Apple iPhone. Can Apple® Inc. really reinvent the phone?
I was musing on the Sony Ericsson P990i even before it was unveiled. Many people would attest to my knowledge of cellphones and contemporary technology. Their testimonies would be nothing short of the truth. However, I've taken keen interest to self accelerating technologies; particularly micro computers, cellphones (that are not only cellphones again anymore) and the other ubiquitous little gidgits/gadgets that most people really have no idea why they're buying them but they do anyway. If you want an idea on what I'm talking about, take for instance those Mp4 players that people buy, and usually the screen is less than 1.5 inches and the memory is just over 256MB. Who can watch what on that?!
I've had a Sony Ericsson T610, an S700i (God bless the sweet 1.3 megapixel CCD image sensor in that silver beauty) a Sony Ericsson P910, a Walkman- W600 and for my other network, I use a quad band Motorola RAZR V3i. I used the T610 because I couldn't get the K700. I was able to use the VGA camera to take pictures and e-mail it to relatives every day using the POP3 e-mail feature in it. I graduated to the S700i because I still couldn’t get the K700 when I went for it another time and I have never regretted it since. I probably regret passing it on to my brother cause he has no idea how to take care of a thing of beauty. You should see the state of that thing now: yeah, I did call it a thing.
When I purchased my P910, my 17" PowerBook G4 followed a few months after. It was a match made in heaven. The contacts synced wonderfully, my calendar was current and everything was beautiful. Absolutely beautiful! I want to deviate to the software side of things as I seek to discuss my findings on the Apple iPhone to see if I can get you to appreciate it or to discover really, do I need such a device and whether or not my history with the UIQ smartphone will allow me to make such an upgrade.
The P910 has Handwriting Recognition. I used to abuse this. Honestly. People would see me writing e-mails or text and ask me if I was writing shorthand. It was quick. The P910's operating system was adequate, fluent and I never had any hiccups with this feature. I had to manually set up my e-mail accounts- no big hassle and the phone would check my accounts every 30 minutes for new mail. A 3rd party app named, "Magic Profiles pro" handled my phone 'profiles' wonderfully. As everyone knows, smartphones do not have profiles. This app would determine my location based on Cell site ID. Through this, it was possible to map a location, lets say 'Penal Junior Secondary School,' with a certain cell site or cell sites in the area. then, I could assign a particular action or actions to it. For instance, if I were in a taxi and I arrive at work. Immediately, the phone can 'see' that I am at Penal Junior Secondary by way of cell site ID and then perform the following actions if I so set them: Change the ringtone from what was originally set, lower the ring volume, screen calls via a designated 'white list' and anything else I saw fit. In addition, If I had an event in the calendar, for example, a staff meeting, the Magic Profiles Pro would 'see' that I am about to enter a meeting and perform the following actions if I saw it fit: mute the ringer, turn the phone vibration on, screen calls and allow calls from VIP designated contacts, reject calls from other contacts and send them a customized SMS message on their cell; regardless if they called from their cell phone or business phone or even home phone. Software like Magic Profiles Pro made owning and using the P910 a dream.
The promise that was represented by the P990 was ultimate. Updates to the software- brand new software actually, CMOS 2 megapixel autofocus camera, better response from the touch screen, Bluetooth 2.0 as well as WiFi, a backlit QWERTY keypad and a higher resolution display as compared to the P910. The promise that was represented was overrated. Instead, it was heralded by reports of bugs in the Operating System, the software was not as stable as it should have, the phone shuts down and restarts on its own and many times often at that. The list rolls on.
ENTER: APPLE iPHONE
In the remaining months of 2006, the rumor mills were churning, predicting that there was going to be a widescreen, touch screen iPod and that Apple was going to make an iPhone and they are going to make new displays 'cause the iSight had been discontinued etc etc... Well, Steve Jobs and Apple have done it again. I have never seen anything so unconventional! It does not look like a phone, it most certainly does not look like an iPod- no click wheel and all and everyone knows that there's no iPod without a click wheel! And as far as the internet part goes, an internet tablet would prove very impractical without a stylus.
Wha?! No stylus?!
The Apple iPhone does not have any physical phone buttons, only a Home button. This gazelle piece of hardware is less than half inch thin but it is big in terms of screen real estate. At 3.5 inches, it sports a 320 x 480 res screen at 160 PPI. That is beautiful. Want to talk about horsepower? The iPhone plays all your content from iTunes. What mobile device do you know plays 640 x 480 resolution videos with a bitrate of more than 1500 kbps? Scratch your heads and think about that one! Pardon my manners but I did forget to mention earlier that it runs Mac OS X. Well, not the full DVD install version that the microcomputers use but an optimized version of OS X. It has the core framework that OS X has including Core Animation which has not been implemented in Tiger but will be seen in Leopard. In addition to the same security that OS X has, the iPhone features a 'Dashboardlike' user experience whereby when you are switching between windows, the transitioning is similar to that of Dashboard. The phone runs widgets also. If you want, you can take a look at the iPhone Keynote to see some of the features of the phone on display. Steve did not mention more detailed specs about he phone. No information on the image sensor of the camera was divulged, no demo on the camera interface was presented, the processor specs or exactly how does it run Mac OS X. I guess the questions curious ones would have on their minds would be what applications do the developers think they may want to create and how long before Apple allows the iPhone to be open to developers for app creation. I for one would love to have an instant messaging program to use and I'm assuming that with the close relationship that Apple has developed with Yahoo! there should at least be a Yahoo! Messenger application for the iPhone. I also have not heard of a flash for the camera. I may be pushing it but what would be really nice is if a built in flash, preferably xenon is cosmetically concealed in the Apple logo behind the iPhone. That would be a functional and an aesthetic enhancement to the product. Picture this (pun intended)... In low lighting conditions, e.g.. at night, you want to take a picture of your friend you haven't seen in a while. You whip out the iPhone and as you touch an icon on the screen that acts as the shutter, the apple logo flashes and the 2 megapixel (CCD image sensor I'm hoping) will do justice to your photo. A winning combination! Functionality. Design. Technology.
I will be honest with you. The first time I saw the pictures of the phone, it was on Macrumors.com. I rushed home after work and set Sheila down and began checking the RSS feeds on the Apple website. No change. When I checked the Apple online stores, they were down and I felt that something was cooking- big. As a Mac user, I will tell you what has blown me away and why I most likely will get one:
1) It works. You can't go wrong there. It syncs my music. And I agree with it phone’s development that the iTunes featured on your phone does not download music. I have my computer for that. Even though my iTunes library is more that 85 GB big consisting of over 7.500 songs; not forgetting to mention my 48 full length movies and 137 odd podcasts, I'll be using different settings for the iPhone as compared to my 60 Gb iPod.
2) It works. Apple's iPhone will automatically sync with my Mail app through iTunes and transfer my mail accounts and settings to my iPhone also. I don’t have to set up anything on the iPhone there.
Ambient light sensor. This changes the brightness of the screen and compensates in different lighting conditions
Accelerometer. This allows the phone to know when you hold it in portrait mode (the regular way we hold phones) or in landscape mode. The Operating system then changes the UI to make maximum efficiency of the large screen. This is commended for its use in handling and viewing photos, introducing Coverflow to scroll through music faster with its sweet graphical UI, for using the internet in landscape mode to better display web pages and looking at movies! YAY!
The proximity sensor lets the phone know if it is close to your ear so when you talk on it like a regular phone, it turns the display off and turns off the Multi Touch screen.
take a look at the photos and see if you're not impressed.
...and on things iPhone....
Thursday, June 7, 2007
