iPhone
I’m having trouble taking this all in. A real, live iPhone. It’s the fullscreen, touch-screen iPod that everyone has been demanding, but it’s also a phone. Quadband GSM, WiFi, Bluetooth. Apparently runs a full version of OSX.
No word on a release date as yet. Full keynote coverage at Engadget.
This is amazing, but there is something nagging at me. I’m not sure what it is. I need to time to consider the implications.
Update: OK, I can articulate that nagging feeling I have: it’s a smartphone, not a phone. It may not seem a material difference, but my experience of smartphones is that they do the ’smart’ pretty darn well, but often fall short on the ‘phone’ side of the equation. My entire experience with a large number of smartphones has been laggy menus, slow application loading, crashes causing dropped calls, poor call quality, slowness switching to the phone ‘app’, etc.. Also smartphones are by design often chunkier than a normal phone – the iPhone definitely is big for a phone.
None of this is a show stopper by any stretch, but I think Apple really have to pull one out of the bag to make the iPhone a step above the smartphone crowd.
- The multi-touch interface is a plus, but lack of 3G is a minus.
- 4/8GB of flash memory is a plus, but there are other phones that have this (e.g the Sony W950).
- Triple wireless (GSM, WiFi, Bluetooth) is standard in all the new Series 60 phones from Nokia, so nothing new there.
- You can’t call iPod-ness a plus because the familiar iPod interface is not carried through to the iPhone.
The summary of incremental features that the iPhone has over other smartphones is a gorgeous screen and multi-touch. Lack of 3G is a minus, so in my opinion, OSX on the iPhone needs to be 100% lag-free and crash-free in order to make the iPhone a definite winner over the rest of the crowded smartphone market. I need to see one in action before making this call.
Update: Gizmodo has a couple of interface videos. One showing the iPhone placing a call, and the other showing the music interface. Two thoughts:
- The music interface is nothing like an iPod. Are Apple throwing away buckets of goodwill and interface familiarity by dropping the scrollwheel?
- The interface is super-smooth, but these are mockup videos. I’m not going to believe the interface on the device will be this smooth until I see one in action.
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There’s no 3G because that would make the device considerably larger, both because of the chipset and the additional power requirements (bigger battery). 3G coverage in the US isn’t that great either, whereas 2/2.5G is.
I found it interesting it’s running OS X. That’s not a smartphone OS, that’s a desktop OS. Did they mention what kind of processor it’s got on board? I missed that. Must be some kind of low power IBM/Intel thing surely. 4 hours of talk time isn’t that sh1t hot either imho. You’ll have to charge this device every night, or every second night at least. Be interesting to see how the battery life actually pans out in the field particularly with that great big backlight screen.
The use of a full screen interface has been coming for a while, all cell phones will do this soon I believe. However it does raise some concerns about how easy these new devices will be to damage (remember the iPod Nano screen issues) considering you take your cellphone everywhere and it’s usually exposed to quite a bit of physical abuse.
Even so. It’s a fucking sexy looking phone (pardon my french). I’d buy one in a snap, although I’ll have to become a Free BSD developer to write mobile apps for it – which is a good thing I guess
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Yeah I was wondering about the touchscreen too. I found the touchscreen dialler on my HTC Apache/Sprint 6700 pretty appalling. Zero tactile feedback, fat fingers, and laggy response all added up to a real PITA to dial a call.
Gizmodo has some interesting videos of the interface (I’ll add links), but I’m not believing the smoothness and lack of lag until I see a real live demo.
I’d love to know what the CPU is. Surely it’s an ARM, surely ‘running OS X’ is a bit of marketing hype. For starters it’s got to be a tweaked version of OS X for the mobile and the UI is totally different (touch screen instead of a mouse) so most people are going to have to re-work their UI’s at least.
And yeah, UI responsiveness will be very interesting to see…
Thanks for the great article. Keep up the good work.