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From a Palm Pre perspective, I found this test to be very similar to my own results. However, I think the lady using the Pre might have pushed a couple buttons wrong on the browser test, which might have slowed her down even more.
I am still stunned every time I use the camera. The Palm Pre is actually faster than my crappy Kodak 10 mp camera with HD.
So iPhone users are starting to experience the joy that comes from doing business with the worlds oldest phone company, at&t. Their iPhone web surfing and texting transactions are itemized and printed out on detailed pages.
One user put together this short little video showing her 300 PAGE phone bill from at&t.
She posts a nice message at the end of the video encouraging people not to kill forests with their iPhone and change their default billing format to something that won’t require a back brace to move from the mail box to the house.
Disclaimer: I refuse to do business with at&t on principle. They slammed me into a $2.50 per minute calling plan in 2000 when I relocated from Illinois to Florida. They didn’t ask me nor did they tell me that they had slammed me into a higher rate. I didn’t learn about it until I received a long distance bill for $1,000+ Their response to their practice was almost as bad as the bill. As a result I will never do business with at&t again. I’m sure at&t will win over the hearts and minds of iPhone users across the US in similar fashion. 
Its not exactly a problem I could call a product liability attorney about, but it sure did raise my blood pressure for several months as I had to deal with customer support on hold for about a total of 50 hours. (unsuccessfully I might add, I had to pay their trumped up bill in full and on time or risk having thems sabotage my credit for their thieving business practice.)
You probably remember seeing some of the media hype running up to and through the iPhone launch on June 29. You probably heard some of the estimates that the iPhone could, would and had sold 500,000 iPhones the first couple days it was on the market. Well, if those numbers seemed suspicious to you, then give yourself a pat on the back for being able to cut through the spin.
AT&T said it signed up 146,000 iPhone customers, well below analyst estimates, which ran as high as 500,000 units. Shares of Apple were down as much as 5 percent in early trading and about 2.5 percent at midday, trading around $140. AT&T?s shares were down less than 1 percent, at slightly under $40.
AT&T has an exclusive deal with Apple to provide wireless service for the iPhone, the combination digital music player, cellular phone and Internet device. The phone went on sale on June 29, two days before the quarter ended, amid fanfare surpassed only by the release of the final ?Harry Potter? book last week.
AT&T Earnings Up, but iPhone Sales Disappoint – New York Times
Selling a cellphone is for good or bad currently about signing up a subscriber. No subscriber is pretty much no sale. Carriers own the market for good or bad and possibly until Google attempts to ‘open’ the market with their own variety of Information Monopoly. At&t released their 2nd quarter numbers and it shows that the iPhone did not due even half as well as the news media claimed. The iPhone didn’t sell 500k nor 400k nor even 250k. It sold 146k.
So there was a lot of hype in those numbers. Now sure, you could argue that some people bought the iPhone from an Apple store. You could say there were difficulties with people getting signed up with At&t resulting from buying from an Apple store even. But let’s think about that for a second.
1. If you make the argument that the sales came from Apple Stores (say 364,000 units sold), then that would indicate that only Apple can sell the iPhone most of the time and that At&t doesn’t know what they are doing. Now I wouldn’t rule that out, but it doesn’t help Apple be successful setting up partnerships with the cell phone industry let alone At&t who has a 5 year lock on the iPhone
2. It could be argued that the phone subscriber number was low due to the difficulty signing up with At&t. There did seem to be a few anecdotes on the internet, but nothing indicated that 364,000 people were having trouble. That would be proof of a very serious problem for At&t and Apple (ergo don’t buy it at the Apple Store if you want an easy transition onto your At&t plan.)
3. Let’s look at the dark side for a second. In the book publishing world, publishers hire people to go out and buy up their books to create the illusion of a best seller. If 500,000 units were the number of total iPhones sold, and lets say that only 50,000 people experienced a slow sign up(that’s still a huge number of customers treated poorly), then we have to account for the other 294,000 unit sales. Could it be that Apple or At&t or someone else with an iPhone agenda went out and purchased up the other 294,000 units to pump up the numbers? Obviously, Apple would have the most to gain from hype, but it could be that a number of people wanted to see if the iPhone would sell on eBay or ask the question Will it Blend? for their YouTube show.
Now don’t get me wrong, neither Apple nor At&t have the best track records at book keeping. I have no idea what type of financial reporting software either company is using nor how their accountants and auditors de’ jour are applying GAAP principles to their numbers. It could also be possible that neither company knows how to count. Regardless of the scenario and possibilities, stock holders didn’t like the news and peppered their At&t stock on Apple before taking a bite out of Apple’s value.
Last week we wrote about the rookie mistakes that Apple made on the new iPhone. We covered 19 mistakes that we noted within the first 48 hours of the release of the iPhone. Many more mistakes have been identified since then, some of which might be able to be fixed with iPhone 2.0.
However, those were mobile phone mistakes for the most part. Those were rookie mistakes made by a rookie mobile phone designer.
We would not have expected them to make rookie mistakes when it came to the design of the MP3 player in the iPhone, the thing that put the ‘i” in the iPhone. Apple apparently forgot to include some of the core functionality that imprinted the Apple signature on the iPod and made it a great device in the first place. (not the only thing but a key thing)
They purposefully removed the ability to drag and drop music onto the iPhone. They went for a glitzy looking interface on the phone itself and dumbed down the interface between the phone to the computer to iTunes. So its now just as tedious to synch up the iPhone with your computer as any other MP3 player with the exception of an iPod. The iPhone might have been a great gadget if it had been as good as an iPod plus had the abilities of a good phone.
In fact it doesn’t have the capabilities of a good phone and isn’t as good as an iPhone.
Monster’s and Critics put together a nice summary of activation numbers iPhone users may need to turn their iBrick into an iPhone.
Many news organizations and bloggers are calling out At&t as the source of the activation issues. I suspect that its Apple’s low tech method of activating iPhones through iTunes that is taxing At&t’s system. At&t like all major wireless carriers are setup to activate phones . . . wirelessly. Trying to force a half million activations in two days through servers handing off from Apple to At&t is definitely an exceptional process for At&t and not one that could have been tested before hand. But Apple had to be special and ‘control’ activations through their own site so they could get a few more iTunes users.
That control seems to have caused some of their new and existing customers hours of hold time headaches. Hopefully Apple tested the iPhone better than they tested their atypical activation process.
AT&T Customer Service (1-877-419-4500)
AT&T Activation Status number (877-800-3701)
Cellular Customer Service (800-331-0500)
Port Request (866-895-1097)
Apple Support (AT&T) number (877-777-4189)
Port and activations line (888-898-7685)
Apple support group (800-694-7466)
Source: AT&T suffers wrath of bloggers over activation issues – Tech
Apple is very new to the mobile phone design business. This newbie status enabled them to throw out a few rules and come up with a sexy software interface, but they missed a number of things that mobile phone consumers have grown to expect or demand over the years.
These mistakes are gathered from multiple news stories and consumer complaints that have surfaced in the first 24 hours or so after the launch of the iPhone. Apple’s rush to market may have ignored the marketing studies that probably highlighted these problems months ago.
Below I present these 19 Rookie Mistakes Apple Made on iPhone in a quick video presentation based on a MindManager Mindmap, a snap shot of the actual mindmap, and the text exported from the mindmap.
If you are one of the minority of people that use a Mac, you may be extremely excited about the launch of the iPhone. If you are a devotee of the iPod, you may be looking to trade in your iPod and cancel your current cell plan paying the $100-$200 cancellation fee, in order to then pay $500 up front for a new iPhone.
The commercials look sexy, the gadget looks like a sexy gadget, its Apple and for the last 10 years(maybe a little less) Apple has been cool again. Apple has a problem with the iPhone and it has been under reported. People have been crazed over a product that has been hyped for almost 2 years and is only finally coming to market (while other cell makers have already rushed out devices that do the same thing and look the same but without the Apple name).
Apple’s problem is that they are working with AT&T and have given the mobile service provider an exclusive deal for 5 years. Mobile phone models, even iPods do not last five years. The product life cycle doesn’t last five years. Five years for an untested mobile product with an untested mobile phone maker was a stupid deal for At&t to make, if they want to sell iPhones.
Another possible hindrance for Apple is the nature of its agreement with AT&T, he said. AT&T gave Apple an unprecedented amount of say in how the iPhone will be sold and what the phone will feature; Motorola and other carriers, accustomed to obeying carrier dictates, would likely be envious.
But Apple has also given AT&T a five-year exclusive deal to sell the phone, analysts say. Exclusive deals rarely run more than one year. Phonemakers want to build market share by selling through multiple carriers. “AT&T gave a lot, but so did Apple,” Hazelton said.Source: Apple’s iPhone casts big shadow on cell industry | Chicago Tribune
I’m sure they do but they win regardless of whether any iPhones sell. If they don’t sell, then Apple will have to pay the bill when AT&T returns the product or chops the price down to something normal like $99(A $200 – $300 per phone charge that Apple will have to pay.) At&t will win because they will be bringing foot traffic into their stores and their websites. If people can’t afford the ridiculous price of the iPhone, At&t can convince them to pick up another product.
The thing is though that At&t is a dud. Under the Cingular brand Bell South/ SBC did quite a bit to revamp a wireless business and then they brought in the albatross that was a mostly failing At&t. They then made the stupid decision of going with the At&t brand name because it is recognized. That is normally smart marketing, when the brand has no positive connotations, but At&t has a long and recent history of bad service, Bad quality, Bad customer service, Bad prices, Bad billing capabilities, and more.
Apple has a good image in most of those areas if you discount the crappy batteries and the iPod sudden death syndrome and ignore those monstrous junky Apple Box things with the jello colors from several years back (the ones that couldn’t be upgraded and got stuck in a bunch of colleges where they rapidly rotted away or became outdated).
So Apple has given an exclusive deal to a company with a brand name that is a dud in the wireless world. What is going to happen to all those Apple devotee types that get suckered into setting up 2 year plans with At&t and end up getting bad service with their cool looking phones?
But none of this is going to be good for the consumer and especially not for Apple fans. The iPhone may have the potential to fly, but its not going to fly well with an At&t albatross.
The Wall Street Journal is reporting this morning that Microsoft submitted a filing to the Federal Communications Commission. The filing suggests that the company might add some version of phone service to its ‘hand-held media players’ known as the Zune.
Microsoft will submit a prototype to the agency. The Zune already has WiFi capability and a new Phone + Zune combo Ph + une = Phune could provide a device to compete on some levels with the iPhone. It might also be an opening salvo in Microsoft’s never ending race to continually play catch up with other companies that have tested the waters first.
The filing indicates that the new device will utilize OFDM, which is a routing technology capable of moving TV and voice calls between devices. Maybe Zune will abandon the Phune concept all together and focus on the potential to virally transmit Microsoft Soapbox videos on its Zune.
That would at least spare everyone another silly sounding gadget name.
Technorati tags: Zune, Microsoft, Microsoft Phune, fcc, bad gadget names like Zune iPhone and Phune
Cisco and Apple revealed this week that they have reached a type of cease fire in their trademark battle over the term iPhone, which Cisco owns.
Cisco launched a product called the iPhone in December and wants to come to terms with Apple on an agreement that would allow the Cisco iPhone to ‘ interoperate ‘ with the Apple iPhone in some form or fashion. Apparently the companies continued negotiations on the topic right up until the night before MacWorld at which point Apple walked out on the talks, launched their iPhone at MacWorld hoping that Cisco was bluffing only to learn that Cisco wasn’t bluffing when they filed a lawsuit against Apple.
Now they are back at the tables trying to work things out. Many companies would jump at a chance to avoid a Trademark lawsuit, but Apple is not a company to be troubled by someone else’s trademark. Plus, they are not normally known for opening up their proprietary systems to allow interoperability with other platforms.
Therefore, they may be talking but they may have a long way to go before a settlement is presented. Even then it looks likely that both companies will exact a pound of iPhone flesh from the other.
Technorati tags: Cisco, Apple, iPhone, Trademark litigation, ineroperable iPhones, proprietary systems
Here is a five minute video of the NYTimes coverage of the iPhone including Steve Jobs keynote speach. The video does not include any coverage of the lawsuit that followed the launch of the device shortly there after.
The iPhone may or may not be a success, but this keynote is definitely a great example of the right way to launch a product and demo it to a crowd that already expects the device.
It is almost unfortunate that Apple was not able to put aside some of their other regulatory and legal trademark issues that are now detracting from the launch. Funny how LG, didn’t have the same problem nor the same buzz for its very similar device that doesn’t hold a name trademarked by a different company.