Read more.Quote:
Apple also showed off its first wearable, the Apple Watch.
Printable View
Read more.Quote:
Apple also showed off its first wearable, the Apple Watch.
The new, more rounded, iPhones look quite appealing to me (at least going on the pictures here and elsewhere). And kudos for doing them in two different sizes rather than trying to force everyone into a single size. It'll be interesting to see how comfortable the Plus is to hold compared to my LG G3, which also has a 5.5" screen.
The iWatch though - oh dear - not exactly the mold-breaking triumph of form and fashion is it? And as the article says, it's not doing anything that Pebble, Samsung, LG, Sony and Motorola aren't doing. So much for the "watch this space and we'll show you how it should be done" from the iFans. Think the Moto 360 is still the most attractive, although the new LG G Watch R might be in with a shout too, (apologies if this, along with the G3 comment above, makes me sound like an LG fanboy - which I'm not).
Quite interested in the iPhone 6. My Galaxy S3 is starting to show its age a little and I'm keen for a change of scenery again. Personally, I don't like larger phones. The 4.7" would be ample for me.
As for the watches - not for me. I ditched watches when phones essentially replaced them, and don't see myself going back to them.
iPhone... welcome to the android party :p
In all honesty, yes they look ok and I'm sure they're relatively well made, and feels better to hold with rounded edges, but if you look at it subjectively the key 'features' are at least a year old or more in most cases. I'm not going on cpu/gpu as iOS has always worked well on it's hardware but 1GB of ram, 1080p max screens, finally getting nfc etc is pretty low/mid level specs these days. Now this is the bit which gets me, for years apple has been going on about one size fits all mantra and now they have to support multiple resolutions and they look to be taking a similar track to android in how it changes it's layout like android does, a perfect example is the email app, it switches into a 2 column view... just like android has for years.
Now the iWatch, yes they can call it Apple Watch but it's the iWatch, why because it's absolutely useless without the iPhone, now don't get me wrong android wear currently needs an android phone too but Google are working towards being able to do certain things without the phone (gps if hardware is there, music playback, fitness stuff I assume) where the iWatch is basically a glorified second display and is likely always going to be that way.
As to the interface... all I'll say is that dial, sorry digital crown, looks like a pita for someone with normal size hands and the argument about covering your screen is just mute in my opinion, it's not exactly hard to lift your finger and I'd argue it's easy to do that than play with a small dial.
When I saw the 'announcement' all I could do was lol at the 'animated smileys'... I remember those from msn and most people hated them back then. Having said that I did like the nfc being on the watch and linked to the phone/payment system, not sure how secure that would be as it's easier to swipe an arm than a phone in a pocket but I like the 'idea'
Then they had the price... US pricing shows it will start at $50 more than the moto 360 with the metal strap... I'd hate to think how much the most expensive model will cost as that base price is likely for the plastic strap.
But at the end of the day it doesn't really matter how much we dislike apple's latest products, or that there are better products out there, they'll sell like hotcakes for one reason... marketing. Apple get so much free, imo biased, marketing from newspapers/tech blogs saying how wonderful everything is that most other brands don't get a look in. I've seen reviews were good products get lacklustre reviews purely because it's not apple or it's made out of plastic not metal....
"iPhone 6 Plus has a resolution of 1920 by 1080 with 401 pixels per inch. That’s full 1080p HD resolution." (as seen at: http://www.apple.com/live/2014-sept-event/)
My oh my! Brilliant! What ever will they think of next at Apple. It'll take ages for Android phones to catch u... Hold on a minute. Android phones are at 2560 x 1440 pixels? Never!
I will be interested to here what improvements are made to the A8 SOC - A7 was quite groundbreaking as the first 64 bit ARM based SOC released for a mobile device.
So when are they going to reveal all of the new stuff they've invented...? :P
It's always a bit different with Apple because they market themselves in such an obnoxious and often downright stupid manner. Classic example would be their ads last decade on security.
However, the phone has nothing, not one new feature. Yet the price tag is high. The screen in paper specifications lags behind existing android and wp devices. Heck I just spend £280 on a Lumia 930 which has on paper a better screen than these as yet unreleased devices. This screen and size is the biggest change...
The A8 could be interesting, but how many people find their phone actually slow? Rather than the internet connection being poor, or the back end server being swamped? Can't imagine it's many who are needing to upgrade for more 'power'.
So we look at the watch. Now whilst BSODMike would probably sigh I do like mechanical watches, hell I'm wearing a curious russian one now, so I may be a little bit biased, but... Would I like to talk into it, 70s scifi? Nope, my headphones for my music do a better job for that. Will it be able to display anything really useful? As is I find myself wanting larger and larger phone screens because there is too much data that I want to see. Will it be better than having say TellMe / Cortana read a text message too me, probably yes, but it's only half the problem solved.
We then look at it as a style piece, is this technology brutalisim? It don't have no alibi.
It makes the moto 360 look good. That's a first in a way I suppose.
No mention of battery life, how hard charging is, only that the clasps were a bit poor. Ho hum.
Compared to my £50 fitbit tracker, which has a 5 day+ battery life, I don't see it. A lot of the demo apps were concepts that the Microsoft Spot watch had, yet no one wanted it, because it was too expensive and battery life too poor. Yet I bet next to the iWatch it will be incredibly long lasting.
There isn't really anything interesting of substance here.
1080p is ridculous for a 5 inch screen I'd have to get a magnifying glass to even see the individual pixels at 720 - it's just wasting battery power to render at a higher resolution just so they can put bigger numbers on the box.
Still using the best phone I've ever had a Moto G which is fantastic value and I prefer it's looks and design to that of any iPhone. I'm glad I never bought into this phone epeening it's saved me a fortune. Funny thing is people say I'm jealous and can't afford an iPhone - I easily can I'm just not that dumb.
Well I am only interested in the technical aspects of the A8 in the general evolution of ARM cores,especially since if they get powerful enough we might start to see them in laptops for examples. When it comes to phones I tend to be more worried by battery life,which for me is the most limiting factor ATM and I have a Moto G which generally is quite decent for that. Another factor is also how good a phone can pick up a data signal or GPS lock in harder areas.
When it comes to performance,even basic new generation SOCs are more than fast enough for most purposes and once you get past 720P the increasing screen resolutions will make less and less of a difference IMHO. I would rather have a 720P screen with half the power consumption of a 1080P screen in a phone with a 4" to 5" screen.
more spyware???????????????
The new iPhones just look exactly like the an S5 and a Note3 - nothing of any interest there.
The Apple Watch does at least look nice (imo), but i'm not really seeing that 'killer feature' that you always used to get from Apple. Maybe they're hoping the payments thing will be a must-have but to me that just looks like a security disaster waiting to happen.
As far as i can see, the only reason to get excited about any of this is that it should massively expand the market for wearables, which will hopefully lead to interesting innovations elsewhere. Other than that, meh.
having an iphone 5s and not particularly wanting a bigger phone, I'm happy about iphone6 as it doesn't offer much of an improvement over 5s. the NFC is of no interest to me either, so that's the main two things. even the speed increase of 25% isn't that much considering the 5s was supposed to be twice as fast as the 5. this of course means the 5s is going to be powerful enough for most new stuff for a while. so no need to upgrade
the watch looks pretty cool though. I fancy one of those. the different straps are a great idea as you can make the watch look casual/sporty with a plastic strap or slightly dressier with a metal strap. initially it doesn't seem to have any/many features that interest me apart from telling the time, but I'm sure it will have a lot of possibilities. the health stuff is of no interest to me or probably most lazy arse tech geeks. I don't need a watch to tell me I've only taken 7 steps all day. however many people buy watches simply for telling the time, and some spend hundreds or thousands on them, so this falls into that catergory too. it's a cool watch and can do tricks. it could be cool in a club if someone can make it flash colours along to the music whilst you dance, or state song details and BPM etc
No Sapphire = no sale.
Great news - the 5S has dropped in price, so that is moving up the list.
More brittle against impacts, yes, but harder against scratches and such.
Also:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BxHWndmCIAAV70q.jpg
Kind of amazed that my post seemed to be the most "pro" one so far. :o
Although, having seen some more pics etc on the AppleWatch/iWatch I still think that Pebble etc have better units available. No doubt the Apple halo factor will mean that the (inferior?) iWatch will sell loads.
By the way, speaking of watches, I seem to remember that my original (still got it) Sony smartwatch worked with both iOS and Android, and the Pebble ones definitely do. To my way of thinking this is a smarter buy than iWatch or Android Wear where you're limited in what you can connect it to. And I presume that Samsung's Gear watches still only work properly with their smartphones:
:wallbash:
@aindanjt: re that pic - ouch. ;)
Early prototypes of the Apple Watch were tested by famous actors...
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_VlmHNP9So5...rider-hoff.jpg
Joking aside, is this the first iPhone launch that has only elicited a 2-page discussion?
Is this a sign that people are now a bit 'meh' about these?
Well no one can get their hands on one for another week or so, so it will descend into 'but I can get a pointless higher res screen on android, and look at the hardware specs.....' or 'but it's the shiny Apple gadget... I will defend it to the last'....
All rather tiresome.
I will probably get one in a few weeks unless there are major problems on launch as almost all of my kit is OSX/iOS (I have an iPhone 4s which is about 2.5 years old), and I'm too heavily invested in the ecosystem to move to Android.
I'm sure Android has moved on from the last time I used it though.
I'm not really sold on the idea of an iWatch. Sure it would be great to have GPS maps on your wrist, and maybe even access to your playlist, but that's not really worth £300 or so. I'm also pretty sure that the fitness thing won't have enough battery to make it worthwhile for training (for me at least).
I'm not sure these launches are that exciting anymore -smartphones are a bit old hat, and smart watches are a bit 'meh' anyway.
as I said earlier, the good thing is that the 5s has dropped in price, and I don't really see any features on the 6 that would give any advantage over the 5s. So it is a straightforward privce decision.
I have looked at Android, but wading through the different specs is a faff - is it jelly bean, tooti fruity, original crunchy, peanut butter, liquorice allsorts or whatever 'ho-ho' brand name this week - plus there are different mfrs ad ons and modifications.
And the one thing the iphone supports that Android doesn't is imessaging.
I do have an Android device (loaded onto an HP touchpad when support for WebOS died. Its OK - and does more or less what I need - apart from imessaging! :) but it isn't good enough to make it a no-brainer over an iphone. However as my old phone (blackberry) is over 5 years old, it is almost time to think about replacing yet... maybe I'll wait until next year.
So buy a Nexus - which is "pure" Android - and then choose your own modifications (and at this point the Android fans are rolling their eyes at the granny-egg-sucking advice I just gave).
And yes, having a choice of specs etc is just sooo fatiguing. :rolleyes: So much better when a manufacturer takes your money and says "this is what we've got, now like it".
And that's a business decision by Apple, although there seem to be iMessage apps for Android, (like this one). Best summation of the iMessage setup though is this one in Lifehacker, which says:
Yes, I realise that this is probably a sarcastic post, but just don't get me started on smartwatches ... and more importantly the people who keep saying "oh, you've just got to have one of these". Especially as they're usually the same bozo's who were saying Glass was the "must have" earlier in the year.Quote:
Even if that doesn’t bother you, functionality can be patchy and there’s no guarantee Apple won’t find a way to block them in the future. They’re absolutely not worth the risk.
:wallbash: Sometimes I hate technology, and hate technologists more.
But why by a device and then spend more time modifying to the way I want it? One of the 'plus' points of the early Android phones was that you could root it. But if you had to root it to get it to do what you wanted, I'd say the design was flawed from the outset - its only a 'phone!!
And that is part of the attraction of the iphone - it does what the majority of users want, straight out of the box. The only decisions to be made are memory size and colour! Which is exactly what I want from a commodity product.
I think you are confusing a brand there peterb.
iPhone people accept as a standard, a bench mark. A friend of mine just bought a smaller sony phone, the keyboard is poor, the swype version unsuitable for the usage she has. She is already lamenting the iPhone. It could probably be addressed. It could probably be fixed by a 3rd party one, but the damage to the brand of 'Android' is done in her mind.
Much the same way, that horrifically set up windows XP machine at work, that takes about 3 min to log on via the domain, makes people dislike windows. Hell I had someone swear blind that their Macbook would boot faster than my surface pro 3. The rational? It was a mac, it *must* be faster. They didn't even know what spec I have.
To be honest, I struggle to use an Android phone as my only phone. I've never managed. Too many things are not smooth enough, as I've said before thats why I use a windows phone. Sure it only does 80% of what I need, but that 80% it does so well compared to the others for me. Simple things like the keyboard is amazing, fixing spelling errors which is an issue for me, is trivial.
However, I can really understand why people are saying "really Apple? You've been saying larger screens aren't needed or wanted, your PPI isn't even catching up". Because the features just aren't there. Would I rather browse a web page on this just announced phone? Or my Lumia 930 that's in my pocket today, and cost half as much. The 930 will win, it has a much better screen for browsing.
This is the thing, whilst the iPhone brand to you means simply out of box experiance of a certain level, to many people, they don't value that convenience, putting it aside, as a lump of hardware without software so to think, it's simply not up to snuff.
Considering that Retina devices are the best thing since sliced bread and stats for them used to show how superior to other devices they are, when new devices are launched without Retina, that the response is 'why would I need a higher resolution?' is amusing.
I predict that next year's 6s will be 'with Retina' and suddenly any lower resolution will be absolutely inferior.
I think the "buy and then mod" is also called personalisation - note that I did say "choose your own modifications", and if you're entirely happy with the out-of-box then don't modify. I've changed the background wallpaper and keyboard on mine, then rooted to allow Titanium Backup to run properly, and rooting was a no-brainer - easy enough for an iFan to do. :p
By the way, there's very few Android phones that aren't rootable these days - certainly all the mainstream ones have been "dealt with". And in some cases the rooting process is laughably easy - Google "towelroot" if you don't believe me (that's what I used on my G3).
And apart from iMessage and iTunes - both Apple-specifics - I doubt you'll find anything of note that the iPhone does that any 'droid phone from the mainstreamers doesn't. And if you're merely looking for a "commodity phone" then why the heck are you paying Apple's prices? Buy a Moto G and pocket the saving! :D
But enough of the bashing, if the iPhone way-of-use is a better fit for you personally then it makes no sense to look elsewhere. Just don't try trotting out that "magical" or "unique" nonsense though - as that's just Apple PR BS. :(
Quite true, and the sad thing is that they're not really doing anything that you can't do buy just pulling your phone out of your pocket. I also don't see the need for energy-sapping colour screen when all you're doing is presenting info, and why would I need to run an app on a resource limited device when I've got a much more powerful one sitting mere inches away.
At the moment, what I'd be looking for is something that runs for hours on a single charge, connects reliably (yes, I'm meaning you Sony) with smartphones and acts as a secondary screen/input device for that phone. Oh, and tells the time without needing to be "woken up", so I guess that means something like eInk screens.
Don't let the iFans hear you say that - it's heresy not to want the latest 'n' greatest. ;)
I know exactly where you're coming from on the money-saving aspect, and to be honest there's not a heck of a lot wrong with the 5s, or the 5, or the 4s, or 4, etc, they're all pretty decent devices. I've got no "religious" objection to Apple products - heck, just bought yet another iPod. Have a good weekend.