“On the heels of bad press about its activation and customer support processes, AT&T last week began sending a survey to some iPhone customers asking them to rate various aspects of their iPhone experience,” MacNN reports.
“One page of the survey asks ‘Now, based on the scale below, please rate the EDGE data network performance when using each of the following applications on your Apple iPhone.’ The survey oddly asks for feedback on Apple’s own iChat instant messaging application — which of course, is not available on the device, but is much requested feature,” MacNN reports.
Full article, including image from survey, here.
Is AT&T just asking or will iChat be included in a future iPhone update?
Apple introduces iChat. AT&T gets data information for mobile VoIP for 4G. Seems logical, and skipping 3G altogether!
There is alot of young people who have iPhones complained there is no iChat. These young folks use AIM alot to communicate with their friends. This would add more sales to the iPhone numbers if they comes about.
What I don’t understand is if iChat is coming soon, why would Apple go through the trouble of writing an iChat look-alike which utilizes Meebo.
I mean, they’ve been developing iPhone for 3 years and they already have the code for iChat in OSX..
Why wouldn’t they just have included it from the beginning?
For a few more clues, here’s a list of some of the OS X goodies inside the iPhone: http://rixstep.com/2/2/20070707,00.shtml
iChat will eventually need to be included, you can bet that the Nokia’s of the world are not taking these gaps in customer satisfaction laying down. Apple will need to act quickly. The customer wish list is too short indicating obvious things missing
iChat is a full application… not a widget.
Maybe this is easy to do – i don’t know?
iPhone maybe full OSX10.5 but where does it say it runs full apps.
Maybe it will… yet there is enough punch in the intial offer of iPhone NOT to include iCHAT yet.
Sure will be exciting when it does.
I would just settle for AT&T not dropping my calls.
GradientFill.png in UIKit. Even though this can be done programmatically they’ve evidently resorted to an image dependent algorithm.
Ha. Even Apple avoids using their convoluted gradient fill API.
iChat will eventually start to kill off traditional cellphones. Why pay to use the Cell network when you can iChat on Wifi for free?
I’d imagine AT& T will move slowly on this one…
@TRE
Text messaging fees for AT&T.
“On the heels of bad press about its activation and customer support processes…”
I’ve had the iPhone since Friday and it’s STILL not activated completely. AT&T’s phone support personnel so far have appeared to be exceedingly ignorant of even basic knowledge of both the iPhone and the Mac. The only saving grace has been Apple’s near heroic support staff. One conferenced me in with an AT&T guy and she basically mopped the floor with him in terms of information and knowledge of what should be done.
@ Red Hot Ryder. Sorry your activation process has sucked so bad. My experience with AT&T support was the exact opposite, though, when my phone wouldn’t activate. Somehow the process completely borked, and I had to go back to AT&T and get a new SIM card. But throughout the process the AT&T people were knowledgeable and professional. In fact, the AT&T rep called Apple for me to find the problem was actually that my activation was still stuck on Apple’s end of things. Of course, Apple was helpful, too.
Back on topic: Has anyone thought that maybe, just maybe, “iChat” is a typo, error, or some weird reference to the SMS widget (code name, maybe)?
MW: Without more info, I wouldn’t read too much into it.
@Jay
Safari is a full application… not a widget. My guess is that it has something to do with AT&T, as noted above… and the need for more memory on the iPhone, which is obviously in the near future.
I do believe that now it finally makes sense to release iChat on Windows… in order to drive up the demand for it on the iPhone.
Plausible:
AT&T left it off so they can add it later in a new package: mobile IM.
$5.99 more a month. You can use iChat anywhere, and it behaves like iChat.
Forgive me for the lack of quotation marks on Jay’s comment. I forgot MDN’s text box does not allow the blockquote HTML tag, so his comment is not separated from mine properly.
(MDN: hint, hint!)
This is just more ignorance on the part of AT&T marketing people. Their reference to iChat is obviously meant as a question about the SMS function currently on the iPhone.
Did everyone iPhone purchaser get the same new customer magazine from AT&T that I did? “Welcome to AT&T” it begins, and then features a big article titled, “The Most Innovative Phones” which showcases Samsungs, Motorola, etc., with no mention of iPhone. AT&T is simply not as coordinated as Apple where product launches are concerned.
Ordered my Phone from Apple the Friday it went on sale, that Saturday moved my four lines to At&t, when my phone arrived last Friday it took less than 3 minutes for activation and I was off and running, Has worked perfectly since.
Me personally, I think that AT&T is just asking. We have been reading posts here on MDN from people wanting iChat on the iPhone. I’m sure that AT&T is getting the same thing. Perhaps this is a way of asking their customers.
My only question now though, is AT&T seriously considering allowing iChat on the iPhone, or is this a way of influencing more iPhone users to contribute to their customer survey?
I’ve noticed from viewing the video demos that the SMS messaging makes the same auditory sounds as iChat when you send or receive a message. Perhaps the people who wrote up this survey got it mixed up. This whole survey could have been written long before the final list of software was released, and it merely slipped through the system.
It wouldn’t be hard for Apple to insert iChat as well as any other kind of application on their iPhone. It’s just a software upgrade. My guess is that AT&T would make a killing by not allowing iChat or Skype to be on their phones and just keep on charging the kids for their SMS messages.
And Apple is including Bonjour with Safari for Windows…
Rudge: It wouldn’t be hard for Apple to insert iChat as well as any other kind of application on their iPhone. It’s just a software upgrade.
Inserting an app is an easy thing to do. <b>Porting an app</i> is the hard thing to do. Despite iPhone running OS X, its CPU is an ARM chip, not an Intel or PPC. Thus, if Apple ever wants to bring iChat to iPhone, it must port the app to run on ARM chip and to make it work with touch-based UI.
I still contend that the reason iChat is not there is because Leopard is not ready. There is no reason for Apple to port the current iChat only to have it replaced later with the newer, feature rich Leopard’s iChat. It’s a waste of resources. Similarly, I think that’s why there are plenty of limitations to the current softwares supported in iPhone, like Safari (which is not Safari 3.0), as the Leopard versions still does not pass the beta phase. However, since iPhone is billed as a communicator device, Apple can’t wait for the Leopard versions and created iPhone’s own Safari and Mail.
iChat has definitely been left out as a rather obvious app on the iPhone for some strange reason as it’s a no-brainer for anyone who uses a Mac and utilizes free communication. From what I’ve read about AT&T’s plans, they are currently embarking on setting up a blanket of WiFi (WiMax) that would allow any AT&T internet customer to access free Wifi on any AT&T hotspots in the country. That would mean free roaming IM/VOIP for anyone who has AT&T’s service at home. If you can do it from a laptop, why would the iPhone have to be any different? They would be foolish not to do so as this is the direction the world is going. My hope is that they are keeping the staus quo until they can drop the bombshell and seriously undercut other providers.
I hope!
“There is no reason for Apple to port the current iChat only to have it replaced later with the newer, feature rich Leopard’s iChat. It’s a waste of resources.”
Also, add the fact that “collaboration” is a buzzword for Leopard and iChat is a big part of that. I’m sure the iChat team has lots of work to do and not enough hands to make an iChat for iPhone.
“Despite iPhone running OS X, its CPU is an ARM chip, not an Intel or PPC. Thus, if Apple ever wants to bring iChat to iPhone, it must port the app to run on ARM chip and to make it work with touch-based UI.”
Keep in mind, also, that despite what Steve says, iPhone OS X and Mac OS X are different. Yes, both iPhone and Mac run “OS X” but Apple can change the definition of what “OS X” is to suit themselves. I mean, starting with the obvious, there’s no Menu Bar in iPhone OS X. There is in Mac OS X. So, at the very least, there will need to be some interface adjustments to iChat to run under iPhone OS X.
That said, with the conversion to Intel, Apple has built up some good knowledge of “Dos and Don’ts” in cross-platform software development. Apple provided tools handle things such as endianness and the like, so porting between the Intel, PPC, and ARM shouldn’t be as difficult as it sounds.
Peter: That said, with the conversion to Intel, Apple has built up some good knowledge of “Dos and Don’ts” in cross-platform software development. Apple provided tools handle things such as endianness and the like, so porting between the Intel, PPC, and ARM shouldn’t be as difficult as it sounds.
Yes, Apple should have tools to help them porting apps, but some apps need to be fine tuned to the processor for optimization and some apps need some of their parts written in the assembly code for performance. I don’t know to what extent Apple apps are optimized so I can’t say how difficult it is to port them. I am just offering it as a possibility why some apps are missing from iPhone. The AT&T explanation doesn’t hold, IMHO, because AT&T already offers VoIP. They have nothing to be scared of.
Duh! Of course iChat will be added as a soon-to-be-released update of the iPhone software. Obviously none of you paid attention to the fact that the recent update to Safari included support for iChat. My guess is that Apple is just finalizing everything so that it can run with AIM AND Yahoo, as Yahoo is conspicuous in the absence of its meager iPhone contributions to date.