I want the new iPhone

[Shalmanese]

@AHunter3

I am not Steve Jobs, I don’t work at Apple, and I do not know what Apple will or will not do wth the iPhone.

I know what I would do with the iPhone if I were CEO of Apple and the iPhone did indeed run OS X itself (regardless of what processor it ran it on).

I would make the computer as we know it obsolete in 18 months.

You would dock your iPhone in a cradle from which USB, DVI, and FireWire ports would let you attach keyboard, monitor, mouse, and peripherals. When docked, it’s a computer. When you go to lunch or to a meeting down the hall, you lift it out of the cradle and the various apps immediately resize / revamp their GUI to sizes & elements appropriate to the screen and available controls of the iPhone. But they’re the same apps. Same data.

Moreover, when it’s properly docked, you highlight a phone number in Safari or Excel or FileMaker and hit, oh I dunno, Command-Control-P and whatever is selected is dialed.

And your voicemails are instantly downloaded to .mp3 files and stored, a la iPhoto, in folders that are auto-named for date and time and caller, and an iVoiceMail app tracks all that so you can quickly search for old calls and play 'em back at will. And of course your voicemails are all part of your iTunes collection as well unless you uncheck that option.

Your texting messages are auto-cc’d to your email application into an iPhone IN and iPhone OUT folder and any email you compose can be cc’d to addresses that are really telephone text addresses, not email addresses.

Wherever you go, you walk up to any unoccupied work carousel and plunk down your cellphone and hey, you’ve got not just a computer but your computer. No MacBook, iMac Mini, or subnotebook is anywhere near as portable.
As soon as they’ve got the technology to put the horsepower, RAM, and storage space necessary into an iPhone, count on it.

That’s my guess.

Congratulations, you’re a ubiquitous computing researcher from the 1980s! There’s no need to send anything from apple, anyone who is anyone within this space has their own very personal vision of what they would do with a pocket sized, infinite powered device. Personally, I like the version where you shine a laser beam straight into your eye to project a virtual, 40" monitor right out in front of you and then use inductive wristpads to send tiny jerks of electricity through your nerves to simulate the force feedback of typing on a real keyboard. You can set up a virtual PC anywhere you want without any extra hardware at all, no DVI, no power.

[AHunter3]

Yeah, I know, but this time the actually-available technology is only a stone’s throw short of what you’d need to pull it off.

They’re running OS X on the damn thing. Not dreaming about it. Processors are small (although cooling is an issue). Memory and storage space is a problem but think of how much you can now store on one of those itsy bitsy iPod Shuffles… not enough to be your main computer, but it’s enough to deploy as a limited-use computer.

[Tuckerfan]

@AHunter3

Yeah, I know, but this time the actually-available technology is only a stone’s throw short of what you’d need to pull it off.

They’re running OS X on the damn thing. Not dreaming about it. Processors are small (although cooling is an issue). Memory and storage space is a problem but think of how much you can now store on one of those itsy bitsy iPod Shuffles… not enough to be your main computer, but it’s enough to deploy as a limited-use computer.

It’d be ample for my use given that I’ve no interest in games.

[Rachael_Rage]

I haven’t read this whole thread, but my main complaint about the iPhone is that you’re forced to use Cingular/ATT or whatever it is. Does anyone know how long it will be before the iPhone will be available to other carriers (eg. Verizon)? I want to get one, but not so much that I want to give up my no-complaints-whatsoever cell phone provider.

I figure I can wait a year, and by then they will have worked the major bugs and/or annoyances out of it, and perhaps by that time it can be used with any carrier. And the price will have gotten to a reasonable level. Am I hopelessly naiive?

[Absolute]

@Darth Vader's Little Pal

I haven’t read this whole thread, but my main complaint about the iPhone is that you’re forced to use Cingular/ATT or whatever it is. Does anyone know how long it will be before the iPhone will be available to other carriers (eg. Verizon)? I want to get one, but not so much that I want to give up my no-complaints-whatsoever cell phone provider.

I figure I can wait a year, and by then they will have worked the major bugs and/or annoyances out of it, and perhaps by that time it can be used with any carrier. And the price will have gotten to a reasonable level. Am I hopelessly naiive?

As I understand it, Apple approached Verizon about the iPhone, but Verizon did not accept Apple’s terms regarding marketing, distribution, and the software that would be loaded on the phone.

Apple has given Cingular multi-year exclusive rights to the iPhone, but it is unknown whether they could sneak around that by releasing (for example) a product called the jPhone and giving it to Verizon.