That pretty much says it all, doesn’t it?
Pie chart: Apple’s outrageous share of the mobile industry’s profits
In any other businesses this would be called a RIP OFF! by Apple, but with the Apple-Fanboy base, They can do no wrong. I used to be a Apple Evanglista back in Apple’s dark days, and I still use a MacBook. But I use a Nokia N900, because I can do more, with less Apple regulation, and I pay a great deal less than any iPhone ball-and-chain.
Moments after we arrived in Wales, we were interested in checking email and whatnot. So we stopped at a McDonald’s to use the non-existant WiFi. So realizing we were in a Vodafone cell site, I thought I’d use my JoikuSpot from my Nokia N900.
No problem we even got decent download performance on the 2MByte download. And then we disconnected, and the shock set in.
I got an immediate SMS with the following;
You’ve spent eur41.43 data roaming and your usage will be capped at eur60.50. To continue past the cap, text PASS EU CAP to 50193. For more info see vodafone.ie
WTF, this is a Vodafone SIM (IE) and they are charging this kind of roaming charge in vodafone Wales. What a Ripoff!
When the Nokia N900 does real-time face tracking it again demonstrates why it’s not playing in the same SmartPhone world as the iPhone and Android phones.
I have been having discussions all over the net about smartphones and feature phones and the vast marketplace for non smartphones in the third world. A market that Nokia is big in, but is not well supported with things like facebook, Twitter and other social networking communications features, due, in part to the lack of more robust networks in those areas. Even during a discussion at yesterdays Cork Open Coffee the subject of community services came up and I was reminded of a New Beta from Nokia called Nokia Listings ( here, here, here. and here ) which is intended to support communications, operating within a weak infrastructure, in a social networking type of framework.
All the bad news,
Nokia smartphones dumb down profits
Nokia releases Q2 2010 results; profits down, market share flat
Nokia Q2 2010 results – profits down but smartphone sales up
So lets do a reality check on the facts; Nokia profits are Down 40%, but are still making a Profit. Which means they are in the green economically, and are making a Profit of €221M Euros (285M$). But 40% less than last quarter, meaning that they are only making 60% of the profit they made last quarter, during the worst recession in over 100 years And everyone is complaining?
The only thing this tells me, is that a manufacture like Apple who makes more profit on their iPhone 4, is ripping off their customers by charging a premium price for a Smartphone and Nokia does not!
This article is one of the best portrayals of Nokia’s Perceived fall from grace: The Background Story
…But somehow with Apple, the facts no longer matter. The iPhone was the ultimate best phone ever – according to Steve Jobs – and because Steve Jobs says so, that started to become the storyline. The truth didn’t matter…
…Because Apple was in the game, now anything Steve Jobs said was the word from god. And no matter how severely deficient the first iPhone models were, because they were Apple phones, that meant they were the world’s ‘leading’ phones. And if you didn’t match the current iPhone model with a potential ‘iPhone killer’ – then you were obsolete. …
Consider how unfair this issue is. Apple has today 2% of total phone market share. Nokia has 34%. Apple has 14% market share in smartphones – and has lost market share now for 3 straight quarters. Nokia has 41% market share in smartphones and has been growing market share in the same period. Of Apple’s flagship phone the iPhone 4 – with its 5 major improvements now in 2010 – Nokia has had 4 of those in its phones long before 2007. Why is Apple given any credit as the ‘leader’ and Nokia accused as ‘having lost the lead’?
This video at the BBC U.S. Site that claims Technology ‘rewires’ our brains Is yet another Pseudoscience attempt to baffle with Bullshit, the viewer. It comes off all Super Tech and is really no better than claiming that “Technology destroys our Brains”. Just more Yellow journalism. The disappointing thing is, that it’s coming from the BBC. This is for the U.S. (read American) audience, so I suppose it has to be Dumbed down to that level of that group.
But it is a sorry thing to watch happen.
I’ve been seeing a lot of iPhone screen snaps lately so I thought I’d post some of mine from the N900 as I use them.
Apps, Apps everywhere Apps. There has been a lot of discussion on the internet about the value of Apps. Which are abbreviations for applications, in this case small applications on mobile devices remind me of previous discussions, read arguments, about Client Server applications. These applications in the past were a model, a class of applications to distribute part of the workload of servers to the client. In reality, they had a more important role in decreasing the network communications traffic created by old style server based applications like Web-Apps. Using a client-server, or mobile app, can utilize an API that reduces the actual amount of data transferred between the server and client. And while the flexibility of Web-Apps is perhaps better for the application administration, mobile apps are better for the Mobile carrier reducing traffic and congestion on the wireless network. The current arguments are, that mobile apps are just a passing fad, funny how the same argument was used for client-server. But giving the issue with the Apple Antenna producing poor throughput, apps are what is saving Apples iPhone 4 and the AT&T network
Apple’s Antenna woes stemming from the poor design of the iPhone 4 are well known. But what has just gotten under my skin is this PC World article Antenna Expert: Apple is Right, iPhone 4 Signal Woes Overblown. The article is laced with the next best thing to professional lying, from a group of self professed Radio Experts AntennaSys, Inc The article blatantly claims;
“This was a non-scientific test, but it was done by two engineers who deal with RF devices for a living,”
and then this is where the spin/falsehood is;
“We succeeded in taking a five-bar display and reducing it to one bar by doing that,” Webb says. “But the call remained solid and never dropped.”
In plain sight they note First that they DID NOT DO A SCIENTIFIC TEST that yes, the signal drops, but the call is Ok. As a geek, and one who has been dealing with wireless communications for 10’s of years. This is insulting, and a professional attempt to baffle with bullshit
First a simple lesson on current digital mobile voice communications;
Speech is divided into 20 (ms) samples, each of which is encoded as 260 bits, giving a total bit rate of 13kbps (kilobits per second). This is the so-called full-rate speech coding
These 260 bit packets are transmitted in serial order with redundancy, so if a packet does not get received, it get’s retransmitted. The data is transmitted into a Time and Frequency Division Multiple Access digital channel. These slots in which the packets of voice are shared are not contiguously serial for each user. So when packets are transmitted they are separated in the channel. So the packet stream must be reassembled at the receiver side to reassemble the stream of packets back into the audio to be intelligible. the packets are chosen to be small enough so that should there be a packet timeout during transmitting/retransmitting the human ear will not detect it.
The professional lie above begins as such, in the use of unscientific terms as ‘the call remained solid’ in reality it never is, they are packets divided in the stream. They may sound solid, but that is due to the nature of human hearing which will fill in any gaps in the sound, and that the actual bit-rate of the wireless sound is very low, about the speed of a dialup modem. This does not constitute much bandwidth and can be sustained on extremely poor wired and wireless connections. It’s a lie to use this as a measure of signal strength. A piece of string and a couple of tin cans, can sustain a voice channel (analog) with no compression at all. Fidelity is in the ear of the beholder, not a scientific result.
When testing the real through put from the defective Apple antenna, the measured bitrate, collision, and retransmitting errors must be tested on a calibrated bench instrument, not by someone clamping their hands around it and listening for the shoe to drop. Someone should tell the ‘Experts’ at AntennaSys to try the same test on a string between two cans, and see if the ‘the call remained solid’ .
UPDATE:
Some how I think that the Nokia announcement that their N-Class phones were moving to MeeGo from Symbian was not greeted with universal internal acceptance, or gracefully.
When Charles Davies departed abruptly and with the appearance of a mystery Nokia N9 running Symbian^3 instead of Meego, I couldn’t help but make a connection. Internally I believe Mr. Davies was bent on pushing Symbian in the N-Class series after the management decision to move to Meego was made, hence the leak of the N9. But who am I to cast aspersions, I was rooting for Maemo.
I have been in Stockholm this past week on a bit of a holiday, and while I was nursing my pay-as-you-go Vodafone account I tried out both the GSM Edge and 3G speeds while in the Stockholm Arlanda Airport
I have had a revelation with regards to SmartPhones and the Reality Distortion Field.
Simply put, if the device, any device, that does not behave like a profit generating platform for Apple, should not be considered a Smartphone.
Sorry not for me, even Android’s more subtle marketing of Google is too much for me. If you are new here, you can be excused for not knowing that I use an Open Source phone called the Nokia N900. And while Nokia has done a lousy job marketing it, it still does all the things that the mighty Apple iPhone 4.
Has to be said, the new iPhone now comes with build-in iAds, just what I wanted an expensive phone that pumps Ads at me as a feature.
Had to be said!
This week Nokia announced that MeeGo would not officially be supported on the N900. On first appearance this would seem to be a bad thing. But I managed to down load the MeeGo v1.0 for Netbooks and burned it to a DVD. I attempted to run this with VirtualBox and then Parallels and neither would finish the load. But my old work Dell Pentium 4 worked just fine booting from the CD.
So I went exploring, and overall it was a bit of fun, and most 5 year olds will be comfortable in a few minutes with it. But use it on an adult machine, a netbook to get work done on? Not a chance, it’s like a world-of-wonder 5-10 year old grade toy.
And guess what, it’s a GREAT thing that this, this, what ever MeeGo is, is not going to be forced ‘officially’ on the N900 users of the world. Compared to Maemo 5…what am I saying, it’s not comparable, if you are listening…
UPDATE: Someone else doesn’t like Netbook MeeGo a NoGo
NOTE: and the BS continues, with Intel killing off MeeGo for Tizen to further delay or destroy Open Source for mobile devices.