Ditto. You AT&T shareholders may be happy, too. Assuming 3 months down the road people aren't b****ing about something going wrong.
Wait a minute...the iPhone comes out yesterday and not one person here bought one? Where's all the gloating?? This happened during the frenzy yesterday: <object width="425" height="350"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/uayBcHDxfww"></param><param name="wmode" value="transparent"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/uayBcHDxfww" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="425" height="350"></embed></object>
People said the same thing about iPods when they were first released. It became chic and now everyone and their mom has one. Your foot is now quickly on the way to your mouth, Faos
I cancelled my Helio Ocean yesterday (because of Helio's new policy of charging for access to youtube), and went to the Apple store with the intention of most likely buying an iPhone. I used one of the demo devices for about 30 minutes (they had a TON of them at the store I went to, and I didn't have any pressure to keep my testing brief). After my 30 minutes or so, I decided not to buy one. All in all, it was a very cool device, but not $600 cool. It also lacked things I'd come to love about the Ocean. Here were my thoughts: 1) Google Maps -- the interface is cool as hell, and it works like a champ. Searching was easy, it moved smothly, and the large screen makes it very useful. Where it fell short is the lack of GPS. The Ocean had Google maps integrated with GPS, which was one of the most useful features I've ever had in any device. The other day I used it to figure out how to get onto the freeway from where I was in downtown Chicago. Then I was going to this bar, but I had to park a ways away, and didn't know where I was in relation to the bar. Both times I was able to bring up Google maps, hit "0", and it told me exactly where I was. Then I could just search for what I needed, and it was there in a flash. With the iPhone, I would've had to find out where I was, and then move the map over to that area (or search for the intersection). Basically, the iPhone's Google maps is cool, but not as useful as it was on the Ocean. Without GPS, you sort of need to know where you are if you want to use it to the fullest. 2) Web Browsing -- slick as hell. For years, I've wanted a device where I could browse the internet everywhere, and have it work basically as well as it does on a full computer. Safari worked on just about everything I threw at it. I wasn't able to do a few things on ajax sites that I wanted to (for instance, I couldn't figure out how to scroll through the listings at Couchville). The lack of flash was a bit disappointing as well, but that's not really Apple's fault or anything like that -- no mobile device has flash. The zooming works great, and there's tabbed browsing!!! Tabs worked great! The browser worked with pretty much everything I threw at it (no clutchfans.net b/c of no flash ). It was THE killer application. But it fell short in one area . . . 3) Edge Network -- Over the wifi, web browsing was AWESOME. I went and disabled wifi and used it over the Edge network. Holy crap, that was a nightmare. SO FREAKING SLOW. So slow, some pages pretty much wouldn't load. Maybe it was just really bad in the area where the Apple store was, I don't know. But it was just interminably slow. A huge disappointment. The Ocean's web browsing was not nearly as good, but it was faster over cellular (3G). That was really, really useful in some situations. AT+T says they've made some improvements to the Edge network so it will go faster, but long story short, I found it really disappointing. As long as you can use wifi, you'll be happy with web browsing, but if you're stuck using Edge, it's going to be frustrating. 4) Youtube -- As long as you're on wifi, it works like a champ. SO awesome. Youtube works on the Ocean too, but Helio decided to charge $6 per month to use it. But videos loaded SO much better on 3G with the Ocean than they did on the Edge network. But wifi kicked the crap out of both of them. I was VERY impressed with Youtube over wifi. Obama Girl never looked better . . . 5) iPod -- VERY slick. Coverflow was neat. I liked the interface of using your finger to scroll, but it didn't just completely blow me away. I think it would be a bit more difficult to use one-handed than the click-wheel. But it was cool. Video on the screen was fantastic. 6) Stocks, weather, etc -- Nice, easy to use. Pretty much what you'd expect. 7) Camera -- This was a disappointment to me. No zooming, no picture options. Just a snapshot and that's it. The Ocean had zoom, flash, lots of options, plus it can take video. I don't know about picture quality . . . I guess it seemed okay. Picture browsing was very neat, and it worked great. 8) Messaging -- Here's another area where I found it really disappointing compared to the Ocean. No instant messenger. Just SMS (no picture messaging, either). SMS interface was neat, how it looks sort of like a chat interface. But it requires you to use . . . 9) Keyboard -- Well, it wasn't as bad as I thought it would be, bit it was still frustrating. The autocorrection worked pretty well, but there are times when it's useless. For instance, I wanted to type "if" and I accidentally hit "of". It's not going to fix that, since "of" is a real word. I found it frustrating, but something you could probably get used to. However, this is where I again preferred the Ocean. With the iPhone, I couldn't seem to use thumbs -- only the index-finger hunt and peck method. I could type sort of quickly, but it was laborious. With the Ocean, I could FLY through text since the keyboard was so large and well-designed. I could hold full convsersations on AIM and YM, and it really was fast and easy. But no such luck with the iPhone. I don't think I'd want to do a ton of typing on the keyboard, if I could help it. 10) Phone -- Haha, phone is the last item on my list. Seemed to work fine. The phones in the store worked, so you could call people. I didn't end up calling anyone, because I didn't want their numbers to be in the phone that hundreds of other folks would be checking out over the next few days. The interface was neat, and speakerphone looked like it would be good -- you can listen to music over the speakerphone speaker, and that was reasonably loud, so I assume that the phone would be the same. That's a big plus for me, because I use the speakerphone feature a lot (and the Ocean's speakerphone sucked). The contact listing was neat, but I didn't like the fact that there was no way to go to a specific letter. You have to scroll the whole list. On the iPod portion, on the right-side, there's an A...Z bar where you can touch a letter and go to that section. Perhaps it was there on the contact screen and I missed it. But either way, for folks who have a crapload of contacts, it might be a pain. But you can add "Favorites" to your contacts, which was very neat. I think that may be all I've got . . . the dock was pretty neat, the phone was slim, easy to hold, etc. Oh, it's got that recessed headphone jack which makes absolutely no sense to me. I don't really understand what the purpose of that is. The iPhone I was using had one of those adapters plugged in, and the Bose Tri-Port headphones plugged into the adapter. The volume rocker was nice, and I *LOVED* the switch to make the phone silent/vibrate. THAT should be on every phone, everywhere. It's a VERY cool, VERY nifty device. Had I not become used to messaging and GPS on the Helio Ocean, I'd probably buy the iPhone. There's a part of me that's still tempted just because it exudes cool. The screen is gorgeous, web browsing was pretty cool, video is great. I just have a tough time spending twice what I did on the Ocean, and not having the features that made me love the Ocean (GPS, messaging). The iPhone beats the Ocean in many ways -- screen, size (Ocean is bulky), coolness, battery life, video and music playback, storage space, interface, and many more things. But if I'm going to spend $600 on a phone, I guess I sort of want it to be everything that the Ocean was, and more. It's got the more part down, but it doesn't have everything that the Ocean did. I'm back to my POS Nokia for now. It has no features at all, but at least it's really durable . . .
Helio vs. IPhone comparison. IPhone may win, but just like the iPod, it won't necessarily be because it's better : -------------------------------------------- http://www.engadget.com/2007/06/30/helio-pits-apples-iphone-against-ocean/
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These things are selling for $800+ on EBay. WHY? It's going to take several days to ship, so it's not like you're not going to be one of the first people to get it. There aren't going to be any lines after this weekend to get one at the normal price, and the stores aren't going to run out.
