Monday, July 02, 2007

The iPhone is real - I saw it today

Normally, I write about Macintosh computers and accessories in this blog. Today, I want to write about an Apple accessory for people: the iPhone.

I saw the ads, watched the commercials, read the articles, scrutinized the specs, and viewed the demos.

After seeing all those things my mind was going: yes, it seems great.

But my gut was going, yeah, but is it really as good in real life as it appears from each recording and recounting put down by people I do not even know?

So today at lunchtime I glided into a nearby Apple store.

I saw the iPhone and it is totally real. It really does all those things you see in the ads and it is really easy to use. I darted around a circle of people surrounding a table full of iPhones.

Everyone was doing something different on them. And everyone was darting from one application or aspect of the device to another.

Nobody seemed to be having trouble trying to use a feature. Nobody seemed to have any trouble going from one feature to another. It was just fast. I've never seen so many people doing so many things so fast.

It made archetypal channel flippers look slow as snails by comparison.

To me, knowledge has always been the at-handedness of information. If you have the information in your head, great - you have knowledge. If you have it at your fingertips and can pull it up in half a second - that is just about as good to me as if you had memorized it.

Anyway, Apple has put the at-handedness of information, communication, and entertainment right at everyone's fingertips. If anything, it seems like they have slightly undersold it and marketing has for once sheathed its exuberance over a great product.

One thing I could not tell from vicariously enjoying the PDA aspect of the product was how well the onscreen virtual keyboard works. I have to try it before I can tell if it is wonderful or not.

Also, I did not try making any calls. Since Friday night, those iPhones have probably made a million calls from all over all 50 states of the US. So, I'm sure call quality, frequency of dropped calls, coverage area - all those sorts of things will be recounted in detail by their owners. I look forward to reading about that.

I bought a new cell phone last year and I am pretty happy about the phone itself and the cellular service I have. I plan on eking at least several years of use out of it. So I am not chomping at the bit to buy an iPhone in the near future. I already know I am buying one someday - when is not a pressing concern.

Personally, I think that as great as the device is - it needs to have more storage for songs and video. 8 GB is not enough. In a couple years, when I finally in the market for a new cell phone - I hope they have a 64 GB model out. That seems realistic, given Moore's Law.

Having used a couple brands of cell phones before - and seeing the iPhone in action - there is NO COMPARISON.

The iPhone is a modern 21st century phone/PDA/player/viewer with terrific usability and power. Compared to it, other cell phones are like pocket calculators or those simplistic PDAs that first arrived around 1990.

I have hunch that iPhones unlike some consumer electronics equipment will not be crashing with silly messages like "INVALID PAGE FAULT" displayed on their screen.

I believe Apple made a wise decision porting the most relevant subsystems of the Mac OSX down from the Mac to the iPhone. The iPhone does not seem like a tiny gadget making pretensions of being a miniaturized computer. It seems seems like another case where Apple has so smoothly met the needs of consumers that the product seems like a work of art - not a crude but functional tool.

Another thing that surprised me is that the monthly rate plan was priced lower than I expected.

Apple will not have to spend a lot of money on marketing this product. It seems they sold out so quickly that people who never read/watch/hear an ad for iPhone will still get an eyeful of one when a colleague, fellow restaurant patron, or relative whips one out to look up something, show them the weather forecast, or communicate with someone.

After that quick glance of the iPhone in action - nobody could respond, What's it for?. If they did, the answer would be pretty simple: You just saw!

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posted by John Collins @ 6:24 PM 1 comments