In LA

We’ve all waited and waited like hungry beavers for the iPhone announcement. Now that the exhilarating presentation is over, everything else just feels…anticlimactic. How can one feel excitement at anything for the rest of the day, or the week –by noting how the iPhone differs from perfection, that’s how. If this hasn’t already become a popular pastime, it will soon. And the iPhone, amazing as it looks, and though it might seem insanely great, does have many deficiencies that can be named and counted. Follow along and see how much better you feel with each bullet point, listed in order of importance.

• Lacks 3G - With a screen made for web browsing and boasting great email and web browsing software (Apple touts it as a “Breakthrough Internet Device“), it’s surprising that the iPhone can’t connect to the fastest cellular data networks. As one of my friends puts it, “3G is in all the devices professionals carry now …going to be no defections in the business space”. Hurrah, a real deficiency. There’s something to live for after all!
• No Expansion slot? - Apple doesn’t mention an SD or miniSD slot on the iPhone Tech Specs page. Though the device does include 4 or 8Gb of internal memory, that high-res screen aches to display big video files. It’d be nice to be able to store movies and TV shows on SD cards and just swap them in when on a long plane flight rather than keep the device’s internal memory packed full of both seasons of Get a Life in HD. Yay, another demerit for the iPhone, but I’d feel even better if there wasn’t a suspiciously utilitarian-looking slot on the side of the photo of the iPhone on Apple’s site. Something tells me they might have just forgotten to mention or haven’t yet decided which kind of media the iPhone will accept. The Tech specs do look a little parsimonious.
• Won’t be out until June - Apple says they’ve announced the iPhone now so that their FCC filing doesn’t steal their thunder and announce it for them. All well and good, but one could also say they’ve announced a phone that won’t be around until June and are in the meantime inviting comparisons with phones currently on the market. The iPhone should by rights be compared with other phones that will exist in June. By then it is possible that everyone and their dog will have released phones featuring 48Gb of memory with even wider, cinemascope-ratio screens and built-in slide-rules. Maybe PalmOne will finally release a phone based on their Advanced Linux Platform, so that I can finally check my email using emacs vm-mode while on the bus. Maybe Microsoft will release a phone running a slimmed-down version of Vista (though hopefully less slimmed-down than the desktop version of Vista). All conjecture, but the point is, we just don’t know what else will be on the table in June. There may be more annnouncements in the future from other companies to brighten our days over the next few months. One can hope.
• iPhone’s features are not revolutionary - Many phones on the market can already do email, play music, browse the web, and crash.
• no GPS - A deficiency because it’s important to know, at all times, where the government satellites think you are. Also can be useful for navigation when you throw caution and anonymity to the wind and remove the tinfoil wrapped around your phone antenna. Geotagged moblogging would the teh awesome.
• no video chat - looks like the camera is on the back of the phone, making video chat an unlikely possibility without some crafty use of mirrors or an iPhone-camera-periscope. One can do video chat between Nokia 7390s, why can’t iPhone users do video chat with other iPhone users, or with computer-based iChat users? Maybe the lack of 3G makes this feature less possible.
• no iPod connector - or maybe I just haven’t given the device a close enough look. Can it connect to all them iPod stereos and alarm clocks and whatnot? How bout the iPod+Nike kit or the iPod FM tuner?
• no brown color - I thought the availability of the Zune in brown was one of the best things going for it. No joke. Brown is cool. Mr. Jobs even wore a brown shirt to announce the iPhone, so you know this has to be something Apple plans to introduce in the future. Has to be. Another announcement to live for.
• no fingerprint scanner - Well, it’d be neat and potentially useful. Do I really want to have to divine my friend’s password and poke it on a touchscreen keyboard when instead I can hack off his thumb and press it to the iPhone’s sensor so that I can read his mail and determine when he first turned state’s evidence against me?
• no thermometer - How hot is it in here? I don’t know. My phone won’t tell me!
• no altimeter - How high am I?
• no FM radio tuner! - This was one of the most-noted deficiencies in the early days of the iPod. Apple even eventually made an FM tuner accessory for the iPod nano, which I bought. It works well. But as it turns out, I rarely use the FM radio, and other people bought plenty of iPods even though they lack an FM radio, so maybe the need for an FM tuner was overplayed. Regardless, it is very true that the iPhone, like the iPod before it, lacks an FM tuner. Once a deficiency always a deficiency.
• Works on a PC - If it really runs OS X, people should by rights be forced to buy a Mac in order to use this phone. All the other great smartphone options only support one computing platform (or at least require commercial 3rd-party software to work on other manufacturers’ platforms). Has Apple not heard of this marketing strategy? If the iPhone is made MacOS-only, it could motivate Mac marketshare to shoot as high as 5%!
• No diagonal mode - The iPhone automatically senses orientation and switches the display between Portrait and Landscape modes, but where is “diagonal mode”? What if I can’t make up my mind how to hold the phone? More orientation options are needed, neither the world nor 3D space is so binary. I want 6 axes, 5 dimensions, and a diagonal screen mode.

Uh oh, I just watched the flash animation on Apple’s site of the iPhone’s music interface. Amazing. What a perfect tactile interface, and the use of coverflow is outstanding. And since the iPhone really does run OS X, emacs vm-mode might be a possibility. Unfortunately, despite having worked up a list of the product’s many real and imaginary flaws, I think the iPhone announcement may well kill my enthusiasm for any other not-yet-released-product-announcement this week.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 8th, 2007 at 10:59 am and is filed under Amusing, Apple, Geeky, PalmOS. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.