user experience is EVERYTHING...

/begin rant

ill give apple this one, they sure know how to design for the lowest common denominator.  now EVERYBODY, AND THEIR CHILDREN, have a reason to give apple a small fortune... so they can update their facebook status from anywhere too.

i knew nokia, palm (the company), and the entire rest of our species were in trouble, when somebody told me they bought iphones for their whole family because they were so easy to use that nobody would have to READ a manual.

because reading is so last century.  people are becoming pathetically complacent...

is apple truly ingenious, or just opportunistic and good at market research?

in my personal opinion, apple is inflicting great disservices on the average joe and the future, by lowering end user standards to such a degree that the user interface is basically a marketing tool.  education, (ie. barrier to entry), is not a bad thing.  struggle breeds strength.  we have much better things to spend our time on than facebook, and much better things to spend our money on than ipad games.

apple  =  wall-e

but, the chinese (apple) dont make up the majority of our population for nothing.

/end rant

...without focus, mechanics are meaningless.

Dunno the logic or motivation behind response #1....

...but I read the link and it's quite profound [provided one overlooks the 'in confidence' mention - subsequently violated]...

Nokia would do better if they dump Windows and use Android.

I suppose my earlier post could be summarized as a commentary on Nokia's rivalries, relating the "epiphany" revealed near the end of the article to Apple's mastery of marketing and opportunism, not ingenuity, which would denote progression.

Personally, I don't see children sleeping with phones under their pillows as a good thing, in any way; other than targeting the economic focal point.  We aren't going to get stronger by making things easier, and watching a massive chunk of my culture Facebook into car accidents at the expense of a bunch of Chinese children is not easy for me; especially when it generally gets attributed to, and lauded as, brilliant user interface design.  It's not.  Apple just created an industry where none was needed, and marketed it to profitability.  I consider the whole business mentality a capitalist sickness, not technological progression; especially as ergonomics and user experience/interface are concerned.  I'm not trying to be obscure or derail the conversation, so hopefully this makes sense.

^This I actually disagree with.  I think MS is ahead of Google in this respect

...but Sony and Valve really intrigue me.

they probably would have sold more units. at least i would have bought one.

that does not mean they would have done better. i believe they lose money on every high-end device sold. so selling more units would mean burning more money.

they also would not have gotten the billions of dollars MS threw at them.

i think one of the main mistakes those phone manufacturers (Nokia, Motorola, HTC) make is that they act as if they produce pc peripherals. people do not buy lifestyle products because of hardware specs. look at the cameras in those Nokias, they are great, they have better hardware specs than the cameras in the iPhones. and it must have cost Nokia a fortune to include them in their devices.

but still, almost every professional photographer who is featured with mobile phone photos in the National Geographic Magazine or elsewhere is using an iPhone. even those folks do not care about hardware specs on a phone. they are not pc geeks.

I think someone beat you to death with an obtusely literal stick....

Android is just a generic OS every other handset maker uses.  The Lumia line has done well for them.

We have had to look at phones. My wife is still using the Samsung Fascinate (Galaxy I) and it's just too old to keep up anymore with the apps and games, etc., it's constantly freezing on her.\

She wants an iphone but has NEVER had one. The 'change' scares her, learning to use it, etc.

Second choice is either the Galaxy 3 or 4 (depending on the deal she can get) Her biggest issue with either is the size of the thing. She thinks it's too bulky to carry around.

I tried to steer her towards the HTC One but no dice.

THEN- I mentioned the Nokia running Windows. The 'salesperson' at BestBuy shot it down for 'her'. He said it was hard to learn how to use it, how it all works, but that once you learned it was easy. Now, honestly...when smartphones and the like first came out, wasn't that basically the case for all of them. We all had to learn.

Because of our finacila situation, I told her to get what she wants and I will get whatever I can for free (both our contracts have been up for a while). I have been looking at lesser praised phones that run Android AND at the Nokia. I like the Lumia but for the life of me don't know which version to go with. As much as I might miss Android, I am more keen on trying a WIndows phone than an iphone of any kind.

I think a lot of it comes down to fear of the unknown or change for some people.

Yeah, Apple products are pretty amazing in how easy they are to use. For the iphones and tablets, a 5-year old can use it and a 75-year old can use it.

Anecdote incoming. My parents recently retired and had to get non-work cellphones. My dad picked up a Samsung running android, and my mom an iphone. Dad's had nothing but troubles trying to sync calendars and had to go back to the store 6 or 7 times just to get everything working on the cellhone (internet, e-mail). He spent days trying to move some pictures over from his old android to the new phone but various software issues made him give up (this program couldn't connect to that, that format wasn't good for the new one and so on). He even entered the phone numbers manually because whatever clients he was using couldn't manage to get it from the google account to the phone. Not that they really worked - the software update also bugged out, leaving him in the hands of an extremely complex uninstallation process just to start over from square one.

Meanwhile, my mom hasn't had a single issue with the iphone, and she does more complicated stuff all the time. She used ITunes to move all her music and phonenumbers over and keeps everything backed up and synced without a hitch. Once it wouldn't charge and it turns out the USB cable had been disconnected.

I think this is really going to hurt them in the long run. The fact that apple products are useable by young kids will cement their headstart for decades to come.

@Moshi, good points!

Jafo, from a reader's perspective, concluding your posts with that smiley face makes it nigh impossible to determine whether or not you're being serious.  If the underlying gist of my posts is still eluding you(?), I will better explain the context behind the line you quoted.

Well put.

Apple products are blatantly designed for the consumption of information, not the creation of it.  I can say with almost certainty that had I grown up with ipads instead of command lines - the rapid advancement of technology would be much more daunting.

For some weird reason, few are able to link the current international socio-political-economic crisis to this rapid advancement, mainly: money + internet.  Countries don't exist anymore, actually haven't for a long time, since banking went multi-national; and the values of goods, services, and PEOPLE are completely askew now... based solely upon whether or not a business takes advantage of the internet.

Last time I checked it was only like ~35 percent of the world that actually used the net, and at the same time, ~65 percent that didn't have clean drinking water. We're talking about the divide between people that can read or write and those that can't on a much larger scale.  From my personal experience, very few Apple afficionados can "write".

Wall-E (or Idiocracy) really isn't that far off.

Additional thoughts:

Basically, internet users = STYLISH, CAPABLE consumers.  Now that everybody with money is easy to target, marketing (user experience / psychology) has become the only industry; everything else, including quality, has become secondary.

...To me this is the undertone of the article in the OP.

STYLISH so that even more people strive to buy access (now via an idevice, modems are last decade).  Another self-serving capitalist loop (pyramid scheme) hindering true technological progression, thanks Apple.  Ask the telecom industry, they will tell you Apple is the new boss.  I say this as someone who has probably spent more time thinking in marketing terms throughout their career than anything else, and not by choice.  I'm a philosopher and an engineer.  Unfortunately, Plato saw this coming a couple thousand years ago: eventually one must learn to just ride the wave.

If all you got from the story Brad linked to was "Personally, I don't see children sleeping with phones under their pillows as a good thing" then you either totally missed the point of the topic or were being deliberately obtuse.

It's a wonder you didn't come up with 'studies have shown that having a lump in your pillow adversely affects sleep patterns'....

Hint....

The link was about 'ease-of-use' of a mobile phone, not whether there was a likelihood of a displaced paternality with a telephone...

...displaced paternality, what are you talking about?

i obviously got much more out of the article, as i wrote much more, including a very clear statement that i was not attempting to be obtuse.  it appears you have difficulty deriving meaning from a string of sentences, because the thought did not end where you originally quoted.  did you read anything else, or just get stuck on that 1 sentence?

this ease-of-use that youre referring to is nothing more than the result of targeted marketing and product design into a demographic that knows practically nothing of the digital world, because they have little need to.  all decreasing the barrier to entry does is increase the available market for sales; and ultimately stifle consumers from developing into producers.  education is the solution, not dumbed down consumerism.  kids shouldnt be playing with cell phones, and technological innovators shouldnt be targeting them as such.  apples parade of contracts across the united states education system is disgusting.  the whole world doesnt need an itunes account and a facebook page at their fingertips.  hell, the whole world doesnt need a cell phone with the internet shoved in their culture.

does anybody even read the warnings that cell phones should be held at least 2 inches away from your head when in use, or that 3d glasses should only be used in short spurts, especially by children with developing eyes?

oh, right, reading...

honestly i cant figure out why you reply to my posts.  your tone always comes across as a snide attempt at self-indulgence, and rarely feels constructive.

a good conversation is a sharing of ideas, its a wonder a forum admin wouldnt know this.

hint: you should really work on relating with your customers. *wink

ok, im done being snarky now if you are.

That's just Jafo being Jafo. He thinks he knows it all.