[Archived] iOS 7

[Biddy]

Ah yes, you are using a stock Google device so software has to come from Google.

It's really odd as Google do have the software and the ability to sync but only if you have a business, education or government account (you can upgrade but no ideas on cost). We use Google apps at work and there is "google apps sync" that is the interface between gmail and outlook. That's why I know it exists bit as I say, not for personal users. Guess they are trying to push people to a pay model or keep you locked in with Google.

[Paul]

There was an iOS update to version 7 this morning.

Be aware this may result in SIM card being invalid and will need replacing.

I know, Biddy, I know........

[Stuart]

Was fine for me Paul.

[ABBEY]

anyone having trouble with car chargers after the updates , mine says its not compatable now ..WTF.

[CapeTownRover]

Lots of issues popping up these days with every new ios update.

[Stuart]

I never understand why Android fanboys are so obsessed with Apple/iOS.

Does pretending to be smug just not do it for you, Isgak?

[K-Hod]

As someone who's had iphones, I found the software decent (iTunes aside), ios whatever it was was always fine and easy to use, just took a while to install.

Though android updates take just as long...

And Stuart, fanboys of any kind are horrendous, Android and Apple ones are as bad as each other!!

[Stuart]

As someone who's had iphones, I found the software decent (iTunes aside), ios whatever it was was always fine and easy to use, just took a while to install.

Though android updates take just as long...

And Stuart, fanboys of any kind are horrendous, Android and Apple ones are as bad as each other!!

I'm sure you are right, K, but I seem to read more comments from the anti-Apple crew. Especially Isgak - I'm always seeing his whinges about it on my Facebook timeline!

[K-Hod]

Ah right, I'll have to agree to disagree, whenever a new Apple product comes out, Facebook and Twitter are unbearable, and don't get me started on the queues outside the Apple shops...

[Stuart]

I don't think they'll be queuing for the latest boob. 5c 8gb. Presumably to try to shift some 5c carcasses at a £40 reduction.

Apple's innovation may have died with Steve Jobs unfortunately.

[adopted scouser]

Mum will be 72 on Saturday, and despite her age is never off the iPad, and loves online banking so she doesn't have to go anywhere near the 'Mall'.

Quite techie then for her age and tears ago I bought her a portable music player, a Sony mp3/4 player and she lost it. Nipped to Argos at tea time near Asda and bought her an iPod Nano 16gb.

I'm a real apple convert these days

[CapeTownRover]

I'm sure you are right, K, but I seem to read more comments from the anti-Apple crew. Especially Isgak - I'm always seeing his whinges about it on my Facebook timeline!

Hehehehe Stuart you sly little man.. By no means anti Apple lol, okay I hate them to be honest. Only reason I dislike Apple is because of all these patent issues. Never have I seen a company look to patent things like curves or edges etc.. These are modern times we are living in, and nearly all manufacturers have something that the other would like to copy. Funny thing is that they are looking at the slide to unlock feature, and then forgetting that their finger sensor was 1st introduced by somebody else. They also Seem to forget that they were not the 1st to introduce the pull down notification system. There are loads more where they were not 1st to the punch.

Rumours around that they will introduce a 4.7 and 5.5 inch iPhone, and yet Steve Jobs laughed at the idea. He also didn't agree with a 7 inch tablet, and yet today there is an Ipad mini at around 7.9 inches.

So what annoys me About Apple, is that they feel that only they should exist, and that everything should be patented.

I believe their products are beautiful, but I disagree with all these court battles as it sure as hell indicates a company under pressure despite positive turnovers year on year etc

[Stuart]

If they invent something, you can't expect for anyone to be allowed to copy it and make money out if it - and vice versa for other companies. Copyrights and parents can be a pain but it is designed to protect innovators.

[Biddy]

He does have a point though.

Very little of the iphone was a new invention. My HTC Touch Windows 6 mobile phone that I had before the iphone came out could do everything and more that the iphone could. That had a version of HTC sense that had a "swipe to unlock" type feature which is what Apple are battling Samsung over at the moment. See http://www.androidcentral.com/apple-granted-patent-slide-unlock-even-though-it-existed-2-years-they-invented-it

And as CTR mentions, Apple completely copied the swipe down notification bar from the top of the screen from Android. Google are still in the process of patenting that which is why Apple are currently free to copy (funny that) but I expect there to be yet more boring cases go to the courts when the patent is finally approved and Google decide they want their blood.

It's all very very very boring and the patent system is simply broken.

[M-K]

I don't think you can argue that Samsung didn't copy the iPhone or that the Android interface didn't set out to clone the iPhone OS.

After the iPhone, the market was flooded with flat, black, buttonless slabs of glass, showing rows of colourful icons. Phones didn't look anything like that before. The patent cases have to hinge on one or two demonstrable features because the wider picture can't be proven in court - that one company introduced a whole new class of product and many others instantly ripped it off.

(I've never owned an iPhone)

[Biddy]

I give you the HTC Prophet which I had as the Orange M600. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTC_Prophet Came out in 2006 so a year before the iphone. It was black slab of mainly glass with a only a few buttons certainly nothing like a traditional mobile and more like the iphone. As I say, did more than the original iphone could but yes, the OS wasn't quite as pretty although still was a full colour icon driven screen.

In fact there is a whole list here from 2002 running up to about the time the iphone came out http://www.gsmarena.com/htc_pocketpc_smartphone.php3

If anything, I would say Apple took these types of devices that were already out there and enhanced them. They certainly didn't innovate "a slab of rounded plastic with a big screen" though.

And no, I don't think Android "cloned" ios. I think they took good points of everything that came before and enhanced them. Windows Mobile 5 had clickable icons on screen (which is all the much vaunted iphone interface is), just like ios, which is just like Android. The only thing Apple really enhanced compared to the Windows phone was to make it idiot proof (ie locking the infrastructure and delivery method down).

[M-K]

That HTC lump of plastic looks like something from a more primitive world, despite being only one year earlier than iPhone. It resembles the Palm Pilot, which had been around for about 10 years before that, and earlier PDA devices which ultimately evolved into today's smartphones.

Nobody's disputing that there is a clear lineage from those older devices, but it's a slow evolution until you hit 2007, and then you get this:

Seems pretty blatant to me. They've changed their designs a lot since those days, but it's clear that they got their foothold in the consumer smartphone market by copying Apple's industial design and selling it on the cheap.

That market didn't exist before iPhone- the gizmos you linked to were niche products and business-oriented things which few companies bought because they had Blackberry instead.

[Biddy]

No, the market was naturally evolving that way. We had gone through flip phones, phones with number keyboards, phones with full qwerty keyboards. The ones I linked to may have looked like a "lump of plastic" but they were evolving to have larger screens and remove the need of a full keyboard. Apple just want people to believe they didn't come from evolution but from revolution and it's plainly rubbish. As you know, the world of technology moved very fast. Note Apple only show one phone in that "before" picture that looks anything like the iphone when in fact there were dozens with larger screens and without the keyboard as my earlier link had.

Apple are just very good at playing the propaganda game as per your statement of them being "niche gizmos for business". So devices that do the same thing (only usually better) were gizmos. If its an Apple device its obviously not just a gizmo. OK then.

Maybe also have a read of this page which has the Samsung slant on the Apple picture you posted

http://www.osnews.com/story/26230/Samsung_reveals_its_pre-iPhone_concepts_10_touchscreen_devices

Both are propaganda and both miss out things that slant the view their way. Its all about trying to alter peoples perceptions.

BTW, as I say earlier, I'm sick of hearing about both sides of the patent wars in America (and round the world). The patent system is broken as many sites continually report. The fact that Apple can patent a "rectangle with rounded sides" (ipad) is absurd. The fact Samsung do exactly the same thing is equally absurd.

[M-K]

Well, all I know is that when Apple launched the iPhone (and I worked in a building full of Mac-loving tech-heads) people were like "wow, I have never seen anything like that before." But hardly anyone owned one because they were so expensive.

Then a year or two later I'd see people on the bus using one, but at second glance it wasn't an iPhone at all, it was something that looked almost identical but had Samsung written on the top and cost a quarter of the price.

Patenting every tiny detail is the only way these companies can protect their property, and I appreciate where they're coming from. I used to work on a magazine that was the clear leader in its niche, and we used to get all the rival mags delivered to the office so we could check out the competition. Bit by bit we noticed several of them kind of morphing into our mag, stealing various design cues from our cover, things that we'd worked hard on and that formed part of our identity. It got so bad that two of them blatantly ripped off our logo, but short of trademarking coloured circles and angles inside fonts there was nothing we could do about it.

[Biddy]

And that is the beauty of competition. More people could afford the multitude of android variants unlike the artificially high priced Apple products. On looking you could still tell the difference though which is what Apple are trying to fight in court that you couldn't and you could be fooled into buying imitations.

Samsung did copy though, that is quite obvious. But at the same time that is a good thing as it keeps Apple on its toes and gets everyone continuing to innovate. It would be a depressing market to have only Apple products available which it appears is what they want.

And patenting coloured circles and angles inside fonts? That sounds just like Apple now doesn't it.

[M-K]

If the other companies made something different, Apple wouldn't have had a problem with it. It's not like Palm and Blackberry were taking Apple to court because they'd made what was effectively a better PDA. They did their own thing.

You should have seen what those magazines did, it was scandalous. Creatively bereft and morally bankrupt, they were. We made something original and successful, that outsold our competitors by four to one, but rather than attempt to outdo us they instead tried to pass themselves off as us. Their big idea was to create a product that an unwitting parent might pick up by mistake for their kid, because it looked so similar on the newsstand.

If it takes trademarking a circle to stop that kind of thing, then so be it. In the magazine market, though, there wasn't the money to spend on neverending legal battles.

[Biddy]

ahem http://www.cnet.com/uk/news/apple-pays-10m-to-license-palm-other-patents/

http://www.patentlyapple.com/patently-apple/2011/11/apple-sued-by-a-third-party-using-powerful-patents-from-palm-3com.html

OK, neither are Palm directly as they don't actually exist any more.

And this is just ridiculous http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartphone_patent_wars

I have no idea how each company actually keeps track of who is suing who for what.

[K-Hod]

The iPhone 4 was the last revolutionary one, since then, their phones haven't broken much new ground and a lot of people have switched over to Android, certainly who I know anyway!

[M-K]

ahem http://www.cnet.com/uk/news/apple-pays-10m-to-license-palm-other-patents/

http://www.patentlyapple.com/patently-apple/2011/11/apple-sued-by-a-third-party-using-powerful-patents-from-palm-3com.html

OK, neither are Palm directly as they don't actually exist any more.

And this is just ridiculous http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartphone_patent_wars

I have no idea how each company actually keeps track of who is suing who for what.

Neither of those are Palm in the slightest - they're just patent trolls that acquired some of Palm's portfolio and decided to make money out of Apple and others. Palm never acted on those patents when they existed as a legitimate company, so it seems likely that the major players are just paying off these relatively minor extortionists so they can concentrate on suing each other properly.

I wonder how much of the price of each handset goes on lawyer fees...

[Biddy]

Patent trolls they may be but they were still patents that used to belong to palm for inventions of theirs which apple used and had to pay compensation for. Still apple only innovate and never copy.