Funny you ask. About a month ago I was talking with a co-worker and the conversation meandered into stuff we worked om that died out. I once wrote a WAP app for a stadium to provide sport stats to Palm and Handspring devices in the stadium. This was in 2003 as the bubble burst so I wasn’t around to see if it was ever deployed or not.
The next day after this talk with the co-worker I walked into the office printer room, glanced up at a top shelf in the room. And there was a book on how to write WAP apps that had been purchased 18 years prior. After 4ish years here I never noticed it sitting there.
Hahah that is awesome! I think my first exposure to a WAP browser was via my Palm VII, which I purchased in 2000, upon graduating college. It was certainly a glimpse of the future that I was very excited about! I think maybe it could pull 15-20 Kbit/second at best, but hey, WAP was text only, so what did it matter.
It was fun to write and somehow more exciting to see my code run on various phones. My typical work was websites for viewing from computers. So writing for a phone or PDA just felt so futuristic at the time. Of course I gained all the skills and then never saw another project requiring WAP knowledge ever again. File with Cold Fusion and Java UI knowledge…
We spend a bunch at Sbux too, but I also grind my own beans and usually make my own coffee at home with an Aeropress - it’s a lot cheaper than an espresso machine and doesn’t take up a lot of counter space.
Is anyone else wondering how quickly this will turn into road-in-the-middle tablet?
Vendors have shown a willingness to ship some shockingly aggressive OLED panels(Samsung’s are generally reputed to be safer and saner than average; but even they are willing to ship stuff where the UI has to be modified to add motion because expected lifetime before burn-in is so low; and LG is worse) to score a win on bullet points; and it’s hard not to be concerned about how mature the new-hotness panel flexibility will turn out to be.
It doesn’t help that, in order to be flexible, the usual layer of toughened glass will presumably not be present, and scratch resistant plastics just aren’t all that…
Maybe they’ve pulled it off; but I’ll put somebody else’s $2k behind testing that part of the bathtub curve.
Hopefully this will drive down the price of phablets. I don’t see a need to own both a smartphone, tablet, and a laptop. I already don’t like having a work laptop and a personal laptop, but out of an abundance of caution I do all side projects on personal machines. I think a phablet is just the right size for Redditing / watching movies on planea (and uh, doing grown up stuff like online banking and receiving… images… on Signal)
I think it’s free as in being able to take part in representative democracy under their own volition and living under no man’s dominion. In the good old days phones were free like that.
Neat form factor, but I’m stuck on the price as well. Two grand for a smart phone/tablet just doesn’t work for me, and I suspect won’t work for most folks (not when you toss in the already high price of cell plans). What I wish is these manufacturers would also focus on the low end models and put out more of those for consumers. It’s great having the super awesome stuff, but let’s start thinking about families whose wages aren’t going up fast enough to keep up with the price of phones these days.
Sam’s marketing geniuses are putting their knowledge in psychological pricing strategies to good work! The phone will surely be deemed a bargain by the public. $2000? No way! But that $1980 screams “bargain”.
You sound like you haven’t actually shopped for or used an iPad. You say it’s over priced, but for less than $400 you can get a 9.7” IPad. The ~$1,500 iPad you mention is 13” with a 1TB SSD and it actually outperforms many smaller laptops. When I’m in the road, my IPP is my news package cutter. Not sure why I would “need” OSX, but it isn’t for “real work”. I happily make money with it and don’t have to drag around a laptop. This Samsung piece of crap is absolutely not worth $2k.
Samsung “Fold” = Dead Phone Walking. Seems like a terrible experience. Thick as a brick folded. Awkward in your hand open.
I’m pretty sure there are cheap cell phone plans that work out close to that amount when you factor in inflation.
Plus back then you were stuck with the model the phone company gave you and the phones lasted long enough that most people paid for the phone many times over during the lifetime of the equipment.
Samsung Galaxy S5 Active. “Purchased” for $.01 on a Black Friday sale from Best Buy, while it was the most current Samsung Galaxy S Flagship model. 2 year commitment on AT&T. (This is my current phone.)
Oddly enough, my prior plan didn’t decline at all when they stopped offering “free phones”. I could have switched to a new plan… but there was no cost savings. The phone subsidy was worth about $10-25 a month for each line, so that was an additional cost, plus now if I want a new phone I either pay full price at once, or add an additional $25 a month to my bill. Oh, and there are 4 phones on my account.
I don’t think I ever paid more than $200 for a class-leading smart phone since I gave up my Nokia in 2006 and rolled with the BlackJack; normally under $100.
I would think the idea of a foldable phone would be to take the currently pretty-big phones and make them way smaller in your pocket. Instead, Samsung creates a device that is still big and takes up a lot of space in your pocket so it can open up to the size of an iPad. I’m not sure that’s going to sell well. Something as small as the original iPhone that could unfold to the size of current iPhones…? Now that’s interesting.
Seems … big. (Formatting left deliberately intact for ambiguity’s sake.)
Whenever someone calls these things pocket computers I think back to my wee Casio PB-80, which ran BASIC, had about 544 bytes of RAM, and was just neat (for 1986).
Yeah, not sure where I’m going with that, but it beats speculating on foldability, which, if it needs to be a thing, should be a thing you can do more than just the once. Three (or four) folds seem appropriate to ask for, for the price. Otherwise I don’t seem to be able to get excited by it.
I had no idea that this stuff would take off like it did. I just didn’t get the iPhone at all (at first). I eventually came around (on my second since 2009!), but the whole concept just mystified me.
I also didn’t used to get the appeal of coffee. In my defense, I was really very stupid.
Except my Razr was free, with my Cellular One plan, before they were purchased by AT&T.
It was a great phone, too; extremely durable, good looking, and well-made. I had one run over by a car (fell out of a pocket and turned into the cell company by someone) and turned into a high-tech semi-shattered potato chip… And it still booted and would call the last number entered (the keypad wouldn’t otherwise actuate, beyond the “Call” button) o.O’.
