worst is the local backup may be useless for restoring an iPhone to its as-configured state after crashing due to application instability or glitches in the 2.0 firmware. If this is a real problem, Apple’s millions of iPhone customers juggling their tens of millions of AppStore downloads will be letting us know quite soon, but as Griffiths writes, “the current implementation of backup in iPhone 2.0 seems very broken.”
Written by Lonnie Lazar on July 17th, 2008 with no comments.
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In case you missed Pete’s snippet from yesterday, the iPhone’s Mobile Safari web browser looks very capable of bringing the full web on to the iPhone, outranking some popular desktop browsers in critical standards support testing.
In tests devised by the Web Standards Project to help developers ensure their work can reach as wide an audience as possible, Mobile Safari blew IE7 out of the water on compliance with support for CSS and even scored higher than Firefox 3 in testing for components vital to “Web 2.0? functionality.
Looks like those faster 3G download speeds could be worth something after all.
Via Paul Beesley
Written by Lonnie Lazar on July 17th, 2008 with no comments.
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