Image from Dan_H's photostream
I really want an iPhone--some day, when it's ready for primetime. But it's not yet. And now that the reality distortion field is lifting, I need to get the iPhone back to the store to qualify for the 14-day returns policy. So, like a bunch of other people have already done, I'll be returning mine (and my wife's) this weekend. Why?
Continue reading "The iPhone Returns, or The Return of the iPhone" »
I’ve been playing with the iPhone for the past few days and agree with what others have written: It represents a giant step forward in personal technology. Its pros and cons have been well documented, so there’s not much of value to add. Deal breakers for me include: the $500 or $600 price tag, the fact that it runs on AT&T’s EDGE Network—which has already been rendered obsolete by AT&T’s 3G Network—and the scary prospect of having to send it off, (within two years!) for days to Apple to replace the battery. This phone is aimed at the very rich, or the chronic early adopters you saw lining up at Apple stores. Most people will be better off waiting for a while, at least until the holiday season when Apple will doubtless update the phone, while dropping the price of this model.
That said, it sure is a lot of fun to use, and I can understand why the Apple fanboys are enraptured. Apple has done so many things right since Steve Jobs returned. His greatest gift—even greater than his uncanny skill spinning the media like Jimi Hendrix played the guitar—is his constant drive to imbue his products with magic. This is a device that does so many things you’ve never experienced before, you feel like you have special powers just carrying it around.
Despite all that I’ve read about it, some things surprised me. For instance, I believe that one of the best markets for this 1.0 phone isn’t consumers—who, without carrier subsidy or handset insurance, can’t afford to buy it, lose it or drop it in the toilet—but business users. A lot will need to be added in the coming months of course, such as real Exchange support and the ability to send out a "kill pill" as my pals in the IT Department call it. (This is a remote command that encrypts and effectively shuts down a lost cell phone.) But from a business user-not-worried-about-security stand point, the iPhone is such an improvement over my Treo, that going back to it, after two days with the iPhone, was a shock. My Treo, which “only” crashes once or twice a day since a firmware upgrade a few months ago, looks and behaves like something from Stalinist Russia by comparison. As my friend Ted said, the iPhone feels “like something from the future—maybe 2012.”
While adults have pretty much picked this thing apart, kids have a different perspective. Luckily, I found one in my neighborhood who's been demoing it, and who agreed to review the phone—from a kid's perspective.
We got a couple of phones last night (cnnmoney wants me to do a small stunt which we'll do later. Watch this space.) but a few things are worth mentioning until then.
1. I got the second to last one at an AT&T store in San Rafael, California. The clerk said that many iPhone customers were first-time cellphone buyers. That's fairly wild if true.
2. I set the phone up at 9 pm; it took AT&T until about 4:30 a.m. (according to the email they sent while I as sleeping) to activate the thing.
3. There's been a lot of bad info about whether the SIM card in the phone can be taken out, or whether Apple worked some special mojo to make it impossible to remove it. Happily it turns out that the phone's SIM card is easily removed with a paper clip, and pops out through a latch on the top of the phone. The manual also says that you can put the SIM card in another GSM phone—which is, apparently, the recommended solution during the next two years when you have to send the thing back to Apple for 3 business days so they can replace the battery. For more on the battery issue, see Joe Nocera's excellent story here.
4. Is it true that, using the YouTube app, you can only search a subset of YouTube videos and not the whole site? Neither the manual nor anything else I've seen is clear on that, and we can't search anything beyond the enclosed Most Viewed, Most Popular, etc. sets.
5. It took a few tries, but I was able to pair it with the Bluetooth in my 2006 BMW i325. I *think* BMW only guarantees it with 3 series post March 2007, so this was a victory. Works way better than my Treo, which was paired via a dumb hack I found online.
Apple's iPhone has been very, very good to the blogosphere.
Whether the $500 gadget actually sells out at Apple stores on Friday remains to be seen. But the blogs that have been fanning iPhone Fever since January can already declare a healthy windfall: Millions of extra dollars in ad-generated income have already flowed into bloggers' pockets, thanks to record pageviews, according to estimates. And the best may be yet to come.
The first reviews are in, and to no one’s surprise, they are all favorable.
In fact, the big four—the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, USA Today and Newsweek—reach precisely the same conclusion: The most-hyped cellphone in the history of the world, while it has plenty of flaws, is nonetheless worthy of the hype. The phone is groundbreaking! And gorgeous! The soft keyboard works pretty darn well! The software is nifty! The only real criticism each review levels is at the phone carrier iPhone buyers must use, AT&T, whose EDGE data network is slow and its coverage is spotty. (More than one reviewer used the same word “pokey.”)
Image from The School Bell
Recently, I went with my wife to Chinatown in San Francisco to buy an unlocked GSM cellphone for my daughter's graduation present.
Phone companies in the U.S. "lock" their phones so you have to use their networks. Unlocking a phone—which
often is nothing more than typing in a secret numeric code—let's you
use the phone on any GSM network—AT&T and Sprint, T-Mobile. All you need to do is buy a prepaid card which, if large enough, gets you down to 10 cents a minute. Gangsters love unlocked phones because they are virtually untraceable. Cheapskates love them because you only pay for the time you use; unused minutes roll over. If you had an unlocked Apple Phone, you wouldn't have to use it on AT&T's network, and presumably, you could also use it overseas...
From Quanto a MMMiM
And on the 29th day of the sixth month, when the sun was at its lowest point in the sky, the Phones appeared, one after another, each in its tasteful white black box without any adornment whatsoever. And the People rejoiced, for they had been waiting a long time and could wait no longer. A great unboxing occurred across the land and many two-year service contracts were entered into.
The Opinion Changers had received no review product in advance and thus despaired and called the Phone a hype and said that the battery would never last and asked what all the fuss was about anyway. But they all wanted one, and only Mossberg of the Journal 4 reporters in the national media got one, and pronounced it “pretty good,” which for him worthy of the hype, which for them was a rave. And the other Opinion Changers were cast out of the Temple.
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