Yet Another Site Disassembles the iPhone

What is with all these sites disassembling their iPhones? A third site, ifixit, has upload photos of its own disassembly process.

iPhone's User Guide

Apple has posted the iPhone's 124 page PDF user guide on its website.

Think Secret Disassembles the iPhone, too

The Apple-centric Think Secret site has posted a photo gallery of a completely dissembled new iPhone. It is the second site to do so, Powerbookmedic being the other one. However, I am not sure which site put up their gallery first. Think Secret's gallery, though, shows a more completely disassembly.

Guess that voids the warranty.

Why iPhone Won’t Redefine SMS Texting

For all its innovations, Apple’s iPhone has slim chances of making an impact on the way mobile phone users around the world do SMS texting. In two words: QWERTY keyboard. Here’s why:

First of all, even if the Apple goes on to sell 10 million iPhones in the first year as Steve Jobs has predicted, that is just roughly 1% of the nearly 1 billion phones sold annually. You simply can’t redefine a market with such a miniscule share.

Secondly, most of the new market gains are entry level phones sold in third world countries. This implies that most buyers are first time users who in most likelihood have never used a computer before, or if ever, sparingly. Thus, for a lot of them, the mobile phone keypad has become their first exposure to typing. For the younger generation, it is their de facto standard. In fact, a lot has mastered the art of touch-typing on phone keypads. They can enter SMS messages one-handed rapidly into the phone without ever looking at the keypad or the LCD. Somehow I simply can’t imagine them doing the same with the iPhone’s on-screen QWERTY keyboard. The Apple design lends itself to two thumb typing, which is definitely far from the current single thumb texting experience.

Yes, Apple will most likely go on and sell millions of the iPhone as it has previously succeeded with the iPod. But until it adds a physical mobile phone keypad, it most likely will remain a niche play. And when it does add a keypad, it will no longer be redefining the SMS experience but merely improving it.

iPhone Disassembled!

Powerbookmedic has a detailed step-by-step photo gallery of a brand new iPhone being taken apart.

Not sure if I should include a graphic warning for the squeamish iPhone fanatic (j/k) but photos are actually very informative.

Top 10 iPhone applications

From Lifehacker, a list of available applications for the iPhone -

• 10. 101 Cookbooks
• 9. goMovies
• 8. iPhlickr


• 7. iPhoneDigg


• 6. iActu


• 5. Gas.app


• 4. iZoho
• 3. Google Reader


• 2. iPhoneChat


• 1. OneTrip Shopping Li

An effective finger-based keyboard for the iPhone

From MobiCommIT, June 27, 2007 post -

Found this at Take a Bite -

It would[n't] be fair to just say that the iPhone is unsuited for use while driving due to the lack of a keypad without mentioning why it'll be quite comparable to typing on a physical keyboard for sighted people.



From left to right:

1. a finger hovers over the letter 'u' (another is over the letter 's')
2. the finger touches the screen, prompting visual feedback before the input is actually registered
3. on release, the letter us is registered and appears in the text input field. Until the release, you get the chance to correctively reposition your finger in the event that 'u' was not your intended keystroke.

The visual feedback you get from letter magnification combined with 'on release' behavior instead of 'on click' behavior suggest that typing will be a breeze on the iPhone. Multi-touch, or the ability to touch different parts of the display at the same time, means fast two (or more) fingered typing.

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I guess the operative word is "sighted" as most teenaged mobile phone users I know these days (except perhaps the ones in the USA) compose SMS text messages without sight - meaning they touch type on the phone's keypad. The phone can very well be in their pocket or their bag. They can even be talking to you, looking at you straight in the eye while their fingers are busy clicking away.

I just don't see how the QWERTY keyboard, on top of the touch feedback, will allow them to replicate the texting experience on the iPhone

What is Missing from the iPhone

From MobiCommIT, June 27, 2007 post -

From Engadget, here is a partial list of what is missing from the iPhone -

• There's no way to cut, copy, or paste text! WHOA! Big, big mistake.
• No A2DP support. That, friends, is such a huge bummer right there.
• Sorry, music can't be used as a ringtone -- even if it's just a raw MP3. No additional ringtones will be sold at launch.
  
• It supports Exchange in some capacity only.
  
• Document file reading only -- but not editing -- for PDF, Word, and Excel (only).
• Adobe Flash support is officially out. It's just not in the browser. Neither is there any other kind of embedded video support.
  
• It will take snaps, but won't record video.
  
• No MMS.
  
• No voice dialing, either.
• Contact groups can't be emailed as contact lists.
  
• iPhone battery capacity maxes out at 300-400 charges -- you'll send it in and get the cell replaced for a fee.
  
• Voice quality is said to be good -- not great.

SMS the iPhone Way

Originally posted at MobileCommIT June 27, 2007 -

With the iPhone getting well over 69 million hits in Google, it is surprising that there is very little discussion on how it deals with SMS texting. Surprising because the iPhone is well a mobile phone. It also does not have a physical keypad. And just as importantly, it processes and presents messages that can be considered a radical departure from the familiar sequential listings in the Inbox, Sent, Log screens established by Nokia.

The iPhone designers are obviously aware that many users often go into texting conversations on the phone, kinda similar to IM chats. So they decided to organize these texting conversations into speech bubbles that can be scrolled back for reference instead of the usual separate Inbox and Sent listings. In addition, mutiple text chats can be stored (by contact name) so that you resume a chain.

This UI will definitely help avid PC IM users transition into text chat on the phone, rather on the iPhone. The question though is just how good is the QWERTY virtual keyboard? I haven't had the chance to do a hands-on but I doubt very much if it can provide a tactile feedback that is often required by users. Personally I feel the keyboard issue will either make or break the iPhone as a mobile phone.

The Hype in iPhone and the Real Test

Originally posted on MobileCommIT June 27, 2007

Give it to Apple to maximize the appeal of its brand cachet. I can’t think of any other tech company which can drum up the media into such a feverish pitch, the New York Times is reporting the iPhone has been the subject of 11,000 print articles and has about 69 million hits in Google. All before its June 29 launch.

It has been hailed both as revolutionary and flawed with both rave reviews and criticisms justified. It does things no phone has ever done before but it also lacks features found even on the most basic phones. Yet Wall Street analysts expect Apple to sell about three million phones within the first weeks. If it does so, that is already 30% of the 10 million Steve Jobs has predicted for first year sales.

Simply amazing.

But of course the real test comes after the first 3 million or so buyers – the bleeding edge junkies of your usual geeks and nerds and, in Apple’s case, the fashionistas who have to have the latest and fanciest fashion accessory (yup, iPhone’s sleek looks qualify it as such) – have sat down, played, and used their iPhones.

Their collective experience will determine whether the next wave of buyers, conservative consumers who rely on peer reviews and experiences to make purchasing decisions, will join the frenzy.

The Hype in iPhone and the Real Test

>Give it to Apple to maximize the appeal of its brand cachet. I can’t think of any other tech company which can drum up the media into such a feverish pitch, the New York Times is reporting the iPhone has been the subject of 11,000 print articles and has about 69 million hits in Google. All before its June 29 launch.

It has been hailed both as revolutionary and flawed with both rave reviews and criticisms justified. It does things no phone has ever done before but it also lacks features found even on the most basic phones. Yet Wall Street analysts expect Apple to sell about three million phones within the first weeks. If it does so, that is already 30% of the 10 million Steve Jobs has predicted for first year sales.

Simply amazing.

But of course the real test comes after the first 3 million or so buyers – the bleeding edge junkies of your usual geeks and nerds and, in Apple’s case, the fashionistas who have to have the latest and fanciest fashion accessory (yup, iPhone’s sleek looks qualify it as such) – have sat down, played, and used their iPhones.

Their collective experience will determine whether the next wave of buyers, conservative consumers who rely on peer reviews and experiences to make purchasing decisions, will join the frenzy.

Some S60 Nokia Phones Can Run iPhone Safari Web Apps

Originally posted in MobileCommIT June 27, 2007 -

iFoNfo has reported that some Series 60 Nokia phones with the Safari-based browser can run Web Apps intended for the iPhone. These include the N75, N95 and a Samsung model, the SGH-i520.

But unlike the iPhone, the S60 phones are not limited to web-based applications as these support J2ME and Flash.

Future iPhone apps that are based on the Safar UI will likely work with the S60 phones provided the difference in the UI is taken into consideration. The N95 has a 240 x 320 screen compared to the iPhone's 320 x 480.

The iPhone’s touch interface also looks nicer than the typical S60 phone’s method of moving a cursor with a directional pad, but it works well enough for pointing and clicking. Still, it is simply cool to know the phones can run iPhone apps.

5 ways iPhone will change the wireless biz

From MobileCommIT, orginally posted June 13, 2007 -

It appears Steve Jobs' WWDC keynote speech in which he revealed his game plan to irreversibly change the wireless world impressed both Om Malik and his co-author Tom T. Ahonen.

For his part, Ahonen believes the mobile telecoms world will now count its time in two Eras - the Era BI: time Before the iPhone, and the ERA AI: time After the iPhone. He also believes that even media business should be very very worried about iPhone.

While no one knows for sure how many million units of the iPhone Apple will sell – 5 or 10M in the first year, an insignificant number when compared to over 950M phones shipped worldwide every year, it will challenge some of the conventional notions of the wireless business, take the hidebound industry by the scruff of the neck and give it a good shake. Nokia will join Microsoft and Dell in experiencing Apple envy.

Om Malik is predicting the following for the iPhone:

A true web applications platform for the mobile

“We have been trying to come up with a solution to expand the capabilities of the iPhone so developers can write great apps for it, but keep the iPhone secure,” he said. “… And we’ve come up with a very innovative new way to create applications for mobile devices… it’s all based on the fact that we have the full Safari engine in the iPhone. And so you can write amazing Web 2.0 and AJAX apps that look and behave exactly like apps on the iPhone, and these apps can integrate perfectly with iPhone services.” (Steve Jobs keynote at WWDC via Engadget.)

Charles Ying thinks that Apple just reinvented the mobile applications platform. “This isn’t mobile Flash, mobile Java, or even the mobile Web. It’s the real Web, the real deal,” he writes. (True web should also mean 3G and not pokey EDGE connections that the device currently offers, one major Achilles heel of this device.) The ease, with which developers can develop and deploy apps on both web and the phones, will put pressure on other companies (and OS vendors) to play catch-up or lose developer attention.

Break the Wireless Walled Gardens

iPhone is a fully functional iPod, with full tracks of music. Do you need to download ring tones for $2.99 a pop, when you get a full song for a third of that price? Ditto for Wallpapers, and themes, and everything else that is being sold on the carrier deck.

Shift of control to the customers

If the embedded (Safari) browser performs the way as hyped, it will give us the choice-control we have on the web. Search engines to web sites – nothing will be determined by the wireless carriers who have thus far done nothing but create barriers between what we want, and giving us what they want to sell.

Slow demise of subsidized, boring phones filled with bloat ware

The introduction of the unlocked iPhone will do two things – it would basically get US buyers savvy to the idea of buying full priced unlocked phones. Secondly, it is going to cause a behavior change - of buying phones instead of freebies. (Will iPhone save the handset business?)

Keep it simple or else

One of the lasting changes that iPhone will bring to the mobile market is simplification. Their new UI is going to make complex mobile services relatively simple, and can have the same impact as Blackberry had on the corporate market.

No iPhone SDK Means No Killer iPhone Apps

Still from MobileCommIT -

Edited commentary by Fast and Furious of Gizmodo -

According to Apple, no software developer kit is required for the iPhone. However, the truth is that the lack of an SDK means that there won't be any killer app the iPhone. It also means the iPhone's potential as an amazing computing and communication platform will never be realized.

Steve Jobs initially sold the iPhone as the Next Big Thing from Apple, just like the Mac was. The Mac really broke the mold. While not as groundbreaking, the iPhone is an intelligent and clean implementation of existing things. Really intelligent, really clean, like the Mac. Unlike the original Mac, however, developers won't have full access to its core features. Without them there won't be the equivalent of PageMaker, Photoshop, Word or Premiere in the iPhone, powerful applications taking full advantage of the unique capabilities of the hardware, the operating system and its frameworks.

Those applications spawned two revolutions: desktop publishing (including photo editing) and desktop video. It was the Mac and its third-party apps that brought radical changes that have deeply affected us, not the Mac alone.

On the iPhone, however, developers will be limited to developing Web applications based on AJAX, a set of Internet standards that make software like GMail, Google Maps or FaceBook possible. The iPhone is the real thing, a complete UNIX-to-go with stunning graphic classes, and developers will be limited to do stuff like this.

Mind you, AJAX is great for what it does on the Web today, but is limited.

Developers can create Web 2.0 applications which look and behave just like the applications built into iPhone, and which can seamlessly access iPhone's services, including making a phone call, sending an email and displaying a location in Google Maps.

This is nothing new, however. We knew this from the very beginning because iPhone's Safari was already doing it. It's called auto-detection of phone numbers and addresses: you click on a phone or address in your web page and it gets passed by Safari to the operating system, which calls the number or shows the address in the Google Maps app. In other words, they are trying to sell us the same thing we already had when the iPhone was introduced and the same thing we already have in Mac OS X's Safari.

So unless they show something boomtastic in the sessions, this will not change. To see how powerful AJAX applications on the iPhone could be, a million questions will have to be answered this week. Questions like:

- Would I be able to access the iPhone databases from Safari and query them from my AJAX application? Looking at Jobs' stress on security, it doesn't look like this will be possible.

- Would I be able store data locally beyond cookies? Probably the same answer.

- How will these application perform over limited EDGE connections? Will I have to do a painful download for the whole app, instead of just the data?

- How will the connection limit the interactive possibilities?

- How is the access to iPhone's hardware? Would I be able to access iPhone's hardware to connect to an infrared scanner via Bluetooth and create an amazing sales or logistics application? How about Multitouch?

If AJAX is that good and the developers don't need an SDK, why has Apple built a dedicated Mail application or Google Maps software into the iPhone? Why not just reformat the CSS on the Web and open a special view to .Mac mail, Gmail or Google Maps made just for iPhone Safari users ?

Maybe because to do the cool stuff that iPhone's Maps do, you need to access all the cool Mac OS X classes that iPhones have.

Now, I'm sure that there will be great AJAX applications created for the iPhone, specially at the corporate level. But what is important here is that we won't have sexy apps. This is what Apple needs to make the iPhone not just great, but huge. A true revolutionary product. Otherwise, we will keep asking where are we going to find the killer apps that made the Mac what is today; where is the next Delicious Library-equivalent for the iPhone; where are the games. Just think about those, as Apple stresses its relationship with EA and id software. There's a great potential for games in the iPhone, which with multi-touch could be a Nintendo DS 2.0 in the making. As Nintendo fans will tell you, a Flash game (which provides with even better flexibility than AJAX) is not a substitute for a real Wii game. And the next big games never come from the established big developers who may, at the end, be the only ones with access to the secret iPhone SDK at use in Apple.

So no SDK means no access to iPhone's cool frameworks which means no revolutionary apps, no real new concepts coming from third-parties, no eye candy available for anyone but Apple and no possibility for some really crazy games that will fully exploit the graphic and multi-touch power of the iPhone.

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Guess we will have to make do with Flash Lite games and Safari plug-ins.

iPhone Details from AT&T's Sales Training Workbook

Again, an earlier entry from MobileCommIT -

From MacRumors -

The guide presents iPhone features and benefits, tips, comparisons, qualifying questions, and objections. Among those listed are:

Revolutionary Mobile Phone

- Dial any telephone number with the touch of a finger
- Create and manage a list of telephone numbers you call most
- If you choose to answer the call, the video will pause and resume once the call ends
- iPhone syncs contact information from the computer to iPhone (from Address Book on a Mac or Outlook or Outlook Express on a Windows PC).
- Built-in speakerphone
- iPhone lets you carry on a phone conversation while you simultaneously browse the Internet or send an email.
- There is a vibrate mode.

Photos

- Sync photos from Mac or PC

SMS Text Messaging

- SMS text message button shows how many new messages are waiting
- Threaded conversations
- Hear an audio alert for new messages
- Error correction and prevention in the keyboard. Only displayed when you need it.
- iPhone users will not be able to conduct IM conversations with instant messaging users
- Does not support MMS messaging for photos or videos

Music and Video

- All videos play in landscape mode
- If you prefer your widescreen content to take up the entire screen, you can double tap the video and iPhone will automatically scale the video to take up the entire screen
- Sync music with iTunes just like any other iPod
- Select how to display music: by playlist, artist, songs or more.
- Media Net, MobiTV, or Cellular Video are not available on iPhone

Email

- Rich formatting
- Support for IMAP and POP3
- Yahoo! Push Mail
- Automatic address completion

Safari

- Double tap an object to make it fill the screen, and double tap to zoom out
- Can have multiple websites open at once and switch between them
- Websites you have bookmarked on your computer will be transfered to your iPhone from your Mac or PC

Google Maps

- iPhone will not support the TeleNav solutions currently offered by other AT&T devices
- GPS is not part of the iPhone feature set.

Apple announces 3rd party software details for iPhone

Decided to copy some previous entries from MobileCommIT so as to consolidate the info.

From Engadgetmobile -



Apple used WWDC as the stage to announce a third-party development solution for the iPhone, putting to rest concerns that the handset would be a closed platform. Calling it a "sweet solution" for developers to get their wares onto iPhones across the globe without sacrificing stability or security, Apple is using its full Safari-based browser to let folks code up true, Web 2.0-compatible apps that can be accessed and updated on developers' own servers. Though any apps that third-party developers put together will run under Safari, they'll be totally customizable and maintain the platform's unique look and feel. Better yet, they won't require any special SDK -- Jobs claims that a working knowledge of modern web standards is all we'll need to code up custom iPhone goodies to our hearts' content.

Hello World

Decided on making a separate blog for the iPhone as it seems, judging on the media and on-line coverage, including in-depth reviews, to be well on its way to becoming a category by itself in the converging worlds of gadgets, computers, electronics, and mobile phones.

Disclaimer - this blog is intended to be a convenient on-line reference and discussion forum for my development team (involved in mobile communications and software development). By making it publicly accessible, we hope to share with others our experience and knowledge. If, in return, we get additional insight from comments, then it becomes a win-win situation for everyone.