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My iPhone Impression

06.09.07 - 03:21pm

I don’t believe I have even posted a slight tidbit of news about the iPhone as I’ve been trying hard not to contribute to the hype. The Apple TV and iPhone have been two huge products for Apple and while both products aren’t exactly what I’d have liked to see, they are still great products. Supposedly the iPhone will be launching on June 29th with AT&T as the launch partner. Traditionally most companies during a product launch have trouble meeting demand as the products fly off the shelves (except for the PS3..) but rumor has it that Apple has 3 million of these beautiful devices sitting on the sidelines for the launch. Hopefully this means that those that want to drop the $500-$600 for the phone won’t suffer from the price gouging that usually accompanies wildly popular electronics. Sifting through the garbage on the Internet has yielded a spec-sheet along with some decent pictures of the iPhone, now the questions is does this device fit into my life?

The iPhone is looking to try and become a jack of all trades but will it be a master of any? The iPhone will primarily be a phone, but it’ll also midnight as a iPod, a Blackberry, and possibly a handheld PC of sorts. MacRumors has the complete specs of the iPhone but there are a lot of features that are either omitted or Apple decided against documenting their presence. A big issue will be availability, AT&T will be the only source and provider for these phones. I have Sprint and this pisses me off. I understand that cell providers need to work hard to make their service more attractive than others but the fact that Apple has gone with a single launch-partner is rather upsetting. Another issue is the onboard storage. The iPhone will be able to store pictures, movies, and music and playback all three but with a rather “limited” 4GB or 8GB onboard flash storage you will be hardpressed to store much media on these devices. I myself use my phone AND iPod as portable flash-drives and by having so little space to work with could cripple some powerusers. I don’t know if Apple is using a single NAND module or two (I’m suspecting 4GB modules) but I would have liked to see a minimum of 8GB and possibly a 20+ GB version. Considering how the cost of commercial NAND modules is well below $10 per GB, 20GB should be possible. By not including an mini-SD slot users won’t be able to include any “mini” upgrades or utilize the phone as a portable movie player. I’ve seen people with a few SD cards loaded with movies and they just swap out the SD cards, no go with the iPhone.

If the specs are true then the 5 hours of talk-time on such a feature packed phone would be phenomenal. My Samsung A900 barely hits 3 hours of continuous talk-time and it can be most frustrating if I forget to charge it every night. Call me lazy but I like my electronics to hold more than a day’s charge. While on the subject of battery life, there is no mention of a user replaceable battery. I cannot say I’ve ever replaced a cellphones battery as I tend to utterly destroy my phones within 12 months however with such an expensive phone I’d try very hard to keep it in operating condition for a bit longer than average. My experience with batteries goes leads me to really want a user replaceable battery, my 4G iPod has a battery-life less than 6 hours and it can be most frustrating when my iPod dies in the afternoon on campus. I’m sure Apple has implemented a ton of battery saving features into the iPhone but you can’t do much with that huge screen.

The iPhone is running on a stripped down version of OS X which really opens up the opportunities for creative coders to really dig into the system. I hope users will be able to upload widgets to customize the interface on the iPhone. I’m sure Apple will have but a lot of thought in what applications will be provided with the phone but if I’m dropping $500 on a smartphone I better be able to customize it and insert the features I need. An RSS plugin would be wicked to go along with the Blackberry features. With WiFi included it’ll be nice to use the phone on the fly to check things on the Internet, often I’ve wished I had a way to find directions to a location or find a place to eat. From the images I have found it looks like a pop-up mini-qwerty keyboard will be featured, great stuff as I hate using phone-touchpads to hack out messages.

I’m interested in seeing how the iPhone launches and how thoroughly tested the product is. This time around I won’t be an early adopter of Apple technology, I didn’t enjoy being a beta tester of the Macbook. Perhaps in a few months if an iPhone is hacked and full-feature enabled on the Sprint network then I might be interested, otherwise I’ll have to wait till the Apple/AT&T contract is up. Apple has the potential to snag another niche market, looks like they are slowly turning into a general electronics company and less of a PC company.

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