'It's as though I've got Jonathan Ive's personal tool in my...' The delicious tumult that surrounds each new release of Jobsian product is enough to make many adults, otherwise a bit weepy and mopesome, positively gush and wobble - and I should know. That some spurt incontinently with excited happiness and others squeal in painful outrage (ooh!) is quite irrelevant, it is the fascinating …
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However irritating Fry might be at his luvvie best, he can at least write readably.
It's possible to bracket sections of text and still leave things readable, and also to punctuate things into a pig's breakfast. A parody of Fry that is pretty much unreadable does't really work
This article seems to be the literary equivalent of a stereotyped 70's copper trying to go undercover in a gay bar.
or he has jailbroken it, and is not on ATT.
For once I'm going to stick up for Jobsie and venture that when I buy the iPhone 4 and use it on Manx Telecom, I will not be suffering any of these issues.
However, if I am wrong I will gladly eat humble pie, most probably with a helping of lamenting-wasted-money gravy.
is undoubtedly the biggest spoon-fed fanboi on the planet. Referring to a cellphone as "an object of rare beauty" is tantamount to calling your typical family picture the Mona Lisa. However, I did feel a slight envy for those who feel "touched" by an iPhone.
-Posted from my iPhone 4G.
I loved this article.
Following from the JOB's banning of dodgy apps in the Apple App store, it seems reasonable to me for them to design a phone which is incapable of being held in the left hand. Thus at a stroke making it pointless for the vast majority of users to bother to phone chat lines, and look for p0rn on the web browser.
and surely putting a "bumper" on the phone detracts from one of the main features, and that is the look. I hate the iEverything ecosystem, but have to concede that the Iphone4 is a cracking design, until you put a sh1tty bit of plastic around it.
BTW, it's nice to see Mr Fry being objective and neutral as usual!
You know, it'd be a lot easier to take The Register's attempts at parody more seriously if The Register were not, itself, part of the perceived "problem". This website cranks out more free publicity for Apple than even Macworld manages—and only one of those sources actually gets invited to Apple's Sales & Marketing stunts.
What's astonishing is that most of your coverage is for essentially the same architecture: UNIX-based "iOS", UNIX-based MINIX Clone "Android" and UNIX-based MINIX Clone "MeeGo".
Only Symbian and Windows Phone 7 have f*ck all to do with that increasingly anachronistic throwback to the 1970s, yet they're losing (or not gaining in Windows Phone 7's case) market share by the picosecond.
UNIX, once revered and worshiped by the High Priests of The Temple Of Code as some kind of "ideal" operating system, (though Codd knows why; OS X goes well out of its way to hide most of it and pretend it's not there), may have briefly lost the phoney battles of the desktop, but is *winning the war* of ubiquity.
And nobody seems to have noticed. THAT is genuinely interesting news.
That Stephen Fry—a notorious gadget nut who has bought almost every bloody electronic device ever made—happens to like the iPhone 4 is NOT news. It never was. He writes for the Guardian, for f*ck's sake: a perennially loss-making national newspaper, with a circulation of a mere 350K readers. It's so popular with old-media types, it's practically their club newsletter, which explains all its biases.
Which sums up exactly why I don't like OSX. I want my system's plumbing exposed, where it can be reached easily.
It is very interesting, as you note, how UNIX derivatives are doing so well on phones, possibly the most single-user application ever. I wouldn't say it's an "ideal" operating system though - it's just the least bad of all operating systems out there. Remember, all hardware sucks, all software sucks. Some just sucks less than others.
The UNIX core is doing well on phones because it was originally written to allow lots of processing to happen on single-CPU systems with limited memory.
It was also written by programmers for programmers. That's programmers, not someone who drives a rapid-development GUI.
Sheesh, I'm getting old.
It's a pity people have to pick one side of the Apple fence and stay there. To be fair the unwavering support true Apple fanbois dish out even in the face a phone that doesn't work when you hold it is understandably polarising. You either agree with them or want to bash them in the head.
I suspect I'm one of a very small group of people who can like certain Apple products without needing to convert to the Church of St Jobs. I've owned a couple of Macs for testing purposes and never found them to be that great, give me a Windows or Linux box any day.
However, I do really like the iPod, I've been buying them since they first came out and my trusty 160GB iPod Classic goes everywhere I do (at least until there's an iPhone with a similar amount of storage). I despise iTunes though, it's clearly the work of Satan. I bought an iPod Touch and thought it was crippled and crap, but I then moved on to an iPhone and I've been incredibly happy with it ever since. After years of Windows CE/Pocket PC/Windows Mobile it truly was an incredible device: portable, stable and very versatile. Anyone who criticised Apple for not adding multi-tasking until now clearly never used a Windows CE device!!! ;)
There's now Android to offer a credible alternative, and certainly the ability to use Flash is tempting, but I'm not massively impressed with the UI or the software keyboard, nor the lack of games compared to the iPhone.
So I've got an iPhone 4, I'm impressed with the camera and the display, the speed it loads web pages is fantastic and my games now run much more smoothly (these were my biggest gripes from my old iPhone 3G). The signal loss thing is incredibly crap, hopefully a bumper will fix it, but at present I'd be reluctant to move to a different phone maker/OS.
But I am starting to feel the time to pick another mobile OS grows near. The lack of emulators on the App Store, the lack of Flash in the browser, restrictions on movie formats the phone will play, etc are all starting to become more and more grating. Jobs is going to have to either open the platform or fall into obscurity, and the decision on which way he is going to go will need to be fairly soon I think... (and knowing him, he'll stubbornly lead his flock off the cliff).
I like Apple's products. I've never had any particular objection to the thingummies and doodads themselves. I don't know anything about Jobs beyond the way he's represented in Publications That Love Apple or in Publications That Despise Apple. I do know that the Mac was/is a great system - I just use the PC (I mean.PC other than the Mac*) out of habit, and the fact that there're quite a few more games for Windows than for Mac. That and the fact that the Mac always seemed to be more focused on graphics and DTP at the time.
What does put me off Apple kit now is, to be honest, the unremitting hype. Sure, there was some of that in the old days, but it does seem to be far more feverish and fervent than it used to be. Until it all calms down and people start to come back to Earth I figure it's just best to stay out of it all.
(* They are PCs, in every way that makes a PC a PC. I just observe the convention of pretending otherwise.)
>It's a pity people have to pick one side of the Apple fence and stay there.
Fry's article in the Guardian - and a similar piece in Wired - deserve and invite contempt, polarisation is entirely rational.
If any other company had brought out such a fundamentally broken product they would be a universal laughing stock. Its the Emperors new phone, only worse given the number of gullable fools buying it, sight unseen.
Who cares, one way or the other, what one bit of Fry or Laurie think? Yes, they have assulted the Yank media with their tatty take on "acting" ... it doesn't mean that they have any useful input on day-to-day technological stuff. Why give 'em any press? Next, you'll be giving Larry Magid or Bob Metcalfe page-inches ...
It's a fscking phone, fer chrissake ... Can I make a phone call in Sonoma Valley's so-called "dead-zones"? No? Then it's useless to me. What good is a phone that can't make a phone call? Surely that should be the end of the story?
Amused, that is, that my first post criticising the waste of time this article represents was rejected. Afraid of your own detractors, I suppose.
/shrug
Oh well, repost without such direct criticism I guess?
The post was bad, a big waste of time, as was the lampooned article in the first place.
Why is it so acceptable to lampoon Stephen Fry as a group sex enjoying bondage loving man who's unable to describe anything without using a million sexual innuendos. I read the register almost daily and have done so for many years, but this pile of crap article has really let you down! Anyone who reads or watches Stephen Fry knows that in general he steers clear of these crass sexual references. Its nice to see that gay stereotypes have not moved on since the 70s in some peoples minds.
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