iPhone

The iPhone...

Wonderful idea. People are going nuts about it. And why shouldn't they? Beautiful touchscreen, elegant design, a seemingly intuitive interface, full iPod capabilities.

I'll tell you why I'm not going nuts over it. It's a great first attempt at a phone for Apple and sticks with their whole attitude towards everything, but I will pass. For starters, I like buttons. I've always liked buttons. When I was a kid I would push every button I could get my grubby little hands on. This never really changed much, I'm the same way today. In my spare time I do radio at a local college station (www.thecore.fm) with plenty of buttons for me to push. So why does Apple think that they can completely do away with buttons? Their touch interface looks hot and the pretty easy to use, but I like to feel stuff when i push buttons. With my current phone, I can be halfway through doing whatever it is that I was going to do before I even get the phone out of my pocket. This is because I can feel where the buttons are and go to town on them before I even look at the device. When it comes to typing out text with an onscreen keyboard, I don't think that I could do it full time. I like to have both physical and visual cues for finding the buttons I'm using.

What about 3rd party applications? We'll be left to web apps? I get that this helps increase security and will save internal storage space for media. It will also make developing applications easier and quicker. All that being said, what were they thinking?!?! This will require users to have an active internet connection in order to use the applications. What about when we're on a plane or in the basement of our grandmother's house where there is no WIFI or EDGE service or the subway? What's the point of having a "smartphone" if half the apps that we want to use aren't accessible at all times? On my p910a, which is about a week away from being upgraded to a Cingular 8525, I have installed a lot of software that I want access to at all times. My most used peice of software is a password manager. I store passwords to hundreds of websites there. I store combinations for lockers there. I store all of my credit card, bank account, student loan info there. You get the picture, if it's something that I will need to remember, it goes there and it is always available to me.

I mean have they used web apps before? Yes, they are great in so many ways. I love that they are available to you no matter what computer you are on. I love that the software gets updated more often. I develop a very powerful webapp for the radio station that I volunteer at. The app runs most of the backend of the radio station and we are completely reliant on it. I'm even using one right now to post this. But all of that aside, they can be very slow sometimes. At the radio station, we have problems with the server getting overloaded from time to time. We can't afford to run it on a dedicated server so we use shared hosting which is great 95% of the time, but when there are problems it's awful. With regular software, you know that once it's installed, nothing outside of our device is going to cause it to not work.

Also, what about real power users? While my p910 doesn't have WIFI and I don't pay for the EDGE service on it, I do wish that I could do more to administer the system that I develop at any time. I have been spending time searching through software available for Windows Mobile and have found plenty of applications that will allow me to edit the code straight from the phone or administer the MySQL databases. To my knowledge, there are no webapps that can do what I would need them to do in this respect. And I certainly am not going to take the time to build one myself.

Other issues? Sure, there are plenty. Of course, it is expected that Apple would create the iPhone without a removable battery and without a storage expansion slot, but I cannot back a device without either of these. AT&T and Apple are requiring a 2 year contract with the phone. So not only will you be stuck with the iPhone for two years when they release a newer, better version 6-9 months after you get it, but those last few months are going to get brutal as your battery life drops to about the length of time that a AA battery could power a Mack truck. What's the gripe with removable storage though? Why don't they allow this? Sure the slot my hinder aestetics slightly, but I want as much storage space as I get and when I take a picture I really like with my digital camera, I love being able to slap the card into my phone and set it as my desktop or caller ID picture for a friend. Why should I have to bring a computer into the mix for this? My camera is a couple years old so there is no wireless of any kind on it, nor have I ever really desired for there to be so it won't be getting an upgrade.

While the lack of 3G has been beaten to a pulp by most of the internet, I have to agree with them. EDGE service really isn't that fast...especially since they are touting YouTube integration. But I'll leave that one be. You know what would have been really nice? GPS. Apple showed off the mapping abilities of the phone and I thought it looked great, but having a built in GPS receiver might have been enough for me to overlook all of the problems that I've already complained about.

Lastly, price. $600 is a huge chunk of change. The iPhone is a convergence device, but even at $600, it can't replace my 60GB iPod which doesn't have enough storage as it is. I'm a real music guy. I have tons of music. My MP3 collection is closing in on 40,000 MP3s. I like to have as much of it with me at any given time because I never know what I'm going to want to listen to and I don't want to have to worry about deciding ahead of time what I should load onto my MP3 player. So a $600 convergence device can't even replace one of the two devices that it was designed to replace.

That's a lot of negativity towards one device that hasn't been released yet, I know. So let's talk about what looks good. The overall sleek design is hot and that screen looks beautiful. Nice and big and the touch interface looks very responsive. Web browsing looks great on it. There are a few other little things that I really like, but right now the verdict is that I'll be passing on the first generation. I'm excited to see where the second generation takes the product, but until then, no thanks.