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10
Jan
2007

apple_iphone-2.jpg

Yesterday was a great day for Apple, by far the best keynote speech to date. Apple TV looked amazing and well the iPhone, what can I say WOW.... it really put my eTen PDA/phone device to shame. I want to go on record and say that I'm buying the iPhone the first day it comes out, it's a very exciting time and I can't wait to see what people will start coming up for it once it gets released, widgets galore ;) .

Anyway since the iPhone is still a couple months away I thought I would play a little devil’s advocate and look at some of the problems that Apple might be facing with the iPhone, I'm sure everyone wants them to succeed, as you can see none of the smart phones have yet but if anyone can Apple will. So here we go:

Complexity of the phone

Well this is key for Apple, they always pride themselves on simplicity for the end user and I think that's why people buy their products. The iPhone has to be simple to use and very responsive. There are a lot of things that can and will happen, as most of you noticed yesterday Steve had a few problems with the phone. I really hope that they can squash all the bugs out of the phone before it ships.

Smearing of the screen

I love the widescreen aspect of the phone, the ability to play all my music and watch all my videos on it. Great idea, but wait no stylus? The whole point of a stylus is to make it easier for the user to access all the menus and navigation on the small screen. Apple has gone even further and has a higher pixel density which will make it even harder to access the navigation. That’s unless their software works really well... lets hope it does.

But this brings me to the whole smudging and smearing of the screen... I mean you have a nice shiny screen and every time you want to do anything the screen will look like your four year old just played with it after eating spaghetti... I don't know maybe they have some sort of coating that will prevent this, I hope they do.

Multi-Touch & Accidental Touches

Multi-Touch seems like a great next step in small space navigation, again it will have to work really well for it to be success... I can't tell you how many times my touch screen phone has dialed one of my friends and then hanged up on them. Again SOFTWARE, key here for the phone to be successful.

Quality of the Camera

So far all phone cameras have been crap, plain and simple I haven't seen a good camera on the phone yet. I hope Apple changes this and we get some great pictures out of this phone.

Battery Life

This is going to be huge... 5 hour battery life with your phone being on... it's not a lot. Especially for people who are used to ipod 10+ hr of battery life. People are not going to buy this device just to use it as an ipod they'll have the phone on at all times and when the juice runs out you'll have a lot of disappointed people. So lets hope over the next two years the battery life gets a good boost... it would have been great to see a tiny solar panel on the back so you can just flip the phone and it starts charging on sun light.

Typing Disaster for bigger fingers

I have big fingers... always had trouble typing on small phones... with the pixel density even smaller I'm really starting to wonder how the data input on the iPhone will function. This is going to be key for using the phone to it's fullest... maybe someone will write a full screen widget that will give us the ease of input.

Fix the damn iTunes for PC

This one is just a rant... I have a library that has 50gb of songs, I'm running it on a dual core system with 2 gb of ram and a Raptor hd and iTunes is soooo damn slow... it always has been, the UI is very sluggish. This could be just a marketing stunt for Apple to push Mac sales but I really hope they can get their act together and fix iTunes. Apple look where your money is coming from... most of the songs and movies that are purchased come from Windows PCs. Get on with it.

Anyway so I hope that these things won't drag on the iPhone idea... like I said I love it and will be the first in line to buy one. Oh ya I hope that the release date is the same in Canada as it is in the States.

 

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17 Comments so far!!

1
Dental_FlossTycoon Says:
Totally valid arguments/questions. Nice article.
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2
Orrin Bloquy Says:
There's no reason to assume the digitizer resolution matches the 160dpi screen resolution on a device designed to be solely controlled with fingertips. If the digitizer resolution is coarse, it eliminates miskeying. I didn't see anything in the demos that showed UI targets any smaller than existing cellphone buttons. I suspect if iPhone OS X is running the same core libraries as desktop OS X, assistive technologies are also there to potentially enlarge button sizes. As far as smearing is concerned, I didn't see anything that suggested a screen protector sheet couldn't be employed (although I suspect it would need to be a wraparound as the screen is not recessed).
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3
John Hench Says:
There are two things that haven't been talked about really, but may make a difference going forward. First: the OS for the iPhone is OSX, or so I understand. I'm wondering if will be as appropriate for phones as the Symbian OS, which is designed specifically for event driven computing. Will it be as solid? Will it be as good at conserving battery life? This could be a plus, but might easily be a minus. Second: just wait until the game designers get ahold of this. It seems that a phone that has proximity sensors, touch screens, and accelerometers provides them with some great options for controls. I think we'll see some very good games coming out in the next year.
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4
Jeff Hume Says:
Concerning the battery life, I think you need to pay attention a bit closer. That's 5 hours of TALK time, and you get 16 hours of music playback. It's pretty evident that it'll be able to last longer just idling waiting for a call.
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5
A Says:
5 hour battery is talk time. The standby time will be higher. That's a pretty typical battery life for this kind of device.
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6
Marcee Says:
It's not 5 hours of battery life... it's 5 hours of TALK TIME. Something like 16 hours of music time. As far as I know, they didn't give an estimate on standby time. I'm guess 2 or 3 days with it just "on" (ie standby).
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7
Kevin Says:
No offense but I think you need to read a little better or watch the actual keynote and not read these half assed reports and comments whiny comments from the uniformed like yourself. Again no offense, but the data is there yet everything seems to be whiny about things that are dead wrong. "This is going to be huge... 5 hour battery life with your phone being on... it's not a lot. Especially for people who are used to ipod 10+ hr of battery life." 5 hours is for talk time/video/browsing. Most important here is obviously talk time. Blackjack claims 5.5 hours. Pearl claims 3.5 hours (and thats a Blackberry, the end all be all business phone) Treo 750 is claiming 4.5. I would say Apple is at the top of the battery game for talk time. Then there is the 16 hours figure. That is for straight music playing. iPod sits at 14, nano sits at 24. I would say the iPhone is doing pretty good as far as audio playback. The last unknown is standby time. My 650 will go days without a charge with little use. I imagine the iPhone would do the same considering the power saying ability built into OS X. So please get your facts straight here. There are also much bigger "downfalls" such as lack of 3G, no 3rd party support (if the reports are true). Remember though, this thing has 6 months to develop further. I don't know how far along in the process they are, but it doesnt sound like they are taking this as the final product. Some things they could add to make iPhone sweeter than it is before launch. 1. 3G 2. iChat 3. Bummed the camera isn't in front, for video conferencing. But considering at this point there is no 3G the network may not be able to handle it. 4. 3rd party development. Skype being a major one. Cingular may not like it though. I don't really care that it is not open to other carriers. It sounds like Apple went through a lot to get this done. Visual voicemail required Cingular to change their network. Not just anyone can do that. I think Apple is taking small steps to change the face of cellular. I hope that Apple pushes for new plans that can take advantage of the iPhone that is more affordable than they are now. Cheers.
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8
A. Nonymous Says:
Make that 10 issues: 8) No 3G (HSDPA) 9) No builtin GPS 10) No voice dial
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9
Henry Says:
if you want a good camera phone, check out the 3.2mp sony K800 with auto focus and xenon flash. The Iphone camera won't even come close to the quality of the K800.
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10
Daniel Says:
Based on the apple iPhone technology page, 5 hours battery life is for watching movies, talking on the phone, or web browsing. 16 hours is listed for listening to music. Nothing is stated for standby time. Comparing it to a standard iPod, you should use the 16 hour number.
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11
Ian H. Says:
I think the 5hrs of battery is talk time - Jobs mentioned that it would do 16 hrs of music-only...
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12
Stephen Says:
Ever stop to think that the problem with iTunes for Windows isn't iTunes at all? More than likely Windows is the problem. Runs fine on my Mac... always has. The software is essentially the same. It's just been ported to Windows. Talk to MS, get them to fix their OS.
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13
KL Says:
Higher pixel density means crisper graphics and more readable fonts, and NOT smaller interface (Apple has been working on this problem since Tiger and I think it's also solved in Vista, so fear not).
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14
Thatnimrod Says:
okay. let's go down the list. #1 - "Steve had problems..." Right. And you would have an occaisional glitch, too, if you had a phone six months before it was ready for the public. #2 - "Smudging" Maybe you don't wear glasses. I do. I have to clean them. They get smudged. It happens. Get a cleaning cloth. #3 - "Accidental Touches" If Steve (and the Apple website) says it ignores accidental touches, guess what? It ignores accidental touches. This is already a common feature for their laptops. Look it up. #4 - "Camera Quality" Yeah, you know, because that's a big thing I look for in a phone. /sarcasm. Don't you have a digital camera? Who the hell would try to replace that with a PHONE? #5 - "Battery Life" Sure, five hours. FIVE hours of CONSTANT webbrowsing, video or talk-time. Helllooooo. That's longer video playback than the current iPods! Granted, by new Nokia E62 has a talk-time close to 12 hours or so, but, hey, this is more than a phone. #6 - "Typing Disaster" If your fingers are too big to hold an xbox controller, you might be SOL. Otherwise, it's pretty simple. It even has predictive text so you dont actually have to hit every letter. That would also make it easy to do it one-handed, like the Jobster. #7 - "Fix iTunes" Yeah. We all know iTunes is slow. It has been since day one. Especially when you dump a ton of music and video and tv shows into it. And it's not just Windows. On my mac, with a gig of memory, it's still slow. But, it's still more advanced than any other mp3 player i've ever tried. Much better organization, too. But, besides all that, iTunes has NOTHING to do with the iPhone, other than loading your things into it. The iPhone's interface itself is not effected by the sluggish iTunes. There. Now that I've gotten that out of my system I feel much better.
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15
Pema Says:
I'm not sold on the iPhone. I think symbian is a great open-source mobile platform with some amazing apps. Hopefully we'll see some killer handsets coming out in the next year that run symbian. Personally I want to see what Nokia do to reply to the iPhone. Nokia recently won the contract to supply the hardware for the Sprint WiMax network in the US. I'm guessing we'll see some pretty amazing hybrid WiFi/GSM smart phones from them soon.
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16
Koonta Says:
There's been many recent tests, and people r saying the battery life last from 40 minutes-4 hrs....40 minutes being excessive internet and phone time or video playback....and 4 hrs being minimal power usage....don't waste ur time and money on this phone yeah its cool but ur gonna have to have a car charger at all time and a charger at home and work, maybe even a good friends house too...and apple usually rapes people on chargers...if u got a macbook and u ever lost or broke a charger, u should kno
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17
Max Power Says:
iTunez is for suckers. Well, iTunes for the PC at least. Apple users are already suckers. Go Open Source! Get a Creative ZEN or an Archos or something. iPods suck!
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