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Humphreys posted:I never got the Blackberry hype. People said it was great for business and what not, but I just don't know why any other established manufacturers weren't good enough. Was it just BBM? Blackberry pretty much invented push email, had pretty good enterprise device management, and was pretty much designed around being an email device. When Blackberry was still king of mobile enterprise email, Windows Mobile and Symbian 60 were pretty much your only other choices for a smart device. Neither of them had as good of battery life when dealing with email because they had to poll the servers on a set schedule or leave an open connection, both of which were battery hogs at the time. KozmoNaut posted:
While WAP has pretty much died off, mobile sites are the modern descendant of what WAP was, and if you look at it that way, that guy wasn't too far off the mark.
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Mar 12, 2014 13:20
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Lowen SoDium posted:While WAP has pretty much died off, mobile sites are the modern descendant of what WAP was, and if you look at it that way, that guy wasn't too far off the mark. That's true in essence, but the severely-limited WML markup language and the concept of WAP-only sites with "decks" and "cards" died, as did the whole mobile WAP Internet separate from the real Internet. Ever since mobile devices gained proper HTTP/HTML-capable browsers, WAP has been obsolete, since it was much easier to develop mobile-friendly sites using proper "big Internet" HTML/PHP/ASP/etc., instead of with the idiosyncrasies and limitations of WAP. And this guy was very particular that WAP was the future, not general Internet access on mobile devices. Several times he shot down the idea of general mobile Internet access, using the argument that the users would just end up confused, and that limited highly-specific WAP portals were the future. He had lots of examples of customized WAP portals that he had dreamt up for various businesses, it was nothing like the mobile versions of websites we know today. They were all incredibly limited in scope and ambition. I will concede that WAP still lives on every time someone sends an MMS, but that's about it. KozmoNaut has a new favorite as of 14:40 on Mar 12, 2014 |
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Mar 12, 2014 14:35
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To take one step back from MMS - wasn't SMS itself a hack of the networks internal messaging system between phones and towers? My memory is a little hazy on it, but I'm sure it was a byproduct of something that happens anyway and now monetized.
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Mar 12, 2014 14:54
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Humphreys posted:I never got the Blackberry hype. People said it was great for business and what not, but I just don't know why any other established manufacturers weren't good enough. Was it just BBM? The keyboard was a huge part of it. Also after using it for awhile you get really quick with the various shortcuts. I personally can't stand them, but my wife has both a work Blackberry and a personal Blackberry. Business in the front, business in the back. The problem is they never adapted to the iPhone paradigm shift. The Blackberry engineers reportedly said the iPhone was impossible, even after it was announced, because they couldn't imagine a battery big enough to power that huge screen. They just didn't see the need for a form factor past their own until it was obsolete.
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Mar 12, 2014 15:02
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Humphreys posted:To take one step back from MMS - wasn't SMS itself a hack of the networks internal messaging system between phones and towers? My memory is a little hazy on it, but I'm sure it was a byproduct of something that happens anyway and now monetized. Basically, the packets that were getting sent to the phone anyway to determine signal strength and the like (not actual voice channels) had some unused bandwidth and SMS was designed to fit there in order to use that bandwidth. Hence the 140 char limit.
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Mar 12, 2014 15:11
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Krispy Kareem posted:The problem is they never adapted to the iPhone paradigm shift. The Blackberry engineers reportedly said the iPhone was impossible, even after it was announced, because they couldn't imagine a battery big enough to power that huge screen. They just didn't see the need for a form factor past their own until it was obsolete. Oh God don't say that, it just makes Apple more smug. "We make the impossible, possible." 
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Mar 12, 2014 15:15
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Humphreys posted:To take one step back from MMS - wasn't SMS itself a hack of the networks internal messaging system between phones and towers? My memory is a little hazy on it, but I'm sure it was a byproduct of something that happens anyway and now monetized. "Hack" is probably the right word for it. It is an implementation of data packets on the voice-optimized GSM network, originally meant for status messages and emergency warnings and the like. It piggybacks onto the control stream used for controlling voice calls, hence the 128-byte (160 7-bit characters) limit per message. Because of their original intended use and small size, text messages usually get through even when the network is heavily loaded (for instance on Christmas or New Year's Eve) and voice calls fail to connect. I work for a telco, and by far the largest income source aside from wholesale traffic from other operators, is text messaging. Think of it, it costs literally nothing to send 128 bytes. Even unlimited messaging plans have an absolutely ridiculous profit margin.
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Mar 12, 2014 15:20
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Thanks to everyone who clarified it. KozmoNaut posted:I work for a telco, and by far the largest income source aside from wholesale traffic from other operators, is text messaging. Think of it, it costs literally nothing to send 128 bytes. Even unlimited messaging plans have an absolutely ridiculous profit margin. Yeah I thought it was trivial for operators, cheers. This thread is making me feel so  and I love it.A friends dad just got himself an alcohol still (legal here), and man it's high tech. I remember them being much simpler. Humphreys has a new favorite as of 15:44 on Mar 12, 2014 |
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Mar 12, 2014 15:38
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Krispy Kareem posted:The problem is they never adapted to the iPhone paradigm shift. The Blackberry engineers reportedly said the iPhone was impossible, even after it was announced, because they couldn't imagine a battery big enough to power that huge screen. They just didn't see the need for a form factor past their own until it was obsolete. Blackberry couldn't figure how to get around the battery life problems with a screen that large, and neither could apple.
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Mar 12, 2014 15:46
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Krispy Kareem posted:The problem is they never adapted to the iPhone paradigm shift. The Blackberry engineers reportedly said the iPhone was impossible, even after it was announced, because they couldn't imagine a battery big enough to power that huge screen. They just didn't see the need for a form factor past their own until it was obsolete. The only reason they're not dead, buried and forgotten already is that large corporations are slow to phase out dying technology, and many have sunk costs in BES infrastructure. They're going that way though. The corporation I work for are phasing Blackberry out (good riddance!) and taking about a quarter of a million users worldwide along.
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Mar 12, 2014 16:05
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MA-Horus posted:Oh God don't say that, it just makes Apple more smug. Nah, I think the guys at Zombo have that trademarked.
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Mar 12, 2014 16:18
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KozmoNaut posted:I work for a telco, and by far the largest income source aside from wholesale traffic from other operators, is text messaging. Think of it, it costs literally nothing to send 128 bytes. Even unlimited messaging plans have an absolutely ridiculous profit margin. Don't know how much truth there is in this, but I've heard that it's cheaper to transmit data to and from the Hubble Space Telescope than the rate which consumers are charged for text messages.
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Mar 12, 2014 16:28
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Gasmask posted:Don't know how much truth there is in this, but I've heard that it's cheaper to transmit data to and from the Hubble Space Telescope than the rate which consumers are charged for text messages. Our basic no-nonsense prepaid brand charges the equivalent of about $.04 per sent SMS, for customers not on an unlimited text plan. So $.04 for 128 bytes of data. That's $327.68 per megabyte. Feeling ripped off yet? 
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Mar 12, 2014 17:08
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KozmoNaut posted:Our basic no-nonsense prepaid brand charges the equivalent of about $.04 per sent SMS, for customers not on an unlimited text plan. So $.04 for 128 bytes of data. In Canada standard rate is 15 cents. So that equals $1228.80/mb for texting. 
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Mar 12, 2014 17:20
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Going back to E-ink a second, another thing I like about it is that the devices are tough. I can throw my regular kindle into my bag and run, and never really had to worry before I even got a case for it. I can't imagine doing that with my Fire. Tablets are so fragile, and it boggles my mind that they're being given to schoolchildren. I can't imagine how many will end up smashed per school year.
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Mar 12, 2014 17:33
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KozmoNaut posted:That's true in essence, but the severely-limited WML markup language and the concept of WAP-only sites with "decks" and "cards" died, as did the whole mobile WAP Internet separate from the real Internet. Ever since mobile devices gained proper HTTP/HTML-capable browsers, WAP has been obsolete, since it was much easier to develop mobile-friendly sites using proper "big Internet" HTML/PHP/ASP/etc., instead of with the idiosyncrasies and limitations of WAP. Oh shesh, that is terrible. Yeah, that guys was wrong. KozmoNaut posted:"Hack" is probably the right word for it. It is an implementation of data packets on the voice-optimized GSM network, originally meant for status messages and emergency warnings and the like. It piggybacks onto the control stream used for controlling voice calls, hence the 128-byte (160 7-bit characters) limit per message. I always like this analogy. SMS is like writing a message on the side of a box that UPS is shipping. The box was already being shipped and the message didn't make the box any harder to be shipped. But you are going to be charged more for the message than you were for the package.
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Mar 12, 2014 17:54
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Lowen SoDium posted:SMS is like writing a message on the side of a box that UPS is shipping. The box was already being shipped and the message didn't make the box any harder to be shipped. But you are going to be charged more for the message than you were for the package. Sounds about right to me, with the addition that sometimes the box never arrives, but somehow the message does.
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Mar 12, 2014 17:58
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Gasmask posted:Don't know how much truth there is in this, but I've heard that it's cheaper to transmit data to and from the Hubble Space Telescope than the rate which consumers are charged for text messages.
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Mar 12, 2014 18:07
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MA-Horus posted:Oh God don't say that, it just makes Apple more smug. Well Apple got around it by making a huge chunk of the device the battery. They also lowered expected battery life, which to give credit where it's due, was awesome on older Blackberries. And on topic with the first iPhone, 2g is pretty drat obsolete. I remember AT&T trying to get permission to pull the plug, but does that mean that areas that only get EDGE just won't have service or are they replacing it with something else?
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Mar 12, 2014 18:08
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Krispy Kareem posted:Well Apple got around it by making a huge chunk of the device the battery. They also lowered expected battery life, which to give credit where it's due, was awesome on older Blackberries. The original iPhone really was a piece of crap with a decent UI stapled to it. It had abysmal battery life, got really hot, didn't do MMS, had overly-simplistic built-in apps and no app store, was 2G-only and cost a fortune. Only the massive amount of marketing bullshit rolling out from Cupertino made it a success. The later iPhones were (and are) great, but the first one was a stinker. All it had going for it was the touchscreen and the relation to the iPod.
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Mar 12, 2014 18:15
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I think the first iPhone really showed how important a good, intuitive UI is with how well it sold despite all its glaring flaws.
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Mar 12, 2014 18:26
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I remember reading about the original iPhone unveiling. The phone was basically half-finished, ran out of memory constantly and crashed hard at the slightest provocation. So they used multiple iPhones, and rehearsed and extremely strict script for Steve Jobs to follow. This was to ensure that each iPhone only ran one specific app to prevent them from running out of memory and crashing. Basically every single time Jobs demos another feature of the iPhone, that's a different phone he's using. But they pulled off the charade and it worked.
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Mar 12, 2014 18:30
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KozmoNaut posted:The original iPhone really was a piece of crap with a decent UI stapled to it. Yeah I had a Moto Q at the time (actually a pretty drat good phone, all things considered) and I remember pulling the oh Apple? How's that 5% market share working for you? bullshit on one of my friends who got an iPhone. Then the 3G and 3GS came out and...welp.
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Mar 12, 2014 18:42
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5% share with your first product in the market segment is pretty good though. (I'm still an Android user)
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Mar 12, 2014 18:47
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Nostrum posted:Yeah I had a Moto Q at the time (actually a pretty drat good phone, all things considered) and I remember pulling the My first smartphone was a Blackberry Curve, don't remember the model number. It had that stupid scroll ball though that broke really quick, then the phone would just refuse to let me know I got calls sometimes until I restarted it. I replaced it with an iPhone 3G, I think shortly after the 3GS released actually, and was blown away. When I was stuck at work doing nothing I was able to browse the internet and play silly games which just blew me away at the time.It was amazing to me that I could do so much with a phone, and the fact that there was an app for everything was the coolest part. I also started to really text a lot for the first time with that phone because the keyboard was so much better than the one on a blackberry. So I guess that's an outdated technology, hardware keyboards on phones. Every single one I ever used was slower and more difficult to type accurately on, plus eventually keys got dust and gunk under, got stuck, or just fell off. Even worse was typing on a regular old number pad before hand. Remember T9 and keyboard shortcuts? Hell, I think even common abbreviations are dying out in texts now thanks to autocomplete, spellcheck, and easier keyboards
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Mar 12, 2014 18:57
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T9 with predictive text is still the best way to text  Although I have to admit that the swipe-capable keyboard on my S4 Mini is pretty good, it still gets a lot of words wrong.
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Mar 12, 2014 19:09
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KozmoNaut posted:I remember reading about the original iPhone unveiling. This is only half-right. From what I'm to understand, most of the demo was done on one phone, but Steve Jobs had to follow a very specific order of doing things (dubbed the "Golden Path") lest the phone crashes. Apparently the end of the demo when he switched between a bunch of apps had a very high probability of crashing, and it was a miracle the entire presentation went through with no hitches.
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Mar 12, 2014 19:24
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That sounds about right, I'm probably misremembering the details.
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Mar 12, 2014 19:35
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kopiko posted:Who remembers Electronic Organizers? I know this is an old post, but I had one of these as a kid as well. The only feature that I actually used on mine was the TV remote feature, which allowed you to program it to act like a remote for the TV. Basically boiled down to me annoying the poo poo out of my brother, changing channels while hidden behind a couch. Good times...
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Mar 12, 2014 19:40
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KozmoNaut posted:T9 with predictive text is still the best way to text I absolutely can't use swipe and don't know how anyone does. I had it on my previous phone, tried it for a bit, and just couldn't get used to it.
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Mar 12, 2014 20:14
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gleep gloop posted:I absolutely can't use swipe and don't know how anyone does. I had it on my previous phone, tried it for a bit, and just couldn't get used to it. Really? I think it's the best way to input text on a touchscreen keyboard. Just swipe through the letters in the word, optionally select from the various alternatives, seems to work pretty well.
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Mar 12, 2014 20:19
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gleep gloop posted:I absolutely can't use swipe and don't know how anyone does. I had it on my previous phone, tried it for a bit, and just couldn't get used to it. Swipe is the only way to type, dude.
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Mar 13, 2014 00:29
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Inspector_666 posted:Swipe is the only way to type, dude. It's even worse than normal touch+dictionary in languages that like gluing together new words on the fly, and only a minority of my phone typing is in English. Two-thumbs typing it is. 
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Mar 13, 2014 00:34
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I guess it might be different if you have German-style compound words but in English swiping is pretty wonderful. Now I'm wondering what the main methods are for Chinese and Japanese...
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Mar 13, 2014 00:43
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Inspector_666 posted:Swipe is the only way to type, dude. But does it work with any language besides american english?
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Mar 13, 2014 01:01
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point of return posted:Now I'm wondering what the main methods are for Chinese and Japanese... It's interesting, it's got to the point where many Japanese can read many complex kanji but don't know how to write them all, because the software does all the hard work of remembering that. It's analogous to English-speakers' spelling degrading over time because auto-correct means they don't need to know the exact spelling. When I lived in Japan I was forced to use a Japanese flip phone which didn't have T9 because the main consumer base didn't need to type in English... sending messages was a very laborious process.
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Mar 13, 2014 01:11
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Computer viking posted:It's even worse than normal touch+dictionary in languages that like gluing together new words on the fly, and only a minority of my phone typing is in English. Two-thumbs typing it is. I've always preferred a strong spell checking to prediction, so that's probably why I really like it. Boiled Water posted:But does it work with any language besides american english? Like that matters 
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Mar 13, 2014 01:11
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Boiled Water posted:But does it work with any language besides american english? It works really well in Spanish
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Mar 13, 2014 03:31
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I was reading an article about wrist watches in movies and this thing took me back to my childhood: Seiko M516 'Voice Note' Watch  Used in Ghostbusters, I would have done anything at the time to have one.
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Mar 13, 2014 05:28
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You can pry my BlackBerry from my cold dead hands. Although if there was a new Android with a keyboard I'd be all over it.
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