I’ve thought about this more, and while it’s a nice toy it doesn’t solve the fundamental problem with smart phones. Users want more and more things, but they also want their devices to be smaller and smaller. It’s cool that I can have pictures, watch movies, surf the web, and get e-mail on this little device, but who the heck wants to do that on a 3.5 inch screen? The true revolution will come when someone figures out a way to have a fold out screen or some other way to get a 7-8 inch screen in a pocket sized device.
The new iPhone: I think everyone should buy one!
Disclaimer: I work for at&t.
All that doesn’t matter if Apple or Cingular locks out or restricts third-party developers. The Motorola ROKR E2 is based on Linux, but additional apps are limited to what the built-in Java support handles. Basically, I’m concerned that OS X on the iPhone is a means to an end rather than a feature in and of itself.
For me it’s less about what it does, and more about how it does it. Not to mention, I’m a sucker for quality, style and well thought out design.
That said, it does a lot, and does it like no one has ever seen before. They way all the features interact with each other, and the interface changes with the current content. the transitions and ease of use. The multi-touch scrolling/pinching/zooming/resizing. I can’t wait to see what third part devs will create for this thing. If you’re a nay-sayer, i think you’re out of your mind. Watch the mini videos apple has on their site vignetting all of the features. Full-on techno-lust.
I agree that it’s cool, but I think it’s a solution without a problem. Being able to surf the web is cool, but can you really do anything meaningful on a 3.5 inch screen? I still have grave doubts about the ability to type on that thing. From the looks of it my thumb would easily cover up 4 letters on the keyboard.
I watched them and I think it made me go limp.
I fail to see what’s caused the massive orgy regarding this - the touchscreen interface works just like any other interface I’ve seen, except gasp the buttons can be pressed by touching the screen.
Meh.
I know that’s rhetorical, but “no” really can’t be said enough
Huh. I don’t like iPods, compared to other mp3 players. In fact, I saw something on the iPhone article that went “DING” in my head on the “HELL NO” alert zone: It uses iTunes. I fucking HATE iTunes. Won’t use it. Also won’t use Cingular. So no iPhone for me. (Plus I do a lot of stuff without looking–dialing and text messaging… I need to feel the buttons)
The iPhone’s too expensive for me, but that’s only because I just want a telephone, and don’t need the smartphone/internet/iPod extras. I can’t wait for the iPhone’s technology to become ubiquious, though, as I’m sure we’ll end up seeing its features in future iPods – not to mention lower-priced next-gen iPhones. 
Are you saying you can’t do anything on a 3.5" screen? My current PDA is a Dell Axim x51v which is a 3.7" screen which has twice the number of pixels as the iPhone. Normal web browsing is mildly painful on it but what Jobs neglected to mention is that many of the big websites have specialised mobile versions designed to be displayed on small screens. My screen is 640x480 so if you flip it sideways, you get about the resolution of an average PC circa 1995. In a few years, 800x600 should be common and that should get you the majority of websites in a functional manner. Much beyond that and you’re going to get into diminishing returns. The current iPhone is 480x320 and there was no indication that the iPhone safari had ANY reflow functionality so, despite what Jobs said, surfing the web using Pocket IE and windows is actually likely to be a better experience for the moment.
I currently check The Onion, Wired News, The New York Times, Slate, BBC, 2 Seattle Local Newspapers and the weather every day. Even The SDMB has a mobile version. I can check email on it. Google Maps is incredibly useful for quick info on the go. I have MSN messenger on there, I can check all of my class websites, I can check the bus schedule, I can do a library search when all the library computers are taken and I can pull up campus maps. Only thing I really wish it had was flash so I could watch youtube clips. Almost every other common website is at least accessible if not supremely usable.
In short, theres tons of stuff you can do with a tiny screen.
Let me revise:
Can one do anything meaningful on a 3.5" screen? Sure.
Do I want want to attempt to do anything meaningful on a 3.5" screen? Hell no.
I’ve tried various portable internet devices, and surfing the web was painful on each and every one of them. Now I’m not saying it’s not a nice bonus, but it’s hardly worth of being hyped as a primary feature.
Trying to surf the Web (in its present state) on that thing would be as frustrating as trying to read a billboard with an electron microscope.
As far as the other stuff, I dunno, it’s a cool interface, but I don’t see any reason to hassle with switching everything over. Novelty, as any kid who ever wanted and got a Stretch Armstrong can tell you, wears off pretty fast.
Also, the camera is an issue. I’m still waiting for my Dream Machine: A phone, texter, mp3 player, flash drive, GPS device, and a 5.0 megapixel camera with a good lens, all in the same handheld device. Granted, it’ll be a few years; so far, cameraphone makers aren’t paying much attention to camera quality. But until that’s available, I’m sticking with my various jerry-rigged stopgaps.
It sure would be nice to leave the house with just one device in my pocket, though.
Warning: the Mac faithful are going to hate this post, and I fully anticipate a flurry of “you don’t get it” and “if you hate Macs why even reply” posts.
The iPhone totally underwhelmed me. I use PCs and Macs, and I readily acknowledge the strengths and weaknesses of each platform. As a graphics professional, I relish the Mac. As a consumer of entertainment in the form of games and movies and web sites, I prefer the PC. I’m pretty comfortable with both platforms and don’t have a strong bias one way or the other. However, while I think that the iPhone is ambitious in concept, ultimately I have little use for it; count me among those that are asking, “what’s the big deal?”
I don’t want to watch “widescreen video” on a tiny screen. If I want to watch video, I have a PC at home with a 22-inch widescreen HD monitor. I don’t want to watch movies on a PSP, which (I’m guessing here, I admit) has a larger screen, so why would I want to watch them on a smaller screen? Streaming video from web sites? OK, cool, but honestly I personally am not away from my computer(s) for so long that I can’t view videos on a big screen anyway. Maybe there are a lot of other people for whom the ability to view video on their phone is a huge boon, but to me it’s fluff.
It is cool that they have a camera built-in, but that’s nothing really new.
If I want to listen to MP3s, I’ll buy an MP3 player. Yes, having an MP3 player combined with your phone equals one less piece of hardware to carry around, but as light as phones and MP3 players are nowadays, is it really that much of a hassle? Plus it’s extra wear on the battery. I can get a decent phone and a decent MP3 player for less than the cost of an iPhone, even if it’s at the lower price point that is being projected.
I’m an art director; I don’t have any use for any OS X apps on a phone-sized piece of hardware. Photoshop CS2? InDesign? Painter? Hell, Word? On a phone-sized piece of hardware, with no Wacom tablet? I’m not going to be doing any of that on a phone. No thanks. Retrieving email? Maybe that might be useful, except that most of the emails that are important to me, I tend to want to keep on my computer at home or work and sometimes there are attachments that I need to save as well. Am I really going to be away from my computer(s) for so long that I’ll need to get email from my phone? Not likely.
HOW much does it cost? TOO MUCH. Continuing the recent trend of pricey toys (XBox 360, PS3, pretty much all Mac hardware for the last decade or so) I can’t possibly justify spending between $500 and $600 for a phone plus a glorified video iPod. WTF would I do with it besides make phone calls and play MP3s? Not much more than what I do with my Samsung-built Sprint phone, which is play Yahoo poker and send the occasional text message and make calls. Now, does it cost too much for all the stuff that it does? Again drawing a parallel to the PS3, it’s probably fairly priced for all the features it has; I just have little use for many of the features.
I *know[/k], it’s neat-o. It’s new tech, it’s all slick interface and combining various functions together. This sort of thing may very well be the wave of the future, but it’s not like it’s the first attempt to combine various media functions in a handheld device. If it succeeds, great, but I’m still not all that excited about it.
If you’re a Mac fanatic, by all means get in line for the first iPhone. I’m also sure Apple will pay handsomely to have the iPhone featured in TV and movies like they have for their iMacs and Powerbooks over the past few years to reinforce the image of Macs as the “hip” computer company. I’d be more impressed if they just made their damn computers affordable.
I was quite impressed overall, but there are still some major problems with the iPhone.
First, it’s only for Cingular. They’re the largest US carrier, but not by much (and not for long, from what I’ve heard of their customer service). Verizon and Sprint are each nearly as big as Cingular, and they have high-speed data networks, while Cingular’s EDGE plods along at a quarter of a Mbps. Have fun watching those Google Maps satellite images load.
Second, it only has 4-8 GB of storage. Why bother with the big screen and flashy iPod features when it can only hold a couple movies or a fraction of your music collection? They rate the video playing time at 5 hours, which is convenient because it only holds 3-6 hours of video anyway.
Finally, it costs as much as a PS3.
The Apple TV, on the other hand, is underwhelming across the board. It apparently doesn’t support 480i output, which means the 89% of American households without HDTV won’t be able to use it. It only supports video in MP4 containers, just like the iPod - no MPEG-2, DivX, etc., so it’s really only good for video you bought from iTMS or converted yourself. It plays downloaded podcasts, but no internet radio.
Xbox Media Center does everything Apple TV does and more, supports more audio and video formats, plays internet radio and streaming video from YouTube/Google, and if you don’t already have an Xbox, you can get one for 1/3 the price of Apple TV.
It really does start to look like a triumph of marketing and packaging over actual content, innovation and function. That’s what really annoys me about the whole iThing - at the release show for the iWheel, Steve would be saying stuff like “Now, get this… We’ve developed a new kind of wheel that’s actually round, incredible, isn’t it? Revolutionary, in more sense than one; this wheel… wait for it… the iWheel actually rotates. Mount several of these babies on a vehicle and, for the first time ever, you can go somewhere”, to a chorus of ‘oooh, aaahh!’ from the iCrowd.
I mean, I actually respect Apple’s design aesthetics, their development techniques, even the technology itself, I just kinda resent the marketing of more sliced bread as ‘new, and the best thing since sliced bread’.
I’m distinctly underwhelmed
“Breakthrough internet device” - it’s GSM, for gods sake. That means it’s absolutely useless for the internet unless you’re within range of a hotspot. Over here t-mobile have just rolled out HSDPA access at 1.8 mbps, with unlimited access starting at £7.50 a month. I’ve been using that for a week now, and it’s great. By the time this phone gets out every carrier in Europe will offer similar. Going back to Edge rates of sub 300k really doesn’t strike me as a breakthrough.
So, it’s a touchscreen unit running a 'nix OS, that in a Wifi zone can be used for web browsing. It has music and video playback. Strikes me that Nokia did that two years back with the 770
Nokia N95. Coming this quarter. As a Nokia Nseries fanboy, I will be getting that when I’m bored of my N73, which has only a 3.2 megapixel camera. It has an excellent lens, but the night shots aren’t so great.
As far as the iPhone – I work on touchscreens all day long, and I have a Windows Mobile PDA, and I can’t imagine doing as much text entry on either of those things as I do on my phone. I hate touchscreens for text entry. When you send 2500 messages a month, entry method is very important.
I also cannot believe it doesn’t have UMTS. With Cingular rolling out their HSPDA network this year, you’d think their new flagship toy would support it. Nokia’s had smartphones with UMTS and WiFi available for a couple years now, including one with a 4 GB hard drive in it. All of their smartphones use an excellent OS that’s open for development and widely developed for. If they’d push these things in the US more, this iPhone thing would seem a lot less revolutionary.
I totally agree. I have a PowerBook G4 and I think it’s a great machine–far and away the best designed laptop in its price range for what I do (perl scripting, word processing, animation, talking and rocking with other *nix systems)–and OS X is (unlike previous Macintosh OSs) stable, robust, highly functional, and only moderately top-heavy, at least in comparison to recent Microsoft OSs. But in general I’m underwhelmed by Apple’s marketing hype, particularly with the iPod, which is, after all, a pretty medium-interesting MP3/video player. (Then again, I have no intention of watching movies on a 2.5" screen, so clearly I’m not in their target demographic.)
The iPhone looks…interesting…like a piece of technology straight out of a Stanley Kubrick sciencie fiction movie, but I have a few doubts about the technology, and tying it to a specific carrier (and one with such a mediocre reputation as Cingular) is not bright. I’m taking the wait and see approach. Actually, I’m taking the “Blackberry 7130 today, we’ll see how the iPhone (and subsequent imitators) fare in two years” approach.
Stranger
The lack of tactile dialing is a deal breaker for me. I shudder to think of all the freeways filled with people’s eyes darting back and forth between the road and their iThing.
For devices like these, you need to get hands on to see if it fits you. I’ve had 3 smart pda’s and a smart phone. For me, I know I need a touch screen keypad, true integration with all the Microsoft Office Suite (if it doesn’t run OneNote or synch with Outlook, then it’s a useless device for me), and ability to run a specialized Chinese English edictionary. So, if it can be a smart pda and have the other stuff and that memory at $600 bucks, then ya I’ll check it out. But all the bells and whistles are useless if it can’t be my pocket pc and last for a work day of battery.