Asian manufacturers race to ready iPhone-alikes
Touch sensitive
Guess what? Taiwanese handset makers are scrambling to ready iPhone-like communications gadgets and could have them out the door before July 2008.
Surprise, surprise. The iPhone is certainly the best known - and most hyped; though the two factors are directly related - of the new breed of touch-operated handsets, but it's by no means the only one. HTC has launched its Touch, which adds a touch-control veneer to Windows Mobile 6, and LG has been selling its Prada-branded KE850 - reviewed here - since February. The Prada has a unique operating system, and so does Samsung's F700, it seems. The F700 is due to go on sale next month.
Apple's iPhone: the one to beat?
To that list we can apparently now add lookalike handsets from Asus, BenQ, Compal and Arima, Taiwanese newssite DigiTimes reckons - all busily trying to ride on the back of the bandwagon Apple has given so much momentum to.
And why not? If you can't join 'em, beat 'em. Nokia is also working on such a device, the report claims, and we'd be very surprised indeed if it were not.
Whatever you think of the iPhone - you can read our view here - it has raised the bar for smoothly running, intuitive to use handset user interfaces. Is that going to matter more in the future than piling on function upon function? The iPod suggests it may well do.
Competing will be intense. HTC recently said it had sold 800,000 HTC Touches - reviewed here - in the first three months it was on sale, just shy of the million iPhones Apple sold in the US alone in the same period.
COMMENTS
Where these clones will fail is .....
..... if they do not function as slick as the iPhone. It is a simple job to make a handset that looks like the iPhone. But what Apple have perfected, as they always do, is the HCI functionality. That is something that, for example, the LG Prada fails on miserably - it is "Touch" but that is all. The interface is miserable to use, flaky at best, clunky, imprecise, you name it. Contrast the iPhone's HCI which is spot on, intuitive, accurate and very quick.
I look forward to see what the other manufacturers do - but with Apple's patents on their Touch technology it will be hard to match, and impossible to beat.
Bit slow there
This one's been available for a couple of months now:
http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.5179
Not just 'alikes' but also...
...'clones':
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_8wuVEYMZ8
pretty...useless
Please please PLEASE send at least this bit of the story to some of these phone manufacturers:
"Whatever you think of the iPhone - you can read our view here - it has raised the bar for smoothly running, intuitive to use handset user interfaces."
I'm sick and tired of all of the r&d going into pretty boxes, and me-too feature lists.
Apple and the i-phone are successful because the phone works and is easy to use. The clones will look similar but I guarantee they won't work. For instance, the last Samsung I had, the MP3 player supported a 1GB memory card, but only 20 songs in a playlist. not so bad, but it only allowed 2 playlists!
I've just bought a nokia 6300, and am so chuffed, it has almost no features but works a treat on calls and messages :o)
Yeah so what
So what! The others are jumping on the bandwagen because they've hardkly got an original idea between them, but they STILL won't get it right.
Instead of things just working the way the user wants them to - simply and good looking, it'll be double click this, scroll down to that and feck about with the other - just like normal.
