3 posts tagged “iphone”
...and all I can say is this:
Beckham wishes he could bend it like Nakamura.
Seriously. If there's a more electrifying free-kick in world football than #25 lining up, I want to see it.
Also, I'm going with a new layout - one that a) reflects my current addiction and b) shows up better on the iPhone ;]
DISCLAIMER: My living for the last 10 years has been based around Apple products, and AAPL stock paid for my last round of property tax, and I have been banking my OT for 6 months to buy this thing with. So maybe I am totally in the bag, maybe not. Take it all with a grain of salt.
Right. I have owned almost twenty cellphones in the last 5 years - I would do the math but I don't want to depress myself. However, the last phone I paid for was almost 2 years ago, for a V635 - since then I have been struggling through with various free phones and watching the feature creep in the low-end segment. Two years ago, the free Nokia was a wee candybar with a tiny passive-matrix screen and no features more advanced than speakerphone; now the free Nokia is a flip with a 320x240 display, high-speed data, Bluetooth, a megapixel camera, and a switchblade button that flips it open if you're too lazy to actually get a thumb under the lid.
I say all this to say that I owned the iPhone of its day, its day being summer 2003: the SonyEricsson P800. This was an amazing thing: touch screen, handwriting recognition, tri-band, camera, Bluetooth AND speaker phone, syncs with a Mac, and a huge 320x208 display. I laid out $500 for the thing, down in the Bowery in NYC, with the aim of switching to T-Mobile so I would be able to exploit unlimited GPRS data.
However, there were some problems. For one, the thing was a brick. For another, despite the big display, I had a WAP browser and an early version of Opera, neither of which was exactly a whiz for cruising the Internet. The camera was VGA only and didn't do video capture, the handwriting recognition was a bit of a show (especially in moving from Grafitti to Jot), GPRS speed was comparable to an old modem from 1994 or so, and - the capper - the phone only got a signal when you touched it directly to a cell tower. Sony Ericsson was a byword for poor antenna performance until just a couple of years ago, but this was rock bottom.
As it happens, I did switch to T-Mobile for a year...but relied almost exclusively on the V300 I got with my contract. My introduction to the misery of the Moto UI, but that's another story.
So...why should I expect the iPhone to be any better?
Well, for starters, the thing is literally less than half the thickness of the P800. It's actually the same weight, width and thickness as a 30 GB iPod, but the iPhone is a half-inch longer. All in all, a slimmer device, which can only be good. The display is MUCH nicer - larger, brighter, more color depth - and Safari beats the hell out of the old style of faking the Internet on a phone. The camera is 2 megapixel, which is a decided improvement, though I don't know if video is on the cards (I'm thinking not, especially given the absence of MMS). No handwriting - instead, we have the onscreen keyboard. Jury's still out. EDGE is better than GPRS, albeit not by much, but the upside of Silicon Valley is that you can find pervasive free Wi-Fi just about anywhere. So the big question is: antenna performance. How easily will the iPhone pick up a signal, and how tightly will it hold on?
As the big questions go, I'm not as concerned about the keyboard - it's got to be better than T9, and I am unlikely to send a lot of e-mail from the phone anyway (I have generally had mail clients on most phones I've owned since 2003, but until I gave up data service in 2006 I was unlikely to send mail, only read). I don't use the video camera very often, but I would be annoyed by knowing I don't have one. I tend to more or less trust the battery metrics on the website, especially vis-a-vis music playback, although I don't know that it will last much longer than a laptop with continuous Wi-Fi use. So the real dagger question: how's the antenna? No way of knowing until it ships.
Also, I find it a bit worrisome that we've had leaks from AT&T on just about everything, from employee leave scheduled around the launch to preparations for security and crowd control if people camp out - yet not one word has leaked about pricing plans. That scares me. I don't mind splashing out for the device - after all, two years ago people were paying $500 for a RAZR and that wasn't even the most powerful phone that Moto made at the time. But if I'm going to have to put down appreciably more than people are paying monthly on a Pearl or a Sidekick (the only two "consumer smartphones" out there right now), I will be displeased. So...
How do you pass the time during a flight? What do you bring in your carry-on?
Couple of magazines - there's always an Economist or New Yorker I haven't gotten through. The advantage there is that I can always toss them when I'm done. After that, there's the iPod, because there's always a couple of podcasts I haven't finished. So far, that's been more than enough - I wouldn't even bother bringing the laptop on board, except that there is NO WAY IN HELL that I will put it in the checked luggage. So the goal is to get to the point where I don't need the laptop and can do everything I would use it for by some other instrumentality. Enter the iPhone...I hope...
