The iPhone

Well, considering I'm mainly a car-guy, it seems a little strange to start my Blog with the iPhone,
but it is the thing most in my mind at the moment.

My wife "gave" me one for Father's Day, and I have to admit I'm looking forward to it. I couldn't quite be tempted to one with the first generation. Edge speed just wasn't enough for me, and while I've REALLY wanted an iPod for some time, the last thing I want is another gadget in my pocket. With not only 3G speed but GPS capability, I'm sold, and will be part of the masses next Friday (July, 11).

I'm really laughing at most of the press coverage, since it mainly seems to compare iPhone v2 to iPhone v1, which isn't nearly enough. Comparing it to the 3G BlackJack or the newest 3G BlackBerries would be more fair in terms of subsidized cost and rate plans, not to mention day to day living.

Lack of 3G made iPhone v1 more of an iPod with phone capability (that is a little extreme, but let's go with it). The web browsing on the go was painful with Edge and lack of GPS limited real exploitation of web-enabled location services. Fine. It was still a milestone product, and by far the best iPod ever when announced.

iPhone v2 with 3G and GPS (and the really interesting WiFi access point location capability) put it way out in front of pocket computing and communication. No other phone will do as much as easily as the 2nd gen. iPhone (there are phones that do more, but at a huge cost in ease of use).

When you compare iPhone to any WM6 phone in terms of 3G plan rates and overall cost, it is still the best deal going. All these press guys who aren't used to covering SmartPhones need to compare iPhone v2 to a higher-end BlackBerry or the Samsung 3G for data plan and phone cost with subsidies. They make it sound like Apple is hiding the cost of the phone. Yup - just like every other smartphone provider AT&T, Verizon, etc. has. In fact, I'm guessing the whole activation process and change of model was driven by AT&T and the whole jailbreak phenomenon as anything. AT&T needed this device to follow the more traditional model.

Anyway, here's my personal take on the gripes from YahooTech and Forbes:

Cost - as mentioned, highly consistent with other smart phones and data plans. No issues for me here.

No Flash - A nice to have at best. Sacrificed for battery life, I'm guessing.

No Replaceable Batteries - Something I'd like to have, but I find I pretty much keep the same battery in my current BlackJack and charge every other day or so. I'm guessing my iPhone will be the same.

Video Recording - A nice to have. I've used it only a handful of times, and never thought the results were worth much.

No Cut-And-Paste - If I have it in my WM6 BlackJack, I've never used it. No worries

No Multimedia Messaging - don't care.

No Voice Dialing - seems like something they'd have, and a bit of a hit, but not a huge issue for me. I've never used it, but is an attractive feature.

No 32GB option - ?? How many smartphones have 32GB of internal storage? This seems like a bit of a stretch. I'm guessing this was sacrificed to space required for the battery and additional guts for phone function.

Here are three I don't see much in the press:
No microSD support: I'd really like to have the ability to put a MicroSD card in this thing, but with 16GB on board, I'll probably be OK.

No Stereo BT support - This is the biggest hit. How can the worlds best portable music player not support stereo BT? I don't think the quality and price of these is great yet, so I'm not sure I'd get one anyway, but ???

Plastic Back Cover - if the back is pretty scratch resistant, I don't care much, but I've seen some folks complain about the switch from a metal back. I'm guessing this was for several reasons, maybe even all three (in my order of importance/likelihood):
-----1 - Radio transparency. 3G wireless and the lack of an external antennae stalk probably required a back cover that is transparent to radio waves for good signal performance.
-----2 - Weight - stuffing all the battery they can in this thing probably prompted them to look for ways to shave weight to keep v2 close to the v1 weight. Moving to a plastic back probably helped.
-----3 - Cost - Plastic $ < $$ Metal

All this nitpicking really seems to miss the point. My BlackJack is a really capable device. I've upgraded it to WM6. It has a huge range of features...but it is really hard to do things like look at the pictures on the device, it is a terrible MP3 player, you have to drill down through menus for EVERYTHING - even the Explorer browser is buried 3 clicks from the Start menu.

The iPhone obliterates the ease of use equation and brings some genuinely new things to phones like visual voicemail (you can see a list of your voicemails and pick which ones to listen to). It has much more seamless integration between e-mail, pictures, etc. It is an extremely easy phone, it is by far the best phone to browse on (flash support is a gap...), photos are an integral part of the phone, mail is seamless, even things like stock tracking and weather are easy to access. Whoever designed the iPhone clearly had the gadget/widget world in mind, and understood what the Wii means to interacting with technology. Add to that the fact that it is the best iPod ever and you've got a winner.

Anyway, I'm a big fan at this point, and I'll be with the masses on Friday. Since getting one and putting it on eBay will be really hard under the new activation model, I'm thinking (and hoping) the lines won't be *quite* as bad as they were for iPhone v1.

So that is it for now - interesting to see where this will lead...