10 Things that "Absolutely suck" about the iPhone. (Yes I have one)

[cmaier]

I don't think they want a royalty situation. Development on OSX has been free throughout.

The iPhone runs Darwin v9, my mac with 10.4 runs Darwin 8.10. This probably means that the development kit (XCode) for the iPhone is tied to Leopard, the upcoming OSX release.

By the way, I'm pretty sure that Steve Jobs would be happy to have UNIX on the iPhone; he founded NeXT, a UNIX computer company, after he was forced out of Apple.

The question is whether they want a macos development model or an ipod development model. Where's xcode for ipod? I think they are more likely to go the ipod way than the desktop way, but we'll see.

 

[vinman]

any of you try ultimate ears? i'm thinking of switching to the super.fi 5 pros or triple.fi 10 pros. I haven't seen much in the way of reviews of the triple.fi's.

UEs are very nice across the board. I'm currently beta testing a set of iPhone specific UEs based on the Metro.fi (their lowest end) and it FAR surpasses the sound quality of the comparable Shures. I'm betting it will be a little less expensive, too - but at the very least cost comaparable.

Take the advice (or warning) I gave Phone Diva - check out head-fi.org. You'll find LOTS of info over there on UE and all sorts of other earbuds, iems, headphones, portable amps, dacs, etc. It's a bad place to go if you like high quality sound and live on a normal budget!

 

[Pearl_Diva]

The Apple store in Chicago quit selling Ultimate Ears. There were none to be found when I went there yesterday.

Their pet brand is Shure, that was the first brand the salesperson pulled out. I have a pair of Shures E2c already actually, maybe I'll just use those.

 

[cmaier]

I've heard great things about the shure e500's. Expensive, though.

 

[Pearl_Diva]

They're the cost of an iPhone, LOL! There's no way.
I think $200 is my absolute limit on earphones. And if I can find a good pair cheaper, I may try them.

 

[vinman]

They're the cost of an iPhone, LOL! There's no way.
I think $200 is my absolute limit on earphones. And if I can find a good pair cheaper, I may try them.

Seems like around $150 is a magic number for earphones (canal phones). You have the decent, actual improved models starting at around $30, the next decent improvement seems to come in around $100. Then, at $150, you start finding some real "audiophile" quality sound where you can consistently start detecting flaws in your equipment and even in the recording process.

You have a LOT of choices in the <$200 range, Phone Diva. The majority of them will sound better than the E2Cs. Having said that, compared to most less expensive earbuds, the E2Cs are very nice - it's all very subjective. We're also WELL into the law of diminishing returns with earbuds costing over about $50. You'll find no shortage of people over on head-fi who have spent +/- $1000 on earbuds (MUCH more than that for actual headphones), and literally thousands on gear such as headphone specific amps, preamps, dacs, etc. As far as the earbuds go, though, realistically the difference in a set of stock iBuds and a set of $100 Sonys is going to be FAR greater than the difference in the $100 Sonys and a set of $500 Shure E530s. Again, most of the differences in sound are very subjective. One thing you'll find universally true, though - you'll have a hard time finding anyone who has used Bose products and has any experience with other high end brands who will recommend Bose. Basically, for the cost of admission, Bose does NOT make good, accurate sound. Whether you LIKE Bose sound is personal. This is (arguably) true for speakers, as well. Some folks swear that Bose makes the best sounding stuff out there. I've never met an audiophile who agrees - myself included.

Basically, if you have a budget you can spend on new 'buds - try some out. You WILL replace the E2Cs - almost certainly. If you never try anything else, however, you will probably live through using them and be just fine and +/- $200 richer!

By the way - if the "test" phone in your sig line is the iPhone, wait just a little longer and the Ultimate Ears iPhone model will be out. They sound REALLY good, and even though they're based on UE's least expensive model, they sound as good as my modified Sony EX90s (which were more expensive and sound REALLY good, too!). Plus, you'll get the same click and double click functionality as the iBuds and the E2Ci (and the Vibes and a few others) and a mic.

 

[mikec#IM]

hmm

I've tried UE's, and while better than Shures, I still think they don't warrant the price for what you get.

Shure's, imho, tend to be tinny, all the way up the line. Low and mid range suffer. I guess they are okay for classical, but for general listening, found them fair to poor, depending on model. Also, the fit isn't very good.

I'm telling you, FutureSonic Atrios are the best out there. Get a foam sleeve and the sound isolation is good.

I think they run about $150...but the sound is like $1,000. Seriously.

Their name is goofy compared to Bose or Shure, but they blow the other away.

 

[darakaye2]

Icali has a quick, awesome podsact on the jesusPhone....bunch of good little tid bitties

 

[archie]

HAHAHAHA!!!
So I just got back from lunc, listening to the PhoneDifferent podcast put together by mike and dieter.

They were saying that this thread had a big discussion without any resolution of whether or not the iPhone has virtual memory ? and inturn using paging I assume?


First, the iPhone has more than the 128MB as you two noted in the podcast; you are forgetting about the 1GB embedded on the CPU.

Second, and more importantly, you are forgetting (or are probably just unaware) about Apple's use of LLVM. It only loads the parts of applications that are needed. This does away with paging and virtual memory as you know it.

More efficient this way.

You can thank Apple for it's pioneering use of "LLVM" and i'ts contributions back to the community AND you can also thank Apple for the development of "launchd" to constantly control these processes and their contributions that they have given back to the open source community in this regard as well.


Probably tough for people here to swallow.



Can't be

 

[Pearl_Diva]

The touch response seems a little to the left on the virtual keys. Maybe it's a quirk of this one, but I notice going dead center on the button often hits the next letter. If I tap a little to the left on the button, it's accurate.

 

[cmaier]

HAHAHAHA!!!
So I just got back from lunc, listening to the PhoneDifferent podcast put together by mike and dieter.

They were saying that this thread had a big discussion without any resolution of whether or not the iPhone has virtual memory ? and inturn using paging I assume?


First, the iPhone has more than the 128MB as you two noted in the podcast; you are forgetting about the 1GB embedded on the CPU.

Second, and more importantly, you are forgetting (or are probably just unaware) about Apple's use of LLVM. It only loads the parts of applications that are needed. This does away with paging and virtual memory as you know it.

More efficient this way.

You can thank Apple for it's pioneering use of "LLVM" and i'ts contributions back to the community AND you can also thank Apple for the development of "launchd" to constantly control these processes and their contributions that they have given back to the open source community in this regard as well.


Probably tough for people here to swallow.



Can't be

Archie - where did you get the 1GB on the cpu thing? That would be an astoundingly large cache for an ARM-based processor. I doubt it. (Even x86 processors haven't had that much cache until very recently). It would also make for a huge die.

As for LLVM, you seem to be confusing code and data. We are not talking about what part of the application is in memory. We are talking (primarily) about what part of the application's DATA is in memory.

 

[surur]

First, the iPhone has more than the 128MB as you two noted in the podcast; you are forgetting about the 1GB embedded on the CPU.

Second, and more importantly, you are forgetting (or are probably just unaware) about Apple's use of LLVM. It only loads the parts of applications that are needed. This does away with paging and virtual memory as you know it.

Archie is back and still spouting nonsense. Do you have a link to back this up?

Surur

 

[cmaier]

The touch response seems a little to the left on the virtual keys. Maybe it's a quirk of this one, but I notice going dead center on the button often hits the next letter. If I tap a little to the left on the button, it's accurate.

What I find is that when I think i'm dead center, the part of my thumb touching the button is actually off to the side a bit, so with my right thumb I had to aim left and with my left thumb I had to aim right. But because of the way I held the phone in my left hand, the adjustment for the right thumb was bigger.

I stopped consciously thinking about after about a week, and now I can just tap away like a madman.

 

[cmaier]

Archie is back and still spouting nonsense. Do you have a link to back this up?

Surur

An 8:1 cache to RAM ratio would be unheard of (but would prove there is VM - otherwise 7/8 of that memory would at all times be empty).

And any on-chip memory would have to be cache (particularly since otherwise there is no point added the 128MB external memory).

Archie, as usual, makes no sense, but his pedantic tone is at least amusing.

 

[oalvarez]

The touch response seems a little to the left on the virtual keys. Maybe it's a quirk of this one, but I notice going dead center on the button often hits the next letter. If I tap a little to the left on the button, it's accurate.

Diva, curious as to what you think of the user experience up to now, especially that of the internet and media. Do you like its simplicity? Do you find it refreshing? We all know that it has omissions (deleting a single call, being able to attach a photo via email, MMS, etc) so I'm really asking about how you find the actual user experience to be. Easy, hard, frustrating, enjoyable?

Thanks in advance!

 

[mikec#IM]

hmm

Archie's back from the dead and ready to party like it's 1994.

It's not surprising his comments are false or mistaken...remeber, he claimed wi-fi and bluetooth couldn't work together on the chipset used by Treos (a completely wrong statement).

He loves spouting LLVM like it's the second coming of Jesus, while he has no understanding of code, data, apis, sdk, and other technical items.

Getting your info from podcasts is almost the same as sniffing glue and inventing the news yourself.

 

[cmaier]

I just took a look at the LLVM website, and it appears to be merely code optimization of the sort used by Transmeta. Presumably one optimizes for speed, not memory, using it, though one could presumably not load code that can't execute (shouldn't be much of that.) When I've seen these things in the past, they actually increase memory usage. For example, typically they do things like eliminate conditional branches by duplicating code, etc.

I'm admittedly not an expert on LLVM or what Apple may or may not be doing with it, however.

 

[whmurray]

3G is still NOT everywhere in the US!

But since it's new technology and we need to move forward, phones without 3G are definitely backwards IMO. I like phones with both wifi and 3G since they cover both areas when one is not to be found.

AT&T UMTS coverage sucks but Sprint EVDO is about as good as Sprint. That is pretty good.

Perhaps ubiquitous overstates it a little but the issue is that it is much wider than Wi-Fi.

 

[whmurray]

If I add the cost of my treo 650 to the price of all the software i added to make it useable, it was well more than $600 Of course, at least I had the ability to ADD software. (Out of the box, the treo 650 had a lot more shortcomings for me than the iphone does. Does anyone actually use that versamail crashbait? i don't like crashes, but crashes that actually wipe all the data off your phone are a serious problem. And I forked over for at least 2 alternative web browsers, in addition to a couple of free ones. Plus zlauncher just to be able to make decent use of flash memory [said flash being needed because i had to load so many other programs on their just to get it to work right]. And backup software for when my preferences database got mangled. Argh. I'm having flashbacks.)

Luckily, I have that ability with iphone, as well, but most people won't go that route.

Anyway, since most people who already forked over the $600 still appear to be happy (yes, there are exceptions, and the people with complaints are always more likely to post than the people who are happy), and since those are the folks who are "waiting," as you put it, i'd say it's got enough of the "basic functions" they want. Presumably most those who believe that deleting individual calls from the log is a "basic function" (not to mention the other missing features) haven't yet forked over their $600.

Personally, now that i have a unix shell, I'm content

I paid $700- for my unlocked GSM Treo from Palm plus another $200 or more for software. iPhone is cheap by comparison. Service is cheaper too. I pay $40- for unlimited data on the Treo but only half that on the iPhone. I do not need Treo customers to tell me about the cost of the iPhone.

 

[Malatesta]

I paid $700- for my unlocked GSM Treo from Palm plus another $200 or more for software. iPhone is cheap by comparison. Service is cheaper too. I pay $40- for unlimited data on the Treo but only half that on the iPhone. I do not need Treo customers to tell me about the cost of the iPhone.

But you are comparing an unlocked GSM Treo to a locked GSM iphone.

So I guess to equate things:

(1) How much more would an unlocked iPhone cost than currently offered?

or

(2) How much does a locked GSM Treo cost with a new contract?

Obviously we can't answer the first, but we could the second, and I bet it would be significantly cheaper with a Treo (plus, couldn't you unlock any GSM treo for a small fee?)

Re: the software for the iPhone. Lets be honest, you don't spend any money on it because you can't. But no one here can honestly tell me that if the iPhone was not sandboxed, you would not buy applications as they became available? No games? No IM client? Not a better PIM?

It seems wherever there is an open OS, there are plenty of developers and programs to be made.

(data costs are obviously dependent on the carrier, so that's hit and miss with who you prefer. )