iPhone

The UI looks Great. I’m worried about fingerprinting up the phone, but we’ll have to see.

The one thing that I hate is that it’s a Closed System. You can’t go and download the Dev Kit and start writing software for it. This is likely to appease the carriers, but it’s very limiting. Yuck.

It’s way too damned expensive. My Treo cost around that much when I bought it, and it did a hell of a lot more. Of course, this is an OS X system (allegedly).

How the hell are they going to get it to run OS X? It’s bloated and huge on superpowerful modern hardware – what the hell is going to happen in this anemic phone world? They must be chopping OS X up into little tiny pieces to jam it into this phone. I bet they use a different kernel! And I wonder what CPU it’ll use – probably ARM, since everyone uses that.

Multi-year exclusive to Cingular sounds terrible. Terrible. I know why they chose GSM (quad-band GSM to be specific), that’s so they can sell the same handset to Europe and elsewhere. And I guess you might be able to buy unlocked handsets straight from Apple, but yeesh. Ugly. And will there be a CDMA version, ever? Who knows? That’s two more carriers you can’t use (Sprint and Verizon)…

The reason the little typing-on-glass thing actually seems to work is because there is some predictive text stuff in there – so if you happen to jam two ‘keys’, it can guess which one you probably meant. It may end up being right more often than not. That’s going to be another thing that we’ll have to try out to believe. Can’t wait till they show up in an Apple Store!

But if it’s sturdy enough (lots of glass there, dunno about that…) and flexible enough and can do what I need it to do (maybe not everything, but at least just what I need…) then I can see myself getting it. But I could see that a lot easier if it were cheaper. Bastards.

I wonder if the development model is actually Widgets? It looks a lot like it. Then your development doesn’t matter whether it’s an ARM or PowerPC or what?

Apple supports iphone? No, it has to be the carrier? I don’t know where Bryan gets this from, but he insists that the support will be done by Apple, not Cingular. That’s insane, if you ask me. If it’s true. I think he’s mistaken. I couldn’t find it in the Engadget article. If that were the case, Apple could just be their own MVNO and leave it at that.

As more details emerge, I shall ponder and write about them if I think they’re interesting.

6 thoughts on “iPhone”

  1. After watching the actual keynote last night, I was a little disappointed.

    The device seemed a bit slow to render data. Steve said they were connected via WiFi, so it couldn’t have been network lag.

    I feel like Apple made too many compromises with this device. How difficult would it have been to include 3G support, open API for 3rd party apps, included iChat and sold it unlocked?

    There are already quite a number of cheap phones out there that already do GSM + GPRS and are not locked into a carrier.

    A lot of young people have SideKicks because it has AIM and Yahoo chat, and it’s cheap.

    Maybe this is Apple’s price of admission to crash the cell phone party.

    Oh, a 5 hour battery life? you’ve got to be kidding me. I had a Sidekick, and I liked it, but having the battery die if I forgot to charge it one day was a deal breaker.

    Speaking of the SideKick, it had access to the ‘real’ internet, sort of, and it was nearly useless. I don’t think people want the ‘real’ internet on their phones. Like me, people want the ‘data’ that’s on there. The reason someone would use their phone to access the internet is because they’re not near a computer, they’re out somewhere most likely in transit. I don’t care if I can render the entire Fandango web page, I’m not going to sit down and browse websites on a 3.5″ screen, shortening an already short battery life, I just want movie showtimes, or an address, a phone number.

    Another thing, it runs OS X? Don’t lie, don’t insult our intelligence with your marketspeak bullshit, that is *not* OS X.

    Don’t get me wrong, I’d buy that phone today if I could, even pay T-Mobile until my contract is up.
    I just think we’ll have to wait a few years until Apple has enough weight in this new market to throw around and then maybe they can create the “one phone to rule them all.”

    Oh and the reason why I said Apple will support it is on this page: http://www.macrumors.com/events/mwsf2007.html

    The Mac Observer: “it appears that apple will support the phone, not cingular”

  2. ok, I need to point out a flaw,
    ITS A PHONE
    (I know not just a phone)
    ITS A $599 PHONE
    (same as the PS3!, someone is gonna get stabbed!)
    (all the sony fanboys should all stand up now and go “WTF!?!? Our superfast blu ray playing monster console took heat for that price point! but every gushes for the iPhone!?!?”)
    My big problem with it is that its the ipod update I have been waiting for. It has the 2 things I wanted out of my next ipod, solid state drive with movie playback plus the wider screen.
    Instead I get left in the cold this time…
    Why? you ask… well let me tell you why:
    I have a phone already, paid for buy my company, on nextel service, no they will not switch to Cingular and yes they pay the bill in total (even my personal calls for pizza on the weekends)
    So a phone with 2 years cingular aint gonna cut it.
    Wheres my ipod with the cool wifi features?
    Web Broweser, Email, widgets…
    whats this phone crap?
    If you have ever seen the way I treat my phone you would know why $599 is not the way I want to waste money…
    Ugh screw this I am going to go play ps3…
    (that has internet broweser and I am working on installing linux…)
    -Robby1051

  3. You all make very good points –

    Robulous – I think you’ve nailed it. It’s too goddamned expensive. It’s not targetted at the “Busy Executive On The Go” market (for which its price is reasonable) – it’s targetted at the “iPod-listening L-train Williamsburgites”. And it’s pretty damned pricey for them. Some of them will get them, many won’t.

    Bryan – in re: device speed, this does use EDGE, which is a _lot_ faster than your shitty GPRS connection on your Sidekick. But still, it could be too slow.

    I think the real answer is what Apple did to the iPod market – they entered on the high end, and worked their way down. Perhaps they’ll do the same thing here? Maybe 2 years from June they’ll intro their ‘iPhone Nano” or “iPhone Shuffle” and start crushing the mid-market? We’ll have to see.

    Oh, and GSM apparently has 70-something% market share worldwide. So says somebody, somewhere. Hence their decision to use GSM instead of CDMA.

  4. EDGE: 236.8 kbit/s

    GPRS: 32-40 kbit/s

    Your old shitty modem that you haven’t touched in 8 years: 57.6 kbit/s (though modern modems seem to be faster! Who knew!)

    So Sayeth Wikipedia (if you believe such things).

  5. Brady,
    My other point was
    “What about the ipod market?”
    you know the people that have a phone already and want a movie whatching ipod with the wide screen and solid state nonskipping hdd (my wife made her ipod skip just walking around and I fixed that by buying here a nano).
    Wheres the show of love to us?
    we are stuck with the same silly little screen while the phone people get the love?
    and throwing in the wifi internet stuff shouldnt be to hard either…
    -robby1051

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