Thanks for the link, but my mind immediately goes to sleep upon seeing all the bla bla. I guess we'll have to wait for some talented bloggers to review it.
Flash support?! Ughh... I was hoping that widespread proliferation of numerous (and varying) mobile platforms will kill this junk and accelerate HTML/JS/CSS progress.
Hoping that the industry and community will adopt better technologies is fine, but did you seriously think they wouldn't adopt the format that YouTube uses? Further, do you really fault them for it?
youtube didn't re-encode videos to get on iphone. It just so happened that youtube wanted to provide High quality videos in h.264 format and iPhone supports it
I think the problem there is Apple - they don't want Flash support on the iPhone. They haven't explicitly stated so, but I think they don't want it because it would give people the ability to develop full iPhone applications that don't go through their store and approval process.
- Mobile Safari also already has other portions of HTML 5 implemented, such as canvas, not to mention really good coverage of css 3.
So as it turns out shipping Mobile Safari already has much better HTML 5 support than many desktop browsers. You may be able to fault iPhone and Mobile Safari a lot of things, but standards support is certainly not one of them.
The innovation-stifling effects of browser lock-in require development to be expensive. Any compelling product in such an environment will be built to maximize revenue, which requires those products to support as wide of a consumer base as possible. This makes it difficult to build products with new technologies.
Today, development is cheap. Compelling products can be built as side projects with a minimal investment of time and money. If creators don't have to worry about making money with their creations, they're more likely to use whatever technology they feel like using.
If Mobile Safari lags behind other browsers in implementing emerging web standards, many developers will run browsers that stay current, even if they have to buy a new phone to do so. When they come up with nifty ideas that are relatively easy to build, they'll use whatever technologies they want, which will occassionally be HTML5 and friends. After normal iPhone users come across enough neat hacks that their phone can't run because their phone can't support it, they'll switch phones.
I doubt that Apple would let Mobile Safari lag behind other browsers, especially since they'll likely want desktop Safari to support emerging standards, but even if they did, it would be self-defeating.
The bigger question is if it will be available in a locked version similar to the G1. They haven't announced carrier partners yet and HTC's direct devices are all unlocked.
The British network "3" (that's their name!) actively encourage it, selling dedicated Skype phones and running a fairly heavy ad campaign promoting "free calls forever": http://www.three.co.uk/Company/3G_Network/Skype
Calls made via Skype don't eat up your data plan and aren't charged by the minute - they're actually free. I have one and it works surprisingly well, even in patchy coverage where voice calls break up. Whether it really will be forever, I don't know...
Yes, but that only works with their supplied phones. You can still use Skype on other phones, but you'll have to pay the bandwidth cost of £5 / month for 1GB.
Well, it's not that expensive. GB is much, isn't it? Here in Russia we pay around 1 ruble/MB which amounts to £20/GB, that's with recent price drops, which I consider decent.
There are no cellular providers like the "3", but on the other hand, phones are not locked to the operator as a rule.
As far as I know, that's because the Skype call isn't actually routed over the data connection, it transfers the voice via the existing voice network and the other end is hooked into a Skype gateway.
[Citation Needed] but I don't have time to dig one up at work
The images seem to be over-accentuating the bend. You can see from http://www.htc.com/uploadedImages/Common/Shared_Image/Galler... , if you tilt your head a bit, most of the "bend" is just making the phone thinner. The front only sticks out ~4mm from the rest of the phone.
On my G1 it also protects the menu button (which also unlocks the phone from locked mode) from being pressed accidentally.
While you can configure an unlock touch gesture, I haven't bothered yet because I don't find that the menu button is being pressed accidentally in my pocket.
Well, it also helps with hand contour. And it makes it easy to identify the phone's orientation by touch.
And it encourages you to put the phone in your pocket the right way around... If you read the G1 user manual (yeah, yeah, I know), there is a curious passage advising you to keep the back of the phone 1.5 cm from the body.
http://gizmodo.com/5301955/htc-hero-android-phone-hands+on-w...
http://www.engadget.com/2009/06/24/htc-hero-hands-on/