The iPhone – The Almighty finally revealed…
While the iPhone shouldn’t be anything new in terms of how often we’ve heard about “it”, it is completely new in what it offers. I have to say I had ZERO interest in the iPhone from the rumors and hype going around. Apple has taken their sweet time making this phone however into a masterpiece of a design. A powerful cpu, a completely new operating system for a smartphone that is unparalled in terms of functionality not to mention being the first to bring BSD to a mobile phone. Sensors galore for the software to know it’s orientation and other things in order to provide the user the experience they need. If it works ANYTHING like what it looks like and what they have released, it will certainly be nothing more than a decade beyond palm and a few years beyond windows mobile.
Now for the bad… What in the world is Apple thinking with this GSM stuff? They design a technological marvel that is unparalled and they choose a obsolete cellular protocol with not even true third generation data speeds. Granted I would imagine they offered this to all carriers (considering the hype) and just took offers on how much each carrier would pay to get the device on their system. So what will happen? A BUNCH of people are gonna switch to Cingular! Of course the logical choice (as much as it pains me to say it being with Sprint) was to offer the device on Verizon. Verizon might be the “ritzysnob” network, but they also have the largest user base in america which also has the best driving technology (CDMA).
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It looks more to me that apple has pushed tech limits beyond just pdaphones… This blows the doors off of current UMPC’s (if indeed the x86 processor and the full size OSX claim pans out) and how long before normal phones use accelerometer’s in the same fashion? Apple really has turned the pdaphone world upsidedown… just like they did with the ipod in the personal music player world.
I think the biggest reason why they went with GSM is because of the large install base world-wide instead of just the North America. With over 800 million GSM users, Veriozon’s 30+ million users pales in comparison from a market install base potential. I do think that the biggest oversight was not adding 3G technology. For a phone that price, it seems a bit pricey only to have old network (EDGE) technology.
The only hole in that logic is that most of those GSM users are outside the united states. The european release is set for the end of this year and the asian release sometime next year… If they were really after market share they would debut in toykyo and let us flounder for some time. I say this because Japan eats up tech toys faster than sticky rice and also because most americans dont trust high tech devices like pdaphones. The mac thing is bigger in europe than in the states (frikken liberals) and it seems to me that the worst place to debut a smartphone is the USA. Although I’m happy that toykyo has to import gadgets from the USA for a change… I wonder if they are just using us to iron out the bugs before releasing it worldwide.
Then you have to figgure in the treo factor… a phone marketed to a very wide profile tends to add a lot of stupid people the userbase. I forsee a lot of dead Iphones and a lot of users very upset that GSM carriers dont offer insureance. I think that “Lockline” will be a more common forum keyword.
Always remember that Apple is also a American company, they are not based overseas. The reason they went with GSM is a complete lack of thought into the most important decision they had to make. CDMA is huge in America and in Asia (if you want to play the “numbers” game. The fact is it’s just a bad decision on Apple’s part to go Cingular and I would imagine the reasoning is a large sum of money paid to them to “fund” the project.
I too thought the iPhone was an interesting concept, until I saw its price and realized that my Treo still does more than it does, out of the box. Now, no doubt that lots of more stuff will come out for it…but it waits to see how much Apple will support it as an open platform; I would think that with such a UI it could be a challenge to maintain a sense of quality control so that some 3rd party ap doesn’t trash the whole thing.
Anyway, we’ll see. Until then, I’m holding onto my Palm 😀