Well I’ve started a blog so I may as well start blogging. Yesterday Apple announced the much hyped iPhone. Interestingly very little was known about it before Steve Job’s official announcement. Anyway as a follower of all things new and geeky I dutifully watched the 100 minute long keynote presentation at this year’s Macworld event. I have to say I was quite impressed. Apple have got almost all the features you might want for a phone – but there are still some criticisms to be made.
- Something that will obviously need to be improved upon is the camera feature. It’s supposed to have a 2 megapixel camera but Steve mentioned almost nothing about it. No doubt it will be of terrible quality as we have seen in all too many mobile phones so far.
- Another feature we didn’t see any sign of was video calling. That would of course require another camera on the screen side of the phone. Not many people use this feature but this is of course supposed to be a phone that is “five years ahead of anything else”.
- No 3G will of course make internet surfing difficult in Europe. 3G will probably replace Edge in the European version however.
- The wifi feature is a really great feature and the seamless transfer between mobile internet and wifi will be very nice but even so, the internet pages which Steve claimed were being loaded over wifi still seemed to load pretty slowly. Maybe it was just the massive presence of hacks’ macbooks that caused the wifi to slow the connection down a bit.
- Web pages and maps could probably render a little quicker too. Hopefully this will improve with faster and more advanced chips powering these devices.
- Steve didn’t mention standby time for the device. I suspect it won’t be that great though. The 5 hours of talk/video/browsing doesn’t seem that great. Also does watching a video drain the phone battery or the music battery?
- Lastly, the killer criticism is of course the price. It was funny how somehow Steve Jobs managed to convince his almost hysterical audience of around 2000 mac fans that the price was reasonable. He claimed that the new BlackBerry 8100 Pearl cost $299 in addition to a 2 year contract. Over here I can get an 18 month contract for £30 a month and get this phone for free. In fact I just checked the cingular website and found that for $60 a month (£30) for a 2 year contract you still end up paying $199! That’s $100 less than what Steve Jobs claimed but still quite an outrageous price considering you’ve agreed to give them your money for 2 years. Steve then considered that because this phone effectively includes an iPod, its $499 price was more than reasonable. I can’t really be sure until the UK version appears but on the face of it, it seems that will be way above what most reasonable people are willing to pay.
Having said all that, I can’t fault Apply for trying their best to come up with a device which is as good as they can possibly make it even if it ends up pricing out most of their target youth market. I really like a lot of the features such as the music and video players and the internet applications. The Google maps application is of course a brilliant thing to have on a phone. So many times I’ve needed to simply find a map of where I’m going while I’m away from a PC.
So am I going to buy one? Well, probably not right now. I think I’ll wait a year and a half or so for the iPhone 2.0. This will be smaller, have all the same features, longer battery life, more memory, a slightly better camera (maybe with an led flash), more custom iPhone internet applications, and with the surge in sales of the iPhone 1.0, everyone will be demanding reasonable prices for unlimited mobile internet access (£15 a month is just too much at the moment). That’s what I think the most important thing yesterday’s announcement has done. It’s awakened the mobile industry to the possibilities and more importantly the mobile users’ demand for the kinds of decent mobile applications we’ve been waiting to see. It will be interesting to see how things change over the next couple of years.
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