Have you been following new phone releases? When they do eventually appear they always come to market much cheaper than these early prices. In every case where I have bought one this has always been true. I don't know if it's dodgy marketing to make people think they are getting a bargain, or just early conservative pricing but that's the way it has always worked.
And how long before the price drops so that it becomes significantly cheaper than these super-fast high-end phones? Don't you think the HTC Desire, Motorola Milestone, Samsung Galaxy, etc will get cheaper as well?
In terms of pricing, the N8 WILL BE competiting directly against these phones.
This is assuming the last mile is the only bottleneck. It's not.
Please elaborate. What is the major bottleneck then? Did you read the article or the text that was referenced?
What planet are you on? That was so irrelevant.
Are you kidding? If I said in 2007, no one should be building a high-end computer with a Pentium D (because the kick-ass Core 2 Duo had been released) and Dell starting selling high-end XPS desktops with Pentium Ds in 2008, the tech community would have gone into meltdown.
ARM11 in a high-end smartphone in 2010 is just plain stupid. Nokia made an error in judgement here... there is no doubt. These Cortex-A8 based SoCs only make up a small proportion of the cost of the phone. For the sake of a few dollars, Nokia crippled the N8.
It's not the size of the engine but the power output, and it's not always related to displacement size. BHP per ton works better, because a lighter car can accelerate faster with a smaller engine.
Using your metaphor, the 600 MHz ARM11 CPU in the N8 can process approximately 600 MIPS (million instructions per second). The 800 Mhz Cortex-A8 in the iPhone 4 can process approximatelly 1600 MIPS per second. The 1 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon can process approximately 2000 MIPS per second.
BTW, 1.3 GHz Snapdragon and Cortex-A8 devices will be appearing in the market soon. That is 2600 MIPS or 4.3x faster than the ARM11 in the N8.
What does this mean to the end user?
- Faster, more responsive and more feature-rich apps.
- More responsive multi-tasking and UI
- Significantly faster web-browsing (important since Nokia is pushing a lot of web runtime "apps"😉
Irrelevant. As said before, real world use and geeks with stopwatches are miles apart.
Sorry but no. Give a "real-world" user an iPhone 3G and a 3GS and see if they think the difference is "irrelevant".