turntable / as the table turns

I wanted to avoid adding more noise to the iPhone echo chamber, but resistance is futile.

The iPhone makes for a jaw dropping demo.

The demo site is also beautifully done. The day of the launch I was slobbering and blubbering when I saw it.

iWant

It has (almost) everything I want: camera, mp3 player, email, web, and…oh yeah…voice calling. In that order.

When I saw that it has no buttons a big smile came across my face. The biggest frustration I have with my beloved Sony k750 are the buttons - the joystick intermittently goes off in a random direction and the camera shutter button craps out regularly. I think the lack of buttons isn’t as important as people are making out. I look forward to it.

Making and receiving calls is what I do the least on my phone. I mostly shoot photos and listen to music. In terms of communications, I probably use email the most, both reading and writing, followed by texting and least of all calls. I don’t talk on the phone very much mostly because of the extortionist voice prices in NZ, but also because I hate talking on the phone. The mobile version of Gmail is fantastic. I use Opera Mini all the time to read Stuff, the NY Times, get the weather, get the train schedule, and occasionally Wikipedia when the kids ask me something I can’t answer. I also use the flash as a reading light. The k750 truly is a magical wonder device.

On the down side

Having WiFi would be great, but I think 3G might be more useful, particularly here in NZ. The iPhone voicemail demo is nifty, but it’s still so crippled. The Telco carriers are fools for not maximising the value of voicemail. I’d be willing to pay extra to forward voice messages to my email, like I did with jFax years and years ago.

Maybe somebody will build an app to do that. Oh. Right. The iPhone is Steve’s personal closed platform. Shame, that. Still, it could be fun developing widgets for it.

One thing that I’d miss from the k750 is the radio. I really do enjoy tuning in to National Radio and Radioactive.

Like most people, I was disappointed by Apple TV. Mostly because I expected there to be a seamless integration between the iPhone and the iTV. It makes so much sense to have the iPhone be a remote for the iTV, as well as being a way of presenting media from the iPhone onto your TV.

The size of the iPhone might be the biggest sticking point for me. It looks pretty fecking big, but it’s always hard to say until you hold one. I used to haul my Palm in my pocket for years. Hell, I even managed to force my Newton in my pocket a few times!

Phone from the future (if the future is 1992)

Speaking of the Newton, it is interesting how in many ways the iPhone isn’t that much further on from the original vision for the Newton. It was 15 years ago that I was at General Magic, the step-brother of the Newton, working with Tony Fadell (lead engineer of the iPhone) on my Mediaphone concept. Note the buttonless touch screen…

It was 12 years ago that I did some work on the original Apple iTV. And it was 7 years ago that I worked on a Wifi prototype that had an mp3 player with social networking communications and digital payments. It’s inexcusable that we’re still waiting for mCommerce.

My point? OMG, it takes forever, really forever, for new technology to hit the street. The iPhone is not a futuristic device. It’s an extremely old device that’s been promised for years and it has only just arrived from ye olde future. A guy could get old waiting for these future technologies to arrive.