Posted on 06/14/2009 1:20:58 AM PDT by Swordmaker
Ironically, Verizon rejected the iPhone, and Apple then took their offer to AT&T.
Simple. 90-99 percent of websites with interactive or multimedia content use Flash.
What real competition exists for Flash, in terms of capabilities?
My granddaughter was here and was showing me hers (we're both camera nuts), and she sent me photos from the Blackberry she had B4 this new one. The quality of those leaves a lot to be desired, and she's taken a photography course and is at least the intermediate level so knows what she is doing. It's not that expensive either but you have to have a contract for the phone service for 2 years I think. I'm not quite ready to jump on it.
She got a small job photographing the office suite of a legal firm, wrote and asked me to recommend a lens. This was with her Canon 40D. I suggested the 17-40L, she got it, said it was the easiest money she ever made, but take off the price of the lens and she about broke even.
Thanks - that does help. So does your total come to about $100/month?
I’ve got the $49 plan for my phone + 1500 text messages added. Taxes also add up. I think the iPhone would be fun, but do *I* really NEED it . . . probably not - but just about everybody I know is getting them. I’m slipping behind the times!
No kidding? That was dumb for Verizon to do. Not just because the iPhone became popular but why throw your competitor a bone in the first place?
I have a Blackberry Curve. Nice phone but a little dated, and Blackberry/Verizon has yet to update to new phones past that crappy Blackberry Storm. Verizon may have a good network but they suck at product development.
The iPhone’s Visual Voicemail required some tinkering with the network to implement properly. Verizon refused to do that tinkering. They also wanted to co-brand the iPhone and, IIRC, add on a charge for downloading from the iTunes Store. (So you would pay the cost of the song, plus a Verizon tax.) I believe Apple’s desire for an unlimited data plan as standard was also a bone of contention.
Long story short, Verizon might have a nice network, but they’re run by idiots who’ve been scrambling for two years now to produce a competitor to the phone they laughed out of the room. Say what you will about AT&T, they had the common sense to say “we’ll do whatever you want, just give us exclusivity.”
Those numbers were not made up:
http://www.adobe.com/products/player_census/flashplayer/
Feel free to challenge them about their statistics, and get back to me when you succeed.
As for clones, is Silverlight present on the iPhone? Is it a legal/ legit alternative to Flash?
Those numbers are entirely made up. Or, at the very least, they are highly spun. The presence of a Flash plugin in a browser does not equate to Flash being the preferred or even ideal way to present the internet. The most common application for Flash on the Internet right now is for embedded advertisements, not for showing content the site user actually wants to see.
Please list the Flash-only sites that you want to use on the iPhone.
Silverlight is not present on the iPhone. It’s a Microsoft clone of Flash that, while better-coded, has not caught on. It’s perfectly legal, but it’s not on the iPhone, because Apple is pushing H.264 and CSS for dynamic web content, and they are entirely right to do so.
In my use, the most important features of the iPhone over my old phone:
1. Ease of use. A lot of the iPhone's features are available on other phones, but they're buried in six layers of menu options.
2. Synching of contacts and calendars. Huge, huge, huge, for me. Also, use the phone to take a picture, and it synchs to your desktop PC contact book, and if you have MobileMe, you can also access the information on the web.
3. GPS with Google maps. Because of my photography business (sports and weddings) I have to go a lot of places I've never been to before. It's kept me from missing at least four appointments by providing accurate directions and time estimates.
4. Email in my hand.
5. Consolidation of dozens of widgets. Having a notepad, calculator, multiple books to read, a stock tracker, weather forecaster, level, full set of maps, alarm clock, stop watch, and iPod (I use the iPod function to play through my car radio, so I hardly listen to anything on the radio except Rush anymore.)
One thing I did have to do is pull the games off of it. This is because I have a tendency to get hooked on games and waste too much time playing them. It's a decent simple game platform, though.
The advantage of the iPhone, for me, is that I really use a bunch of these features, and that makes the extra $30 per month worth it. My daughter, who doesn't need a lot of the connectivity features has my old Razr and an iPod touch, and is quite happy.
Flash is an energy hog... it drains the batteries almost twice as fast and limits the phone's usability. If Adobe would come up with a less CPU intensive Flash driver, then it would be allowed.
At $30 per month the monthly data plan for iPhone's is competitive with other smartphones' plans. Voice plans are in the mid-range of the gamut of US providers.
The iPhones will let you tether. It's AT&T that won't... at least for now. I suspect they will in the near future for an additional fee.
For Apple, they were the only game in town. Apple approached both Verizon and T-Mobile and they would not play ball. They wanted to charge a fee for every iPhone feature on an ala Carte system that would have made it much more expensive and were not willing to make the changes to their network's phone messaging to support Apple's visual voice mail. AT&T agreed to a flat data rate for everything and funded the nation wide changes to their cell towers and infrastructure.
You might want to check out AT&T's early evening plan... unlimited night minutes starting at 7PM for an additional $15 a month. If a lot of your calling on your Sprint plan is in that time frame, it might be cheaper to bite the bullet and pay the $15 and drop Verizon. I found that with my family plan, the roll-over minutes never got used so I just dropped the early evening plan and use some roll-over. My roll-over balance is still growing though.
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