Strangely, the one thing I get asked about a lot as of late is what I think about the iPhone - as if it’s an issue of controversy where everyone has to form an opinion.
So, here’s my $0.0180 USD on the matter.
MP3 playa + Phone = two devices with different demands
An mp3 player and a phone are two competing devices that are not initially compatible. Apple better be on top of things and pipe your phone audio through the head phones automatically as it’s a pain in the ass to pull out the little buds to answer your phone.
Vibrating rings mess with hard drives. Anything that vibrates shouldn’t be next to a spinning desk, it’s just bad mechanics.
Apple also better be intelligent and have the phone beep into music so you can answer calls while listening. Further, Apple better release high quality HK Bluetooth earphones if they hope to take their wirelessness seriously.
Video player is STUPID
I know many people who own iPod videos, not one of them actually watches videos on the damn thing. I realize I’m probably some tiny fraction of a minority but I just think making a device that stores and plays videos that’s smaller than an index card is a whoppingly stupid idea. I understand the inclination to have cutting edge features but I would’ve taken bluetooth connectivity over video playback any day.
The World does not need another Phone OS
Having developed for a number of microdevice operating systems I can tell you it sucks and that’s why all the software for them also sucks. Symbian, Palm, Blackberry, even J2ME is frustrating. Apple has never been the paragon of ease of development for native software - they’ve recently taken some steps to alleviate an issue but that just elevates them from industry worst to in the pack with everyone else.
The iPhone better have kick ass Java support, otherwise they’ll be cutting themselves off from a huge chunk of existing software - a mistake Apple seems to ENJOY making. I don’t think it’ll pan out the way Mac OS did…oh wait, Mac OS nearly bankrupted the company until they decided to dress up BSD instead.
But it looks so pretty
The screen is nice and high quality. Should this be in the coffee table book on industrial design alongside the iPod? No. This goes next to the eMate in functional but brainless design. It’s a shiny black brick. Much like the Sony towers made a couple years ago (they look like PC versions of the monoliths in 2001: A Space Odyssey) they aren’t what you call inspired genius - featureless boxes.
AT&T released buttonless phones WAY back in the 80’s and early 90’s they were total flops. Mind they didn’t have a shiny dynamic animated interface the way the iPhone does and had buttons that were like the Speak-And-Spell toys from Texas Instruments - but nobody liked them because they lacked the tactility. Apple’s trying to work around that by animating shit but I like to be able to dial or even txt without looking at my phone.
Also, much like the blackberries it suffers from the not looking like a phone design problem. I still find it weird and supremely dorky when someone has a plastic box stuck to their ear.
Mac-iness as much a liability as assset
The iPod, despite being indisputably Apple, was reasonably distinct from the Aqua aesthetic, so users of other operating systems didn’t get the false impression of lack of compatibility. If anyone thinks I’m off my rocker, please refer to the “made for windows XP” or “compatible with Mac OS X, Intel and PowerPC” stickers on USB devices with generic universal drivers (eg. keyboards, mice, dongles etc).
The iPhone looks and behaves like MacOS X, this is not a bad thing, Mac OS X behaves nicely - for what it does. However for someone who likes their Windows XP just fine thankyouverymuch something like the Blackberry might be more familiar feeling - not to mention immediately compatible with critical apps for a phone in this market such as Outlook.
Other companies should make their merged phones
Nokia made the horrendous frankenstein N-Gage by merging the hollowed out corpses of two awful devices and producing an unholy taco shaped piece of expensive plastic. (When held to the ear it look eerily like you were conversing intently with a futuristic taco)
However, Nintendo, which likes coming out with enhanced versions of its portable hardware (how many game boys were there? How many GBA’s?) should come out with a GMS version of the DS. They could have a stylus based interface. You phone data could be stored on a special DS card that as a little dongle adapter to connect to your PC to download from Outlook - heck the device could just use Wifi.
The same is true of the PSP - though with bluetooth devices on the existing unit.
Basic Economic Reality
The matter will be settled largely by economics. If cost of iPhone is greater than cost of iPod plus phone then iPhone is waste of money. If iPhone same cost or only slightly more, then it provides the utility of merging the devices.
I however have been a member of the simplicity and discrete design school for some time. I own an mp3 player, a cell phone and a palm pilot. I bought them all at roughly the same time and I did so not because I couldn’t afford a unified device. I did so because I don’t necessarily need all that functionality all the time and each of the devices does what it does better than a unified device could.
In other news…
The Sony eReader is hitting the Great White North very soon I’m told and I want was desperately. I know my dad, an voracious, and I would get a lot of use of it. My dad would because he reads a lot of books and I would because I read very thick books and this device would be much smaller.
It’s SD card compatible (thank you Sony for not hating your customers) and all around very awesome.