I know I speak as a Mac user and thus by definition in thrall to the Steve Jobs RDF — though I am not in the market for a phone right now — but looking at these new commercials, it does seem as though the iPhone is going to be a license for Apple to print money. When was the last time you saw a cellphone ad that just went through some of the things the phone could do? And what phone on the market does these things in remotely as integrated and elegant a fashion? It seems like the main unknown is the physical stuff: will it scratch, will the screen get greasy, and all that.
{ 47 comments }
ogged 06.04.07 at 3:46 am
It seems like the main unknown is the physical stuff
You think so? I’d worry more that the main disappointment is going to be from what it’s theoretically capable of and what it’s convenient to do with it. My guess is that people will find the keyboard disappointing for full qwerty and that the browsing will be quite slow (at least in the first, non-3G models).
Kieran Healy 06.04.07 at 4:14 am
Yeah, there’s the works-as-advertised part. I can see the keyboard being iffy. The touch interface may take away the need to do a lot of typing and selecting with keys. Slow browsing would detract a lot from the fluidity of the interface, which is easily one of the main selling points. The internal transitions (and use of the screen) from movie to email to pictures, etc, still seem to blow away the competition, though.
SomeCallMeTim 06.04.07 at 4:31 am
thus by definition in thrall to the Steve Jobs RDF
“Thrall” is putting it politely, no? This is what you should want.
Jon H 06.04.07 at 4:42 am
It’s neat that it runs OS X.
I’m still waiting to see if, and if then how, they open it up for 3rd party developers.
As far as the greasy goes, pretty much any phone is subject to that as soon as you hold it up to your face. Splortch goes the screen.
It’ll be at least a few years before I consider getting one. I’m not a big phone user, I just renewed my contract and upgraded to a razr, and I’d want something with more storage so I could watch videos on it.
Doctor Memory 06.04.07 at 6:30 am
Weirdly, the seafood restaurant in the “Calimari” ad is real — I’ve been there a couple of times, and they do a decent fish & chips. (Well, by degenerate west coast standards anyways — the “chips” are fried sweet potato strips.) Not bad for an unpaid endorsement.
Peter Clay 06.04.07 at 8:31 am
It’s very impressive, my main question is how Apple have managed to get it onto the networks without the carriers ruining it. This was the problem with the previous phone they did (Motorola collaboration), which would only let you put MP3s onto it over the network at some expensive data rate.
SKapusniak 06.04.07 at 10:17 am
I’ll confess I haven’t watched those commercials, but from what I can work out the iPhone doesn’t seem to quite converge enough stuff for me to replace my HTC-710 (Phone, text entry, ebook reading, other mobile applications) and Sony PSP (video, big screen html reader, rarely used music capability, games) in regular use.
It’s nearly there, it just (just!) needs enough of the 3rd party application library of Windows Mobile to do my stuff, a slide out physical keyboard, and some Nintendo DS/Sony PSP class games (hah!).
3G is irrelevant to me, because the only time I connect to the ‘net with my current devices is within range of my own wireless router, which is far faster/cheaper/better than anything my mobile operator is interested in selling me at a non-insane price :)
However as it stands, I couldn’t replace either one of my current devices with an iPhone without losing stuff I actually use. I guess it comes closest to replacing the PSP, if you can browse to html files on the internal flash as well as the net, as I’m not really that big a mobile gamer. But that would leave me with two phones — madness! madness I tell you! — since it doesn’t seem to do the non-phone stuff I use my HTC for, and I’m highly dubious about using a touchscreen as a full keyboard.
This is despite the iPhone being an overall much nicer and better sized device than either of the other two (the HTC is really rather too small, PSP too clunky to carry around casually).
So close, and yet so far…
I think it’s not a bad bet that before Apple opens up enough to let in 3rd party apps, and those 3rd parties have ported the apps I need, there will probably be some other device made by the boys and girls in Taiwan running Windows Mobile 6, with an iPhone form factor that actually does do everything I want, possibly even with the slide-out keyboard, in an only slightly clunkier way (except for the games).
So all due thanks to Apple for the oncoming avalanche of iPhone copycats that might finally get me what I want in a mobile/phone device :)
Jack 06.04.07 at 11:09 am
Is Nokia chopped liver?
In the UK unlimited 3G data costs £5/month.
Jacob T. Levy 06.04.07 at 11:16 am
mmm… gadget lust…
Not giving up my treo anytime soon, and maybe not ever, because of the physical keyboard issue. But I’m very well aware that all those pretty pretty things are things the treo doesn’t do or doesn’t do as well. Those are very effective commercials.
Slocum 06.04.07 at 11:43 am
It’s very impressive, my main question is how Apple have managed to get it onto the networks without the carriers ruining it.
Well, they haven’t. In the U.S., they just have Cingular (AT&T) so far, not Verizon:
http://www.engadget.com/2007/01/29/verizon-passed-up-apple-iphone-deal/
Cingular has been more congenial to users in not locking down their phones.
it does seem as though the iPhone is going to be a license for Apple to print money.
Well, you may be right, but the money won’t be any of mine. Other than being unwilling to drop $500 on a phone, the problem is the size. I want a small, slim phone like my Razr that I can slip in a pocket, take everywhere, and hardly know it’s there. I’ve been eying a little personal media player as an upgrade to my old MP3 player, and that’ll be about the size of an iPhone (or larger), but I wouldn’t plan to carry it with me everywhere (and it won’t cost $500-$600).
But Apple is smart to introduce the iPhone at $500-$600, because I’m sure there are enough people in his RDF who will just have to have the latest Apple ‘it’ gadget, and I expect the first batches will sell out at those prices.
It occurs to me that what the cell-phone market really needs is a model where you can plunk a SIM card into several devices, all of which share your number and minutes. If that were the case, I might be willing to own an iPhone sized device with phone capabilities, as long as it wasn’t my only phone.
aaron_m 06.04.07 at 12:15 pm
“It occurs to me that what the cell-phone market really needs is a model where you can plunk a SIM card into several devices, all of which share your number and minutes.”
Hmmm, well it is not the phone models that are the problem so it must be the operators. What market are you talking about by the way? Were I am at (somewhere in Europe) your dream has been a reality for some time.
Is the North American market still screwing over its customers with high rates and obnoxious operators?
Ginger Yellow 06.04.07 at 12:32 pm
The internal transitions (and use of the screen) from movie to email to pictures, etc, still seem to blow away the competition, though.
Do people really make their phone purchasing decisions on the basis of internal transitions? And more importantly, are they going to spend £300 on it when they can get a slighly less specced phone for free? I really can’t see the iPhone taking off like the iPod, but I could be wrong. I reckon it will be bought by exactly the same people who buy Mac laptops.
fred lapides 06.04.07 at 1:41 pm
…and whoever dies with the most toys, wins.
novakant 06.04.07 at 2:09 pm
we’ll see what it’s all about when the more substantial reviews and user feedback appear, say, 3 months after the launch
why is it, though, that everytime I see an Apple ad or worse a Steve Jobs presentation I get these incredibly violent fantasies aimed at the local flagship store and latte-sipping IBook users in general – it must be the smugness of it all; I get the same urges whenever I see an innocent ad or am subjected to pret a manger marketing speak
Slocum 06.04.07 at 2:14 pm
Hmmm, well it is not the phone models that are the problem so it must be the operators. What market are you talking about by the way? Were I am at (somewhere in Europe) your dream has been a reality for some time.
Is the North American market still screwing over its customers with high rates and obnoxious operators?
So in the EU, you can own several devices all of which use a single plan and number and all of which can be active at the same time and all of which will ring if somebody dials you up?
Or do you just mean you can move your SIM from phone to phone? Because you can do that here in the U.S. if you have a GSM phone and provider (which I do).
But I don’t want to be switching SIM cards, I want to be able to have multiple devices all active at the same time with the same plan & number. The analogy would be to multiple phones in a house all plugged into the same land line.
With respect to rates, my understanding has been that the voice rates in North America are quite low and tend toward ‘all you can eat’ plans, but if you want to send text messages or browse the web (or buy ring-tones) then it starts to get expensive. I’ve heard that text messaging is more common outside North America because ‘over there’ texting is cheaper than voice, whereas here, voice is cheaper than texting.
Kieran Healy 06.04.07 at 2:35 pm
Do people really make their phone purchasing decisions on the basis of internal transitions?
No. But if you rephrase the question as, “Do people really make their phone purchasing decisions on the basis of whether the phone has many useful features but is easy and even fun to use?” then the answer may be “Some people do, yes.”
Ralph Hitchens 06.04.07 at 2:50 pm
From what I’ve read, the big question is why Apple cut a deal to put this great full-featured phone on Cingular’s “Edge” network. Supposed to be, like, really slow, dude.
Ginger Yellow 06.04.07 at 3:27 pm
Well, that’s the thing, Kieran. Touch-sensitivity is pretty much the only feature on the iPhone that you can’t find anywhere else and who knows how useful that’s going to be? Plenty of smartphones already use a stylus. And I don’t see the fashion and usability argument being anything like as important as it was with the iPod because there are already dozens of phones aimed at that market. The iPod filled a key niche in a young market. The iPhone is just another consumer product, but with Apple branding and a price tag to match.
Slocum 06.04.07 at 3:43 pm
“From what I’ve read, the big question is why Apple cut a deal to put this great full-featured phone on Cingular’s “Edge†network. Supposed to be, like, really slow, dude.”
Because Verizon wouldn’t accept Apple’s conditions.
Charlie Whitaker 06.04.07 at 3:58 pm
My ambitions for device consolidation aren’t huge: just merging my iPod with my phone would be enough and the iPhone looks set to do that nicely. A bigger screen for – say – Google Maps would be great; the bigger screen might also help a bit with diary keeping.
Alternatively, my phone manufacturer could up the built-in storage on my handset, provide a FireWire connector and write a decent OS X app for synchronising media (i.e. iTunes). My current phone has a very nice camera but getting the pics out of it is a pain. Music is a disaster.
I suspect the iPod-iTunes integration model is enough to make the iPhone a success.
Ginger Yellow 06.04.07 at 4:03 pm
Like I say, it will appeal to people who own Macs. But that’s not many people. As for music and pics, plenty of phones, including mine, just store them in a folder on an SD card. Transferring them is as easy as taking it out and plugging it into your computer’s reader. Drag and drop. Or if you don’t like that there’s bluetooth.
I’m skeptical of the convergence appeal, beyond a limited few. I don’t want using my phone to wear down my iPod’s battery and vice versa. More importantly, the hard drive on the iPhone is tiny. Fine if you’re switching from a Nano, but no good otherwise.
pietr 06.04.07 at 4:13 pm
Hello? Mum? Oh bloody hell, I’m listening to the Bangles again….Hold on a minute mum!Oh no, no, I don’t want theatre tickets…free car wash? No!
Mum! Mum? Mum? Damnit she’s hung up.
Ketzl Brame 06.04.07 at 4:31 pm
Surely battery life on the iPhone, if you DO use all its cool video and surfing capacities, will be shorter than one day. I can’t have a device as a cellphone if using it means I won’t get calls. I’ve got a video/mp3 player and a laptop, I burn through the batteries of all of them on one good direct crosscountry flight, not even counting layovers. So no iPhone for me, I’d like to entertain myself sure but not at the cost of running my phone dead.
What I really want for my cellphone– and I can’t get it– is a phone with a phonebook, a basic grey&black crystal screen with backlight you can turn on and off, NO other functions except to make and receive calls… and a battery life of 1+ weeks.
Is that too much to ask?
Ginger Yellow 06.04.07 at 4:48 pm
My old Nokia 8210 did pretty much that.
anomalous 06.04.07 at 5:12 pm
I sat in a restaurant next a man who was using an iphone. He was one of the design techs on the project. He gave us a demo and I even got to hold the thing.
It was pretty impressive. I asked him about the touchscreen and keypad and he said that it wasn’t a problem, and it didn’t seem to be that way he was using it. I didn’t get to type anything myself though.
And everything else, the motions looked as simple and clean as they do on the ads: graceful. But of course he’s had a lot of practice
Jake 06.04.07 at 5:39 pm
When the iPod was introduced, much the same comments were made about it (“It’s just a little slicker and easier to use than all the other players, but it costs way more and has a smaller hard drive. Who would buy one?”). Given how much I hate the interface and behavior of my RAZR, I would not be surprised if the iPhone turned out to be just as successful as the iPod.
Wax Banks 06.04.07 at 5:53 pm
Someone sez:
I’ve never owned a PDA or an iPod – nor for that matter played a game or browsed the Web on my cell phone – but I imagine the ‘dicking around with the Web’ phase is short even for new PDA owners, and for most users the battery life will be sufficient. The iPhone supposedly handles its iPod duties for a full day without a recharge (sounds optimistic to me but I dunno), and phone/video/Web/etc for five hours on a charge. The new version of Windows Mobile comes with Word/Excel readers but doesn’t allow you to create documents, only to edit existing ones; that sounds ridiculous but the sensible-enough idea behind these PDA’s is that they’re very thin supplements to laptops or desktops, not replacements. (No one’s gonna spend five hours writing email from his phone in a day either.)
Fact is, this is an iPod that’ll handle everything my phone does and plenty it doesn’t, and its interface is gorgeous and apparently a pleasure to use. Bitching about it seems…childish.
Charlie Whitaker 06.04.07 at 6:02 pm
But the iPod experience shows that if you update your content regularly (with podcasts or downloaded singles) this is actually too much hassle. iTunes is available for Windows, and I’d guess that almost every iPod Windows user has installed it.
Bill Gardner 06.04.07 at 6:43 pm
The iPhone will give Apple a license to print money? So what was the legal basis on which they racked me up for the last 25 years…?
Ginger Yellow 06.04.07 at 7:57 pm
Charlie, if you regularly update your iPod with singles and podcasts, you’re going to want more than 4GB-8GB of storage. I’ve got over 20GB of podcasts alone on mine.
Wax: I’m not bitching about it. I’m just baffled by the assumption this is going to be the biggest thing ever. Like I said, the iPod was unique when it launched, and even then it took two years for it to take off, thanks to Apple’s decision to make it Mac only at first. Also, you don’t get free, fully functional mp3 players.
Freddie 06.04.07 at 8:03 pm
I know that, when Marx talked about commodity fetishism, he didn’t mean people were actually sexually attracted to the things they buy. But I really do believe that if they could, people literally would be fucking their iPods and Blackberries.
I mean Jesus Christ. It’s a phone.
Richard J 06.04.07 at 8:07 pm
With this and the PS3, it seems like being a golden year for technology firms assuming that their brand’s consumers are price insensitive…
A. G. Rud 06.04.07 at 8:33 pm
Slap what a friend calls a “condom” on the glass, the protectors you squeegee on with great difficulty to PDAs, and that I now have on my Blackjack, to prevent scratching. But then, does anyone really worry about scratching, when most folks trade for new phones frequently? I have had to get out of the “make it last” mindset, a relic of years past, with my electronics. Use it, scratch it, replace it seems the order of the day.
Jake 06.04.07 at 8:54 pm
The only thing that made the iPod unique when it came out was that it wasn’t a poorly-designed difficult to use piece of shit like all the other music players. Oh, and it came with simple and effective software to synchronize with your computer. I have no trouble imagining the iPhone sharing both of those attributes.
aaron_m 06.04.07 at 9:07 pm
#15
Here is a link to your multi-sim dream
http://www.airtimemanager.co.uk/AdditionalServices/multiSIM.aspx
I do not know how common this is. Academics has left me with just one pretty basic communications device, so I don’t have any use for this service.
Martin Bento 06.04.07 at 9:37 pm
freddie wrote:
“But I really do believe that if they could, people literally would be fucking their iPods and Blackberries.”
Well, it probably has a “vibrate” (silent ring) feature. If Steve adds an “endless vibrate” feature, we’ll know he reads crooked timber.
richard 06.05.07 at 12:11 am
The only thing that made the iPod unique when it came out was that it wasn’t a poorly-designed difficult to use piece of shit like all the other music players.
Thank you. Apple have been pushing the “it just works” angle pretty hard for a while now, and for all the apple products I’ve tried, it’s actually been true… which is pretty rare in the marketplace.
I don’t want an iPod, or a video player, and I’d probably be better off without internet wherever I go, but I see this as the first real, practical step toward a pocket-top (as it were) computer; one that runs real applications. That’s pretty exciting (scary, even), even if it’s going to take a few years to get good and capacious enough to replace my laptop. When it does, I’ll buy one, but not before.
Brendon 06.05.07 at 2:08 am
It’s like a little erogenous zone.
C. L. Ball 06.05.07 at 4:05 am
It looks pretty impressive but if the AT&T data fees remain pricey and if the coverage is not very good, it is not going to do as well.
iPod did well because it worked much better than the alternatives — as I recall, it had more storage capacity than the available Flash-based music players at the time and it also served as an external hard-drive (I still back-up data to mine when I’m on trips).
Ginger Yellow 06.05.07 at 9:47 am
“The only thing that made the iPod unique when it came out was that it wasn’t a poorly-designed difficult to use piece of shit like all the other music players.”
Well precisely. Mobile phone design is far further along than mp3 player design was at that time, both aesthetically and functionally.
Matt Weiner 06.05.07 at 2:04 pm
If Steve adds an “endless vibrate†feature, we’ll know he reads crooked timber.
And then you won’t be able to buy iPhones in Texas.
Matt T. 06.05.07 at 2:49 pm
Re: #40
Phone design in 2007 is ahead of mp3 player design in, what, 2000. But that doesn’t mean that current phone design is actually good. So the Razr is thin? It’s also ugly and awkward.
I like the iPhone; but I’m with #23: I’m waiting for the iPhone nano, as it were; a phone-and-nothing-else, as small as possible, that looks good when I have to see it and is otherwise unobtrusive. I have a 40G iPod, and the iPhone isn’t going to eliminate that.
PK 06.05.07 at 4:35 pm
Or how bout one of these:
HTC Touch
Watson Aname 06.05.07 at 4:52 pm
40: Mobiles pretty universally suck, only slightly less so than pre-ipod mp3 players. I don’t know if apple has/can do it, but there is definitely room for someone to trump the competition with usability.
Caslon 06.05.07 at 8:20 pm
Forty years ago I had a moment of cosmic consciousness during which I saw the interconnectedness of all humanity. Little did I realize that I was just getting a preview of the future. Back then I thought it was wonderful. Now I’m not so sure.
Every day I see people who are driven and directed by the dictates of their gadgets. They may surf the globe and have friends in strange places and be available 24-hours a day. But in the end, they’ve lost themselves to function, with form all but forgotten. They’ve become avatars made of flesh.
nick s 06.06.07 at 9:01 am
With this and the PS3, it seems like being a golden year for technology firms assuming that their brand’s consumers are price insensitive…
As John Gruber has noted, it’s not massively more expensive as the other top-end phones that Cingular sells. Now, there’s an obvious distinction, since Blackberries and Treos and suchlike are more likely to be bought by employers. But I think the market’s there if it works as advertised.
European CTers should also be aware that American providers tend to offer a much blander, more homogenous range of phones, just as American car models are blander and more homogenous than their foreign variants. The iPhone sticks out in the US market.
Maynard Handley 06.07.07 at 2:14 am
It’s amazing how liberalism just vanishes when a non-orthodox topic arises and people can’t fall back on stereotypes.
What’s with all the iPhone hate here? Not just people saying they won’t buy it, but a strong projection that anyone who does buy it is morally inferior. Look guys, here’s a hint: we’re not living in Soviet Russia. The way the system works is that companies produce many items, and we, the lucky consumers, choose the ones we want best. Companies (the smart ones) are not TRYING to produce the one single device that will replace every single competitor; like the one perfect pasta sauce (http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/20) that one perfect device doesn’t exist, so stop evaluating the iPhone in those terms. I mean christ, even Apple doesn’t pretend macs are for everyone, that’s why PC in the ads is a lovable doofus — he’s uncool, but Apple’s not trying to make him out as despicable.
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