Walt Mossberg's iphone video review - "A beautiful and breakthrough handheld computer" | Hacker News Reader

Walt Mossberg's iphone video review - "A beautiful and breakthrough handheld computer"

online.wsj.com

13 pointsbrezina14 comments

I'm more skeptical.

1) How will webapps perform when they have to do a stream of http requests over a cingular wireless connection.

2) The people willing to pay 600 bucks for a phone are the people that already own smart phones. The people that own smartphones will not like typing out emails on a touch screen. These people want a device to let them read and enter text quickly, and often they want to type without seeing the screen.

I should clarify that I think the phone will be a success in the long run. It's very exciting to see the bar raised and I hope this ushers in a new era of mobile development. I just don't see 10 million units leaving the shelves this year.

They won't be able to make enough of these things... it's an amazing device.

Folks, start creating apps for it... pretty much everyone I know that has a web2.0 company is making sure they have something that works well on an iPhone.

I was a little disappointed when I read this tidbit in the article: "The only add-on software Apple is allowing will be Web-based programs that must be accessed through the on-board Web browser. The company says these can be made to look just like built-in programs, but the few we tried weren't impressive."

Is this a comment on the particular apps Walt saw, or is it a sign that the iPhone won't be a good 3rd party platform?

The only way to create apps for an iPhone, for now at least, is through the web standards. Frankly, I don't mind this at all since our app is a web app and we don't need access to local resources.

From what we managed to figure out on our own, the key is to make sure your app works well in Safari (duh!) and to make sure you optimize fonts and layout for iPhone's resolution 480x320 (it has a very high DPI count though). We made a custom CSS for an iPhone for our "Edit" screen. Also, to make it easy to zoom in on certain portions, iPhone's Safari is zooming in on individual DIVs so splitting your front page into more DIVs sounds like a great thing.... you won't notice this on regular browser but it will allow you to have a nice zoom on an iPhone.

PS: We're more excited about this than about F8 platform. First few apps that come out with "support" for iPhone will get a lot of free publicity and a lot of users.

"From what we managed to figure out on our own, the key is to make sure your app works well in Safari (duh!) and to make sure you optimize fonts and layout for iPhone's resolution 480x320 (it has a very high DPI count though)."

It seems the slowness of AT&T's EDGE network will be a big constraint too. 100s for the Amazon.com homepage to load, 2 minutes for yahoo.com, according to the NYT:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/27/technology/circuits/27pogue.html

From what I can tell, a lot of people are a tad confused by the fact that you have to use Javascript to interface with the iPhone.. A lot might think that it's a crippled interface. But Apple can expose every single part of the phone to Javascript. Add in the ability to create an icon on the iPhone that automatically visits a website, and you have, for all intents and purposes, a native application running on the iPhone. So I'm not sure why people feel that it's a crippled platform.

Now, if Apple doesn't expose every single part of the iPhone to Javascript, then that's a little annoying. But then again, I wouldn't want a random web application to be able to take a picture and upload it whenever it felt like.

The only problem with that idea is performance. Javascript the language is not necessarily slow, but almost all modern implementations are. I suppose the saving grace is that multitasking isn't exactly common on a phone, but even still I can see it being a problem. What about games, for example? Anything beyond Sudoku is going to have problems.

I think the biggest problem with this hope is security -- whatever you expose in the api will be available to any arbitrary web site you visit. They can't expose contacts and other private info without major problems. There might be some ways around this (e.g. asking for permission, trusting certain sites) but it is hard to see how this will be completely seamless as they want the experience to be.

If they sell 2 million of the $500 devices, Apple will have a new billion-dollar business. If they sell as they claim, 10 million, that is $5B per year added to Apple revenue.

However I expect that Apple stock will not grow until Leopard ships, losing the Mac business in favor of the tough cell phone business would not be seen as a good tradeoff.

Apple stock will not grow until Leopard ships? Their stock is up 100% over 1 year. It's up ~50% YTD.

Sorry for not being more clear. I mean, that since AAPL hit in the range of $120 after announcing the iPhone, they have plateaued. I think that Wall Street is waiting to see whether Apple can deliver a new product and keep things going on its other product lines without being distracted.

I think it is more likely that Wall Street is waiting to see if the iPhone is a hit or a miss.

I did not expect to be impressed but wow... that thing looks amazing. Nicely done apple. This will easily add another bill$ to their business.

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