So I saw in the news today that Jobs did his usual song and dance and flitted about with this iPhone. I'm sure all the Apple fanboys will be right up his crack as usual, and all the iPod afficianados will be drooling to get their hands on an iPhone... but seriously. Let's think about this shall we?
Other than the interesting user interface, what is of real substance here? A conflux of devices that brings together a web browser, a widget based operating system (they are calling it OS X, but really, what is under the hood there?), a phone, an iPod Video and a touchscreen. Well, minus the iPod Video, it sounds an awful lot like a Treo or a Blackberry.
Say you want a revolution? If you read all the hype on Apple's iPhone website, you'd think that the rest of us knuckledraggers are running around with Motorola StarTACs or
Nah. I don't. And I don't need to be able to pick my tunes based on cover art (who really remembers cover art anyway? Judge any books by their covers today?). Honestly, I would've rather seen more standards innovation here. Give me a method to display a web page without all the crap on it. One of the great things about simple WAP browsers is that their simplicity breeds KISS'd design (you know: Keep It Simple, Stupid). I navigate to a news page, and I get headlines and content. No adverts or popups or flashy reminders of how great your HD newscast is, or various viral videos of the latest despot hanging or whatever. Perhaps I'm just being stodgy, but I guess what I'm getting to is that I don't see a lot of revolution in the iPhone. Sure, Apple's UI group went nuts and you can press an icon and "flip" the CD cover to see the list of songs on the back. Wow, that's great guys.
How about instead you give me a voice controlled phone where I don't have to finger it like a, uh, almost-empty jar of peanut butter (whew) to get to the good stuff? How about instead of the same old meme for finding music you give me a voice controlled player where I can say, "play all the live tracks from Led Zeppelin" or "shuffle my reggae tunes" - and you just do it. Or perhaps instead of presenting the TV guide, you let me tell you to "play last week's episode of The Office". Maybe instead of a widget for weather, you use the cell phone part of the phone to figure out where I am and display the weather.
Better yet - instead of hobbling your iPhone with 4-8GB of storage (a video iPod with 8GB? C'mon! That's like 4 movies and 2 albums!), why not have just a phone. That's the boat I'm sailing on at the moment. Just a phone. I have a Treo. I have an iPod. I have a Blackberry. I don't want a iBerryo or a TrePoddy, or a Blackpodeo. Now technically I wouldn't normally have a Blackberry AND a Treo, but the Treo is mine and the Blackberry belongs to work, and it's just for email.
So I guess I'm saying all of this to say that I will definitely not be looking to acquire an iPhone. In fact, I'm probably going to slim down my nerd belt accessories. Instead of having several gadgets each of which does several functions moderately well, I'll have several gadgets each of which does one function very well. Call it best of breed or whatever. I have a video/audio player, and while it's the top of the heap in marketshare, it's certainly limiting what I can put it on. I have a phone that's the top of the heap for business, but it's big and duplicating a lot of functions. I have a wireless office device that's the top of the heap for business, but it cannot be enabled for phone usage. So I get a small phone that has what I need: phone, sync, SMS and perhaps a camera. I keep the Blackberry. For now I'll keep my iPod, but when that goes - I'm saying good bye to Apple and the iTunes monopoly. I've about had it with DRM, so I think I'll go back to buying good ol' CDs.
