I have one. I recently moved to an area with very poor AT&T coverage. I am under contract with AT&T, and I wasn't pleased with the prospect of having to go outside every time I wanted to make or receive a phone call from my house, so this seemed good for me.
I bought one for $150 (not $250). It works, but not very well. On some calls I get fairly severe audio distortion that makes it hard to understand people. I'm not sure how to fix this yet. Still, though, it's better than not being able to make or receive any phone calls at home.
Data usage isn't an issue because I have wifi, and call time isn't an issue because I never get close to my limit anyway.
I wasn't expecting this to really hold my attention, but I ended up watching for 25 minutes the first time I tried it.
I just hope they add a way to add videos to the favorites and view the original youtube page for a video. Also a bit annoying that you can't control it with the mouse, but they'll probably fix that.
I agree. Native apps are great if you have some features you want to implement that aren't practical in a web app, but I can't think of any case where a website with a native app for mobile devices has any good excuse not to also have a web app to fall back on.
With things like games, you can see that an app could be the only option. While HTML5 is almost there, it still doesn't offer the performance and capabilities of a native app, while Apple's stance on Flash means Flash-based games are a no-no.
Yesterday there was an app called "A mirror" at the top of the Top Grossing list selling for $499.99. The developer, SufPay, has no website listed and has only released one app. The app displays images of picture frames that are simply black in the center; that's it. It's by a different developer, but it definitely seems to be part of a similar scheme.
I checked just now, and the price has changed to 99¢, but it's scary to think that a completely useless app 'sold' enough copies at $500 a pop to become the top grossing app on the app store.
I think I've heard of this trick. What the developers do is that they make the app expensive ($500), then they purchase it with promo-codes, leading to it going into the top-grossing list. Then they switch it to 99cents, but since it takes some time for it to slide off the top-grossing list, a lot of people buy the app. This gives it enough sales to break into the top 100 of the category charts, and it will then use that momentum to rise up.
Devs use such tricks - if you keep in touch with the forum, you'll see some crazy stuff people are doing to sell.
Well that's a bit of a relief. I thought they were actually charging $500 to unsuspecting account holders.
You're right about people buying the app after it drops in price. When it was $500 it had two obviously fake 5/5 reviews. Now it has an additional 40 reviews, 1/3 of which are additional fake reviews, 2/3 of which are 1-star reviews shocked that their iPhone didn't magically turn reflective.
I would love this as much as any other web designer or developer, but sadly, it's just not feasible.
The biggest problem with upgrades is that lots of companies rely on specific versions of specific browsers for in-house websites and web apps. Expiration dates essentially amount to browser makers saying 'too bad, fix your software'. This would be amusing, but realistically, Microsoft would never do such a thing, and without Microsoft on board, not much will change.
The best compromise I can think of is for browser vendors to decouple updates of web-technology support (HTML, CSS, JS, Canvas, etc.) from updates of user-facing features, the things that get advertised when an full point upgrade is released, and start pushing out HTML, CSS and JS upgrades automatically, in the background. Once the first round of such browsers were widely adopted, browser upgrades would cease to be an issue at all. Upgrade averse users could keep their old versions with familiar interfaces and still have cutting edge standards support.
This leaves the problem of getting the first round of upgrades through, but that could be solved by building in backwards compatibility for all currently popular version of a browser. This would be a pain, but would only have to happen once. If Microsoft, for example, gave IE9 full backwards compatibility with IE8, 7 and 6, and made future rendering updates automatic, there would be very little excuse left for any company to stick with an older version of IE.
I don't think it's the UI that breaks legacy applications.. it's the rendering engine. Automatically pushing out upgrades to the rendering engine would be as bad as forcing upgrades from IE6->IE8.
I think you misread what I wrote. I was suggesting separate updates for the rendering engine to solve the problem of upgrade-averse users. Legacy applications would be accommodated by keeping older rendering engines running beside a newer, automatically updating engine. The idea is to remove roadblocks to getting everyone to upgrade, and then make it so that upgrading the browser version is no longer necessary to maintain current standards support.
I think the release of the bumper case is much more likely because the iPhone now has twice as many glass surfaces, and those glass surfaces are not guarded from direct impact by a metal bezel like on the previous iPhones. If Apple expected reception problems before release they could've just bumped back the release date.
I bought one for $150 (not $250). It works, but not very well. On some calls I get fairly severe audio distortion that makes it hard to understand people. I'm not sure how to fix this yet. Still, though, it's better than not being able to make or receive any phone calls at home.
Data usage isn't an issue because I have wifi, and call time isn't an issue because I never get close to my limit anyway.