O2 Ireland iPhone 3G 8GB:
£134, £35 a month, 1GB data limit, no visual voicemail, 175 minutes and 100 texts. One of the issues with people using a jailbroken iPhone on a different network was no visual voicemail; to not have it supported by the official carrier in Ireland is a joke.
For comparison, on O2 UK: £99, £35 a month, unlimited data, visual voicemail, 600 minutes and 500 texts.
Quick image annotation credits to Skitch.
It looks like the lines are being drawn. There are going to be 5 mobile device Operating Systems: Apple's OS X iPhone, Windows Mobile, the Symbian Foundation, Research In Motion's BlackBerry and Google's Android.
Regarding Fruit war starts as BlackBerry takes on Apple.
"People tell us, don't futz around with your stone axe heads," he told Stone Age Tools magazine in Bedrock. "They say, whatever you do, don't innovate and get rid of that - nothing could ever beat the stone axe head!"
I've had my new MacBook for a few months now, and while it has numerous improvements compared to my G3 iBook, the one that I notice the most is being able to scroll using two fingers on the trackpad.
I find myself missing the feature when I use other laptops - it seems like such a natural thing to do. Such a small feature, yet it makes such a large difference and influences my opinion on other laptops when I have to use them.
It's this attention to design that makes me continue to buy Apple products. It's not just about looking good (that helps) - but about the approach taken. One thing that strikes me about most new laptops if the amount of 'features' they have - the external surfaces are crammed with them. Media card readers, media control buttons, WiFi buttons and LEDs, power indicators, battery charging indicators, remote control slots. Apparently, the more stuff you can cram on to a laptop, the better it is - and that's the mistake. It might sound like a good idea on paper to have all these 'features', but it turns out that less really is more.
I tend to find Apple focus on the refinement of smaller details. They don't always get it right, but I don't see any other company even coming close at the moment.
I think the iPhone in particular embodies this. On paper, it has less and costs more (so much more that I can't afford one at the moment). To other companies, they could not imagine who would buy one (apart from the Apple fanatics). "It has a touch screen - big deal! They have been around for years!". But Apple's attention to detail has created a product which shouldn't sell at the amount it costs and with the features it lacks, but does and will continue to. A feature which other companies had ignored as already done, Apple examined, refined and is now one of the key selling points for the device.