Well, it’s officially official. Verizon will be selling the iPhone 4 beginning in early February. Even though everyone has known for years it was an eventuality, it’s nice to see it finally happen.
From here we’ll be able to see who really has a better network, AT&T or Verizon. Up to this point AT&T has had the misfortune of having nearly every single iPhone ever sold in the US (not counting jailbroken/unlocked) pounding it’s network day and night, which is quite a huge factor in the poor service that everyone experiences. Conversely, Verizon has a fraction of that number of Android phones on it’s network, and only for the past couple of years. With the iPhone finally coming to Verizon, the real test of their network begins.
In some ways announcing and beginning to sell the iPhone 4 now versus this summer when the next iteration of the device is announced (assuming Apple sticks to their traditions) is a very, very smart move on Verizon’s part. A large number of people will either upgrade their existing Verizon phones to the iPhone or switch carriers to Verizon to get it, placing a little bit more load on the network. But since the vast majority of people will probably wait until June/July to make the jump, it gives Verizon a chance to make sure that everything is going smoothly for 4 months before the real impact arrives.
Once the new iPhone is released however, the flood gates will open and I would not doubt if Verizon has numerous network issues and service degradation for the first two months or so while the patch things up and until the rush cools down. Meanwhile AT&T’s network performance will likely skyrocket as hundreds of thousands of customers jump ship to Verizon.
Financially, it looks like Verizon is heading into quite a positive year with the expected increase of new subscribers. AT&T, on the other hand, is probably looking at a blood bath over the summer and they start to hemorrhage customers to Verizon.
Personally, I am very much inclined to switch to Verizon once my contract with AT&T ends this summer. I am very pleased with how conveniently that worked out time-wise because it’ll give me the option of jumping ship at the beginning if I do choose that path. Ultimately it’ll depend on how things go for Verizon between now and then, if I hear of any major network problems before the summer, I may well decide to stick with AT&T because those problems will only get worse once the new iPhone is released (which also coincides with a large number of contracts ending with AT&T for everyone that, like me, signed new ones or renewed their contracts two years ago with the release of the iPhone 3GS).
Either way, things are about to get very interesting.
Apple’s Mac App Store launched this morning after 3 months of build up. When they announced it I was skeptical about it. Two years ago I wrote about why I thought Apple should provide a way for 3rd party applications to be included in the system-wide Software Update utility. This wish is finally coming true, which I love, it will make things a lot easier, especially for applications that don’t make use of auto-update frameworks like Sparkle. But I also wasn’t sure how I felt about Apple now having the same control of what apps are available through this that they have over the iOS App Store, which has been quite a source of bad blood between Apple and developers.
But now that it’s launched I have a better attitude about it overall. I like the simplicity of being able to purchase and install applications. Although I’m also afraid for my bank account because of that simplicity.
One of the cool things about the App Store is that it recognizes what applications you already have installed. This ‘links’ the Mac Store app to the one on your computer and allows you to update that application. Unfortunately for apps you purchased elsewhere previously, it doesn’t work quite so seamlessly. There are a few applications that are recognized by the App Store, but because they weren’t purchased through the App Store, you can’t update them through it.
This is one of the things that Apple really could do better with. I know it’s not an easy task, but there should be a way for developers to ‘provision’ licenses for existing customers and get them on board with using the Mac App Store (even a discount coupon or something), versus having to provide support and application updates on two fronts for the foreseeable future. From what I’ve seen today already this is a frustration I share with many developers, but until Apple does something, there’s nothing anyone else can really do.
At launch the Mac App Store has a pretty decent collection of apps. There are quite a few apps that I’ve never heard of or seen before, but there are also quite a few familiar faces. Pixelmator and Panic‘s apps are my favorites from long ago, and of course Apple has thrown all of their consumer applications onto the store (iLife, iWork, Aperture, and Apple Remote Desktop).
Over time I’m sure more and more developers will join the program until the majority of new applications available on the Mac are available through the Mac App Store.
The other day I had a real chance to use Google Docs collaboration features. Three of my friends and I ended up in the same Economics lecture this quarter and we decided to take notes together using Google Docs. It started with only three people, each of us typing different parts of the lecture slides as they appeared, and the fourth joined in 20 minutes later.
In theory the idea of four people working together on something like this is amazing. You get a lovely image of four people typing furiously and seamlessly to build an entire document in tandem.
In reality, it’s not nearly as clean. The first 30-40 minutes were rough. Very rough. More often than not we had sentences spliced into each other and kept stepping on each others toes in regards to who was typing what parts of the slides. But eventually with a little forethought and planning we started to get the flow of things. By the end of the 2 hour lecture we were copying down an entire slide in 30 seconds or so.
It was quite a sight sitting back and watching it all happen. Tables just seemed to magically fill themselves as if the text was being poured in by an invisible pitcher. Spelling corrections were made while the rest of the sentence was still being finished. Formatting, highlighting, positioning and bullets appeared out of nowhere.
Initially we typed chat-like comments directly into the document and then deleted them after they were read. It worked, sort of. Then we realized that there was a built-in chat feature. I feel like this should have been obvious from the start, but I guess we were too distracted by the cool-factor of the rest of the situation.
We did find that at moments when we were all typing it was easier and more efficient to just talk verbally rather than pause from our work and switch over to the chat window, but it was still nice to be able to make comments and observations in the privacy of our chat versus out-loud in the middle of a full lecture hall.
Just as a bit of help to other people that are interested in doing this kind of thing, there are a few things we learned in our first run of this that would be good to keep in mind or know about.