FCC Approves iPhone

An anonymous reader alerted us that the iPhone is one step closer to hitting shelves. "The Federal Communications Commission approved Apple Inc.'s iPhone, clearing the way for the combined phone and music player to hit the shelves. Apple expects to begin selling the phones in late June. Some of the FCC documents confirm a few features of the phone, including it will have Bluetooth and Wi-Fi and will operate in the 1900MHz and 850MHz frequency bands. The phone uses GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications) technology and the low-speed GPRS (General Packet Radio Service) wireless data standard."

No WiMax, either!

[Ungrounded Lightning]

Looks like there's a lot of room for competition (or upgrade models).

Re:Apple will still need lots of luck

[rolfwind]

Another techie making the mistake that the checklist of features is all there is to a product.

Re:Radio Schematic

[Doppler00]

Well.... if they were to do that the schematics would be grossly complex now days. You'd have a circuit schematic with 100's of pins per chip.... would be very impractical and useless to all but a dozen people. Besides, the schematic doesn't really say how it works, since all the circuitry is integrated into proprietary IC's. THOSE are the schematics Apple and other manufacturers keep to themselves.

Re:Dev Kit?

[Doppler00]

Windows Mobile already lets you do this. Has GPRS/802.11, and a skype client available is available. I don't understand why people get excited about the iPhone as a geek toy, when really it's being marketed to the same folks that buy the stripped down Razor and iPods. Just as much innovation is happening at HTC and Nokia with phones as with Apple, but I never understood why the main stream news media has such an obsession with Apple.

Re:Apple will still need lots of luck

[postbigbang]

Hmmmmm. What part of 'Apple cache'' didn't you read? Sure, distribution is nice. Marketing plans are nice. But it's not the same as slogging MP3 players and MacBook Pros. I doubt Xserve's do very well, despite their margins and accessorizing. Are they making money on media? Perhaps a little. Hardware margins are tight, and they're asking a fat wad of cash for a phone, even with the checklist. I wish them luck, but they'll be bruises.

Re:Apple will still need lots of luck

[seanadams.com]

What part of 'Apple cache'' didn't you read?

I read it and I also think you're wrong. Not everybody buys Apple products for their "cache" [sic]. Some of us buy them because they WORK BETTER, and that does not mean "has the most checkbox features".

Re:Radio Schematic

[Trailer Trash]

Anyone else miss the old days when every radio came with a schematic? They were usually under the battery cover or in the manuals.

Well, if the iPhone is anything like the iPod, it may well have a schematic under the battery, but you'd never know.

Re:well-thats-not-very-exciting

[Anonymous Coward]

And the battery is not user replacable. Over the past 12 years or so that I've been using mobile phones, I have replaced the batteries in each handset I've owned, to extend the life of the phones (3 Nokia's).

I'm not going to spend megabucks on a phone which WILL die between 18 and 24 months.

Again /. readers miss the point.

[Steve Cowan]

People don't care whether their phone has GPRS or EDGE or EVDO or 3G. The points nobody's mentioning here that will make the phone take off are:

Decent resolution camera for a a phone.
Sexy touchscreen with multi-touch! This is new to any consumer device, not just phones.
Visual voicemail. A first for any phone.
Display changes orientation when you turn the device. Again: HAWT.
The promise of web browsing in your hand that sctually renders real web pages correctly.
Built-in iPod functionality that syncs with iTunes, and lists of songs/movies you can "flip" through.

It's not how much memory it has or how fast it communicates, it is the "unquantifiable" that sells things like phones.

Re:Again /. readers miss the point.

[dn15]

The promise of web browsing in your hand that sctually renders real web pages correctly.

This is a huge feature to me. Not that I'm really going to drop all that cash on one. But its ability to zoom in and out from full page view to readable text makes it possible to use a "real" browser on a mobile device without limiting one's self to mobile-friendly sites.

Re: AT&T just invested tons of money into 3G i

[Anonymous Coward]

No 3G because so far, the 3G GSM chipsets gobble power like crazy. GULPING huge mouthfuls of power. If this phone had used 3G, the battery life would have been in the tens of minutes. Super fast... oh no, battery is dead.

It remains to be seen how much better things will be with wifi. With wifi turned on, My Dell PDA went would go from full charge down to dead in about 25 minutes. The trick was simply to not use if with the wifi unless it was plugged in, which usually meant there was a real desktop PC nearby, so why bother playing with the PDA's awful browser.

Anyway, a lot of this chatter about the iPhone has been about how great it will be, blah blah blah. Truth is, nearly nobody has actually used one for any length of time. There are no actual hands-on real-world daily-use reviews. Right now, everyone is talking about a bunch of features it's supposed to have. A "feature checklist" as others have called it.

It slices! It dices! And wait! There's more!

But features listed in a product flyer don't always mean the product actually does those things well, nor does it mean those nifty sounding features will be things people actually need and want and will actually use every day. For cost of this phone, it needs to be loaded with things that A) actually work, and B) people will want to use all of them to get value back out of their purchase.

Re:Wow, I thought it was going to be bad...

[bsdU]

omg they spoiled it again to enter the "handheld" market

You are right. It is not acceptable to have no UMTS or at least EDGE support for this price.
I do not know whats up with apple, I am really surprised that they did not even add last years technology.

For this price and the brand Apple I would expect EDGE/UMTS and the ability to have third party software on the
phone like small java apps that make your live easier. I would expect at least a developer kit like you can have for
Palm, M$ or Symbian based systems.
And with this for sure overpowered HW one could really do nice things. Too bad that apple decided to be even more proprietary than the others.
Somehow the iPhone is an overpriced Music Player with some phone functionality and not even a Smart Phone.
I stick with my Palm Treo stuff until Apple decides to be more open and consideres to have a "normal" price for the really awsome hw (except having no EDGE or UMTS)
Apple should work on developing a Platform for phones that is less dommed than m$ stuff and symbian stuff.
Does it include GPS btw? I would expect GPS too to have some google maps and routing with this phone.

I worked in some mobile phone software/platform company a year ago and I can tell you these ppl could have done a better phone if there was enough money.
Thats why it really depresses me what apple did with their resources.
I at least hope some companies manage to clone some good stuff of apple that this branche moves on to some brighter future

c.u.

bsdU

Re:Low tech phone

[Alexis1537]

For one, most cell-phone music players are bad. Very bad. For example, the Digital Audio Player application on most Motorola phones has innate trouble finding MP3s correctly!

Totally agree with that. Indeed, I was watching my boss trying to upload some music onto his Nokia N95 and it looked like an unbelievably frustrating experience. The point is that geeks will have to learn to think a little more outside the box on this one. In any market (not just the handset market) you cannot automatically assume that functionality = market success. It just doesn't work like that and Apple almost certainly better than any of us at working this one out. Indeed, they have shown in the past that this idea holds true (c.f iPod).

I think that the choice of spec for the iPhone is interesting and it tells me that Apple does not see 3G as being as "killer" as people think it is for the time being. Here in Europe, 3G is ubiquitous but irrelevant. We tried it for a while with video calling but it was expensive and rubbish and people don't determine their purchases on whether the handset is capable of doing it - 3G is just a marketing tool to foll people into thinking that they are buying something revolutionary (a kind of tech security blanket if you like).

That doesn't mean that Apple won't introduce it (they've certainly said they would), it's just that there is no real justification for having it. If you want bandwidth to surf the web, use wifi - plenty of it about here in London and so much cheaper than the data plans the operators currently offer, "web'n'walk"-type deals notwithstanding.

Ultimately, the success of the device will hinge on whether people think they are getting a great experience "using" the device for the money that they will be charged. People will forget about the lack of 3G if the fascination with the UI and the iPod functionality becomes the primary focus of the device.

We shall see...

Re:EVDO is much faster

[kalidasa]

Do they have EVDO in Europe? No. So if you're trying to build a killer international product, EVDO is not what you're going to choose.

Re:Apple will still need lots of luck

[Shakrai]

AT&T as a captive carrier

You know, I really don't care for Apple and I tend to think that most of their products are more marketing success then actual functionality, but even so you can't really blame them for AT&T being a captive carrier. That's the way the damn cell industry works in the United States. The carriers have all the power. Ever tried to create an app for a cell phone? Ever tried to do something in the interest of your users and not in the interest of the carriers? Good luck!

Verizon and AT&T rank as the least friendly carriers to do business with -- both for developers and for their end users. Crippled phones, disabled features, draconian terms of service, etc, etc, etc. Sprint is slightly better and T-Mobile USA is probably the most friendly but even they pale in comparison to the freedom of choice that exists in the rest of the World.

I would encourage everybody to go read this [newamerica.net] document. It explains how the industry works and advocates for an adoption of wireless network neutrality and applying the carterphone rules to the wireless industry. There is simply no excuse for why I can't just go down to Wally World, buy any phone I want (from a $20 el-cheapo POS to a $600 PDA), plug my SIM card (or RUIM card for CDMA) into it and use it.