soaringthor

It’s hard to know. As pointed out on webOS Nation, the AT&T Pre 3 was slated for Sept 4th release, the Verizon Pre 3 was slated for Sept 18th release. When Leo stood up behind the podium on August 18th to kill the US version of the product, there weren’t as many finished production VZW Pre 3’s as there were finished production AT&T Pre 3’s. Remember, finished production includes passing QC checks and sealed in retail packaging. In my browsing through the forums, it seems like there are more than a handful active on forums (and what geek that shells out $500+ for a phone isn’t going to get on the forums?). Seems like there aren’t more then a couple on ebay at any given time, but there’s always at least one, so looks like there are HP employees that got them during the employees-only firesale and are trickling them out.

I went from a VZW HTC Trophy to a VZW Pre 3. Both definitely have their strong points. I’ve found that on my Pre 3, I have a lot more icons in the launcher that are just shortcuts to mobile versions of web pages (US Bank, Fitbit, Tripit, etc). I also loved the Start screen on Windows Phone. It’s nice having all that information at a glance. webOS’ Synergy doesn’t come close to the level of app integration in Windows Phone.

“The user interface on newspapers isn’t very good, and it involved a lot of wrestling, cajoling, and crumpling on my part…”

Oddly enough, the same qualm I have with The Verge’s front page… as discussed a lot since the beginning of the site..

(Just more “closed ecosystem stuff” I just thought of)

Could you define what you think a “closed ecosystem” is? To buy an iDevice or an Apple computer isn’t buying into and getting stuck in an ecosystem. All the services that I use in Windows (Skype, Dropbox, Firefox, Citrix, Office suite) I can use in OSX as well – in fact, in iOS as well (minus Firefox).

“The main reason I avoid Apple products is because they are so locked down and don’t talk to other products outside their ecosystem as well.”
Again I argue – isn’t this the same problem that Microsoft has (if you can even consider it a problem)? Windows Live Mail, Skydrive, XBOX 360… none of those talk to other products outside their ecosystem as well.

Interesting that you bring up both the lack of usability of iTunes in the Windows environment, and the lack of Skydrive support in the Apple environment as support for your Microsoft > Apple argument. Apple fanboys could make the same argument… certainly iTunes’ usability issues are due to poor development tools, and since all the major cloud storage companies have offerings in the Apple ecosystem, wouldn’t it just be Microsoft’s lack of desire to create an iOS & OSX client?
I think iTunes is fine… have you ever tried using WinAmp to organize your library? /shudder

I will say that I am on your side here, but I think that using the “their app sucks on my OS” argument can be used either pro-Apple or pro-Microsoft for either example you introduced, and as an insider you should definitely be able to scrounge up some better arguments.

Also: With over 25 billion downloads of over 600,000 apps in the App Store (so not including homebrew apps), I find it hard to agree with the “Apple is locked down and doesn’t listen to users” argument. Look at the evolution of iOS since its introduction as iPhone OS with the 1st gen iPhone. I can only imagine that the new features introduced in every major release were user-driven. Even if a lot of the ideas came from other OSes, it was still users saying “notifications are cool, iOS plz?”
Again, I can say the same for the patches and changes that have been added to Windows 8 since the developer preview, but I’m just running out of reasons for accepting the “closed ecosystem” spill.