.Dust

I think that 90% of the posts I’ve read today are iPhone related. Yes­ter­day I was fol­low­ing the Steve Jobs keynote and while I was lis­ten­ing at him my first reac­tion was “I want one of those. Now!”.

This was emo­tional. When the speech ended and emo­tions started to fade I came up with some more detailed impres­sions on the iPhone.

What I (really) like:

• Design: It’s one of the most impres­sive phone design I have seen in years.
• Screen: 3,5″ with 320×480 pix­els res­o­lu­tion and 160dpi make this a big guy. From the pho­tos I’ve seen on the inter­net it looks very sharp. I think that dura­bil­ity will need to be ver­i­fied over time (Rememe­ber the iPod nano scratch issue)
• Mul­ti­Touch: with some reserve. We should really try to under­stand how it works before say­ing any­thing. From a User Expe­ri­ence point of view not hav­ing tac­tile feed­back from key presses is not a very good thing.
• WiFi and Blue­tooth: even if it’s not really clear which func­tion­al­ity they will support.
• Inter­net Apps: Safari, Wid­gets, Google Maps, Yahoo e-​mail push.
• Sen­sors: not really new tech­nol­ogy but great use in this device.
• Max OS X: Cool. Even if it will be a stripped down ver­sion of the OS it’s a great choice. Some impli­ca­tions need to be con­sid­ered. Will third par­ties be allowed to develop appli­ca­tions for this hand­set ? The great suc­cess of Sym­bian based devices really comes from this. Will these devel­oper will be will­ing to add another plat­form to their cur­rent offer ? A final obser­va­tion on the imple­men­ta­tion of Mac OS X. At the end of the day it’s a Unix based OS derived from BSD. We see plenty of Linux based port­ings to small devices (Linux on iPod just to say one) so it does not seem a big deal to me.

What I do not like:

• GSM/​EDGE: Well if we want to talk about Mobile Inter­net you should look at some­thing dif­fer­ent. The main point is that U.S. is not Europe and I think this was the only approach they could take on this sub­ject. Actu­ally Steve Jobs said that 3G will come later.
• The bat­tery could not be removed. Prob­a­bly this a con­se­quence of the design in order to spare some space on the device. It’s going to be an issue for heavy users that will need to send their phone to ser­vice when the need to change the bat­tery will arise.
• No room for mem­ory expan­sion. You could not use any kind of mem­ory card on this device.
• No sup­port for Mis­crosoft file for­mat like Pow­er­point, Excel, Word. (Maybe this will solved if third party devel­op­ers will be allowed to develop appli­ca­tions for this)
• No sup­port for Exchange based e-​mail. (Maybe this will solved if third party devel­op­ers will be allowed to develop appli­ca­tions for this)
• No inte­grated TV: what it can be, DVB-​H, Medi­aFlo, DMB.
• No inte­grated iTunes store down­load over the air.
• I have not seen men­tioned MMS but only SMS.
• 2 Megapixel cam­era: I think this is pretty low qual­ity. The stan­dard for this on this kind of devices seems to be 3.2 Megapixels.
• 2 years con­tract with Cingular.
• I do not really under­stand how the Mul­ti­Touch inter­face could work on a web browser when you will need to select a link. Pos­si­bly the only key on the iPhone will be a rocker but I have not been able to find out if it’s a rocker or not.

Other con­sid­er­a­tions:

• Steve Jobs said that “Voice is the killer appli­ca­tion”. Is this a soft way to say to other oper­a­tors that they will keep all the money com­ing from iTunes pur­chases ? Since the iPhone will be seen from iTunes as an iPod it’s quite clear that it will not be able which pur­chases will be sit­ting on the PC and which on the iPhone. So, no money for operators.
• Can the iPhone be con­sid­ered a Smart­phone? I think no, at least as it was pre­sented yesterday.
• Switch­ing between WiFi and GSM/​EDGE. It’s not really clear what this means. I pre­sume it will be only for data con­nec­tions since there was no men­tion of any dif­fer­ent mean to make voice calls. This can be an issue for oper­a­tors too.
• The iPhone is going to be an icon for con­sumer mar­ket just like Black­berry is for the busi­ness mar­ket. Apple has lot of brand power to spend of this and they will spend. Not sure what will come after. It’s such a dif­fer­ent prod­uct that they will need to make a clear roadmap for future devel­op­ment if they will want to cap­i­tal­ize as they have done with the iPod fam­ily. Just wan­der­ing if Steve Jobs is think­ing that cus­tomer will have to change their iPhone once a year as he said for iPod a while ago.
• We will need to wait some months to under­stand how the iPhone will be intro­duced in the Euo­pean and Asian mar­ket. Will they gor for exclu­siv­ity with some oper­a­tor with oper­a­tions in dif­fer­ent coun­tries? (Voda­fone, Tim, Hutchi­son, etc)
• It’s quite clear that the brand power and the fea­tures of this phone will be able to beat any issues on usabil­ity and functionality.

Will I buy it ?

Well, that’s sure, but I’ll wait for 3G and, pos­si­bly, HSDPA.

Related posts:

1. iPhone spec­u­la­tions