Jotting down my thoughts on the iPhone...

Feature-wise, it's about average. GSM only to begin with, a 2 megapixel camera (which'll look pretty tired for a device this expensive when it finally launches). Battery life looks poorish, and in practice will no doubt be worse than what's advertised. Was there any mention of the 2-batteries approach which was rumoured? Without it I think the device may be pretty flawed: the first time you drop off the network unable to make or take calls because you've been listening to music, I'm betting you'll go back to your iPod.

The UI looks pretty. Not sure how well the keyboard will work for tapping out texts, but if there's a predictive error correction thing going on in there (T9 for Qwerty) it may well be usable. It seems to have some nice haptic and accelerometer-driven innovations in the UI - shame Nintendo got there first really. I don't consider "running MacOS X" to be a feature in a handset, without more info to back it up. Will 3rd parties be able (and willing) to develop apps?

Nice to see widgets making it to the home screen of a mobile device - about time :) But that said I'm sceptical about mobile device demos (like others). I've seen too many 3G concept videos to be convinced that anything I haven't grasped in my own two paws and fiddled with is any good.

Some of the features look like they'll require close co-operation with the networks to roll out - e.g. random access voicemail and conference calling. It'll be quite humiliating for the big incumbent handset vendors if Apple manage to get this integration done before they do. I note that Apple have made no announcements for who they'll be working with outside the US.

I find the idea of the iPhone "service partners" pretty laughable. Everyone knows that Yahoo will do it behind the bike sheds for jelly babies these days, and Google drops its knickers for anyone. Doing a deal to give these guys placement on your device is nothing special, I'm afraid.

It seems expensive: $500 with a 2 year contract? I'm a heavy mobile user and I'd shy away from a 2-year contract, that's bound to be a disincentive to most (and obviously the great PAYG unwashed don't get to play at all). If that $500 translates to £500 (as it often seems to) then it's going to be classic Apple: a luxury item for whatever yuppies like me are called this millenia rather than a mass-market device. And whatever it's not available for another 6 months, or the end of the year if you're into 3G (which I'm betting a lot of the target audience will be).

According to MobHappy Jobs wants to take 1% of the handset market - reminds me of #11 on Guy Kawasaki's list of entrepreneur lies. Disclaimer: Steve Jobs is way smarter than me, and may even know this. He dresses better too. But according to El Reg we shipped 39.5m handsets in Western Europe in Q3 2005. Extrapolating crudely, that's 916m handsets for the year (assuming no growth or decline since then). So Steve needs to ship 9.16m handsets next year to get what he wants, which seems quite aggressive to me: it's just under half the number of iPods Apple predicted sales of in 2006.

As MEX puts it "this is a product for the user who instant messages sitting in front of the TV, Googles words while they are reading magazines and shares photos like gossip". i.e. not the current European mobile market, but maybe a better fit with that in the US.

I'm with Ive: it's "not too shabby" and all that, and my now-Pavlovian responses to any product Apple releases are telling me I want one, but I don't see this as meaningfully impacting on the mass market (other than giving a slight kicking to other handset vendors). As such it's more of a decent PDA than a phone, in my book.

I don't want to say the word Newton (a lovely device which didn't really sell). Whoops.

Comments

[Tommy]

Conference calling is a part of the GSM standard and many recent handsets have support for it, however _NOWHERE_ near as simple and elegant. Some operators doesn't turn it on by default because "it makes customers confused".

Random access voicemail is operator specific.

I also choked when I heard the price together with a 2 year contract, what are they on? Here in the UK if you sign a two year contract you almost always get a nice handset "for free".

[Jag]

Hey, it's a nice, shiny, pretty, music-playing PDA. I want one! :-)

[pauldwaite]

> "If that $500 translates to £500 (as it often seems to) then it's going to be classic Apple: a luxury item for whatever yuppies like me are called this millenia rather than a mass-market device."

Yeah, but that's exactly what the iPod was at first. I know this is a whole different ball game, but the iPhone as it stands is purely round one of a long... er... match? Tournament? Note to self, stop using sport metapohrs until you actually watch some sport.

[karl]

Great post, Ted.
I agree about the SDK, and it will be fascinating to see what happens with widgets, if at all?
I’m just not anxious to sign on to Cingulars pricey data plans.
I’ll def get it for the mp3, movie, photo, contact and everything else, non web-related.

Thanks for the insights.

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[michael]

iPhone is cool

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