I haven’t seen LG’s Prada phone either, but this Frog has. Looks similar, but the iPhone operates at a much higher level; for example the KE850 has a scroll bar and it looks like it doesn’t automagically rotate images. The iphone’s zoom feature is far cooler. Reminds me a bit of Minority Report. Battery life of the KE850 is not covered also.

Did Apple rip off LG? Kinda hard to determine from a video of still shots.

The latest reports have it that iPhone is actually powered by an Xscale chip originally developed by Intel, then sold to Marvell Technology Group (from California). Seems Intel supplies the NAND flash for iPhone, too.

Apple sources components from a myriad of suppliers, from Intel, Portal Player, Texas Instruments, Toshiba and others. It also develops its own stuff, particularly application and UI software. All companies do this. Doesn’t matter much anyway because the end products are a lot more than the sum of their parts.

1984 Macintosh ad
Lemmings
Think Different
Mac guy vs. PC guy .

“Fall flat on itself in Europe”? Well I think the good folks at Amazon Germany would disagree with you seeing as iPhone is already the #1 selling device there and it’s still only at the pre-order stage with release not until August. Insane. I’m sure even you will agree, cm, those Germans know high-tech when they see it.

But just so you know, it’s not Korea pioneering the most cutting edge data transfer processes anyway. Qualcomm along with Canada’s Nortel last year made the world’s fastest data transfer call and developed the latest HSDPA tech for LG and other customers. Elisa of Finland put it to market first. Nice of them, huh?

Nobody would argue that Apple are great at marketing, even hyping, their product but when you’re leading the high-tech industry why not advertise it?

3G is old hat these days and covers 90% of the UK and other European countries where high population densities can help support it. It’s quite possible that Apple will bypass standard 3G at home and adopt HSDPA (up to 4 times faster)… if the North American networks decide to offer it. This will largely depend on whether their customers actually want this and many could care less. So I guess it depends on what you like to do with your device. For many North American users, watching TV on a phone with a clunky T-fold screen simply doesn’t interest them. Who wants live corporate TV anymore? Yawn. But having their own movies, music and rich HTML web-browsing does interest many. This is why iTunes dominates the market in North America, large parts of Europe and Japan. At heart many iPod fans will still see the music and killer UI as the most important offering of the iPhone.

You imply that under the design, iPhone is lacking in substance. In fact, no Korean company is anywhere NEAR able to combine high-technology or develop in-house software like Apple or Nokia (iPhone will reportedly run on Leopard). Show me an LG phone that can surf the web as well as iPhone’s rich HTML enabled device. There aren’t any. Show me a Korean company which has developed and incorporated a UI anywhere near as sophisticated as Multi-touch. None. Show me a Korean company that combines an iPod with a phone with a rich HTML browser. Again, none. In any event even iPhone 1.0 is wi-fi enabled, and this is faster than 3G in many cases. Apple isn’t listed as the World’s Most Innovative Company (Google it) for nothing.

Perhaps the Korean handset manufacturers haven’t quite grasped the concept that a highly intuitive UI is much more important than extraneous shite like bubbles and cutesy ringtones. But it proves Andrea del Sarto was dead on when he wrote [sometimes ]“less is more”.

Just to put it all in perspective let’s step back and appreciate that we’d all still be communicating by semaphore if it weren’t for Alexander Graham Bell, Antonio Meucci and Martin Cooper. Jobs is just taking their revolutions to the next level. Get left behind again if you wish.

This author agrees with me that’s it’s all hype.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com.....ology/home

BTW Brendon, somewhat OTT, but since you’ve disaparaged people here as “hippies” and have a rather dim opinion of pot smoking, I’m curious as to how you’ve come to be such a fan of Apple, a company whose roots in the Bay Area sixties counterculture are visible even today, and whose whole identity is premised on marketing an alternative, nonconformist “lifestyle.”

Hey! I’m a nonconformist too. Do I have to live in a camper van to be a nonconformist?

There are a number of reasons I’m a fan of Apple, some of which I won’t get into here. But one of my earliest jobs was hanging around and helping flog Apples at Century Next Computers in Columbia, Mo. ($2.00 an hour!) and I have liked computers for a very long time. The original Macintosh was exciting for its time, NeXT Computer was exciting, and NextStep 5.0 (Mac OS X) is exciting. Shouldn’t computers be fun again? There’s so much advanced engineering going on under the hood of a Macintosh these days that’s so demonstrably superior and elegant, it’s hard not to be a fan. So far, there hasn’t been any pot in any of the computers I’ve bought from Apple — nary a seed or stray fleck of tar.

Plus, they have outstanding taste and discerning judgment in the lawyers they hire.

LGYawn

It’s nice of the LG official to say he’s flattered other companies are “following their (LG’s) design policy” because as everyone knows, LG are so well known for cutting edge design while Apple isn’t. Groan. Someone should inform LG Spokesman Lee that (even bad) imitation is the highest form of flattery before he ends up with his other foot in his mouth. Lucky Goldstar, what a joke.