Not to poo poo your excitement, but there are already plenty of other "smartphones" out there that do all of that & more. The most practical have a small keyboard of some sort. Can you imagine trying to do anything on the internet via a touch-screen keyboard? What a pain in the butt.
The Smartphone I have does just about everything you just mentioned & much much more... and mine hit the market over a year ago!!!
This reporter for the Chicago Sun Times disagrees with you.......but then again Steve Jobs probably paid him very well for this article...right?
January 18, 2007
BY ANDY IHNATKO
I have used the Apple iPhone. I had a private briefing the day after Steve Jobs' keynote and spent about 45 minutes noodling around with the device.
You may touch the hem of my robe if you wish.
In response to a Beatlemania-scale pile of e-mails, here's what I can tell you so far, based on my hands-on impressions, my talks with Apple and general first-hand sniffing around:
1. The touch-interface works flawlessly, in terms of both technical function and user interface design. Whatever you want to do -- select an album to play, make or take a call, compose and send an e-mail -- your first impulse is almost always the correct one.
This is the simplest phone ever.
And there are no lags, no pauses, no waiting for the slickly animated UI to catch up with you, even when you're scrolling through a stack of album art that's flopping past your finger in 3D: It's liquid.
The bad news: It works only with direct, skin contact. You can't wear gloves, and I don't know if you can even put a screen protector on it. On the plus side, the screen is supposed to be more scratch-resistant than an iPod.
"So long as you don't have a pocket full of broken glass, it'll be OK in there," I was told.
2. I think the iPhone's virtual keyboard is a huge improvement over the mechanical thumbpads found on the Treo and any other smart phones of its size.
The buttons are significantly larger, you don't have to hit them dead-center, you lightly tap them instead of punching them down, and the software is smart enough to know that you meant to type "Tuesday" instead of "Tudsday."
After 30 seconds, I was already typing faster with the iPhone than I ever have with any other phone. I suspect that true e-mail demons will need to adapt to the lack of tactile feedback, though.
3. It's the most beautiful freakin' display I've ever seen on a phone or PDA, both in range of color and level of detail. Even microscopic browser text is credibly readable.
4. The apps that were functional at the time of the demo give the satisfying, protein-rich experience of "real" software. The mail client and browser make you feel like you're using a powerful desktop app, not a cell phone that can kind of send e-mail and browse the Web (depending on how you define "e-mail" and "the Web").
5. Apple will keep a very tight rein on software development.
I asked point-blank if third parties would be able to write and distribute iPhone apps and was told, point-blank, no.
However, it appears that there'll be some third-party opportunities. I'm going to take a guess that iPhone software will be distributed the same way as iPod games: no "unsigned" apps will install, but apps will start appearing on the iTunes Store after successfully passing through a mysterious process of Apple certification -- one that ensures that they meet a certain standard of quality and won't, you know, secretly send your credit-card info to Nigeria.
The lockdown on software is an area of ongoing suspicious interest. I noticed that the iPhone's pre-release browser was missing some plug-ins. I asked if Real and Macromedia et al. would be writing media plug-ins for the iPhone's Web browser, and was told that no, the browser would ship with plug-ins, but Apple would be writing them all in-house. Odd, that.
6. The iPhone runs the same OS as the Macintosh. And not in the way that Windows Mobile is, I suppose, technically, if you want to split hairs about it, classified somewhere in the Microsoft Windows phylum.
Nope, everything I've learned (both in official briefings and "you and I never spoke, all right?" sort of discussions) says that it truly does run Leopard, the upcoming 10.5 OS that will be released for the Macintosh late in the spring.
Those spiffy UI animations, for instance, come courtesy of Leopard's Core Animation suite.
So will it run Mac software? Nope. The iPhone runs OS X, but it's an iPhone, not a Macintosh. And it stands to reason that the OS on the iPhone doesn't include any bits that it doesn't need.
And no, the iPhone's Widgets aren't the same as the Mac's Dashboard widgets. But they do use DashCode and other desktop widget tech, so who knows? I'm really hoping that widgets will be more open to third-party developers than apps.
7. The iPhone is still under development and isn't feature-complete. I opened the "Notes" application and found myself tapping impotently at a JPEG of what the app is supposed to look like. And the camera app only had one button.
Any complaints about what the iPhone can't do are premature. Remember, it won't ship for six months.
I really, really like what I've seen so far. But true judgment won't come until June.
Andy Ihnatko writes on technical and computer issues for the Sun-Times.
If you think the Apple Iphone is so amazing, maybe you should check out what Blackberry, Palm, and the numerous "Pocket PC" makers have to offer.
Have you looked at the iphone? Have you seen the screen? have you seen the touch screen technology used in it? I know, touch screens are nothing new but touch screens that work this well, look that well and are that small are special. Like I said before, I probably will not own one of these phones. I don't really care about spending time typing messages on a phone and I actually enjoy writing notes with a pen and paper, I like the feel and the personal touch that isn't possible over the internet or on the phone.
Just like the Ipod vs other MP3 players, the Iphone offers fewer features for more money. I'm sure, as you have made clear, they'll sell plenty of them, though.
You might want to share these startling observations with the many experts coming out of the woodwork to say how incredible the iphone is. Then you can let the 73 million of people who not only were happy to buy an ipod but love the decision everyday when they enjoy the use of it, just how stupid they are. Yea, I know, someone, somewhere had a problem with the battery or the hard drive or itunes not working on their PC but for the most part there is a reason why Apple is dominating the music player and download industry(just hit the 2 billion mark, that's billion with a B).
I suggest you buy whatever makes you feel good about how much smarter you are. I will continue to support Apple because I believe in the work that they do....plenty of people will never see it, just as many people will look at Michelangelo's Pieta and say big deal, it's just a statue, or look at a 59 Porsche Speedster and say it looks like a smashed Volkswagen. I'm one of the ones that gets tears in my eyes when I see "The Pieta" because it is easily the finest work of art ever produced by human(?) hands. No I'm not comparing Apple with Michelangelo....the point is that some are perfectly happy to drive a Hundai, working on a compaq with Windows and live in a mobile home and think the starving artist sale paintings are great art...I don't so shoot me.
I don't pretend that there aren't other products that have more features for less money.... I don't care. I have stock in Apple because I like their innovation that tends to be copied by everyone else and usually poorly(Microsoft's Zune player...what an obvious ripoff). Their beauty of design that also just happens to work.
