Also interesting that Apple finally decided to include OLED for the first time. This isn't new tech and they could have included it years ago. The keynote said finally there is a good enough OLED to be in an IPhone. Well they don't even have the best OLED in the new phone so that's a little misleading.
It's Samsung's display. Haha. They make it. I doubt they'll sell the best ones to Apple.
I think they specifically said the watch would use your same phone number. There's no SIM slot, but a virtual SIM in the watch. I think it was heavily implied that carriers might impose an additional charge.
As an aside, the event should be up on the Apple site if anyone still wants to check it out.
That's a carrier side thing. T-Mobile rolled similar tech out last year for ALL phones (ring all phones on the account with one number) and it's not ready for prime time. Be interesting to see the weeping and gnashing of teeth when it hits on the VZ and T networks too.
It's kinda like group MMS which is a similar behind the scenes disaster.
I'd settle for Apple finally getting around to making iMessage delete messages across all devices when you delete on one -- which it should have done from the start.
They claim it won't work, but will see in real life. More important question I got from a buddy of mine.... so with facial unlock can his wife hold the phone in front of his face while he is sleeping and it will unlock??? For his sake, I hope not. They did demo that if u aren't looking at it, it won't unlock, but donno if it can determine eyes open vs closed.
Face rec and such have significant new security challenges. But if you don't trust your wife unlocking your phone, you probably have other big problems anyway.
I'm fine with all of this as the quality and execution is usually better. Being on the bleeding edge of technology isn't always the best idea. My iphones last a long time compared to the people I know with Samsungs or any of the others.
Everyone says that, but that ended around iPhone 6 or so. The other manufacturers caught up and surpassed Apple in a number of ways from 6 on.
The biggest thing harming Android is the carrier lock on versions with the manufacturers. If you want the best Android experience you have to go with the Google devices where they control the version on the phones and not the carrier. Apple never allowed the carriers to get that much control over iOS, and waiting around for the latest and greatest because a cell carrier thinks they know OSs better than the OS maker, is dumb.
That said, anything "modern" Android is pretty good. And has tons more features than iOS which keeps getting fatter and buggier trying to race downward to meet up with Android.
There's no business model that works to write efficient OS code into mobile devices when the company needs their lifespan to be three years or less to make the Wall Street quarterlies.
But way more interesting for the mobile phone market in the next decade is the bandwidth and spectrum problem. All the carriers went with some form of "unlimited" after nutty Lajere flipped that switch at T-Mobile and now all have pulled it back and restricted it.
And Ergen is still sitting on massive spectrum and is likely to put fake transmitters that do nothing on it just to avoid FCC fines for disuse. (Yes carriers and spectrum "owners" are already doing that -- a lovely side effect of FCC spectrum "auctions" which never should have ever been allowed. Regulators are supposed to manage spectrum, they don't sell it like it's a product. They have a huge conflict of interest there now.) Ergen has people out now meeting with tower operators. He's ten years overdue and just now getting around to having people talk to tower owners. Auctions essentially delayed the turn-up of a lot of spectrum for over a decade.
Microcells and "densification" are only going to take LTE so far. Then it's "why doesn't my $1200 pocket device work worth a crap?"
VZ, the ONLY carrier worth having if you need real connectivity in the boonies in the West, moved their cell site that services my neighborhood seven miles up the road to save money on the site, and clobbered coverage into my neighborhood. The entire neighborhood has noticed on social media and reported it, VZ doesn't care. They know there's no alternative that even works out here.
My iPhone spends the vast majority of its day on wifi. Doing wifi calls. That's an indication that even the carrier with the most spectrum overall can't handle the flood of smartphone users and background apps doing all sorts of things constantly on top of everyone streaming video.
Speaking of streaming video, all the carriers have compressed the holy hell out of even standard HD video at this point and it's "opt out" for the compression. It wasn't "opt-in". I suspect it won't be too long before flipping the "I want my data uncompressed" switch is a pay to play option.
They know they're in serious trouble for spectrum in the next five years. Marketing wank about "unlimited" aside, it at least gave them all an excuse to deploy massive throttling tech and compress the hell out of everything -- you agreed to it when you signed up for "unlimited".
I got a chuckle out of T-Mobile announcing they'd pay for Netflix for all their customers. They're banking on people getting set top boxes that'll do Netflix and getting them off their phones as much as possible with their serious and much deeper spectrum troubles. Kudos to them for turning up 700 MHz so quickly but anything before iPhone 5S/6S won't do band 12, and other Android phones also didn't get band 12 support until right around the same timeframe, so there's still a LOT of devices that can't even use their new spectrum. AT&T also essentially has some new stuff in band 12 spectrum in some markets where T-Mobile doesn't.
They're all in serious trouble spectrum-wise when it comes to video streaming. Heck out here in the West outside of major cities you'll still be hard pressed to keep an audio stream going without multiple stops and starts as you switch sites.
These phones are only as good as the network backing them. Remember the old Sun Microsystems ads in the 90s? "The Network is the Computer"? Yeah, not so much. The Network is overloaded and the experience on the computers is about to hit a "tipping point of suckage". Haha.
