iBacklash
To hear Apple die-hards tell it, the new iPhone will be the greatest thing against sliced bread — which, they note, does not automatically reconfigure itself depending on which way it’s held, nor does it connect to the Internet, switching over to wi-fi where available.
I’m not so sure, myself, since it mostly seems to be a crippled Treo merged with a small iPod. The Apple fans who claim that an iPhone can do everything a Treo can seem to have never used a Treo. Mine is a lot more than a phone, camera, calendar and chat client, and most folks I know that use one have likewise loaded it up with additional programs, both commercial and shareware, greatly expanding its capabilities.
And it looks like I’m not alone in this view:
Knowledge@Wharton: The iPhone has a lot of cool features. Are there too many, and is the price — starting at $500 — too high?
Fader: Well it’s not going to be too high for the first few hundred thousand people who just have to have it. You can charge them anything and they’ll pay anything. But for the mass market, if they really want to create something that is anywhere close to what the iPod did, it is very expensive.
And, I think on the feature side, it doesn’t really have that many features. In fact, it’s missing some really, really important features. What it has [going] for it is just a really cool design factor and that’s not enough. It’s going to help them to differentiate themselves from the other phones out there, but it’s not going to be enough to really be a winning entry.
Knowledge@Wharton: What other features [would you imagine] should it include?
Fader: Well, one of the things that it must include is a key pad. I think that it’s very important for people to be able to type or at least text message, and to be able to do that just on the screen instead of having actual keys is going to be very disappointing. There are a lot of people who won’t even give it a try because of the absence of that. And then there’s just some of the lack of the integration with Outlook and other standard bits of software that are becoming quite common with so many phones today.
Knowledge@Wharton: Do you think consumers are tired of juggling multiple devices though? Does the iPhone at least address that problem?
Fader: I don’t think it does. I think about how many people right now are carrying around an iPod and a Blackberry or a Treo, and this kind of falls in between the two. In some sense it’s not as simple; it’s not as small as an iPod. So, it’s a bigger iPod but not necessarily a better one. And, while it does function as a phone, it does lack some features, as we just mentioned. So I think that the large numbers of people who are in that modality are not going to have their needs satisfied here.
The absolutely accurately named Cult of Mac blog at Wired disagrees:
I don’t know how, I don’t know why, but in the United States, the vast majority of people still don’t understand what good design is really about. Good design is not about aesthetics. It’s about solving people’s needs. It’s about clarifying the complex. It’s about looking good AND working better. People care a little bit about features. They care way more about knowing how to use them.
Does he know what he’s even arguing in terms of design here? The breakthrough on the iPhone is not how it looks. It’s how it works. Don’t look at the appearance of the interface, look at how brilliantly the iPhone switches modes and hooks its features into one another. It’s about integration AND intuition. You don’t have to make trade-offs.
Certainly not if you don’t really want a smartphone, no matter what Jobs may have sneered about the phones in that category in his presentation.
Anyway, the Wharton professor and the Mac cult leader are continuing to go back and forth over this at Wired:
Where’s the growth in the smart phone market? Not by trying to get people to trade in their BlackBerry tomorrow, let me tell you. It’s in convincing the millions of people with fairly commodity cell phones and an iPod that what they really want to do is trade in both for an iPhone. It’s an unclaimed market space, and its overhead is nearly unstoppable. Apple’s tool for getting there is around a revolutionary interface and not just an iPod but THE BEST iPOD IN THE WORLD built in so people actually understand how to use all the features already found in smart phones everywhere.
It’s what Apple is counting on. And if they’re wrong — they certainly might be, especially about the small virtual keyboard, which no one has tried out, particularly — they can get it right next time. They can learn over time and roll out a really amazing product line to make the iPhone resemble the iPod line. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither was Apple’s death grip on the MP3 market. They face a tremendous adoption problem — they’re wisely going super high-end to cater to early adopters. They can learn from those early adopters to make the product better, smaller, cheaper and more customized. That’s when everyone else will want one — including the people staunchly defending their Treos and BlackBerrys right now.
I’d love to be able to get rid of my iPod or my Treo and have a single all-in-one device, but the first generation iPhone doesn’t look like it’s going to fit the bill. In the interim, I’m just going to wait on the next generation of the video iPod, which I assume will show up this fall, and have the same widescreen and touchscreen aspects of the iPhone, but will have its other guts replaced with a substantial 30 GB or larger iPod hard drive.
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All of this stuff looks like caveman arguing over logs when you see the kind of stuff that is available in other parts of the world. The biggest problem for all the smart devices are interoperability and bandwidth–two problems that aren’t likely to be solved in the U.S. market anytime soon.
Unless, of course, municipal wifi gets rolled out in a major way–then all of a sudden it isn’t about cellphones, it’s about a portable internet device that can do iptelephony (think skype or vodaphone or some such).
Comment by f. chong rutherfod — January 26, 2007 @ 21:04
I think it would just take one major U.S. city doing it, and then being able to show an influx of valuable new residents moved in because of it, for it to start spreading to other major metro areas.
Wasn’t San Francisco threatening to do this?
Comment by Beau — January 27, 2007 @ 3:21
It’s rolled out in quite a few areas already. St. Cloud, Mountain View, Corpus Christi, Longmont, Milpitas, New Orleans and Pittsburgh all use a system developed by Tropos. New York has a number of hotspots around the city.
What’s missing, I think, is awareness of technology implications. Like, all summer, I would go to Central Park with my laptop, connect my head set, and make calls to Japan via skype. I’m not sure if people who saw me understood what I was doing. A few people asked–and seemed shocked. One guy was convinced I was some kind of computer hacker and kept saying, “get out of here, for real? For real?” The tech environment is kind of like cellphones in the mid-90s. Current cellphone tech is to 90s era beepers as 90s era cellphone tech is to current portable internet devices.
Comment by f. chong rutherfod — January 27, 2007 @ 8:42
Apparently Cingular may be giving away multiple months of service for “free” with the purchase of the phone since Apple won’t be letting then discount the phone.
I think this phone is meant for consumers who enjoy a fancy phone –
its not really aimed at the mobile worker or
white collar professional business market in the same way a Treo or Blackberry is.
Comment by Cam — January 27, 2007 @ 15:21
Cam- Cingular denies that rumor. You’re 100% right that this is not a prosumer phone. It’s like the old Clamshell iBooks. Unique design, but very much for the basic consumer. If you wanted a “real” laptop, you got a Powerbook (I still miss my Pismo). Eventually Apple migrated some features from the PB line to the iBook like, to the extent that the two are practically the same machine now. If the iPhone doesn’t flop out of the gate, that’s the most likely future for it.
Beau – if you want to ditch the iPod and only cary your Treo, you can. Sure, you can’t carry 30 Gb, but a 4 GB SD card can cary a decent amount of MP3s or videos and TCMP plays just about every video format out there, *and* the screen is a higher rez than a video iPod (Galactica looks great on my Treo).
I use PocketTunes as an MP3 player and actually like it better than an iPod. It intigrates to iTunes or WMP for easy frag and dropping.
I say this as a die-hard Mac user, by the way. Third-party aps like MissingSync intigrate my Treo to my Macs to an extent that my 10 GB iPod is now just used for shuttling files/
Comment by Typo Lad — January 29, 2007 @ 4:52
Neat article from Infinite Loop, which votes on the yea side as this being a disruptive technology (all of the folks saying this are paying attention to the user interface, which is very different than other cellphones*)
iPhone interface analysis from an actual usability expert. Gasp!
http://arstechnica.com/journals/apple.ars/2007/1/19/6688
On a side note, the real future of the iphone and other integrated devices are as, for lack of a better term, universal remote controls. Like, if you’ve got an 8GB iphone, and an iTV hooked up to a 1080i screen, it probably won’t be long before you just point the phone at the thing and watch whatever on a bigger screen. When flash memory capacity and shelf life expands–or if apple decides to start selling expandable iMemory for their devices–then it’s even more. Think about the kinds of things you could do on a 386 in the late 80s–including international banking. Now think about the fact most smart phones carry more onboard memory than ANY of those older computers.
All this entertainment stuff is just the beginnnig, for better or for worse.
*this post, and the one before, should note that by cellphone, I mean U.S. cellphones. I stand by the earlier assertion that us/north america mobile tech=logs.
Comment by f. chong rutherford — January 29, 2007 @ 15:58
Kind of an interesting article about smart phones, and how the US lags behind. Also talks a little about Apple’s strategy with their GSM phone and the world market.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17154970/
Comment by Cam S — February 15, 2007 @ 7:46