I have been getting some stick from my long suffering collegue Ian regarding my “assasination” of the iPhone and then apparent turnaround saying that the E61 will tide me over until the iPhone becomes available in the UK.
Generally Apple have been getting a lot of bad press from the geekery regarding the phone. This is to be expected when (as I said in a previous post) a rumoured Apple product is lord’ed so much before announcement as the iPhone was.
There was no way Apple could have created the device that we were all salivating for, no company could have, for starters it wouldn’t all fit in that little box and secondly Apple are a commercial operation with shareholders and have certain responsibilities, like making as much money as possible. This need to make money results in compromises in specification and practices such as holding back features for the next revision (something all companies do – “never show all your cards at once”).
The “iPhone” (as the name suggests) is an iPod with an integrated phone not a phone with a music player. This has to be remembered when talking about the product. There is a temptation to think of the device as a Smart Phone because that is what Steve positioned it against in the Keynote, but it isn’t. Like the iPod of today can accept Videos, photos, calendars, contacts and notes, and can have the Apple sanctioned games installed upon it, the phone will too.
Like the iPod you will need to attach the device to iTunes to achieve this feet of convergence because the phone like the Pod, is a peripheral to the real device – the Mac (or PC). I fully expect to see a non-phone version as the next incarnation of the iPod.
It has WiFi which enables the device to use web and email but the WiFi connection is not really taken advantage of for commercial reasons. The constraints that Cingular have placed upon Apple for their patronage seem to have been immence. The exclusion of the iChat application can only be a curtailment to Cingular’s commercially lucrative text messaging business. Why would they want to make a pittance on the minute amounts of data sent via IM clients when they get a 10c bung for every sentence sent via Text?
According to Apple the iPhone runs “OS X”, except when you look deeper, it doesn’t really, what it runs is an embedded version of the OS with most of the things that Make OS X, OS X, removed.
For starters there’s no…:
- Finder.
- Dock,
- command line (as far as we can tell)
- folder navigation (shown at all so far)
- Spotlight
- iChat
- Applications (to speak of)
We know there is:
- The Darwin kernel (compiled for what is rumoured to be Intel ARM processors)
- some ‘core’ services such as WebCore and CoreImage
- drivers for the hardware like the touchscreen and phone
- a new iPod application that incorporates the CoverView code
- The Phone application
- a very cut-down Safari (which could just be a widget using the WebCore engine)
- JavaScript (for safari and Widgets)
- Qucktime (which also plays Flash)
- Camera Driver
- A Syncronisation agent
- Software keyboard service
- a Mail client (again could just be a widget of sorts)
- Some more widgets ported from 10.4.x
- an application/Widget manager which looks like a ported version of Exposure/Dashboard
These things do not an OS X make.
To most people a proper OS is about Applications. No OS has everything you need out of the box. If there is functionality you need (like something to track your expenses or a useful phrases translator when traveling abroad) with any other Phone OS (I am thinking Palm, WM2005 or Sybian Series 60 etc.), you can add the functions to your device, sometimes via your PC and sometimes directly from the net. With the more popular ones you have a choice of applications to boot.
Apple owning the supply and controlling the development of software for the iPhone will hold it back and may relegate it to being just a pretty device that plays music. Then their only commercial advantage over other music phones is iTunes and it may not be enough.
Perhaps, by the time the ApplePhone comes to market, they will have listened a little and opened the Widget API for third party developers. I have seen some wonderful things done in a widget and with the release of DashCode fior Leopard this offers some hope in the future.
Apple haven’t shown all their cards with this first device, look at the evolution of the iPod over the last few years and apply that to the iPhone. Its not in their interest to show everything at once, but to keep some good stuff for the next time around – remember those shareholders!
I suspect the relationship with Cingular is going to be rocky over the next two years, the tension has already started between Jobs and the CEO of Cingular in the press. I don’t know (apart from taking a risk with an unknown device and the visual voicemail thing) what Cingular bring to the party.
It is unusual for Apple to let go of control and I really expected them to launch their own phone service from that newly puchased from MCI datacenter in Texas. I guess they have another trick in store for that premises.
I am very interested in how it will play outside the US and who they choose as their service provider in the UK. When I was buying the E61 the assistant said that Charles Dunston’s Carphone Warehouse were trying very hard to become the exclusive dealer for the unit in the UK. That would be interesting because they have access to all service providers and even have their own service that could be adapted.
So to Ian I’ll say: I stand by what I wrote, the iPhone is a dissapointment for all us tech-heads that wanted mobile phone nirvana, it doesn’t meet our expectations, but then nothing could.
The Apple iPhone, even as shown, still looks to be one of the most innovative mobile devices on the market and will probably be a great success regardless of its pricing and limitations.
I don’t mind waiting a while for my one, I never was an early adopter (with my own money).
In 12 months, when I am ready to indulge (because I surely will), there may be a 2.0 device that will tick all those boxes on my wish-list.
We’ll just have to wait and see.