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November 21, 2008
iPhone users - more women than men? and the anti-iphone ..
At least two women I spoke to last week said that they love the iPhone and wanted to upgrade to one ..
In contrast, I am not a fan of the iPhone .. and actually not very a fan of visual/ touch interfaces etc per-se
I suspect I am not the typical user of devices and appliances.
For instance, I started developing on Unix and never even got comfortable with Windows .. i,e. Graphical user interfaces ..
I kept going back to command line prompts since it was faster to work that way and in the times I worked as an Oracle DBA, this was cool i.e. I never really needed to work with the visual elements
So, what I am asking is:
a) Is there a male/female usage difference for the iPhone?
b) Perhaps there is a place for the anti-iPhone i.e. a complex phone driven by simple textual commands(think 'vi', 'shell scripting' etc here) - and I hope that there may be at least some people will relate to this :)
The two topics are not related .. i.e. women may well be users of the proposed anti-iphone .. but these are more random thoughts in my own mind
Posted by ajit at November 21, 2008 6:34 PM
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Comments
Hi Ajit - I too am a fan of the command line approach inspired by unix/linux - however, for three reasons, I don't think that this will work on the mobile phone (possibly ever, but at least not in the near future).
1) The input to these mechanisms for these devices is just too clunky/slow.
2) Mobile devices are for people on the move. Even the most multi-tasking of people will end up walking out in front of a bus while trying to remember and type the correct regex format in order to search for that important email!
3) Using command line in your office or at conferences around other developers may make you look cool - but on the street, it will not! 8-)
I have the iPhone and I love it. For me, what makes it great is the web 2.0 philosophy i.e the (semi) openness of the appstore. Eventually, of course - Android will win out as manufacturers compete to build the best hardware and users compete to build the best software on a truly open platform.
Nice blog, keep up the good work.
Posted by: Damian Flannery at November 22, 2008 3:28 PM
many thanks Damian for your comments and your kind words rgds Ajit
Posted by: Ajit Jaokar at November 22, 2008 3:39 PM
I believe Android if the equivalent of the command-line driven device that you are looking for. Open operating system and rich SDK being are the new "command lines" that techies are looking for.
Posted by: Lionel at December 3, 2008 6:33 PM