iPhone thoughts

Ok, lets be fair here... while I love Apple, I am not actually that much of an Apple early adopter.

Well, not lately at least. Yeah, I did jump on the first iBook in 1999 (a lovely little blueberry) when it came out, then the next generation iBook (white) in 2001 (when my first iBook was stolen at Minicon), and I did jump on the first 17" Powerbook when it came out in 2003 (after the 15" Powerbooks had already been out for at least a year). Joe bought me my first iPod in 2001 for Christmas, and I bought my second iPod from a friend of romeoa's in 2003, and then finally our iPod's with Video in 2005 (for Joe's birthday I got both of us new iPods).

I haven't jumped on buying a MacBook Pro yet. They were first announced exactly a year ago today. I've made do with my Powerbook for now, but with my video development work increasing at work, it sure would be nice to have a stronger machine to bring home work.

What about non-Apple gear? I bought the Samsung SPH-I300 when it first came out in 2001, and then the I330 in 2002. Then I switched to non-PDA phones for 3 years, and then I bought the Cingular 8125 last spring.

So... does this mean that I'm going to jump on the iPhone? I don't really know yet. Yeah, it's a lovely lovely lovely phone, but does it have the features that I've come to expect in a PDA phone? Or... doesn't it at least have enough of them.

Here's what I do with my 8125 (beyond making calls): I check e-mail, I play games (mostly solitaire and boggle), I manage contacts, I log in remotely to my home PC, and I stream tv shows from my Slingbox at home. I also have the Microsoft Voice Command software on the device, so I never have to actually manually lookup a contact, I can just hit the voice button, tell it to call a person, and it places the call.

It appears the the Apple iPhone can do most of these, but the remote login and the Slingbox streaming are not going to be around a least for a while. And the voice dialing... some form of voice dial is getting to be pretty standard on phones now. iPhone really needs that.

When Job's says that it runs on OS X, I expect that it isn't the full blown OS that we've come to know and love on our Macs. Windows has Windows Mobile, and not OS X has its mobile version. But how will developers create new software for this light version of the OS? Can we get more than widgets? Is a iPhone version of SlingPlayer just to far out there?

Yes, I will be watching the iPhone closely over the next few months, but I really don't know if I'll buy one right away or not. Maybe I should just wait until my current contract expires next year. Then the iPhone will have been out for at least 9 months and hopefully the initial bugs will have been worked out.

A few additional thoughts on the iPhone...

I was just reading Wired's list of the "Top 5 Worst Things About The iPhone", and I strongly agree that not having 3G (high speed wireless internet) really sucks. I was starting to look at getting the 8525 (the next version of my current phone) largely based on it having 3G access. (Not that Minneapolis has 3G coverage through Cingular yet!).

As for the keyboard, one commenter responded that a bluetooth keyboard would fill the need for a physical keyboard.

I really like that idea. As for the small storage (4gb or 8gb), I like minnehaha B's suggestion of a bluetooth connection to a regular iPod in your pocket, which could give you a lovely 80gb of extra storage nearby.